Happiness is being satisfied with what you have success comes from dissatisfaction.
Its success worth it then
poof. I'm not sure that's it. Mint is true anymore. Like I made that statement a long time ago and a lot of these things are just notes to myself and they're highly. Contextual they come in the moment they leave in the moment
happiness. Okay. So very
complicated topic
but I always liked the Socrates
story where he goes into the marketplace and they show him all these luxuries and find reason. He says, how many things there are in this world that I do not want and that's a form of Freedom. So
Not wanting something is as good as having it in the old story with Alexander dionysios. Right Alexander's, goes out and conquer the world and he meets dionysius is living in a barrel. And Dynasty says, get out of the way, you're blocking my sun and Alexander says oh how I wish. I, you know, could be like Dionysus in the next life and Dionysus is that's the difference. I don't wish that I could sorry, diogenes. Diogenes dodgy says, I don't wish to be Alexander. So two pads to happiness and one path is to success. You get what you want.
You satisfy your material needs or like dodging? He's you just don't want in the first place and I'm not sure which one is more valid.
And it also depends what you define success. If the end goal is happiness, then why not cut to the Chase and just go straight for it? Does
being happy, make you
less successful. That is a conventional wisdom, that may even be the Practical earned experience of your reality. You find that when you're happy, you don't want anything so you don't get up and do anything on the other hand, you know, you still got to do something, you're an animal, you're here, you're here to survive, you here to replicate your driven, You're motivated, you're going to do something, you're not just going to sit there all day unlikely.
Um, people do, maybe it's in their nature, but I think most people still want to act. They want to live in the arena. I found for myself as
I've become
happier as a big word. But you know, more peaceful more calm, more present, more satisfied, with what I have.
I still want to do things. I just want to do
bigger things, I want to do things that are more, pure more aligned with what I think needs to be done and what I can uniquely do. So in that sense, I think that being happier can actually make
Make you more successful but your definition of success will likely change along the way.
Is that a realization? You think you could have gotten to? How do you have not had some success in the first
place?
At least for me, I always wanted to take the path of material success. First I was not going to go, be an aesthetic and sit there and renounce, everything that just seems too unrealistic and too painful in the story of Buddha, he starts out as a prince and then he sees that it's all kind of meaningless because you're still going to get old and die. And then he goes into the woods looking for something more. I'll take the happy route. That involves material success. Thank
you, I think it's quicker.
In some ways, you know, one of your insights is it's far easier to achieve our material desires than it is to renounce them and it
depends on the person, but I think you have to try that path. If you want something, go get it. You know, like I quit that, the reason to win the game is to be free of it. So you play the games, you win the games, and then you get, hopefully, get bored of the games. You don't want to just keep looping on the same game over and over. Although a lot of these games are very enticing and have many levels in a relatively open ended.
And then you become free of the game. In a sense that you're
no longer trying to win it, you know, you can win it. And either you move to a different game, or you play the game for the sheer, Joy of
it. Mmm. Yeah. Another one of yours, most of the gains in life, come from suffering in the short term so you can get paid in the long term. I think that's classic that winning the marshmallow test. Yeah, on a daily basis, but there's an interesting challenge where I think people need to avoid becoming a suffering addict sort of using
Suffering as the proxy for progress as opposed to the outcome of the suffering, right? It's like I was in pain, not eating the marshmallow, I was in pain doing this work. I have attached well-being and satisfaction to pain not to what the pain gets me on the other side of it. If you define
pain as physical pain, that is a real thing. It happens and you can't ignore it. But that's not what we mean by suffering. Suffering is mostly mental, anguish, and mental pain, and it just means
Don't want to do the task at hand. If you are fine, doing the task at hand, then you wouldn't be suffering. And then the question is, what's more effective to suffer along the way or just to interpret it in a way? That is not suffering you hear from a lot of successful people. They look back and they say, oh, the journey was a fun part, right? That was actually the entertaining part and I should have enjoyed it more. It's a common
regret, there's a little thought exercise. I
like to do which is, you can go back into your own life and try to put yourself in the exact position.
In you were in 5 years ago, 10 years ago, 15 years ago, 20 years ago, and you try to remember, okay, who was I, with, what was I doing? What was I feeling? Well, my emotions, what would my objectives and really, really try to transport yourself back and see if there's any advice, you'd give yourself anything, you'd do differently. Now, you don't have new information. Don't pretend you could have gone back and, you know, bought a stock or, but Bitcoin, or whatever. But, just knowing what, you know, now in terms of your temperament and a little bit of age-related experience,
How would you have done things differently? And I think it's a worthwhile exercise to do. So don't let me Rob you of the conclusion. But I'll tell you, for me, I would have done everything the same except I would have done it with less anger, less emotion, less internal suffering because that was optional, it wasn't necessary. And I would argue that someone who can do the job at least peacefully, but maybe happily is going to be more effective than someone who has unnecessary emotional turmoil.
But you end up
up with a series of miserable successes, right? The outcome may have been the same, but the entire experience of getting
that and the journey is not only rewarding journey is the only thing there is, you know, so
even success
it's human nature to bank it very very quickly, right?
Because the normal Loop that we run through is you
sit around your board, then you want something, then when you want something, you decide you're not going to be happy until you get that thing. Then you start your bout of suffering or anticipation while you strike.
To get that thing. If you get that thing, then you get used to it and then you get bored again. Then a few months later, you want something else, and if you don't get it, then you're unhappy for a bit and then you get over it, then you want something else, right? That's the normal cycle. So whether you're happy or unhappy at the end, it tends not to last. Now I don't want to be glib and say that oh, there's no point in making money or be successful. There absolutely is money solves all your money problems so it is good to have money. That said there are those those stories
Is, I don't know if you seen the studies. I don't know how real these are a lot of these psych studies don't replicate, but it's a fun fun little study that shows that people who break their back and people who win the lottery are back to their Baseline happiness. Two years later. Yep. Again, I don't know if this entirely true. I think money can buy you, happiness, if you earned it because then along the way, you have both pride and confidence in yourself and you have a sense of accomplishment and you, you know, set out to do something and you were right. So I'll bet that lingers and then as I said,
You solved your money problem. So I don't wanna be too glib about it. But I would say in general this this Loop that we runs through of Desire dopamine fulfillment, unfulfilled men, like you have to enjoy the journey. The journey is all there is right, 99%? Your time is spent on the journey. So what kind of a journey is that, if you're not going to enjoy it,
how do you shortcut that desire contract?
You could focus, you could decide that, I
don't want most things. I think we have a lot of unnecessary desires that we just pick up everywhere we have opinions on everything, judgments and everything. So I think just knowing that those are the source of unhappiness will make you be choosy about your desires and frankly if you want to be successful you have to be choosy about your desires. You have to focus, you can't be great at everything, you can't be great at everything. You're just going to waste your energy and waste your time.
This Fame, a worthwhile goal.
It gets you invited to better parties,
gets you to better restaurants.
Fame. So Fame, is this funny
thing where a lot of people know you but you don't know them and it does get you put on a pedestal it can get you what you want at a distance so I wouldn't say it's worthless obviously people want it for a reason it's high status so it attracts the
opposite sex
especially for men it attracts women.
That's it is high
cost. It means you have no privacy. You do
Have weirdos and lunatics. You do get hit up a lot for weird things and you're on a stage. So you're forced to perform. So you're forced to be consistent with your past proclamations and actions and you're going to have haters and all that nonsense. But the fact that we do it, the fact that we all seem to want, it means that it would be disingenuous to say oh no, I'm famous but you don't want to be famous. Hmm. That said I think Fame like anything else is best produced as a pursued as a byproduct of
Something potentially more worthwhile wanting to be famous and craving to be famous and being famous for being famous. These are sort of traps
same things like yeah exactly. So it's better that it's earned Fame.
So for example, own respect in the tribe is you do things that are good for the tribe who are the most famous people in human history. There, you know, there are people who sort of transcended the self the Buddha's and the Jesus is in the Muhammad's of the world. Who else is famous the artists are
Miss, you know, art last for a long time. The scientists are famous. They discover thing the conquerors are famous presumably because they conquered for their tribe. There was somewhere that they were fighting for. So generally the higher up, you rise by doing things for greater and greater groups of people, even though it may be considered tyrannical or - like I, you know, Jenna's Khan is famous, but to the Mongols he was doing good to the rest of them. Not so much, the higher level. You're operating at the more people, you're taking care of.
Of the more you sort of earn respect and fame. And I think those are good reasons to be famous. If Fame is empty, if you're famous just because your name showed up in a lot of places of your face showed up in a lot of places. Then that's a hollow Fame, and I think, deep down you will know that. And so, it'll be fragile and you'll always be afraid of losing it and then you'll be forced to perform. So the kind of Fame that pure actors and celebrities have, I wouldn't want, but the kind of Fame that's earned because you did something useful.
Why Dodge that now you can
There's a challenge. I think, especially if people make very loud public proclamations about things. You mentioned there about your almost, a hostage to the things that you used to say. That being able to update your opinions and change your mind. Your looks very similar to the internet as hypocrisy does. You know the difference between me saying something in the past and saying something different. Now is perhaps I've learned perhaps I've updated my beliefs, right? But so few people do it in a legitimate way. I
At the grifter she'll you see this is a Smoking Gun that shows that he didn't really believe that thing all along. And yeah I went to a retreat in l.a. a couple of years ago. And there was a guy that used to follow that big business and productivity advice content creator, really, really successful. And he just told you step back from everything. When like monk mode and focused on his business, I asked him, why? And he said, I started feeling like I had to live up to him private, the things that I was saying
in public, right? Yeah, it's a,
was it then who said it was a Menken that a
foolish consistency is the
hobgoblin of little Minds, right?
But essentially look, all life is are all learning
is error, correction, right? Every knowledge creation system works through correcting errors, making guesses and correcting errors. So by definition, if you're learning you're going to be wrong most of the time and you'll be updating your priors. And so, for example, I did this Joe Rogan podcast and I was like eight or nine years ago and
People will call out like, the one thing that didn't turn out to be correct, right? And it's just like, and they just beat on it because it helps them in their mind. Raise their status a little bit. Aha, I caught him in an error. Well, I think if you catch someone in a blatant lie where there's believe one thing and they say another that's legit, that's a character flaw, they shouldn't be lying. But on the other hand, if they just made a guess at something and they got it wrong and by the way, mostly it's about the aiag I think and I think I'm still right about that but that's a different story. People who think we have achieved a g. I just feel at all.
Ring test from their side.
But it's funny how people latch onto single proclamations.
But the reality is, all of us are dynamical systems. We're always changing. We're always learning. We're always growing and hopefully we're correcting errors. What you don't want to be doing is lying in public so that because you're trying to look good and I think people can smell that what this world really lacks right now is authenticity and because everybody wants something they want to be seen as something they want to be.
Something that they're not. And so you do catch a lot of people saying things that they don't really believe and I think people are very sensitive to
that bullshit. Ray does have become hyper sensitized to try and work out whether or not. This person means the things that they're
saying. Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of people are wrong. Most of us are wrong, most of the time, especially in any new Endeavor and
difference between being wrong and disingenuous though. Corrupt is fully wrong.
Correct, exactly. So I think I think that's the big difference is someone is wrong no big deal as long as they have a genuine reason for saying what
They're saying who believe in what they're believing. But if they are lying to elevate their status or their appearance or to live up to some expectation, that's the mistake and there's a mistake, not just for the listener to mistake for themselves because then you're going to get trapped in a hole mirrors. You yourself are going to be consistent with your past Proclamation. So if you're lying to others, you're going to be lying to your
city of your puppeted by all the person that you are not even
that's right? Yeah. It's like what was that line? There's, you're basically trying to impress people who don't care about.
You so and I don't like the real you and if they saw the real you they wouldn't care. And the people who would like the real you don't get to see the real use. So they pass you by
right. You only want the respect of the very, very few people that you
respect
trying to demand respect for the masses is a Fool's. Errand,
statist games, the Allure of accruing, whether it's Fame, actual fame, or just the competition comparison trap, it's always there. There's a real draw of being
Swayed by social approval, how should people learn to get less distracted by status games in that way?
I think it just helps to see that status games don't matter as much as they used to, in all Society. Let's go back hunter-gatherer at times. There was no such thing as wealth. You just had what you could carry, there was no stored wealth, so wealth games, didn't really exist to wealth creation games. All that is a civil status games. If you are high status, then you got what little was available first. But even back, then you had to earn your status by taking care of the tried. Now we have wealth creation where you can
She create a product or a service. You can scale that product or service and can provide abundance for a lot of people and that's not Zero Sum. That's a positive sum game. I can be wealthy, you can be wealthy, we can create things together and clearly since we are all collectively far far, wealthier than we were in hunter-gatherer times what creation is
positive but status is limited. There's limited
status to go around, it's a ranking ladder to hierarchy. And so to rise in status, somebody else has a lower in status. Now, you can have multiple kinds of status so you can expand
I'm kind of status but it's not like wealth creation where you can go infinitely where we can all be, you know, living in the stars and moon bases or Mars colonies or what have you. So just realize the status games are inherently limited, they're always combative. They're always require direct combat. Whereas I wealth creation games can be just you creating products. You don't have to fight anybody else. Yes. In the marketplace, your product has succeed, but that's not quite the same as invective against other people or being angry.
Other people are feeling push down or pushed up or having a beef with somebody. So I would argue that wealth creation games are both more pleasant their positive, some and they actually have concrete material returns. If you have more money, you can buy
more. Show me why you can exchange your status at the bank.
Exactly. Yeah. It's vague and it's fuzzy. Now you see, people get rich, they have money. What do they want? They want status. So they go to Hollywood. Start starring in movies, they donate to nonprofits to go to Cannes or Davos or what have you
And they start trying to trade the money for status. So, you know, people always want what they don't have. And we are evolutionarily hardwired for status, because as I said, wealth creation didn't really exist until the Agricultural Revolution when you can store grain and then the Industrial Revolution took it to another level. Now, the information age of taking it to yet another level but there's never been an easier time to make money. Yes, it's still hard but there's never been an easier time to create wealth because there's so much leverage out there. There's so much opportunity you still have to go find, it's not easy, it's not going to fall.
Your lap and you have to learn something and knows something and do something interesting. But nevertheless it's possible to many more people. Few hundred years ago, you were born to Surf. You were going to die a surf. There was almost no way out of that that's changed. And so I would argue that you're better off focusing on wealth games and Status games. If you're trying to build up for example, you're following on a social network and get famous and then get rich off of being famous. That's a much harder path and getting rich first and then go for your Fame. Afterwards would be
My advice.
Well, a lot of people do that. As you said, it's funny how people who have achieved such a level of wealth. You don't think why do you need the status? Given that most people use status to then try and cash in to achieve wealth. If you've achieved, fuck you money already. If your post money or asset, heavy as it's known, why you trying to go in the other direction? What, as you said, because we've heard wired, we've got an illustrious history biologically of wanting status and wealth is kind of Novel,
new
New Wealth is something that you have to understand more intellectually. Yeah, there's a physical component, more food, more survival, but to truly understand the effects and the powers, and abilities and limitations and the advantages and disadvantages of wealth. You have to use your neocortex a lot more.
Does that mean not limbic? The reason to play the game is to win the game and be done with it is harder to win and be done with for status than it is for wealth. That's a good observation.
I had thought that through but you're right. Yeah I think that's right. I think you people will always
Want more status but I think you can be satisfied at a certain level of
wealth. Well, as well. You always have this sort of sense in, this is what leaderboards are, right. This is the right either boards are Billboard charts right? And it is zero sum right? And it is I guess you know the Forbes richest people on the planet.
Yeah I mean that was harder to climb the ladder on but the fact that for example, iTunes and YouTube can put you in competition against your contemporaries every single day and make you go up.
Down and show you likes and comments and rating. This is how much I fell. This is. How much Europe? Exactly, they keep you running on that treadmill forever.
Jimmy Carr. Has this cool idea where he says, trajectory is more important than position. So if you are number 101 in the world but last year, you remember 200 vs. Your number two in the world. But last year, you were number one. There is this sense of the deceleration is very, very tangible. And it's my again, it goes back
to Evolution, you know, something that is bleeding eventually dies unless you
stop the bleeding. So your mirror hardwired not to lose what you have and because we evolved in conditions where we're so close to just not surviving, you don't want to give anything up, it's hardwired into us to not give anything up. So you grip tightly. That's
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Yeah, it's a tough one. I look at the people and I don't want to offend anybody, but I look at the people who don't like themselves, and that's the toughest slot because they're always wrestling with themselves, and it's hard enough to face the outside world and no one
I like you more than you like yourself. So if you're struggling with yourself then the outside world, becomes an insurmountable Challenge, and it's hard to say why people have low self-esteem. It might be genetic, it might just be circumstantial, a lot of times I think it's because they just weren't unconditionally loved as a child. And that sort of seeps in that, a deep core level, but self-esteem issues can be the most limiting one interesting thought is that, you know, to some extent, self-esteem is a reputation, you have with yourself,
You're watching yourself at all times, you know what you're doing and you have your own moral code, everyone has a different moral code, but if you don't live up to your own moral code, the same code that you hold others to it will damage your self-esteem. So, perhaps, one way to build up, your self-esteem, is to live up to your own code, very rigorously have one and then live up to it another way to raise your self-esteem, might be to do things for others. If I look back on my life and you know, what are the moments that I'm actually proud of? There's very
If you between and it's not that often, it's not the things you would expect, it's not the material success. It's Not Having learned this thing or that it's when I made a sacrifice for somebody or something that I loved. And that's when I'm actually ironically most proud. Now, that's the one explicit mental exercise. But I'll bet you at some level, I'm recording that implicit lie. So that tells me that even if I am not being loved and the way to create love is to give love to, to express, love through, sacrifice, and through Duty. And so, I think doing things like that can build up your self-esteem,
Ali
fast. It's interesting when you talk about sacrifice because a lot of the time people so I sacrifice so much for my job it's like yeah but that was you sacrificing something that you wanted less for something that you wanted more as opposed to genuinely taking some sort of cost and yeah I wonder whether if self-esteem is you adhering to your internal your actions and your values aligning even when it's difficult or perhaps even more. So when it's difficult I wonder whether there is a
Price that people who are more introspective high integrity pay because think, well, you've got this.
Have you said about the heads that you need to pay in some way?
Well, if being ethical or profitable, everybody would do it,
right? So you at some level it does involve a sacrifice
but that's sacrifice can also be thought of as you're thinking for the long term rather than the short term. For example, the virtues are the set
of
Virtues Of set of beliefs that have everybody in society, followed them as individuals, it would lead to win-win outcomes for everybody. So if I am honest and you were honest, then we can
do business more easily. We can interact more easily because we can trust each other. So even though there might be a few lawyers in the system as long as there aren't too many lawyers in too many, cheaters a high trust Society where everybody is honest is better off and I think a lot of the virtues work this way, right? If I don't go around sleeping with your wife and you don't sleep with mine and you know, if I don't take all the food, that's at the table first and so on, then we all get along better and we can play Win. Win games in Game Theory. The most famous game is prisoner's dilemma, but that's all about everybody cheating in the Nash, equilibrium the stable equilibrium,
From there is everybody cheats and your for the only way you can be, you can play a win-win game as if you have long-term iterated moves, but that's not actually the most common game played in society, the most common gameplay, it is one called a stag hunt. Where if we cooperate, we can bring down the big stag in both have big dinners, but if we don't cooperate, then we have to go hunt like rabbits and we each have small dinners. So, most of and that game has two stable equilibriums and one could be where we're both hunting the rabbit in one could be where we are hunting the stack. So, the High Trestle,
Society is a Merv most more virtuous Society where I can trust you to come hunt, the Stag with me and show up on time and do the work and divide it up properly. So you want to live in a system where everybody has their own set of Virtues and follows them and then we all win. It's but I would argue you don't need to do that for sacrifice. You don't need to do that for other people. You can do it, just purely for yourself. You will have higher self-esteem, you will attract other high virtue
people. With I go on a stag hunt with
me, correct? Yeah, that's right. And if you are the kind,
Kind of person. If you're the kind of person who long-term signals ethics and virtues, then you'll attract other people who are ethical and virtuous. Whereas if you are shark, you will eventually find yourself swimming entirely amongst sharks and that's an unpleasant existence.
But again this goes back to the equivalent of the
marshmallow test and by the marshmallow test does not replicate. I
was so excited, good occasion, crisis
hard, right recently. But it is about trading off the short term for the long term. And so I think for a lot of
Of these so-called virtues. There are long-term selfish reasons to be virtuous.
Mmm, yeah. Did you deal with self-doubt in the past? Is that something that was a hurdle feed will become?
Yes. And no, I think I dealt with self-doubt in the sense that, oh, I don't know what I'm doing and need to figure it out, but I didn't doubt myself in the way of somebody else, knows better than me for me or that, you know, I'm an idiot. Or I'm not worthwhile or
That I guess I had the benefit of I grew up with a lot of love. Like the people around me, love me unconditionally and so that just gave me a lot of confidence. Not the kind of confidence that would say I have the answer but the kind of confidence that I will figure it out and I know what I want or only. I am a good Arbiter of what I want.
Yeah, that level of self-belief I suppose allows you to determine what is it that matters to me? My self-esteem. Should I chase this thing or not? I can make a fair judgment on that.
Opposed to being so suede. But it's such a good point about. Even if you think you're not consciously logging the stuff that you're doing, there is some Duds in the back of your mind. Was it the Daemon? Is that what the ancient Greeks or something used to?
Yeah, yeah. Also in computer science, like there's a concert of a Daemon which is a program that's always running in the background. You can't see it. Okay but yeah it's probably comes from the ancient Greek Damon. But yeah, the
what, you know,
That you don't even know, you know, is far greater than what, you know, you know, right. You can't even articulate, most of the things, you know, there are feelings, you have that have no words for them. There are thoughts, you have that are felt within the body or subconsciously that you never articulate to yourself. You don't really, you can't articulate the rules of grammar yet. You exercise them effortlessly when you speak. So I would argue that your implicit knowledge and your knowledge that is unknown to yourself as far greater than the knowledge, you can articulate that you can communicate and
And so at some level, you're always watching yourself, that's what your Consciousness is, right? It's the thing that's watching everything including your mind including your body. So if you want to have high self-esteem, then earn your own self-respect.
I had this idea. The internal Golden Rule. So the Golden Rule says, treat others. The way that you should be treated you want to be treated the internal Golden Rule says treat yourself. Like others should have treated you and it was a
Riposte to maybe people that didn't grow up with unconditional love, you know, in that way and the love thing. One of the interesting things
about love is you can try to remember the feeling of being loved. So go back to when someone was in love with you, or someone did love you and like, really remember that feeling like really sick with it and try to recreate it within yourself
and then go to the feeling of you,
loving someone, and when you were in love, and I'm not even talking about romantic love nest,
Early. So be little careful there. I'm talking more about like
love for sometimes. Get complex if you talking about past romantic love, right? A
sibling or a child, or something like that or a parent and think about when you felt love towards someone or something. And now, which is better.
And I would argue
that the feeling of
being in love is actually more exhilarating the feeling of being loved. Being loved is a little clawing. It's a little too sweet. You kind of want to push the person the way, it's a little embarrassing and you know, that if that person is too much into it that you feel constrained on the other hand, the feeling of being in love is very expensive. It's very open. It actually makes you a better version of yourself and makes you want to be a better person and so you can create love anytime you want. It's just that craving to receive it. That's the problem.
The most expensive trait is
Is pride how come oh, that was a recent
one. I tweeted that just because I think that pride is the enemy of learning. So when I look at my friends and colleagues, the ones who are still stuck in the past and have grown, the least are the ones who were the proudest because they sort of feel like they already had the answers and so they don't want to correct themselves publicly. And so this goes back to the fame conversation. You get locked into something. You said it made you famous, you're known for that and now you want to Pivot or change.
So Prive prevents you from saying, I'm wrong.
What's wrong? What's your pride in this context?
It could be as simple as your trading stocks, and then you don't admit you were wrong. So you hang onto a lousy trade, it could be that you made a decision to, you know, marry someone or move somewhere or enter a profession, it doesn't work out and then you don't admit that you were wrong. So you get stuck in it. It's mostly about getting trapped in local Maxima as opposed to going back down and climbing up the mountain again.
And that's why it's an expensive trade because you continue to
You need to repay it in one form or
another. Yeah, you're just stuck at a sub optimal point. It's going to cost you money. It's going to cost you success
and time and time. The
great artists always have this a bit of start over whether it's Paul Simon or Madonna or you too. And I'm dating myself a little bit but even the great entrepreneurs, they're just always want to start over. I'm always struck by the Elon Musk story where, you know, he, he did PayPal as x.com. Originally, actually, was his financial institution that got merged
PayPal.
It's good that you've got the domain, you know me? Yeah, exactly. I'll just lock that. I'll hold on. He's
consistent. He's been using it for quite a while and he said something, like, along the lines of I made 200 million dollars from the sale of PayPal. I put 100 million dollars in the SpaceX. It even Tesla, 22 SolarCity, and I had to borrow money for rent, right? This guy is a perennial risk-taker. He's always would start over. He doesn't have any Pride about being seen as successful as being seen as a failure. He's willing to put it all the like
himself again. Each team back himself again, each time.
I'm
but the key thing is, he's always willing to start over, right? Even now when he's sort of made his new startup is a USA. Right. He's basically trying to fix it like he would fix one of his startups and I think that is a willingness to look like a fool and that is a willingness to start over. And a lot of people just don't have that they become successful or they become richly become famous and that's it. They're stuck. They don't want to go back to zero and creating anything great requires zero to one. And that means you go back to zero and that's really
Painful and hard to do talking about risk,
something. I've been thinking about a lot to do with you, any moment, when you're not having a good time, when you're not really happy, you're not doing anyone. Any favors and lots of people have become
unusually familiar with suffering silently, in that sort of a way of not having
a high bar for your expectation for quality of life.
Yeah, a lot of is this true, meaning yourself into a better outcome because you think that somehow suffering is glorious or that it makes you a better person or you know, my old quit was if you're so smart why aren't you happy? Why can't you figure that one out? The reality is you can be smart and happy. There are plenty of people in human history who were smart and happy and I think it just starts with saying yeah you know what, I'm going to be happy. It was a guy that I met in Thailand a long time ago.
Go and he used to work for Tony Robbins. You know, he had a great attitude and we were sitting around and he said, you know, he said, I realized one day that someone out there had to be the happiest person in the world like they're just had that person just has to exist. He said, why not me, I'll take on that burden. I'll be that guy. And I heard that Miss like, wow, that's pretty good. That's a good frame, but he knew how to reframe things. And so I think a lot of happiness is just a choice in the sense that you make.
So you just identify yourself as actually, I'm going to be a person's going to be happy. I want to figure it out and you just figure it out along the way. You're not going to lose your other predilections. You're not going to lose your ambition or desire for success. I think a lot of people have this fear that, oh, if I'm happy that I won't want to be successful, no, you'll just want to do things that are more aligned with the happy version of you and you'll be successful at those things. And believe me that happy version of you is not going to look back at the end. Happy version and say, oh man, that work. That guy
was the most success. I wish I was him. You're actually trying to be successful so you'll be happy.
P, let's duel point with you. Got it backwards, you you unlocked one of my trap cards. One of my favorite insights is that. We sacrifice the thing we want for the thing that supposed to get it. So we sacrifice happiness in order to be successful so that when we're finally sufficiently successful, we can actually be happy. And if you have some sort of simultaneous equation, you just sort of stripped success off from both
sides. The, at least in my own life I have not found it to be a trade-off. If anything I've found that the happier I get the more I
I'm going to do the things that I'm good at and aligned with, and that will make me even happier. And so I actually end up more successful, not less,
the aligned with thing is interesting. I'm going to try and put this across as delicately as I can. I would say from the bit of time that we've spent together. You have a really interesting trait of
Holistic selfishness, you're sort of prepared to put yourself. First, you seem largely unfazed by saying or doing things that might result in other people. Feeling a little bit awkward. If it's truthful for you, it's like unapologetically self prioritizing, I
guess. Yeah, I think everybody is maybe an Unapologetic is the part. That's that's relatively rare but I think everybody puts themselves first that's just human nature. You're here because you
survive your separate organism.
That's interesting. I'm maybe but
I know we like to Virtue signal Pretend We're doing it for each
other. How many times did somebody say? Yeah, of course. I'd love to come to the wedding. Like I do want to be at the fucking wedding. Yeah, I me times to someone. So how you doing today? And they don't tell you how many I don't go to weddings. This is my coin it. So I don't think you necessarily right with that. I think that people do, I don't think they put themselves first. I sometimes think that they, they compromise what it is that they want in order to appease socially, what's in front of
them,
Yeah, I just view it as your waste. Everyone's wasting their time on it. Don't do something. You don't want to do, why are you wasting your time? There's so little time on this Earth life goes fast, one of the four thousand weeks that's your lifespan and and yes, we hear that. But we don't remember it, but I guess I'm keenly aware of how little time I have. So I'm just not going to waste it.
How have you got more comfortable at?
Being the Unapologetic self prioritize ER, yeah.
I've gotten, I've got an early more and more, ruthless on it. Mainly its that I see or hear people's freedom and then, that liberates me further. So I read a, I read a blog post by P, Mark AK Marc Andreessen reset, don't keep the schedule and I took that to heart. So I deleted my calendar and I don't keep a schedule. I try to remember it all my head. If I can't remember it, I'm not going to add a, glad you got here in time. Yeah, exactly.
I hate to look things up at the last minute, so but
ironically, I leave enough Mark himself follows that. But he made the correct point, I read a little story about Jack Dorsey, doing all his business off, his iPhone and iPad and not even going into a Mac. And I said, Okay, I want to do that. So I'm going to operate through text messaging and I put up my
nasty, he's I feel like more freedom. It does. Yeah, because you're on the
go. So I have a nasty email autoresponder that says, I don't check email and don't text me either, right? If you need to find me you'll find me. Obviously, some of this is a
A luxury of success. But some of these habits, I adopted long before. Actually, the hostel email autoresponder start alone,
I used to own the domain, I can let It Go. Don't coffee, don't care, I don't do coffee that commies to reply from that email, just so people who get the point, but I stop being rude about it. Now, just ghost, I just disappear. My wife knows not to ever book or scheduled me for anything. I'm not expected to go to couples dinners and expect to go to birthdays and I expected
Weddings, if somebody tries to rope her into having me, show up, she says he makes his own decisions. You have asked him
directly, what about salesperson? Well, you're not killing Serendipity in a way
that no, no, I'm freeing up all my time. So my entire life is Serendipity. I get to interact with whoever. I want. Whenever I want
wherever here, the invite but make the decision.
Because if you're, if this few things and come, you're assuming that, you know, what's better, you will to
anything in the future. So I'll say, OK, if that thing is interesting, I'll see if I can get him that day when I'm in the mood but there's nothing worse than something. Coming up that your past self committed,
YouTube itself doesn't want to do a damn it, positive all. Yeah,
and then it destroys your entire calendar that it destroys your day because there's like, other this one hour slot, which is sitting like a turd on my calendar that I have to like schedule my whole day around. I can't do it yet, 20 minutes before the 20 minutes afterwards.
Even for phone calls, if someone was to do phone calls it, okay? Just text me when you're free. I'll text you when I'm free and we'll just do it on the Fly. It's a much better way of living than this over these scheduled, you know, Cal.com or iCal, whatever
it was, that the, the over scheduled life is not worth living. It's not, I think it's terrible
way to live life. That's not how we evolved. It's not how we grew up. It's not how we were as children. Hopefully, unless you have a helicopter parent or a tiger mom. Your natural order is freedom. I had a friend who said
Me once, you know, I never want to have to be at a specific place at a specific time. And I was like, oh my God, that's Freedom. When I heard that that shaped my life, right? He's
still alarm clock less. Yes, I'm alarm clock class
today. I did set my alarm clock
just so I wouldn't miss re-insulate yeah, if you would. So, it's just
so, you know, I set the alarm clock from 11 a.m. in case I was stricken with the
flu. Ha ha ha.
We're gonna set my clock clock for 8 a.m. or 9 a.m. and sure enough. I got up many hours and before that. Yeah, but it was sort of a backup
Emergency alarm. In fact, sometimes when I something that
I need to do,
I don't want to look at a calendar. So I'll just set an alarm for it. Hmm.
Just sitting sink a little bit more into that. I kind of let that fuck you energy that self prioritizing energy because I think people rationally love the idea of this. I'm going to do what only I want to do. Even if they've got the level of Freedom at fuck you
energy, in the sense that I think everyone should live their life that way to the greatest extent possible. Obviously we have our requirements around
And work and obligations that are genuinely important to us. But don't Fritter away your life on randomly schedule things and I things that aren't important, don't matter and events and weddings. And you know, tedious dinners, with tedious people that you don't want to go to, to the extent, you can bring freedom into your life optimized for that, you actually be more productive, you won't just be happier, more free. You will be more productive because then you can focus on what is in front of you. Whatever the biggest problem of that day.
When I wake up in the morning, the first four hours are when I have the most energy and that's what I wanted, solve all the hard problems and the next 4 hours are when I kind of want to, you know, do some more outdoorsy activities or I want to work out or maybe I can, you know, have some meetings but I'll try to do those last second based on whatever the days parties demand the last four hours. I kind of want to wind down. I want to hang out with the kids and I want to play games and read a book or something like that. So having that flexibility and freedom is
we important. So you can just put whatever is most needed into the slot at that moment and instead if I have like a meeting at 2 p.m. and then I have to like get a thing and some emails done I put that off till 6 p.m. I'm rushing I'm not going to be productive, I'm not going to be you certainly not free.
You're not I'm definitely not free.
But also another thing that I really believe is that inspiration is perishable act on it immediately. So when you're inspired to do something do that thing, if I'm inspired to write a blog post, I want to do
That moment if inspired said we don't do it. That moment if inspired to solve a problem, we do at that moment, if I'm inspired to read a book, I want to read it, right? Then if I'm inspired to solve a problem or solve it right there, if I want to learn something, I do it at the moment of curiosity. The moment, the Curiosity arrives. I go learn that thing immediately. I download the book, I get on Google, I get on Chachi PT, whatever. I will figure that thing out on the spot. And that's when the learning happens, it doesn't happen because I've scheduled time because I've set in our side, because when that time arrives, I might be in a different mood. I might just want to do something different.
And so I think that spontaneity is really important. You're going to learn best when you're having fun when you generally are enjoying the process, not when you're forced to sit there and do it, how much do you remember from school? You know, you were forced to learn geography history mathematics on this schedule at this time. According to this person didn't happen. All the stuff that sticks with you is you learned it when you wanted to, when you genuinely have the desire
and that freedom that ability to act on
something. The moment you want to is so liberating that most of us go through our lives.
Very, very little tastes of that. If you live your entire life, that way that is a recipe for
happiness, it feels like efficiency that that you have the ancient. Also, you have the inspiration that is going to be the most frictionless time to ever do, that particular task. So I've had the inspiration to do that, I'll put that off until the time when I no longer really want to do quite so much. And while I do want to do that thing, I'll do something else that I needed to do because it's on the
schedule. It does not work procrastination is because you don't want to do that thing right now. You want to do something else. Go do that. Something else? I reject this Frame.
Mmmmm that efficiency and productivity and success are counter to happiness and freedom. They actually go
together. How so
the happier you are the more you can sustain doing something the more likely you're going to do something that will in turn. Make you even happier and you continue to do it new outwork. Everybody else. The more free you are, the better you can allocate your time and the less you're caught up in a web of obligations and commitments and the more you can focus on the task at
hand in other news, this episode is brought to you by function. Staying on top of your health requires more.
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Right now, you can get the exact same blood panels that I get and bypass their wait list by going to the link in the description below are heading to function, health.com / modern wisdom, that's function, health.com / 10. Most mm, this is related to another inside of yours. The less you want something, the less you're thinking about it, the less you're obsessing over it the more you're going to do it in a natural way. The more you're going to do it for yourself, you're going to do it in a way that you're good at and you're going to stick with it. The people around, you will see the quality of your work is higher but this seems like a difficult tension.
To navigate because an obsessive attention to detail is a competitive advantage of your work as well. So you have these two things sort of conflicting with each
other. No one is going to beat you at being you. If it's so one of the things I like to say is like
find what feels like play to you, but looks like work to
others. So it looks like work to them but to you feels like play, it's not work. So you're going to out-compete them because you're doing it effortlessly, you're doing it for fun. They're doing.
It for work. They're doing it for some by-product to you. It's art, its beauty, its Joy, its flow it's fulfilling. You must enjoy podcasting.
If you didn't, you wouldn't be good at it but you will nine hundred episodes either, right? If you would, you do,
if you decided that the right way to get ahead in life, was to go write books. You would nobody would have heard of you. Chris Williamson's book, would be a complete flop, that's not who you are, you're a podcaster, you enjoy talking to people, you enjoy interviewing them. The more you do things that are natural
You the less competition you have, you escaped competition through authenticity, it by being your own self. If I had to summarize how to be successful in life into words, I would just say productize yourself. That's it. Just
figure out what it is that you naturally, do that the
world might want that. You can scale up and turn into a
product and it'll be, it'll eventually be
effortless for you. Yes, it, there's always work required, but he won't even feel like work to do feel like plate.
To you and modern society gives us that opportunity, you know, if you were 2,000 years ago, you're born in a farm, your choices are very limited, all right? You're going to do stuff on that farm. Now you can literally wake up and you can move to a different city. You can switch careers, you can switch jobs, you can change the people that you're with, you know, you can change so many things about who you are and who you're with and what you're doing. That there is infinite opportunity out there for you literally infinite and so it's much better to treat this like a
Function, defined the people who need you. The most Define the work that needs you the most to find the place, your best suited to be at, and it's worthwhile to spend time in that exploration before diving into exploitation. The biggest mistake in a world with so many choices is premature Commitment if you prematurely commit to being a lawyer or a doctor and now you've got like you know, five years invested into that you might have just completely missed, you might just end up in the wrong, profession, the wrong place, the wrong, people for 30 years, your life, grinding away, and yes, the best time.
To figure that out was before but the second best time is now so just change it.
Hmm. And also presumably kill things that aren't working very quickly
by default it should kill everything. You know, if you can't decide the answer is no and most things. You just be saying no to that. It part of my keeping. My calendar free is just by default saying no to everything. Do I want to create a calendar just to add your event, right? Or to add your need or your desire? One of the other things
about
Early on in life, you're
looking for opportunities. So you're saying yes to everything and that is a phase that you go through. That is the exploration phase later. When you found the thing, you want to work on your in the exploitation phase, you have to say, no to everything by default, and if you don't say no to everything
by default, if you have to even explicitly,
go out of your way to say no to something that will take up time, for example, you know, there a lot of people out there who are in the hospital culture and a big piece of hustle, culture is like, well, you're not going to get something if you don't ask for it so they will hustle people. They'll always be
Ting. You requests messages. Yeah, this is a famous person problem, but I have it and people are always asking me for things and I kind of squirm when I get these messages and I'm sure you get these two text messages email saying, hey Chris, my friend so-and-so should really be on your podcast or you should come to my event. You should write a foreword for my book and you kind of squirm when you get this, right? If to figure out how to say no. And one of the things I learned along the way is that, if you wouldn't ask somebody else to do it and then you get that request yourself. You can just dismiss it. You don't have to respond, you don't, you don't even let
That enter your brain. You have to be able to delete emails, and text messages without flinching. If you want to scale and scaling is very important, scaling, your time is really important, every Interruption will take you out of flow. So the only way you can remain in flows, if you get either, very good at ignoring, these things, by default or closing yourself off like a hermit, like our mutual friend, Tim Ferriss to us or you just become emotionally capable of not registering these as something that causes turbulence inside of you
that not
Not registering it emotionally thing. Is that a
fundamental? That's so fundamental to so
many things in life. Okay. Can we dig into that a little bit, is it? Because again I've only seen you as you write. I didn't know you 20 years ago, I didn't know you was a child. So I've only seen you with this holistic selfishness, the integrated self prioritization, whatever week. I don't know what we called.
It selfish is fine. I'll take selfish. I know this dish. I'm very selfish person. Don't contact me.
Yeah, did that.
All right, ladies, I also get the sense to that maybe people have lived obligation life for so long that they actually kind of struggled to tap into what it is that they want, they've hidden their wants, and their desires, and their needs and have deprioritized themselves so much for so long, they go. What do I want? Actually, what it, what is it? Do I want to go to this thing or not? Because all I've done is be fucking puppeted, right? I've been Marianne netted by other people's desires for so so long, I can't even
Tap into that anymore and saying no feels like a war crime.
So I think it's really good to be able to view your own mind and your own thoughts objectively. And that is the big benefit of meditation. It creates a small gap between your conscious observation self and your mind and that lets you. Then look at your thoughts and evaluate them a little bit like a, you would have third parties statements and if you just take your mind to be you and they're integrated in one of the same at all times. And you reacting,
The mind then you're not evenly question, things that come into your mind. Anything that comes in that creates a reaction will immediately create a reaction. But if you can observe your thoughts a little bit and not in some wu8, but you can even just do it through therapy, you can do it through journaling, you can do it any way. You like you can just take long walks, you don't have to meditate and do Lotus position. All that is unnecessary but if you can observe your own thoughts and view them a little objectively, then you can start being a little more choosy a little more critical and you can realize that there are no
Problems in the real world other than maybe things that inflict pain on your body. Everything else has to become a problem in your mind. First it you have to view it and interpret it and create a narrative that it is a problem before it becomes a problem. And then you realize that a lot of your emotional energy is spent on reacting to things that your mind is automatically saying our problems and you don't need all those problems.
Do you really need that many problems in your life?
Again I would say try to focus.
Send just one overarching problem and then go solve that problems. Like if you want to be successful define success, very concretely, focus on that in everything else. When it enters your mind, it becomes a problem. With it's a judgment about the girl walking down the street or the car that just cut in front of you. Or whether it's like, you know, this your accountant did the stupid thing. Like yes, it's going to trigger you but observe for a moment that like it's triggering me I've created a problem. Do I really want to have this problem right now? To only spend the energy in this problem or do I want that going somewhere else?
And it doesn't have to be that over. You'd have to the mine mud wrestling with itself, is also a
problem. But to do that, I have my problems have got problems and I have a real problem about fixing my problem. Yeah, exactly. It's so you just you're going to be
much happier and much more focused. Again I think happiness and focus and success can kind of complement each other. You're going to have much more energy just think about his mental energy. You know much more mental energy to focus on the actual problems you want to solve if you don't start on.
Consciously subconsciously, reactively, picking up problems everywhere. So before anything can be a problem that takes up your emotional energy, you have to accept it as a problem. You can be choosy about your problems. And I'm not saying I'm perfect in that regard, but I think I'm better
than I used to be. Well, lots of people are addicted to solving problems so much, so that sometimes people create problems when we don't have any simply so that we can solve them,
we have that going on and then even worse, as we take on problems, that we can affect. So,
You know, another one of my little quips was, you know, a rational person can sort of a rational person, should should cultivate indifference to things that are out of their control, right? Or a rational person can find Peace by cultivating, indifference the things that are out of their control. And I'm, as guilty as anybody of Doom surfing on X or social media and getting worked up about things that I can't do anything about right. Like, do I want to be fighting those battles in?
And I literally cannot do anything about it. So if you find yourself looping on a problem, like you're watching the news too much and you're getting caught up in a problem. You can't do anything about, you have to step away from that, and modern media is a delivery mechanism for mimetic viruses and not what's happened. Now is, you know, 100 years ago, five hundred years ago, if something wasn't happening in your immediate vicinity, you wouldn't hear about it. It wouldn't be a problem for you but now, every single one
One of the world's problems has turned into a memetic virus, which is going into the battlefield of the news and is trying to infect your mind in real time. I could so that. Yeah. So
that you become obsessed with the war in
Ukraine, which is really far away, or you get obsessed with climate change, or you get obsessed with a. I do more, you get obsessed with whatever. And there's nothing as riveting as the old religion, the world is ending. The world is ending, pay attention. The world is ending. And if
you don't design for complex at Global 600 complex, a global
scale and I would argue that large percentage of the population.
Asian are essentially just infected with these mimetic viruses that have taken over their brain and are causing them to do. Incredible, gyration about things that probably aren't even true or are greatly exaggerated, but even to the extent, they are true there. Things that that person can do nothing about and they should put their own house in order first. So, you know, another little line I have for myself is your family is broken, but you're going to fix the world, right? People are running out there to try and fix the world with a
little lives. Are a mess. My God,
right? And, and I think it defies credibility,
If you can't fix your own life first, I'm not going to take you seriously, if you can't fix your own life, like all these philosophers who, you know, seem like people, you emulate, and so smart, or like these, brilliant celebrities, and they go off and commit suicide, while you just kind of invalidated your whole way of life. It's like that line of in No Country for Old Men were the Killer's waiting for the protagonist and protagonist shows up in the killer says, well, you know, if your set of rules and brought you here, then what good are you
rules didn't work?
I am self.
I'm holistically selfish in that. I want to be objectively successful in everything I set out to want.
Yeah you have one life don't settle for mediocrity, don't
settle for mediocrity and I
think the only people debate
intelligence for example, right? We talked about IQ test and all that, but I think the only true test of intelligence is if you get what you want out of life, and there are two parts to that, one is getting what you want. So, you know, how to get it, and the second is wanting the right things knowing what to
You want in the first place, I could want to be a, you know, six foot eight basketball player and I'm not going to get that. So it's one thing, the wrong thing.
So wanting something that you can't get. That's one that's in the. You can catch also wanting something that you don't
want. Yeah, wanting something. That's a booby prize. There are plenty of booby prize has
to write that. What is that? What is it about? 20.
Yeah. Prizes that are just not worth having or that create their own
problems so if you're not careful you can end up in a place in life not only that you don't want to be but one that you didn't even mean to get to
that's if you're kind of proceeding unconsciously
How many people and usually I think people end up there because they are going on autopilot with sort of societal expectations or other people's expectations. So you know or out of guilt or out of like mimetic desire. You know, Peter teal has this whole thing from Rene Girard about how mimetic desires our desires are picked up from other people and some of those are automatically baked into society, like, you know, go to law school. Go to med school or whatever, go to business school or they might be from watching what your friends are doing. And, you know, the
Other monkeys are doing or it might just be you know what your parents expectations are. I might be to guilt you know, guilt is just societies voice. Speaking in your head socially program so you'll be a good little monkey and do things that are good for the tribe but I think the the best outcomes come when you think it through for yourself and decide for yourself. And I don't think people spend enough time deciding. For example, we run on these 4-year Cycles. You know, you in Silicon Valley, you go join a start-up, you vest your stock over four years. That's the
In college, you know, you go for four years, high school, you go for four years, some things take longer, you know, you have children, they hit puberty nine years later. The second nine year cycle until that relationship changes.
But we're used to these fairly long
Cycles, multi-year cycles, in which we are committed to things, you go to law school, you know, for five year cycle, you go be a lawyer 40-year cycle. These are very long Cycles. The amount of time we spend deciding
What to do, and who to do it with very short, very, very short, right? We spend you know, three months deciding one month deciding on a job where we're going to be for 10 years or five years and because a lot of discoveries path-dependent where the next thing you find on the path is depend on where you were on the previous path. You sort of start going down this Vector that is a very long distance. So people decide frivolously which city to live in and that's going to decide who their friends are. What their jobs are there opportunity there whether their food supply, their Air Supply quality of life.
It's such an important decision with you will spend. So little time thinking it through, I would argue that if you're making a for your decision, spend a year thinking it through, like really thinking,
it's 25% of the time.
Yeah, exactly. It is the secretary theorem on a female that one
is that Peter. So after you've done this, many people pick the best one of the next. However, many that's
right. Yeah yeah. The secretary theorem is computer science. Professor is trying to figure out how much time you spent interviewing secretaries and then how long to keep the secretary. So let's say it's kind of a secretary for 10 years does he keep searching for, you know?
One year two years, three years 1 month 2 months, what is the optimal time? And it turns out that the optimal time is somewhere around a third, about a third of the way through you take the best person you've work with and try to find someone that good or better.
So that by the time you got about
a third of the way through you have, excuse me, seen enough that you now have a sense of what the bar is and then anybody who meets or exceeds that bar is good enough and this applies to dating this applies to jobs and careers is applies generally.
But the interesting thing about the secretary theorem is that it's actually not time-based. It's not based on one third of the time. It's iteration Base number of tons of the number of shots you took on goal. That's right. So you want to have lots and lots of iterations. So in that
sense you need to bail out quickly and you need to be decisive quickly. That's right. - you need to take opportunities quickly
and bail out quickly, correct. Like, if you go back and you look through failed relationships, probably the biggest regret will be staying in the relationship to
after you was over. Exactly.
Should have left sooner the
moment you knew it wasn't going to work out, you should have moved on. So in that sense I think Malcolm Gladwell popularize, this idea of 10,000 hours to Mastery. I would say it's actually 10 thousand iterations to Mastery. It's not actually 10,000. It's some unknown number but it's about the number of iterations that drive to learning curve and iteration is not repetition. Repetition is a different thing repeating is doing the same thing over and over. Iteration is modifying it with a learning and then doing another version of it. So that's error correction. So if you get 10,000 error Corrections in anything
thing, you will be an expert at it.
Don't partner with cynics and pessimists. You mentioned there about the people who've got a nightmare going on at home and trying to fix the world but a lot of the time that cynicism and pessimism we find in ourselves. We see the world whether we want to whether it's because we've been bribed, what the news or or the negative people around us have said or it's a bit more kind of endogenous than that. It's just sort of in us. It's the way that we see the world how can people
Avoid cynicism and pessimism within themselves.
Ya cynicism pessimism is a tough one. It's we're naturally hardwired for it again. I go back to Evolution. I'm sorry to keep harping at Evolution but within biology there's very few good explanatory theories and you know theory of evolution by natural selection is probably the best one. So if you can't explain something about life or psychology or human nature through Evolution, then you probably don't have a good theory for it and I would say that pessimism is another one that comes out of this which is in the natural environment. Your
A hardwired to be pessimistic because let's say that I see something rustling in the woods, and if I move towards it and it turns out to be food and pray, then good. I get to eat one meal, but if it turns out to be a predator, I get eaten. And that's the end of that. So, we are hard-wired to avoid ruin and, you know, just dying. So we are naturally hardwired to be pessimist. But modern society is very different, despite whatever problems you may have with modern society. It is far far safer than living in the jungle and just trying to survive.
And the opportunities and the upside are nonlinear. For example, when you're investing, if you short a stock you the, most money you can make is to
X. You just lose. You know, if the stock goes to
0, you double your money but if the stock is a next Nvidia and it goes 100 X or 1000x. You make a lot of money. So upside through because of Leverage is nearly unlimited also in modern society because there's so many different people you can interact with if you go on a date and a fails, their infinite more people to go on a date with in a tribal system there
Might have been 20 people and you can't even get through all of them. So modern societies far more forgiving of failure and you just have to sort of neocortical e realizing
override that realize
that you were much more running a search function to find the thing that will work and then that one thing will pay off in massive compounding. Once you find your mate, for the rest of your life, you find your wife or your husband, then you can compound in that relationship. It's okay. If you had 50 failed dates in between the same way, once you find the one business you're meant to plow into and will compound return.
Okay, if you had 50 small
field Ventures or 50 small failed job interviews, it doesn't the number of failures doesn't matter and so there's no point in being a pessimist. It's you want to be an optimist, but I would say you want to be you want to be skeptical about specific things. Every specific opportunities probably a fail, but you want to be optimistic in the
general, in the general, you will be like something in here is going to work. How do you navigate that tension
between exactly, as I said, I'm optimistic in the general, that if something fails right now,
Now then this is a little woo, but it wasn't meant to be. It was a learning experience. It was an iteration as long as I learned something from it then it's a win. If I didn't learn from it, then it's a loss. But as long as you're learning and you keep iterating fast and cutting your losses quickly, then when you find the right thing, you have to be optimistic and compound into it. So you don't want to jump into the first thing. You do want to marry the first person, you date necessarily, unless you got very lucky, but you want to investigate and explore very, very quickly until you find the
And then you have to be willing to go all in. You have
to go in the movie chips at Center table. So both those both those
approaches are required. So it's a barbell strategy, it's sort of black or it's white and most people sort of stuck in this grey bit more like half in, but I'm kind of doing, you know, if I am.
And I also think like labels like pessimists Optimist, cynic, introvert/extrovert. These are very self. Limiting, humans are very Dynamic. There times when you feel like being in,
Reverted there times when you feel like being extroverted their context in which you'll be pessimistic their context in which will be optimistic, leave all the labels alone it's better. Just to look at the problem at hand. Look at reality. The way it is try to take yourself out of the equation in this, in a sense like obviously your involves but motivated reasoning is the worst kind of reasoning. You're not going to find truth through highly motivated. Reason you have to be objective. And objective means try to take yourself out of it as much as possible, or at least your personality.
But as much as possible. And so to the extent you run with his thick, identity and personality is going to Cloud, your judgment is going to try and lock you into the past. If you say, I'm a dick wrestling. I'm happy person. Yeah, I'm going to be unhappy. That's the way of locking yourself into your past even saying I have trauma and PTSD. Yeah, you feel something. There are memories. There are flashes their occasional bad feelings, but don't Define Yourself by because then you lock it into your identity and just going to loop on it. It's better to stay flexible because the reality is
Always changing, and you have to be able to adapt to it at a tation is also intelligence at a tation is survival. Adaptation is kind of how you're here. You're here because you're an adapter and your ancestors were adapters. So to adapt, you will you'll see things clearly. And if you're seeing them through your own identity, it's going to Cloud your
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Modern wisdom.
Moving on to sort of thinking about happiness, obviously topic of yours. That's a
It's honestly the one that I feel the least qualified to talk
about. This is like a guy that's got long arms teaching how to bench press or a dude it's really tall teaching how to deadlift someone that feels like they came from behind the eight ball.
Yeah, is you're asking a crazy person about their thoughts. So just started through
this happiness, still more about peace than it is
about Joy.
It's just one of those overloaded words, that means different things to different people. So I'm not even sure we're communicating the same language, but
What is happiness?
I think it's just basically being okay with Where You Are.
Not wanting.
Not wanting things to be different than the way they are not having the sense that anything is missing in this
moment.
Needing something to change. Your current positive situation being contingent on an adjustment. I'm getting something from the outside
world.
Ironically, I think most people if you were to ask them when they were happiest for a sustained period of time, not for a brief moment because pleasure can override happiness and create kind of this illusion of happiness. But if you ask people when they were happy for a sustained period of time, they were probably doing some variation of nothing.
That's interesting because in the chase is this sort of black this contingency? That's right. But then you get bored.
If you just sit around all the time, you get bored. So you want Adventure, you want surprise like there's the funny thought experiment of the Bliss machine, right? Which is suppose I could drill a hole in your head and put electrode and they did this with monkeys and I couldn't put a wire in there and I can't stimulate just the right part of your brain and I can put you in Bliss and you'll just be in Bliss. Would you want
that?
Might be nice for how long.
Do it and I'll tell you. All right,
so most people will say, well, I don't want that, I want meaning, I want just Bliss. I want meeting and you like, okay, well, I'll put an electrode in there and I'll give you meeting how about that. And if you kind of run this thought experiment, long enough, I think most people realize, actually, what I want is I want surprise, I want and I want the world to surprise me and I want to wrestle with it in ways that are somewhat predictable, but somewhat not any kind of end up back where you started. So I don't know if necessarily
For some people, pure happiness is the ultimate goal. They want to, you know, just be blissfully happy, wherever they are whenever they are. But I think other people, most people would say, well I'm here in this world, I'm here in this life, I don't understand it or why? But I want to be, I want to be engaged. I want to be surprised. I want to do things. I want to accomplish things. I want to want things, and then get them. Right. That's kind of the whole game that we're all playing here.
Surprise is a really interesting the sort of
Unpredictability, I think total Bro Science here, but I'm pretty sure that that's kind of how dopamine works that things are a bit better than you expected that within that. It means that if you for the perennial insecure, overachievers that Chloe for control. The really want to be able to schedule this perfectly done and we know the itinerary, we know where we're going to be at this time, you're in some ways. I guess reducing down the capacity for surprised because everything has become very
Strived, prescribed done in advance. Laid out your ability to be surprised actually diminishes.
Yeah. If if nothing worked out the way you expected, it was all Serendipity and you didn't want that. You would just be a ball of anxiety on the other hand. If everything worked out as you expected and wanted you'd be so bored, you might as well be dead.
So there's some, you know,
the River of Life kind of flows between these two Banks and enjoy it.
Yusei thinking about yourself is the source of all and happiness. But presumably, you need to work on yourself and your weaknesses as well. So, some degree of reflection is important and if thinking about yourself as a source of unhappiness, is this a price that you need to pay, I need to sort of reflect in word. I'm going to have to diminish this level of happiness, for a little while. And then I can use this new level. I've got my brown belt on and I can go out into the world as a brown
belt. What I'm specifically referring to that is if you're thinking about your personality and your
Your ego and the character of you and you're obsessing over that. That's where a lot of depression and happiness sort of lingers and and gets cultivated. So thinking about whoa is me this happened to me that happened to me. I have this personality. I have this issue. I deserve this. I didn't get that. That's your just strengthening a little beast in there that is insatiable and that's where I think a lot of unhappiness comes from. What's the Beast?
See.
Go. But that word is so overused that I kind of hate to use the word but it's like, it's a recurrent collection of thoughts that are very self-obsessed and will never be satisfied
and very concrete sized as well. So they're not malleable, not particularly like. So here is adding to
them by thinking about them all the time, you're creating narratives and stories and identities. But that's different from solving personal problems. So if you encounter something you learn from something, you're reflecting upon the learning, then you can reflect upon it, absorb it and then just move on.
But sitting there saying, I'm Chris, I'm the Vol, I deserve this. This happened to me, that person wrong me. This is who I am. This shouldn't have happened. I need to go get revenge on this or any to fix that or change this. I mean, that I think is where a lot of mental illness is, you know, comes from. So it depends if you are thinking about something to solve a problem and get it off your chest and get it off your mind.
If it leaves your mind
clearer at the end of it, then I think it was worthwhile if it leaves your mind.
Busier at the end of it, then
you're probably going to trust direction. Is this a justification for detachment? Cultivated ignorance. Distraction Detachment is not a goal. This has made as a by-product. It's just a byproduct of just realizing, you know, what matters, and what does it and? And just for one moment on the self thing, I think
Everybody. Craves thinking about something more than themselves. If you want to be you know, happy to some extent, you have to forget about your personal problems. And one way to do that is take on other problems, bigger problems. And that could be a mission. That could be serious. That could be spirituality, that could be kids. It could be caring about the planet or letting people take that a little far, you know, and then they get kind of oppressive and in Toronto, coal in support of abstract Concepts but so these can be taken too far just like religion, for example.
Sample. Just like anything in excess, anything in excess, right? But generally, the less you think about yourself the more, you give think about a mission or about God or about a child or something like that.
I remember, Vinnie, High math. The founder of loom, said, I'm rich, and I have no idea to do what to do with my life and you replied godkids. Our mission pick at least one.
That's right. Preferably all three,
it's very liberating.
Yeah, thinking, I think over thinking about yourself is probably the, it's it may not be the cause of depression, but it certainly doesn't help rumination.
Yeah, I kind of had a self-induced Stockholm Syndrome from this sort of a thing because I like to think about stuff and you provide you with an endless number of things to think about. So you're kind of you have this, other prisoner in the prison guard at the same time, and
I
had Abigail schreyer on the show,
she was wrote this book about therapy sort of pushing back against therapy culture for kids specifically for kids. But there was a blast radius. That covered pretty much everything including kind of CBT and like fire like we're getting perilously close to some really evidence-based stuff here. But the more that I thought about it and the more that I've looked at the evidence there is like basically a direct correlation between how much you think about yourself and how miserable you
are. It's therapy is great. If it lets you vent and is solves the thing in the
Then X session later as you're done, you're clear. But if you're just looping on the same thing forever, then it's
actually the opposite bathing in it. You're indulging in it. Yeah, you know.
How have you become happy techniques developed over time?
Yeah I used to have a lot of them now. I kind of try not to have any because I think the techniques themselves are kind of a struggle. It's sort of like bidding for status, implies your little status it reveals that you're low status. So someone who's basically trying to show off comes across as low status the same way someone was trying to be happy sort of saying I'm unhappy and
In that frame. So it's better just not even think in
terms of position yourself as being in lack, in order to
attain. Yeah, I don't even think in terms of Happiness unhappiness anymore. I just kind of just do my thing again, another
question, that's similar to a bunch of them, do you think you could have got that? Had you have not done the procedural. Systematic. Sort of, I would step by step by step. This is what it is and then come out the other side. I don't think they're any formulas.
I think it's Unique to each person. It's like asking a successful person. How did you become successful? Each one of them will give you a different story.
You can't follow anyone else's path, and most of them are even probably telling you some narratives version of it, that isn't quite true. I mean, that's
something that I continually realize, especially as I get to spend more time around people that are successful and you hear very important to prioritize work life balance, right? That's one of the most common things that people who have attained success say that's not my experience but if you look at it, you shouldn't be asking somebody who is successful, what they do to continue their success. Now, you should be asking
What did they do to attain their success when they are where you
were? And the people who are really extraordinarily successful, didn't sit around watching success porn. This is when it did it. What is this? Had they had such an overwhelming desire to be successful at the thing that they were doing that they just went and did that thing they didn't have time to study and learn and listen and they just did it. It's the overwhelming desire. That's the most important and the focus that comes from that.
So tweet of yours, that was a people who are good at making wealth or people are good at attaining wealth. Don't need to teach anybody else how to do
it. Yeah, you don't need mentors. You need action. That was one of them. The other one is, you know, the the people who actually know how to make money, you don't need to sell your course on it. There it is. Yeah, there's lots of variations on it, but if you don't another one is, if you don't lie awake at night, thinking about it, you don't want it badly enough.
Yeah, I think you I've heard you talk before about how
I'm closed Loops problems that you're working on can cause you to be Sleepless and this I'm not a good sleeper.
Tell me about that. Oh I mean my eat sleep hates me. It's
always funny. I feel that sleeping again. Brian Johnson thinks I'm gonna
die all these probably. Right, but I
how much do you reckon you sleep at night? You got any idea? Oh, it's
so Random. Some nights are sleep eight hours some nights of sleep for hours but it's literally just
random. Are you bothered about that knowing to optimize your sleep coach teaching you how to
I don't flog myself over things. If I want to sleep, I sleep. If I don't want to sleep, I don't sleep. It's not a. I don't think I'm doing anything right? I
don't label it. Good night, bad
night.
No, I work out every day because I think it gives me more energy, and I've gotten into a good habit with it. Maybe I'll do the same thing with sleep. Maybe I'll develop a good habit but I'm not going to beat myself up over it. They'll come a point where it's important to me was important to me. I'll just do it. You know, most of the like for example, you'll get people with addictions right over eating or smoking or whatever, they can
kind of go through all the
different methods, but it's half-hearted and then one day, they're like, oh shit, I got lung cancer. I mean, my dad has lung cancer when they drop it immediately. So,
A lot a lot, a lot of changes more about desire and understanding. Then it is about forcing yourself or trying to domesticate yourself its
efficiency again. I guess, you know aligning the thing that you want to do with the way that you feel about what it is that you want to do.
Yeah, it's not it's not getting caught up in a half desire or mimetic desire. It's really just
being aware of what it is that you actually want at this point in time and when you want something then you will act on it with maximal capability and that's the time to act on it. The meantime just doing it because other people tell you should do it or Society tells you should do it or you feel slightly guilty about it. These are these are half-hearted efforts and half-hearted efforts, don't get you there
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Imagine how effective you'd be if you want anxious. All the time is is one of yours and anxiety as the emotion du jour of the 21st century, and a lots of driven people, very anxious, very paranoid. That's what's caused them to be effective. It pays so much attention, detail oriented, not letting things go. The staying up at night, thinking about it. That's the paranoia coming in. What have you come to learn about anxiety and dealing with it.
So anxiety and stress are interesting. They're very related. Stresses when, like, if you look at iron beam when iron
Beam
is under stress is because it's being bent in two different directions at the same time. So when your mind is under stress is because it has two conflicting desires at once. So, for example, you know, you, you want to be liked, but you want to do something selfish and you can't reconcile the two. And so you are under stress, you want to do something for somebody else, you want to do something for yourself, right? These are exactly you. You don't want to go to work, but you want to make money so you're under stress, right? So you have two conflicting desires and I think one of the ways to get through
Stress is to acknowledge that, oh, I actually have two conflicting desires, and either I need to resolve it. I need to pick one and then be okay. Losing the other or I will decide later, but at least just being aware of why your stress can help alleviate a lot of stress and anxiety. I think is sort of this pervasive unidentifiable stress where you're just kind of stressed out all the time and you're not even sure why, and you can't even identify the underlying problem. The reason for that is because you have so many.
Unresolved problems, unresolved stress points that are piled up in your life that you can no longer identify what the problems are. And there's this mountain of garbage in your mind and a little bit of it, poking out the top, like an iceberg and
that's anxiety. But underneath there's a lot of unresolved things
and so you just need to kind of go through very carefully every time you're anxious, like, okay, why am I anxious this time? I don't know why. Oh, well, let me sit here and just think about it. Let me, let me write down what the possible causes could be. Let me meditate
donít, Let Me journal, let me talk to a therapist. Let me talk to my friends. Let me just kind of see like when does that stress, go away, if you can kind of identify and unravel and resolve these issues that I think that helps get rid of anxiety,
a lot of the anxieties piled up because we move through life too
quickly, not observing our own reactions to things, we don't resolve them. So this goes counter to what I was saying earlier about not reflecting too much on things but you reflect on the problems to observe them and solve them. You don't reflect on them to feel better about your Indulgence.
If you're doing it to just feel better about
yourself, that could be strengthening your personality and your ego and could be creating a more fragile personality, you know, one big anxiety resolve for me is ruminating on death. I think that's a good one. You're gonna die. It's all going to 0. You cannot take anything with you. And I know this is trite and I know the we don't spend enough time thinking about the big questions. We kind of give up on them when we're very, very young, you know, a little child, might ask the big questions, like why are we?
Here, with some being a life. What it's all about, you know, is there Santa Claus's or God, but then, as adults were taught, not to think about these things, we were given up on them. But I think the big questions of the big questions for good reasons, and
if you can keep
the idea in front of you at all times that you're going to die and that everything goes literally
20
What sort of stress about? Yeah, For Better or Worse. Life is very short. How should people deal with its
briefness?
Enjoy it.
Make the best of it, you know, they it's even briefer than
that each moment just
disappears. It's gone. There's only a present moment and it's gone instantly. So if you're not, if you're not there for it, if you're stressed out or you're anxious or you're thinking about something else, you missed it. So you're any moment when you're not in that moment, you are dead to that moment.
You might as well be dead
because your mind is off doing something else. Or, you know, living in some imagine reality, that is just a very poor substitute for the actual
Reality. So one of my recent realizations was, what is wasted time?
What is it? What is a waste of time? So I don't like to waste time but what is wasted time and everything is wasted time in a sense because nothing matters in the ultimate. But in each moment, the thing matters in each moment. This the only thing that matters actually the what's happening in front of you is literally has all the meaning in the world and so what matters is just being present for the thing. So, if you're doing something that you want to do and you're fully there for it, there's not wasted time.
If you don't want to do it, and your
mind is running away from it, and you're reacting against it and you're wishing, you were somewhere else and you're thinking about some other thing, you're anticipating some future thing or regretting, some past thing or being fearful of something. Then that's wasted time. That's time. That's being wasted. When you're not actually present for the Riyadh in front of you. So, my definition of wasted time. Yes, I do want some material things in life and I, you know, there are things that have more value than others within this life, but this life is very short and bounded. So, the true wasted time is it
The time that you are not present for when you are not there for it, when you're not doing the thing, you want to do to the best of a kid, but is such that you're immersed in. If you're not immersed, in this moment, then you're wasting your time.
People get worried about dying and no longer being here but they don't realize that so much of that life is spent not being here in any case, that's
right. But I think people crave being here for it and and and when you're here for it you're actually not thinking about yourself. You are more immersed in the
The thing that the moment the
task at hand we don't want peace of mind, we want peace for a
mind. That's right. Yeah you don't PC the mind is what killed Eat You Alive if you let it and there's more to you than the mind.
How? So
Well, I mean the very if I don't want to disassemble the body, some speaker, right?
Because please go on ya. At the end of the day like
everything arises within your Consciousness right
you you got that we're also experiencing sorry you've got nowhere else to go nowhere else to
experience it and that Consciousness is relatively static in a sense that it's been exactly the same. For the moment, you were born to the moment, you die and everything that you experience for your body, for your mind to the world. It says everything is within that consciousness.
And that thing that base layer of being in, this is what the Buddhists will tell you is the real thing everything that comes and goes in the middle, including your mind, including your body is unreal, and trying to find stability in those transient. Things is your castle that you're building on sand that's going to crumble.
Like it's going to play out the way it's going to play out. There will be some good and some bad most of it is actually just up to your interpretation. You're born, you have a set of sensory experiences and then you die, how you choose to interpret
Those experiences up to you and different people interpret them in different
ways. Yeah. See. All line about two people walking down the street, they're having the exact same experience. One is have experienced, one is happy. One is said, right? It's a narrative in their heads as had to choose to interpret. So I think, when I said that, it was a long time ago, I was talking more about having positive interpretations and - interpretations, but these days, I think it's better just not to have any interpretations
and to just allow things to be
You're still going to have interpretations, you can't stop it. And nor should you try, but even that having an interpretation is just a thing you could leave alone.
Yeah, I really want to try and just dig in a little more to the best way to remind people that they should value that time. Just how brief it is that the time that you spend ruminating being distracted fears of the past
regrets
Well.
I don't want to tell anybody how to live their life. I would just say that to the extent that you want to improve your quality of life,
the the
easiest and best way to do that is to observe your own mind and your own thoughts and and be a little not necessary critical but be observant of yourself more objectively and then you kind of realize your own loops and patterns, it takes time, it's not, it's not overnight, it's not instantaneous.
So you mean letting go is not a one-time event. Yeah, and
there's
Letting go is not necessarily even the right answer. Like, yes, if you're trying to be an enlightened being and you know, you want to live like a God and everything to be perfect to be a Buddha. Sure, you can let go. But I think it practice is actually quite hard to do. I think I would say that it's you're going to find a lot of fulfillment out of Life by just doing what you want to do. And genuinely exploring what it is that you want, rather than doing what other people expect you do. Or Society expects you to do or what you might. Just think it should be.
Be done by default. You know, I think most older successful people will tell you that their life was best when they lived it unapologetically on their own terms.
Be selfish. Holistic selfish. There you go.
Exactly. We can clip that little. I'm telling you about the selfish.
Yeah. That's everybody keep running it. Bad guy. Great. I had this
Insight or a question. I
guess
how much do you think that we should trust the voice in our heads? Because half of wisdom suggests to rely on your sort of bottom up intuition, and then half of it has to be sort of top-down rational as possible, how do you navigate the tension between head and gut in this way?
I think the gut is what decides? The head is kind of what rationalizes it afterwards. The gut is the ultimate decision maker. If it doesn't and what is a gut, the gut is refined judgment, its taste aggregate to aggregate it, and it could be a grid through Evolution, and it's in your genes and your DNA, or it could be aggregated through your experiences, and what you thought through the mind is good at solving new problems and new problems in the external world that have different defined.
Edges, you know, beginnings and ends and objectives. What the mind is actually really bad at is making hard decisions. So when you have a hard decision to make, I find it's better to. Yes. You ruminate on it. You think through all the pros and cons, but then you sleep on it, you wait a couple of days, you wait until the gut answer appears with conviction and it feels right. And when you're younger it takes longer because you just don't have as much experience. And when you're older you can happen much faster which is why? You know
and you'll have less time to yeah, I know people.
More set in their ways, the consequence right, they know what they want, they know what they don't want. So it takes time to develop your gut instinct in judgment, but once you've developed them, don't trust anything else because you can't go against your gut. It'll bite you in the end. Usually in relationships that failed. You can look back and say, oh actually, I knew it was going to fail because of this reason but I kind of went ahead anyway because I wanted it to be this way, right? I wanted this person to be a different way than they are. I wanted to get a different thing out of it than I thought I was going to. Then I knew I was going to get
But I just wanted it. So sometimes desire will override your judgment and then travel thinking yeah, wishful thinking it traps. You into a into a pathway that she's choose a time. What's
that inside of yours? We think we can't change ourselves but we can. We think we can change other people but we can't. Exactly. I
think to add to that. You can't change other people. You can change your reaction to them. You can change yourself but other people only change through trauma or their own Insight on their own schedule and never in a way that you
Like yeah. Alain de botton says that people do sometimes change but rarely in relationships and never when they're told to
absolutely. Yeah. The fastest way to kind of alienate somebody to tell them to change. In fact the Dale Carnegie School of Public Speaking. You know the way that operates is the get you up there and they realize that the number one problem with public speaking is that people are very self-conscious and so people who are practicing in the Dale Carnegie School of public speaking, I don't know, I never
Went through it, I heard the second hand so I could be wrong but I like the story where they get up and they start speaking and the people in the audience are only allowed to compliment them. Genuine compliments, not fake compliments on things that they did well, but you're not allowed to criticize them on things that they did poorly and eventually they
kind of get through it. And they developed
self-confidence the same way. There's like the Michelle Thomas School of language learning and on that one, what they do is you listen to a teacher, talking to a student. They're not teaching you, you're not expected to remember memorize anything. You just
Listen to a student's
stumbling over the language. It's a better way to learn because you yourself. Don't feel flustered. You're being tested graded though. So you're not in your own head as much, correct, you're not in your own head and you're just, you might even be laughing at the student or you might be agreeing with the teacher or vice versa or sympathize with the student but because you are a passive Observer, you can be more objective about it and you aren't threatened or fearful and you can learn better, and coming back to the original point of, you can't change people. If you do want to change someone's Behavior,
I think the only effective way to do it is to compliment them when they do something you want, not to positive rings. Yet. Exactly not to insult them or be negative or critical, but they do something you don't want and we can't help it. It's obviously in our nature to criticize and I do it as well, but it just reminds me that like, when somebody does something praiseworthy, don't forget to praise them. Like definitely go out of here with it and it'll be genuine. It has to be genuinely can't be a fake thing. This is not you know one of those just dropping compliments type thing, eventually that people will see through that they want authenticity.
But just don't forget to praise people when they do something praiseworthy and you'll get more of that behavior. There was
a really famous thread on Reddit about five questions to ask yourself. If you're uncertain about your relationship, one of the questions was are you truly in love with your partner or just that potential or the idea of them? And that's the, you know, they show such great promise. They either look at the look at their ability for Change and growth, they they're on the right path,
the partner matching thing is so hard. You know when people come and ask me like oh should I be with this person?
Person. Like well if you're asking me if
it's just clearly though, right? Because you wouldn't have to ask if you were with the right
person or when you ask someone like why they're in a relationship with somebody in the start reading out, his, or her resume, right? That's also a bad side. So what do you mean? It's like, oh, we have so much in common, we like to golf together, like, it's not a basis for a relationship or do is, you know, she's a ballerina or, you know, he went to Harvard or what have you, this is the resume item. So that's not who the person actually is. What's up?
Run, sir. I just love being with this person. I just trust them. I, you know, I enjoy being around them. I love how capable he is, I love how kind she is, you know, I love her spirit, I love his energy. The more, the more materially and concretely definable, the reasons are your together. The worst they
are. The ineffable is actually where the sort of True Love Lies
because Real Love is a form of unity. It's a form of connection, it's connecting spirit. So YouTube, My
Consciousness meets your Consciousness. It's that
the, the underlying
Drive in love in art in science in mysticism. Is the desire for Unity? It's a desire for connection as, you know, bore has famously wrote in every human. There's a sense of something infinite has been lost, you know, there's a god-shaped hole in you. You're trying to fill. And so we're always trying to find that connection love is trying to find it in one other person. And
Okay, your mail I'm female or whatever and you know, what are your predictions are? Not now we connect. Now we form a whole connected whole or in mysticism, it's like it's all about. Okay, sit down meditate and you'll feel the whole in science. It's like oh, you know, Adams bouncing is mechanics but that generates heat so thermodynamics and motion or kinetics are one combine Theory that's a whole electricity and magnetism or one thing. That's that's the whole creates that sense of all in art. It's like I feel,
An emotion. I create a piece of art around it and then you see that painting or you see the Sistine Chapel or you read the poem and you feel that emotion. So again, it's creating Unity, it's creating connection and I think everybody craves that. And so when you really love somebody, it's because you you feel a sense of wholeness by being around them and that sense of wholeness probably doesn't have anything to do with what school they went to, you know, or what career they're in.
Just sort of tying that into the life is short, stop fucking about if you're faced with a difficult choice and you kind of decide the answer is no. And the reason is modern society is full of options. Yeah. Knowing this rationally. Sounds sounds great. But Having the courage to commit to it, in reality, I think, is a different task and cutting your losses quickly in the big three relationships. Jobs, and locations is hard. What would you say to someone who
May cerebrally be able to agree with you and say I understand who the answer is. My cousin said this
happen. He he said that. He said, what I really he says what I really noticed about you is your ability to walk away from situations that are
Just not great enough for you or good, not good enough for you. Yes. And I think that is a characteristic that I have well I will not accept second best outcomes in my life. Ultimately you will end up wherever it is acceptable to you, you will get out of life, whatever it is acceptable to you. And there are certain things to me that are very, very important where I will not settle for second best. But then there are a lot of other things. I just don't care about. Because if I spend all my time, caring about those things, I don't have the
Energy for the few things that matter. And so in decision making up a few heuristics for myself. Other people can use their own but minor, if you can't decide, the answer is no. If you're offered an opportunity, if you have a new thing that you're saying yes or no to that is a change from where you starting. The answer is by default always know the secondly if you have two decisions if you're have a or b and both seem like very equal take the path, that's more painful in the short term, the
That's going to be painful immediately because
your brain is always trying to avoid pain. So any pain that is imminent, it is going to treat as much larger than it actually is.
This is kind of like a decision-making equivalent of Talib
surgeon. Tell a surgeon whether you want the surgery doesn't look as good because he's more likely to be a good surgeon. Yeah, it's similar in that appearances are deceiving because you're avoiding conflict, you're avoiding pain. So take the path is a more painful in the short term because your brain is create this illusion.
And the short-term pain is greater than the long-term pain because it long-term. Yeah, you can meet your future self to all kinds of long-term money on their money on exactly Mañana. So take the more short-term painful one. And then finally, the last one, which I would try to Cobble Gupta with is that you want to check it. Take the choice that will leave. You more equanimous in the long term by Quantum seems like more. Peace, more mental, peace, and long-term. So whatever, clears your mind more, and we'll have you having less self-talk in the future. If you can model that out, that is
With the better route to go. And then I would focus decision making down on the three things that really matter because everything else is
Downstream of these things. These three decision especially these are early, life
decisions. Later, in life, you have different things to optimize for, but early in life, you're trying to figure out who you're with what you're doing and where you live. And I think on all three of those you want to, you want to think pretty hard about it. And people do some of these unconsciously, you know, who you're with very often. It's like, well, we were in a relationship with stumble long, it felt
Okay. Have been enough time so we got married right. Not great reasons, maybe not terrible reasons. Either these people who over think these things. Sometimes don't get the right answer but maybe here. If you are the kind of person that's not going to settle for second best you iterate, you iterate on a close time frame so you don't run out the clock and then you decide on what you do. You try a whole bunch of different things until you find the one that feels like play to you? Looks like work to others. Can't lose that. It get some leverage. Try to find some
Application of it and go into that. And then where you live, where you live is really important that people spend enough time on that one. I think people pick cities randomly based on where, I went to school, or where my family happened, to be, or where my friend was are visited one weekend. I really liked it. You really want to think it through because where you live, really constraints and defines your opportunities. It it's going to determine your friends circle is going to turn your dating pool is going to determine your job opportunities is going to determine the food and
air and water quality that you receive. It's going to determine your proximity to your family which might be important as you get older and have kids. So very, very, very important decision, whether, you know, quality of life. How much do you stay inside or outside? And how long you live based on that? And I think people choose that one probably more poorly than the put a lot of thought into that one than the other two,
in some ways. Yeah, but also the you're so right. How many people fall backward into a relationship and before they know it? They're living together. We got it. Do we go? Can we were
Wood. And yeah and then when you have kids because then that's half of you and half of them running around, you're never going to separate yourself from that. So once you have a child with somebody, then the most important thing in the world to use half that other person whether you like them or not.
Mmm. Yeah. Jeffrey Mela had a tweet a long time ago that I always think about and he said, every parenting book in the world, could be replaced with one book on behavioral genetics that. The, I'm a big
believer in genetics. Yes, I do think a lot of behaviors Downstream of genetics.
Yes. And I think we underplay that we like to
overplay nurture and underplayed nurture for a source, a underplay nature for societal reasons. But nature is a big deal. The temperament of the person you marry is probably going to be reflected in your child by
default people can change. Julia, touch kid, pick a securely attached partner.
Well, the secret to a happy relationship is too happy people, right? So I would say, if you want to be happy, then be with a happy person. Don't think you're gonna be with someone who's unhappy and then make them happy down the road. Our if you're okay with them being unhappy,
But there are other things to like about them. That's fine.
This goes back to compensate for their unhappiness with other things.
Yes, it actually. We talked a little bit about how people do connect successfully, you know, on spirit and those things. But that's maybe a little too abstract. If you want to get a little more practical, it could be based on
values and values. This set of things,
you won't compromise on
values of the tough decisions
of. Oh my parent got sick. Do they move in with us? Or do we put them in a nursing home? You know, the to do. We give the children money.
Or do we not, you know, do we
do? We move across the country to be
closer to our family or do we? Stay put where we are, you know, do we argue about politics? Do we care? Or do we not? Write the values are way more important than checklist items. And I think if people were to align much more on their values, they would have much more successful relationships.
Hmm. The emotional pain of fearing change. I have this think the job to location.
I'm going to enter or not enter this thing for the most part it's leaving. I think we have this sort of loss of ocean that we really have evolved loss
aversion. That's just painful, separating yourself in front of your friends, it's embarrassing and
how you, how would you advise people to get past themselves with the loss of version? That fear of change? Oh my God, I'm gonna die.
Yeah, so hardest thing in the world starting over it's back to the zero to one thing. It's a is the mountain climbing thing. You're not going to find your path to the top of the mountain and the first go around. Sometimes you go up there, you get stuck and you come back down.
And the difference between all the successful people and the ones who are not is the ones who are successful wanted so badly. They're willing to go back and start over again. And again, whether in their career or in their relationships or anything else.
The most. Seriously, you take yourself the unhappier, you're going to be you learned how to take yourself. Less seriously ill. Fame doesn't help on
that one because that is one of the traps of Fame. People always talking about you. They have a certain view of you, and you start believing that, and then you take yourself, seriously, and then that limits your own actions, you can't look like a fool anymore. You can't do new things anymore. You know, it's tomorrow announce them a break dancer, right? That's going to be met with a lot of scorn and ridicule, but what if I want a break
dancer, I'd back, I'd back you up.
The make that cut. Yeah the truth is if I want to be a breakdancer, I'd be breakdancing
but you know like I'm starting a new company 0 to 1 again from scratch. Let's do it. You know, one more time and not just going in, raising a big VC, fund or retiring, or what have you. But that's because I want to build the product. I want to see it exists, so, I
think that you constantly
just have to force yourself you to remind yourself. Look, deep down. You're still the same Chris. You were. When you were nine years old deep down, you're still a kid. You know, you're still curious about the world.
World, you're still have a lot of the same predilections and desires and wants. You've got a nice souvenir on it, but one of the nice things when you have kids as you realize how much closer they are to you in a personality and knowledge and know how, like I look at my son who's, you know, he's 8 and I just noticed like wow he's probably has 60 to 80 percent of my knowledge and development wisdom and he's a lot more freedom and he's a lot more spontaneity in some ways. He's smarter
And there's not a big gap here left to close this, kids going to be, you know, done very soon at a caught up to me. And so to the extent that I think I know better or that I'm somewhere or that I'm someone it's just an illusion it's just a belief.
What's the lineage between that and taking yourself too
seriously?
I shouldn't take myself too seriously cause there's nothing here. To take that, seriously. And if I take myself too, seriously, then I'm going to get trapped. I'm going to get, I'm going to circumscribe myself again, into a limited set of behaviors and outcomes that keep me from being free. Keep me from being spontaneous, keep me from being happy. So it just goes back to the, you know, don't think about yourself too much. There's a
special type of pain in realizing that the advice that you need to hear right now is
Thing that almost always you learned a long time ago and that, you know, you're basically sort of the same person you were as you were nine in A lot of the time. People ask questions like what advice do you wish that you would give yourself 10 years ago? People ask themselves that question?
Almost invariably the advice that you would give yourself 10 years ago? It's still the advice that you need to hear today. Absolutely. That's why I did that exercise of
thinking back, you know, 10 years, 20 years, 30 years ago. What advice would I give myself? For me? It's just be less. Emotional, don't take, don't take everything. So seriously, do the same things, but do them without all the emotional turbulence. And so, that's the advice. I'm giving myself going forward.
Yeah, it's funny how we need that distance to be able to be a little bit more objective to have a little bit more perspective?
And it's almost a little bit of a trick, right? Because typically when you do those so what would you tell a friend that was going through this, right? And then you try and turn the advice to the friend around onto yourself, but you always think I'm not the friend, you. Okay, you 10 years ago, there's enough distance in. There you go. I actually am still that person. There's just a single line between the end and related to this
story is I think understanding is way more important than discipline. Now Jocko would have a
fit but you know on physical things
Discipline is important. If I want to build a good body, I got to work out on a regular basis, but on mental things, I think understanding is way more important. Once you see the truth of something, you cannot unsee. It all of us have had experiences where we've seen a behavior in a person and then it just changes what we think about that person. We no longer want to be friends with them, or we're deeply, respect them. If it was, you know, really good behavior that maybe was observed unintentionally. So when we, when we really do see something clearly
Early. It changes our Behavior immediately and that is far more efficient than trying to change your behavior through repetition. Could you give me an
example?
If you were, let's say that you know, you have a friend and then that person turns out to be a thief. You see that person stealing something you're done with them if you are you know the smoking and lung cancer example is a good one right? Someone close to you or any time someone Close to You dies or you even hear about someone dying, you hear about something like what's the first thing you do? The first thing assuming that you weren't that close to them, obviously their closeness different if you weren't that close to them. But, you know, you hear about someone in your
Extended social dying. You immediately start trying to different distinguish yourself from them, like, oh, well, how old was this person? You know, did they have it? Where this smoker, you know, did they have an issue? Do I have that issue, right? You immediately start comparing and what you what you're doing. There is you're sort of just trying to see if there's an overlap here, but if you see the truth in something, if you like, oh my God, this person was the same age as me and they died. And that's starting to happen at my age where I'm starting to hear about, you know, extend Circle. People just reminds you time is really short.
Truth. There is a truthful that certain action that distance and US of the truth to that you cannot unsee
you know. Or for example I think we're you enter bodybuilding or something back when I don't know just like that's
like bro lifting stuff. Okay. A little less of a skinny bitch. Yeah right but there probably was a
point where you were being really a grow in the gym and you injured yourself many times, right? And each one of those was and deep understanding of, don't go beyond this point, right? There was a truth there. So again,
Gnu. When you see these things in such a way that you can't unsee them, that changes your behavior instantly and I would argue that that introspection to find those truths is actually very
useful. Is that a justification for more experimentation exploration?
Experience in life. So they're trying to find Serendipity because all of these experiences are going to teach you a inescapable lesson.
You're going to do what you're going to do. Come on your level of exploration, I think is sort of up to you, but life is always throwing truth back at you. It's about whether you choose to see it, whether you choose to acknowledge it, even if it's painful. Truth is often painful, right? If it wasn't, we'd all be seeing truth. All the time. Reality is always reflecting truth. That's all it is. Why would you not have access to it already?
Exactly, you know, all the philosophy that's out there. For example, it's almost trite, like, most people that look at philosophy, like until they discovered for themselves. And
because, because wisdom is the set
of things that cannot be transmitted. If they could be transmitted, you know, we'd read the same five philosophy books with all be done, with all be wise, you have to learn it for yourself. It has to be rediscovered for yourself. In your own context. You have to have specific experiences that then allow you to generalize and see the truth in those things.
In such a way that you're not going to unsee them but each person is going to see them in a different way. I can tell you that Socrates story and it's not going to resonate until there's something that other people desire that you realize you yourself don't want and the moment that happens then you'll see the truth in the general statement.
I want to just read you a two-minute essay that I wrote a couple of weeks ago it's called unteachable lessons. I've been thinking about the special category of lesson one, which you cannot discover. Without experiencing it firsthand, there is a
Subset of advice. That for some reason, we all refused to learn through instruction. These are unteachable lessons, no matter how arduous or costly, or effortful it is going to be for us to find out ourselves. We prefer to disregard the mountains of warnings from our elders songs, literature historical, catastrophes, public scandals, and instead think some version of, yeah, that might be true for them, but not for me, we decide to learn the hard lessons, the hard way over and over again. Unfortunately, they all seem to be the big things too.
It's never new insights about how to put up level shelves or charming. The introduce yourself at a cocktail party. Instead, we spend most of our Lives learning firsthand the most important lessons that the previous generations already. Warned us about things, like money, won't make you happy Fame, won't fix your self-worth. You don't love that. Pretty girl. She's just hot and difficult to get. Nothing is as important as you think it is. When you're thinking about it, you will regret working too much. Worrying is not improving your performance, all your fears are a waste of time, you should see your
Parents more. You'll be fine after the breakup and be grateful that you did it, it's perfectly. Okay, to cut toxic people out of your life and even reading this list back, I'm rolling my eyes at how fucking trite. It is. These are all basic bitch, obvious insights that everybody has heard before, but if they're so basic. Why does everyone so reliably fall? Prey to them throughout our lives and if they're so obvious. Why do people who have recently become famous or wealthy or lost? A parent are gone through a breakup start to Proclaim these facts.
It's with the renewed, grandiose ceremony of someone who's just gone through religious Revelation. It's also a very contentious list of points to say, on the internet, if you interview, a billionaire who says that all of his money didn't make him happy or a movie star, who said that, her Fame felt like a prison, the internet will tear them apart for being ungrateful and out of touch. So, not only do, we refused to learn these lessons. We even refused to hear the message from those warning us about them. And even more than that, I think for every one of these, if I consider a bit deeper, I can recall a Time.
Time including right now where I convinced myself that I am, the exception to the rule that my particular mental makeup, or life situation, or historical, wounds, or dreams for the future, render me immune to these lessons being applicable. No, no, no, my inner landscape would be solved by skirting around the most well-known wisdom of the ages? No, no, I can thread. This needle properly. Watch Me dance through the Minefield and avoid all of the trip wires that everyone else kicks.
And then you kick one and you share a knowing luck. The kind that can only occur between two people have been hurt in the exact same way and a voice in the back of your mind, will say, I told you. So that's a teachable that it's a good essay. I think
one of the reasons why these lessons are unteachable is because they're too broad. They have to be applied in context, a number of the ones that you later contradict each other, like spend more time with your parents and you know, don't work so hard. But you know, at the same time,
You do want to be successful, right? I think, I think a lot of these lessons come from down on high from, as you said, like the famous movie star or the billionaire saying, oh, you don't need me to be happy, it's like well, okay, then give it up bitch.
All right,
so in reality, I think many of these contradict each other and it's like if you went to school and you just study Philosophy for years, you would not know how to live life because you wouldn't know which philosophical Doctrine to apply in which circumstance, you have to actually live life, go.
All of the issues to figure out what it is that you want, what's the context in which some of these things? Apply in some of them don't. Yes. You want to visit your parents more often but you don't live with your parents and you don't want to necessarily see them every day or every week in depending on the parent you might not get along with one of them. So I think it is highly. Contextual that said I would argue that once you figure it out for yourself you can kind of carve these variations on these Maxim's that apply to you and then you'll have a
If experience, that helps you remember it and actually execute on it and you can also phrase it in a way, where it's not right anymore,
so, like my hustle. Yeah. So a lot of my Maxim's in those two self
are carved in a way that they're modernized, they're saying something true, which might be tried if I didn't say it in a new way or an interesting way that is more relevant to me.
Today. It was a Nobel Prize winner who said something to the effect of everything worth saying may have been said before, but given that nobody was listening, it must be said
again, yeah, it has been
Again, has to be recontextualized for the Modern Age. Things do change technology to this thing. Culture changes, people
change on the I've heard you say, you talk about the difference between seeming wise and being wise that you tried to appear smart as a kid by sort of still do rote memorization masquerading as insight and wisdom. And I'd certainly feel that you know a lot of the show for me I think has been was and still is a Redemption Arc from
This, you know, decade of my life or I completely suppress any intellectual curiosity. Like okay, I'll be professional party boy for 10 years. Stand on the front door of a nightclub and give up VIP wristbands and have access to all of the pretty girls or, you know, the cool parties or whatever it might be,
see if they worked out, okay?
It did in some ways. I mean, it's not fun. It was like, it was a good way to spend my twenties, but to sort of come back above, put your head above water, two degrees, one of which was a masters and then this like just shut down any of that loan. I mean, I ever did that.
While I was at Uni, while I was at Uni, I was running the events, so he's actually a decade and a half. I think there was a big Redemption Arc within this show. And I constantly have to kind of
Wipe the Slime off, me of this sense that I need to prove myself in so much of it. It had this white, really resonates with me when you're memorizing things, that indicates that you don't understand them or that sort of, yeah, rote memorization and regurgitation masquerading as wisdom because people use fluency as a proxy for truthfulness and insides. They use the complexity of your language and your communication.
Yeah there's a lot of jargon out there, I think. Yeah it's the mark of a Charlotte and to
Lane, a simple thing in a complex way. And so, when you see people using very complicated language to explain simple things, they're either trying to impress you in office gate or they don't understand. It
themselves is an allure in that though. You know, this was one of the things I had to do when I went to therapy, it's kind of an interesting. I think I've talked about this before I needed to turn off podcast Chris, when I stepped in to therapy because most of the time that I spend one-on-one in a deep conversation that's undistracted throughout the week, I'd trained myself over, you know, when I started doing it,
Episodes now, 900 whatever. And I knew what I could do to say to this therapist, some, you know, to just sort of Veer off a little and create some nice story, put a bow on it, push it across the table, and watch her eyes, light up a little bit, like a little grin, or what self-deprecating joke, or whatever. Like you're not here, you're performing, you're doing this, you're doing the Chris Williams and thing with the sort of jazz hands, I
have my own version. Okay, tell me. Okay, so you have podcast Chris, I have podcast guests in the wall.
All precisely. So very often, I'll think of something, I'll have some, what I think is an insight and I want to tweet it or write it down. But in my mind I'm talking about on a podcast, that's kind of how my mind registers it. And for a while, I thought this was a bad thing. And I tried to eradicate podcast Nepal and then I just realize that's just how it comes out. So I might as well just be okay with it
now. Do you know, the reason I'm in this
podcast? No, no, I haven't done a proper formal interviews, straight up top,
Over 10, 20 podcast on a long time. Since Rogan, maybe. Probably since Rogan. Yep. Yeah, I went out the top. Right. That was the theory
but the top, yeah, I know. And then, you
know, I've done some stuff with Tim. Tim Ferriss. Good friend a, but it has been more co-hosting. I haven't been a guest and then I did wanted to random things where I just stumbled into a thing, right? You know, there was a reason but it wasn't like this. And I reached out to you for this one, right? I have lots of people reaching out to hear from podcast. I do not answer them. I reached out to you and the reason is a really funny one. It's
Because when I am playing podcast in the ball in my head, for some reason, you're on the other side and I don't know why.
I literally don't know why, it's not. Like I've even seen many of your
podcast. I think I've seen some Snippets here and there but for some reason you were the guy in the podcast in podcasting of all and so it's like I might as well just do it. So I reached out to you. I wonder
if this will close. That loophole further, entrench it. I wonder if you've made it way worse now and you're just going to have well, first off, it was a dream and now it's reality, plus a dream and well, now I
don't get away from him. Yeah, they're in.
People that I turned down where I said, I'm just not doing podcasts. That feel bad about that. I got to go back and do those podcasts, but I'll probably wear out my welcome. I have nothing new to talk about so I don't know what I'm going to say. Well, I appreciate you said
on Rogan and this is something, you know, to kind of pay it back to you. I had a five-headed Mount Rushmore of guests before I started the show and it was John Peterson. Sam Harris. Alain de botton from the school of life, you and Rogan and that was my Hydra of a Mount Rushmore and
I knew I think someone asked you at some point, maybe it was a tweet or something after Rogan or maybe even said it on Rogan where you said. I don't like to say the same thing twice at least not in the same way. I don't like
sequels. Yeah
and I really really respected that. You know that was 2019. He said it was eight or nine years ago. Wasn't it only goes
have a terrible memory? Yeah you're right. 2019 raipur
recovered. Yes. And I really appreciated that because there is something
the content game, you can continue to sort of, I'm sure I'll have said many things today that the audience will have already heard but
Caring enough about having novel insights, or at least having a new perspective on similar insight to how well, you know, in the space of six years since you were on Joe, a lot of these that one coming at them actually. The first thing I said to you today, like, I'm not convinced that actually fully agree with that thing that I used to say, which is cool, right? That's you. Yeah. Showing that the position that you put in the ground, previously is not a tether, it's not you being held to it
anymore.
I think the reason why I wanted to be on this is because for some reason, I have the impression that you engage in conversations and I like conversations, I don't like interviews. This is why I was doing my last start a chat which is all about conversations and conversations to me are more genuine, the more authentic, there's a give-and-take, there's a back and forth, there's a genuine curiosity, it's not to say the other podcasters are do it, they absolutely do, do it. But for some reason in my mind I had you as a guy that I would actually a conversation with
And sure enough. You just read me your essay which I don't think anybody else would really to write that implies as a give-and-take. There's a genuine curiosity and I think that's useful because then certain in explicit knowledge that I had will be surfaced for myself. And I think that's helpful what you're
seeing, you know, to kind of break the fourth wall a bit. You're seeing very much of some of the
Gateway drug insights that you had that you just don't get to choose. I'm aware that you kind of have an anti Guru sentiment in you like a very strong. Like don't listen to me, I don't know what I'm doing. I do not
wrap, no gurus a trap,
do not follow me, do not bow to me, do not do any of the other things to me, but if you see resonance in another person and I think this is what we're all trying to find, you know, people can complain about the mountains of content creation that happens and maybe rightly so
But if you're able to find someone and you see in them, a little bit of you, maybe not even much of you, but like, oh that bit of them, their self-esteem. Or the way they look at relationships or what they want to do, with the kind of Life. They want other level of peace of mind that they want to have or whatever it might be, if you find in somebody else. A little bit of that, it's kind of like what you saying before. You can't you can no longer be unconvinced of that and it it steps in and becomes a part of you. And yeah, you may be seeing
Like to use some, you know, this sort of percolated, very Meandering, Insight from however long ago that something's happening maybe in, you know, five years time. You'll be like you know that thing that you said about the lessons of the Bubba. Bubba. Bubba. And
then I don't know. It's Cutlass
like synthesis, right? It's this sort of blending of,
the reason I spend a lot of time in San Francisco, is because it's a gravitational tractor for the smartest people in the world. And despite all the many problems, the city had because mismanaged beyond belief.
It does just seem to pull in the Young, Smart creative. People not just the ones who are Building Technology but they're exploring every facet of life and they are weird and sometimes is repulsive and is bizarre. But you talk to these people and you just see a very intelligent person coming at life in a completely different way, putting it to the common interests of human DNA which are uncountable and giving you a weird perspective that can twist your mind around.
And to do that, you always have to be learning. You have, you can't beat a guru mentality. If I'm with somebody and they're listening to every word I say in, hang on it. That's not interesting for me, I'm not gonna learn anything. I want people who are intelligent, who will say something back? That is a little different, and I may not agree with it, but it's going to leave a mark, it's going to leave an impression, and it's going to leave an impression to the extent that both, that they are correct. And that I choose to listen and I'll choose to listen, if I don't view myself.
Whereas higher status or smarter than them, the flip side of that is I'm not really impressed by high status people like I don't just because it's always been goes pretty much. In fact, most of my friends have gone on to become very famous successful. The more famous successful, they've been the less I spend time with them partially because they get surrounded by an army of sycophants, these gets hard to break through because I don't want anything from them and I don't like that. I don't like these situations in which
All relationships are
implying a gift though to people who are of that because the higher that they climb up that hierarchy to fewer and fewer people don't want anything from them, so, in that way. Yeah. But wouldn't
even better friend, right? But they get, they get surrounded by people who do want things from them and are so good at pretending. They don't that it's just not worth my time to try and break out from that groom. So it does Get Lonely at the Top so to speak. But this also by choice because, you know, it's
because I'm going problem. Yeah, you can be your own
best friend, too. I am my own best friend. Actually.
Yes, so I really do enjoy spending time with
myself. Yeah. The smartest people on interested in appearing smart and don't care what you think is.
Yeah, I mean a lot of life is not giving a shit, you know? But a lot of the best things in life, come out of that.
Does this mean you just sort of talking about that rote memorization masquerading as wisdom and insight thing? Which I think perhaps almost certainly podcast like this will have contributed to you know, you here.
And Alain de botton who's, you know, like a painter with words, very simple, very sort of unpretentious. But if you're intellectually, curious, you see you only see the production of his thoughts. You don't necessarily see the work that's gone into the thoughts behind. So you can fuse the presentation of them for the Insight. Does that make sense?
Of course. Yeah. A lot of my stuff is more polished like one of the funny things thing. Yeah, one of the funny things that
Right before this podcast was I thought oh maybe I should go back and read my old tweets to sort of remember what I said and I can articulate it. Well then I realize that's this performance. I would just be memorizing, my whole stuff to, before my one,
that's an extra special level of exactly how that you've discerned. It actually not wrote memorizing me to be more me.
Bingo. And I'm to live up to some expectations or some famous personality that are not have to become straight jacket, that have to
put on time having to live up to him private, the things that
I bet. It's right. So, of course, pretty quickly, I saw through that.
You know, it's nonsense and it also constraints my time and it's just work because
I think that's that's you know, your meditation practice at work though, that mindfulness Gap to be like, huh? Yeah, there's that thing
again in exactly exactly low. So, it's not about changing your thoughts. It's not about fixing your thoughts, not about changing yourself, it's just about being observant of yourself, so that you can then it'll automatically change, whatever. Change needs to happen. Will happen is if you try to change yourself is very circular, the mind trying to change the mind that the mind doesn't mud wrestling with itself out.
I don't think it gets you anywhere.
You spend a lot of time either creating wealth of thinking about how to create wealth. What have you learned are? The best places to spend wealth this spend well. Yeah, yeah, you spend this time creating this world.
Yeah,
accumulating. How does it what are the best ways for you to put it back out?
I actually think Elon had this one figured out, which is he plowed his own money back into his own businesses to go and do bigger and better things for Humanity. So what I would like to, you know, you could give it to nonprofits but a lot of nonprofits are Griff t or its people who didn't own a try to spend it or they don't have tight feedback loops on having a good effect. So one of the things I want to do as an aside is I want to create a little school for young physicist. But that's
that's my number young physicist. Yeah. That would that. That's my nonprofit anything but
and I've been
I've actually underwritten media and some Physics stuff. I like to talk about it. So I don't talk about my, whatever so-called philanthropy because I think that makes it less real. That makes it more status oriented less philanthropic. Yeah, exactly. And
then people just how charitable my charity
is and then people also come hunting for money. So there's all that disease. I don't believe in giving the schools, they have enough money. I believes have enough money and no, not to spend it. So I think the best use of money is I think a good business creates a product for people that they
terally by and they get value out of. So, in that sense, I think Steve Jobs and Ilan and and entrepreneurs like that and create a lot of value for the world. So, one of the things I can do is I can take my own money and I can invest it in myself, to go and build the next great thing that I think needs to exist and that's basically what I'm doing right now. I'm doing a new business. I'm self-funding it implying a lot of money into it, I'm going to build something that I think is beautiful that I want to see exist. I really want to see it exists. You
spoken about this yet or is it still sucks?
Boat. It's so early. It's yeah. Maybe I'll show it to you. A few months school, hopefully, six months. And I'm excited about it and that's a good use of money. Mmm,
what about the worst places to spend
wealth?
What is the 0 line? If it flies floats and
fornicates very nice way to change the final F. Very impressive. That's the way I heard it. Okay. Credit pretty sure it's false but
yeah, I think that was maybe it was Felix Dennis. Okay, who had that quote? Yeah, I said if it flies floats in for Nick it's rented. I think the last one was a little too, it's wrong and that he didn't have a family. Didn't have kids. So, you know, he missed the big one.
But yeah, there are lots of bad ways to spend money.
I believe investment. You know, I don't believe in consumption. Yes, you can. You're born with a short housing position, you close that out. You got yourself a nice house. Get yourself some help to free up your time so you're not doing things that other people can do better. Treat people. Well, you know, always overpay and expect the best pay them like they were the best in the next back the best. But overall I
think a good use of money is to
take risks.
And Bill things and do things that other people can't do. Align it with your own unique talents so you can keep delivering to the world. I'm not going to sit idle. I'm not going to retire. That's a that's a waste of whatever time I have left on this Earth. And if I'm doing something, I enjoy that and I'm already in Perpetual retirement
because work is just a set of
things. You want to do that, that you have to do that, you don't want to do. So if you want to do it, it's not work. And so there are things that I want to do. Don't feel like work, I can put money behind them.
Em. And I can use that to make the instantiate them into reality and other want to say make the world a better place because that's too trite. But it's more just create a product that I'm proud of that wouldn't exist otherwise that other people will get tremendous value. And it's been
enabled through wealth because you're able to take a level of risk that you wouldn't have been able to
exactly. Yeah. Wealth gives you Freedom. It gives you freedom to explore more options and in my case, it gives me freedom to start businesses without having to ask other people for permission or to warp my vision based on
Their desires to make a return or how they think money should be
made. Hmm, is there anything that you'd add to the how to get rich thread? Is there anything where you thought? Fuck. Like, just one if I could go in and edit and add one more in
or there's like 10,000 things I could talk about that topic forever. It yet, honestly, get that thread was so short and it was so limited. And it was so like, you know, crafted in a sense, although I wrote it very spontaneously, it left so much on The Cutting Room floor that I could just talk about that topic for
Four days, but it's all contextual right? Business is very, very, very contextual. Like you have to look at the particular business and understand what's being done and why it's being done and how it's being done. And then you can tear it apart, or you can read and then reassemble it properly. And I like to think that that is actually where I have specific knowledge and expertise, my specific knowledge expertise is not in happiness and on philosophy. Not yes. My life is very hacked to be very unique but I don't think that's where my specific knowledge is nice.
Acknowledge is and being able to analyze a business, especially a technology business and take it apart at the seams and predict in advance. What is likely to work in what is not likely to work Clubhouse. Notwithstanding because you're still going to be wrong most of the time, it's like playing the lottery but you know, one or two of the tickets numbers in advance, you only have to be right a few times or even just once to get the big score, you know, Peter teal started PayPal but he made all his money on Facebook right now. He's done more
since then obviously.
SLI. But that was the big
winner and that's true in any power law distribution. Number one is going to return more than two through and put together to return more than three through and put together your operating in a highly leveraged intellectual domain. So the outcomes are going to be nonlinear. So
I know a lot about the topic but it's highly.
Contextual it makes a lot more sense if there's a specific business in front of me a specific entrepreneur and I can take that apart and I can say, you know, so there are certain companies were all say oh this is not going to work because you the entrepreneur are doing this.
The wrong reasons you're doing a so you can get to be just go to be or you're doing this to make money when really the person who's doing this because they love the product is going to beat you or you're raising money from the wrong, people who are in it for the wrong reasons, or your co-founder is not in for the right reasons. Or you don't have the right kind of co-founder or your vesting schedule is wrong, or you're starting the business in the wrong place, or you're approaching it from this angle, instead of that angle. And I'll course, I'll be wrong too,
but I've just seen a lot of data, I
have my theories around it.
It. And that's where I feel very comfortable operating. The problem is when I have talked about how to create wealth and how to get rich, he's a clickbait title on deliberately. But when I talk about how to create wealth talking about it in the abstract is very difficult because then you just want to speak truth. You have to just say the Timeless stuff you have to be right in almost every context and so it really limits, what
you can say, the lack of specificity makes it. Yeah. Correct. Its back to
philosophy but when I find I can get specific about it. You know, that's when that's when
The real knowledge and be like a wealth of counselor for. Yeah. Part of the reason why I started doing podcasts and you know, this is ego at place, I'll admit it freely. When I was tweeting, you know, I kind of pioneered philosophy, Twitter, if you will, or a certain kind of, practical philosophy, Twitter, where in 140 characters, I would try to say something true in an interesting way, that was insightful to me at the time but then that can copied there's thousands of us. Now, write thousands of people spitting it out, chat GPT, trying to create these things all day long for the
like to say, I like to think that my stuff is incompressible. I'm saying it in the tightest way possible, which is kind of a little failed, poetry background, but what I realized was, if you truly have a deep understanding of something, then you can talk about it all day long, then you can re derive everything you need from that understanding, no memorization required, you can get to it from first principles. And every piece of what, you know, is is like a. It's like a Lego block. That just fits in and forms. A steel frame is solid. It's locked in there.
And so, on a podcast, I can unload much more deeply about some of these topics. So, for example, we can talk about any business you like, but it has to be in context, it has to be real. It has to be an actual problem, then we can solve it. I'll just really love that heuristic of, if you're having to memorize something, it's because you don't understand. You don't understand it. That's right. If you, if you have to memorize something, that's because you don't understand it. And if you understand something, you don't have to memorize it.
Yeah, I again you know just to sort of call out.
A lot of what I tried to do this Redemption Arc. Thing of like I sound smart. That's like being smart, right? Yo,
Richie PT is memorize the entire turn. It good luck competing with that. You're not going to be their memorization. You're not going to be the library of memorization here. They're not going to be any 10 books in memorization. So memorization is not the thing. I'm
Jolly a memorization is going down by the
day. It's already solo, understanding is the thing. Being able to being able to judgment is the thing too.
Taste is a thing and understanding judgment taste these come out of having real problems and then solving them and then finding the commonalities, what is philosophy? Everyone you live long enough, you'll be a philosopher philosophy is just when you find the Hidden generalizable Truths, among the specific experiences that you've had in life and then you know how to navigate future specific experiences based on some heuristics and you create a philosophy around that any subject pursued, deeply enough will eventually lead to philosophy Mastery in anything, literally
anything.
Will lead you to being a philosopher. You just have to stick
with it. Long enough and generalize the truth back out and these are Universal truths. It's back to the unity and variety you can find. You can find unit in anything if you go deep
enough and that's why the trite stuff, unfortunately sort of keeps coming back around it. You like well look this is cliche for
kind of a reason. It's cliche for reasons, but you know, sometimes you learn new things, sometimes, you do figure out new things to even even in Philosophy. For example, science has advanced as science has
This is actually expanded our boundaries of philosophy when we used to think that the Earth was the center of the universe, you would actually have a different philosophical Outlook. Then when you think the universe is vast, and we're infinitesimally small, it will give you a different philosophical, Outlook the same way. If you think that the nature is driven by angels and demons and gods versus if there are laws of physics that are computable and understandable that will lead you to
A different philosophical Outlook. If you think that knowledge is something that is passed down from above and through generations, which is something that is created on the Fly, and then test it against reality that will lead to a different philosophical Outlook. If you think humans are created by God as opposed to humans evolved from some, you know, unicellular organism. Yes, still doesn't solve the original problem would be that, that, but at least it takes you further ticket on down the road. Even. Same theory is an attempt at reform that in philosophy based on what we know about computers, even though,
Kind of leads to a lot of the same conclusions as, you know, Creator. But it is at least philosophy that is informed by technology and by science. So, philosophy, can also involve evolve moral philosophy involves. Right there was a time when every culture practically that was a conquering culture practice slavery. Now, almost all cultures aboard slavery. That's moral philosophy. Having evolved, you know, there was even like the sounds to ludicrous to be true and I don't know if it fully is true but they were
Fairly large group of doctors based on studies who believed until the 1980s that babies couldn't feel pain. And so, even to this day, I think circumcision is done without anesthesia and because under the theory that you know, very young children babies, don't feel pain and that's ludicrous. And there was a study that came out in the 80s. I said, no, no, they do feel pain, it's like, oh yeah, of course. Right. So people can be stuck in bad philosophical traps for a long period of time. So even philosophy can make progress and as an example, one of the realizations that I had and this is thanks to
David Deutsch, and my friend James Pierce and also thinking it through a little bit, is that there are these Timeless old questions that we run into where the answer seemed like, paradoxes, so we stop thinking about them. So an example is free will, do you have free will or does anything matter? Is there a meaning to life and the and and we get stuck in them. Because for example, is there a meaning to life? Like yes, life has a meaning because you're right here, you create your own meaning. This this moment has all the meaning, you could imagine. It's all the meeting there is on the other hand, you're going to die at all.
Goes to zero heat death of the universe. Has no meaning, right? So which one is it? Well the reason why it seems paradoxical is because you're asking the question of a human here now at a certain scale and a certain time and then you're answering it from the Viewpoint of the universe over infinite time. So you pull the trick, you switch the level at which your answer, the question and question should be answered at the level at which they're asked. So if you ask the question, is there meaning you Chris are asking that question?
Ian yes yes to Chris. There is meaning there's meeting right here. This is the meaning interpret. Any meaning you want onto it, don't ask the question as Chris and then answered as God or the universe, that's the trick that you're playing.
That's why it seems paradoxical the
same way you can say, do I have free? Will people debate free will all day long? This question is answered at the wrong frame. So they asked the question is. Do I as an individual have free will. Hell yeah, I have free. Will my mind body system. Can't predict what I'm going to do. Next. The universe is infinitely complex. I'm making a choice in my mind. I'm doing
Something there's my free will so answer the level at which your ass, of course, I have free will because I feel like I have free will and I treat you like you're free. When you treat me like a free, will we have free will, the problem then? Is you start trying to answer the question is if you're the universe, you're like well on the universal scale, Big Bang particle collisions. No one makes any choices. You know, how could you be any different than the you? What the universe wants you to be? And it's all one block universe. So you don't have free. Will, don't answer the question at the level at which it wasn't asked. So, it's God, asked the question, is there free? Well, no, there is no.
We will the universe, that's the question, there's no free will. But if an individual ask the question right now, then, yes, there is Free Will. So a lot of these paradoxes resolve themselves philosophical paradoxes that people have been struggling with sense of being a time when you just realize their, you're answering them at a scale and time different than they were asked,
speaking of updating beliefs. Is there anything that you changed your mind around recently?
Very recently, I mean all the time but are you talking about like philosophical existential things? Like technological things?
Yeah, so let's nautical existential things or anything that comes to mind if there's anything that's friend of mine. We go. Yeah, that's a pretty bad. I'm less update. Yeah, I'm less
lazy Fair than I used to be on a societal level. I think that culture and religion are good Cooperative systems for humans. And so if you want to operate in a Hydra Society, you need to have sets of rules that people need to follow and Obey. So they get along. Even if they're, you know, one size fits all doesn't work
for everybody up a little bit from libertarian.
Yeah. Eric you Libertarians get out competed in die but they get overrun because they're every man for himself, they can't coordinate, they can coordinate exactly, right? So the coordination problems, I culture exists to solve fundamental coordination problems. Religion solves coordination problems, ethnicity solves, coordination problems. Historically, and when you break down those coordination systems too fast and don't replace them with anything else you get societal breakdown. So you can have a very malfunctioning societies you know, go to
Japan versus go to knee Western City and you can see the difference being a culture that's working in a culture. That's not. So I think that that's
like a broader set of things that
I've changed my mind on a fair bit. I used to be much more laissez-faire on that stuff. Let's put it that way. What else? I mean on child-raising I've gotten a lot looser. You know I'm still not like completely laissez-faire but in a much more realize that kids are going to be kids and you kind of let them do their
thing is going to babysit them. Is it at a lab that has the
Levels of, like, anarchism versus conservatism. Is that his and say like at the local level? I'm this. But it seems like you've got any other way. It's like the child level. I'm an anarchist that the societal level and we can.
Yeah. You know, he was quoting somebody else. Some brothers I forget which ones but it was making the point
eloquently as he often does
that at, you know, at the family, local level, he's a communist at the family, level your communist, at maybe the extended family, level your socialist,
At the local level, you know, you're kind of a Democrat and so on until at the federal level, you libertarian, right? So you've done it the other way, you know, being a Libertarian with the kids and you're being really and
77 societal. That's, that's, that's
a, that's a funny way of looking at it. I don't know if the scale is that area. That's simple. Well. So I changed my mind on. I mean, I think the modern AI is really cool. I think it's but I think these are natural language computers. They are starting to show evidence of kind of
Reasoning at some levels but I don't think they do creativity. I think modern AI.
Another, what I'm gonna do just on that. One of my favorite takes is from dwell cash Patel and he says, if you gave any human on the planet
naught Point naught naught naught naught. 1
percent of the consumption that LM has any LM. They would have come up with thousands of new ideas, right? Give me one new idea. One
fundamental new idea has been generated. Yeah. Like I'm big into poetry.
The poem ever written by an alarm is garbage. I think, even their fiction writing is terrible, even the new GPT 45 with all due respect to Sam and crew. I think they're terrible, terrible writers. I find them really bad at summarizing. The really good extrapolating, you know, paperwork. They're very bad, actually distilling, the essence of something. And what's important, they don't have any opinions or point of view, but they're still unbelievably powerful breakthroughs. They solve search this all natural language, Computing. They make English a programming language to solve driving. The solve, simple coding and back.
Coding. They solve translation this of transcription. They are a fundamental breakthrough in Computing is a different way to program a computer rather than you explicitly. Speak its language or write the code and then run the data through users run enough data through it until it figures out how to write the program. That's huge. But are they, are they a GI not yet and I don't see a direct path from here to there. Maybe you will have to solve a few more problems before that happens and I think ASI is a fantasy. I don't think there's any such things as
Artificial super intelligence, where it has some kind of intelligence that humans can
fathom, okay? Yeah. It seems like I don't know if you from the boss from camp or whatever and you know, I'm not an EI du
mer. I think that's such a flawed line of reasoning.
But let's say that, you know, you came out of the less rom.com, like slate star codec. Yeah, world. And there was this sort of lineage from computers and AI gets more powerful, more powerful, more powerful and then you end up AGI a sis. I and it's
Like LMS have been this sort of orthogonal move from that which are you saying you don't believe? They are a step on that. It's kind of a little bit of a. Yeah I think is additional
Branch at least Stephen Wolfram puts it better to different form of intelligence. It's like if you see a jaguar in the jungle that has a different form of intelligence and you're like a plant has a form of intelligence how it can like photosynthesize and grow. It's a different form of intelligence. It's not an intelligence again like love or like happiness is overloaded word. That means many things to many people, but by my definition,
Where you know, the true test is you get what you want out of life, it doesn't have a life, it doesn't want anything. It's a different thing I do. Think it's unbelievably useful. I'm glad that it exists. You don't see it much yet in large-scale production systems replacing humans because this tendency to hallucinate so you can't put it into anything mission-critical, confidently, wrong one time out of ten. Correct. And it doesn't even know when it's wrong and maybe they'll get that one out of 10 down to 1 out of 100, but you kind of always want human oversight for critical critical things I
I always feel so bitter. It's I'm Petty sometimes, you know, my less equanimous version of me is petty and I always want to like teach it a lesson if it gets something
wrong. Like how the fuck
like know you were so confident? I'm treating it, but I'm through for sizing and
throw. It doesn't have a point of view and they are going to get a lot better and they might get to the point where the error rates are so low that you can put them into certain bounded problems like self-driving. I think will be solved completely because it's a bounded problem cars. Don't you know go like off road and drive through houses and stuff like
like that night. So because and and same way like certain kinds of coding the creative side of coding. I think doesn't go away. I think if anything programmers, get even more leverage and more powerful and rather than Computing. Replacing programmers programmers, use AI to replace everybody else
on Tesla versus ymo. Would you bet on software or hardware for self-driving? Yeah, so the I think Tesla's in the
stronger longer term position but it's hard to argue with what's working right now and way MO is working right now. So I would not underestimate them
because there's a learning curve that you
go through.
When you actually deploy something and way MO is way ahead in that regard but Tesla's camera only approach if it works is about the superiors, much more scalable and Tesla knows how to print cards, right? They can just Mass manufacture cars, but I think I think they'll both be around, they'll both be fine. It's everybody else who doesn't have a self-driving vehicle that
screwed. You mentioned kids that are and you had a tweet that said I'm not convinced that declining fertility needs to be proactively fought. I forgot that one
you
Gonna have to. I mean, I
dug deep,
why? Well, I mean, think back like it was it 30 years ago? 20 years ago, everybody was saying over population of the Earth is going to be a problem. Malthusian ending, we're going to have too many people, and all of a sudden we're going to few people. So part of it is just the Doomer is a meme is always alive and well, right? Let's just get three package. Yeah, we're running out of oil. We have too much oil, right? You know, it's like the world is cooling. The world is warming. Like there's always something to scream about the world is ending. There's no progress in technology as going to blow up the world, right? So people tend to overdo it.
Through actions. Now, what is the actual fertility problem, right? Well, people are having less kids, are they having less kids? Because there's a disease, was there a virus to the loser fertility? The microplastics in the testicles, right? No, it's people are having less kids cause they're choosing to have less kids right. Women have gotten emancipation Independence in the workforce and they're making more money. People don't need Kids insurance policies, they have less kids. Maybe they're living hedonistic lives. God bless them, right? They want a more fun than one of those kids. I don't see the act of choosing to have
Less kids as a problem. Okay, so let's move one level up. It's because the retirees. It's because a large percentage of the population is essentially retiring at the guaranteed age of 65 or 70. Thanks, Social Security. And so they need other people to pay for it. They need more workers in the workforce. And if the workforce is shrinking, then you have a small number of people exactly who are supporting a large number of retirees. And in democracies, you can't take pensions away the voters. Vote you out. So this slowly strangle the economy. So what do you do? Then you have a bunch of immigration and
The whole culture changes to end up in a low trust society and people start fighting over limited resources and how do you control, which immigrants come in? How do you make sure that they're good taxpayers after they're in and so on. So you end up with in kind of this trap where the low fertility rate is Upstream of the downstream problems that are cultural and
societal. But I'm not sure that
you're going to solve that by making people have more kids. How are you going to mean them into having more kids? And I'm not even sure, it's necessarily a problem, because keep in mind, you have more resources now.
You have less of a burden. Now there's a flip side where every kid is a lottery ticket man invention. So there's some benefit to having more kids but you can't you can't force it. I think it'll work itself out, right? The Scott Adams is great log which caused the atoms law of slow-moving, disasters, and disasters are very slow-moving like peak oil or global warming or population collapse. And everyone can kind of see them coming economics, and Society is a force solve them.
Because enough individual people has incentives to go solve them. So I don't know exactly how it gets solved, but I think it could get solved in various ways. One example could be you know maybe people retire later, maybe Ai and Automation and robots take care of the older people. Maybe we figure out how to have immigrants while still keeping a high trust Society. We kind of put more rules around immigration that protect some of the high, trust benefits, maybe we Outsource more things, maybe we just, you know, have
More land and housing to go around. Believe me. If we are having too many kids are, will be complaining about how there's no housing, there's no land, right? So you always find something to care about so I just don't view this as like a thing that any individual or government action is going to solve I think economics and incentives over time will solve it and I'm not even convinced it's like that big of a problem. Is there anything that you do think
is the same? It may be
self-correcting to which is that if they're too
few kids in society
in the returns to having kids, literally might just go up. It might just be easier
to have incentive.
I'll have a child because there's so few around they're going to get the best job - job and she is
sources. Like everyone wants to see everyone. So I
suppose if you could come at it from a pain side which is you look at all of the other people around, who don't have kids. Let's say that pensions completely drop off. And the only way to old people are able to survive is if their children pay them some sort of stipend like reverse, you know, send money back up the generations. You okay? Well, that's a pretty fucking good incentives. Like that is said, I also think that people have been memed into thinking
that kids make your life worse and that's
That's it. That's a pretty, pretty bad but your experience me. My kids make your life better and every possible way if you want to, if you want an automatic built-in meeting to life have kids and I think there are these bad psych studies like most like studies. Unfortunately, that say that people are unhappy when they have kids. Yeah. It's because you're catching in the middle of changing a diaper and you're saying, like, are you glad you had kids or not, or do you say that they say, are you happy or not? And they say, no, I'm not happy right now but what they don't realize is that person is found something more important than being happy. In the moment, they found meaning and the meaning comes from
Kids. And if you ask parents, do you regret having kids? I think would be 99 to one against, you know. It would be. No, I don't regret having kids. I love having kids, I'm so glad I had kids. It's incredibly rare to meet a parent that regretted having children. It's pretty good odds. It's extremely good odds and I think so, I think, I think a lot of people get late into life and, you know, then they can't admit that they didn't want kids that they should have had kids, it's kind of late in the game, but, you know, a lot of times, you see everybody who has a pet, right?
Right. And they're pushing them around in a stroller. Right? What is that? That's a sub. Limited desire for children.
Yeah. Malcolm Colin says that having a pet is to children as using Poland is to sex. He basically thinks it's sort of a
surrogate. It's definitely in that direction. And I said, you know, I don't know how
to, like, I like pets. I like
animals, I don't but I don't like the idea of like neutering or spaying something and then keeping it as a prisoner in the house and having to train it. You know, it's just I don't want to be responsible for
that given that you've been thinking more.
More about child. Rearing kids. What do you hope that your kids learn from their childhood?
This is to be happy and do what they want. I don't, I don't have particular goals in mind for them. I think that's it. That's another route to unhappiness having that's
different though, right than Lunn. Lunn, versus goals, it's not necessarily what do they want? What you want them to want out of life? Like what is it that you had that idea around your number one job as a parent is to provide unconditional? Love to you? That's it. Yeah, that's it, right? So I can be loved or I am loved unconditionally is that one of the things I want my kids to
feel unconditional love and I want them to have high.
Office Team.
Uh-huh. As a consequence of that but I don't get to choose any.
All I get to choose in my output. I can output love, I can't choose what they feel. I can choose how they behave. I can't choose what they want. I can choose what they turn out to be
and downstream from that that should be Freedom. That should be a degree of Freedom that comes from the self-esteem that comes from the
unconditional. She's make their own mistakes and learn their own lessons and have their own desires and fulfill them as is appropriate. I like
Any parent? I wouldn't want them to be hurt. I wouldn't want them to be unhappy, but I cannot control these
things. Mmm, you replied to my friends Rob Henderson. He was talking about how kids fall asleep, more quickly, when they're being carried and you said, cry, it out and co-sleeping is dangerous. What's iyi science iy is a Nassim taleb.
It's over intellectual yet. Idiot. These are people who are over educated and they didn't, I like basic Common Sense. Okay. So there's a lot of that that goes on.
Child rearing things to really bad studies and and bad public medical directive. So for example, you know a few a few parents, you maybe they're drunk or they're high or they're just other issues and you know, they roll over their kid when they're sleeping, the kids suffocates or they neglect their kid and then sorry
closely closely beings having it in the bed.
Yeah, exactly. Or their, you know, the the modern Proclamation and so because of that they say well don't co-sleep your kids. Well, the kids in every society through all of human history,
Because
slept with their parents. Where else you think they were sleeping? They weren't houses in multiple roles of in the other time. Yeah, exactly. Putting the tent will put it, it's just nonsense. Co-sleeping has been around since the dawn of time. So has feeding kids cow milk when or goat milk, when breast milk is runs out or is not available yet. We're told formula, you know, made with soy and and corn syrup, which was invented. Recently is somehow better than cow milk in cow, milk can be dangerous for your kids, and co-sleeping is dangerous for kids. And cried out, is the right answer.
So, all that is nonsense. I mean, it's very clear that we raise children throughout human history without these interventions and to melee idea that like you going to let your kid cry it out. I get why that's done for practical reasons so that, you know, you can get some sleep and you can go to work in the morning. But the reality is when you let the kid cry it out, you're letting the kid ball until it finally gives up. I mean, a kid left by itself to cry it out and go by all the snow it's going to get it's going to get eaten, right? It's gonna get eaten by a tiger. So this kid
Starting off in the wrong Foundation. That the one I mentioned earlier about the idea that babies don't feel pain like that's ludicrous, right?
I've never heard that before, but that's such a while. Yeah, I'm not saying that's 100% true. I read it, I read it. I told in the cheek quite hard insect, that's in the
category of, I read it on Twitter and I did one level confirmation on it, but it's so ludicrous that I should probably do two or three level confrontations on it before, it's not about it.
But there are definitely some people
who believe that there is enough that it was a thing in certain circles for a while.
While, but I think we just go through these, you know, the these I why I believe sees intellectually it believes come from people who take a little bit of knowledge and extrapolate it too far. They think we know more than we know due to recent scientific studies and this is junk science. These are low power studies on you know--and very certain contexts that then get over applied behavioral. Psych is very guilty of this but it's true cross a lot of science. So even with science you have to be skeptical, you have to look very
Carefully at, you know, does apply in the right context or not. Is come from good sources that they run enough, high-powered studies a widely accepted and there are whole bunch of things were just not supposed to talk about. You're not supposed to say, like, you don't say like you can, you can't say anything negative about vaccines because God forbid, what if they don't get the polio vaccine, right? And that's part of the reason why the recent vaccine debate, because we've taken our worship for vaccines too far because we don't want people to not take non-essential vaccine, so it gets over done. So the same way. This is whole SIDS things, sudden infant death syndrome, right on. Psych know, there's
Kids. Don't suddenly mysteriously died, like more likely, there was a neglect or there was a problem and then whoever was the, caretaker doesn't want to admit to the problem. Where didn't recognize a problem, but kids don't just spontaneously died in the crib, right? So they talk about swaddling babies, you swaddle babies, you know, basically tie them up, mummify them so you constrict them. So then died of Sids weather rolled over and they can't get back up. It's just all this craziness around town raising. It's a real Minefield. It's a Minefield. And, and you know, you have this
He's scared parents or having kids for the first time and they open a book. And start reading how to raise children when I would argue that your Natural Instincts on what to do with your child are actually pretty good. It's funny when my wife and I had our first baby. I remember, you know, at the hospital. Sorry. First one the natural birth at the birthing center. We went home. It was like, there you go. That's it. We're like, What do we do? Where's the instruction manual? You take them home and then you relaxing, that's actually
Instincts are pretty good. You know, if the kid cries check to see the clean feedom all that, it's like your Basic Instincts are actually very, very good. And kids instincts are actually very, very good. They know what they want and they want things for a reason
and I can encourage you to give it to
them. Yes, it's usually, it can children are not deficient adults who can't reason and to some extent, that's true. But mostly it's not true. Mostly they have very good reasons for what they want.
And you as a parent mostly have communication problems with them, they can't yet communicate to you, you can communicate to them. They can communicate to you. So early on with my kids, I tried to focus on teaching them, you know, basic explanatory theories
and what's not having the memories, it's just the most. Yeah, the most of all solution. But if I'll give you, I'll give you a very simple example, right? Okay, so this is Twitter. Yeah, and this is, this is the how to get rich without getting lucky threat. So the
Just one. Well as a simple one is, you know, how does knowledge get created. If you follow the critical rationalism, David Deutsch philosophy, then it's by guessing and then by testing your guesses. So whenever they ask me something like, well why do you think that is well, how would we figure out if, that's true, right? So that's a basic game. You
can play involving them involving them but another one
is that a
lot of the rules that you teach
kids have to do with hygiene, but you must brush your teeth, You Know, cover your mouth, when you cough, you know, clean up after yourself, don't touch that wash your
Hands after you do this, don't eat food off the floor, right. But all of these are subsumed Under The Germ theory of disease, right? So if you instead go on YouTube and show them videos of germs or if you have them look under a microscope at anything that I got
that info. What's good is creepy, crawlies everywhere and I
gotta watch out for them. And then, you know, you can talk about how if you look at humans, like our Real Enemy or pathogens. I think a lot of aging and disease are actually Downstream of our competition with pathogens over time.
To a point that people still don't fully appreciate. There's a red queen hypothesis which is that we undergo sexual selection to mix up our genes and so every 20 years every generation because of your genes. But if you look at how bacteria and viruses mutate through just random mutations there mix-up rate on their genes and evolution rate is roughly the same as ours even though they go through thousands of generations, those 20 years because they're not doing sexual selection, they're doing a sexual replication, mutation there, their evolutionary
Rate is roughly equivalent to our. So we're in a Red Queen Race where we're both running at the roughly, the same speed be using very different strategies, but a
lot of how we're
involved is around pathogens. Like, our immune system is one of the most expensive things around. The body is so much is about immune system optimization, that's about pathogens. Junk, DNA in bacteria, and crisper was discovered because in bacteria. Their DNA is evolved to fight viruses, and the way it does that is by taking viral DNA. In snipping it up every time there's a viral attack and storing it in there.
DNA's. They have a copy so that it can recognize it next time hit attacks and you know, and so on a lot of the population structure of species determines how long their lifespans are so very. So if, if in a given species is a very high rate of infection, then you'll have these older members of the population or carrying diseases that will then infect the young. So, it's important for that species to get rid of the old faster. So the higher the disease rate
In a given population, the less long-lived the entire population, so the older ones, don't infect the younger
ones, that's a hypothesis and I think it's pretty interesting. It's an interesting hypothesis
homeostasis within the human body, how we're always returning to a given level of things. Like that's a, that's a fundamental part of our makeup or temperature pH blood pressure, and so on under homeostasis. But if you, if you engage any kind of signaling like you take a peptide, for example, as a signaling molecule to take a hormone externally, the body will counteract it. You take testosterone in the body will counteract the will down.
Gets on production, very fast and the body releases its own hormones and pulses rather than steady state. Why is that? Well, that's because bacteria and viruses can infect your body and trick your body. They can take it over like toxoplasmosis. Does this rabies does it take over macroscopic structure? Structural bodies and small bacteria, and viruses would hack our bodies and literally take them over if we didn't have defense mechanisms and one of the defense mechanisms is homeostasis. Anytime you see something getting out of whack you immediately push.
Like, really hard on because like, did I just get infected? Something trying to take me over. It's also why hormones get released in pulses at night, rather than in steady-state, low levels because enemy bacteria can release toxins or the same signaling molecules in small quantities, but they can't pulse the can't coordinate to pulse so your body can coordinate. The pulse is a macroscopic object but microscopic objects can coordinate to create the same pulse. Oh, that's cool. Yeah. So there's all
them in there. So, you know that it's coming from you is that why I wrecked your own attend dodging, this rather
- so I never knew that and that's why we resist a lot of exhaustion has
treatments a lot of our Medical Treatments don't work anyway.
So this these are, there's a bunch more, I could go on, but I think that
a lot of you see this in cancers, where a lot of bacteria show up at the Epstein-Barr virus shows up in a lot of cancers. And, you know, now it seems like the gut microbiome influences. So many things basically bacteria and viruses are at the top of the food chain.
Paired to us. Like we are top of the well-known food chain, but bacteria and viruses eat us, fungus eats us. So these microscopic predators are our natural predators. And so a lot of Aging societal structure, hygiene religious structures against pork, you know, circumcision, all of these things. These are all designed to resist bacterial, viruses. So if you can teach children this philosophy at an early age, you shortcut, all the debates,
how effective you being a teaching that philosophy to
children? That one? I think I've been pretty effective.
Will that one at home? The one. I haven't quite gotten around to yet as Evolution. Like I'm starting to do little bits of that. You know like we came from monkeys. What does that mean? I already got them thinking about some of the deeper questions I did, ask my, you know, young son like you know Ken nothing exists. I thought it was a fun questions like to
throw a phone call. Did you know like 43 that he's 80? All right.
What an eight-year-old has six year olds, I asked them both like Ken, nothing exists, and they had pretty good answers, right? Another one we played with the other day was, like, what is the Matrix?
X-Play? We can know what is this? What is this? What is all this? I just find it and it's entertaining. It's just fun to talk about right to talk about these questions that your kids. I'm not saying that one is a good way of child-raising. It's not
leading to any deeper learning other than, maybe, just have them
start or continue to question the basic structure of reality and not move past it so quickly, and also to take joy, you know, what's
the matter lesson? That's being taught there, dad.
Dad spends time asking questions to which there are not necessarily an answer because there is something enjoyable in the process of learning and trying to
decipher what's happening. Possibly also dad tries, not to hard to teach people things. I don't want to be, I don't want to be didactic. It helps
them to arrive at it. Yeah. Correct
correct. Daddy, Dad is here to help you solve problems when you have problems and you constantly have problems. So if you come to Dad Dad can help explain to you how he would solve the problem. But most of the time they don't want that. Most of the time.
They just laid. Yeah. Most of the time. They
just want me to solve the problem.
So sometimes it's have to play dumb SEC. Why is my Wi-Fi not
working on my computer? Like, I don't know, did you click on
that thing? Like you've got like a rebellious Sovereign child Sovereign as they may be, but sometimes they still need
the, your dad to stop her. So, in addition to feeling loved and having high self esteem, I think the most important trait that would be nice to not Rob them of his agency. I want them to preserve their agency, their born naturally, agentic and willful, but a lot of child-raising can
beat that out of them by essentially, domestic.
Skating them
strength and I would rather have wild animals and wolves then have well trained dogs. Because I'm not going to be around to take care of them
yet. So they're going to have to be able to look after them.
Exactly, yeah, a friend of mine, parsa on, on are chat. He had a great saying he said he wants his children to be quick to learn and hard to kill.
That's pretty good. Yeah, that's cool. I remember you saying just thinking about sort of future and culture and stuff like that. I remember you saying that
Had won the culture war. And now they're just driving around shooting the survivors right after the last six months of change that we've seen and sort of where we're at at the moment. What do you think? The future of the culture wall? Looks like
it's not over yet. They definitely one earlier rounds, they took over institutions, I think, now it's much more of a fair fight where you have people like, Elon, you know, kind of supporting so is. So there's these different forces through history, right? Historians will argue about
Out this. But there's a theory of the great man of History thing, where it's like, oh, you're the Einsteins, you have the Tesla's, you have the youngest cons in the Caesars, right? They determine the flow of history. And then there's the other point of view that know, there are these massive forces at play, you know, demographics and geography and so on. And then the particular grade man doesn't matter. They just come and go. Napoleon doesn't matter, they would've been somebody else. The specific names are not important
and because of kind of the leftist
turn that our institutions took in the last few,
Few decades. They now only subscribe to the great forces theory of History. Not the great man theory of history but I think now we're seeing the to play out where you seeing from Binky lawn and other individuals rising up and saying no we resist. Yeah that's
interesting and
I think that,
unfortunately, the into the battle between the kind of these collectivists and great Forces versus individuals, it's as old as
Humanity itself and it is fundamental to the
species. We are not a completely individualistic species, you know? No, man is an island a single person can't do anything by themselves, but we're also not a borg. We're not a beehive. We're not an ant colony, we're not all just drones marching along so which is it we're somewhere in the middle and the human race is all this
Kind of bouncing between the two. We like, strong leaders, we like to be led we like to coordinate our forces, and mass and do things, but at the same time we're also all individuals and willing to break away and willing to do our own thing and everyone's always fighting to be the leader and it's always status games going on. So we're there's a pendulum that's always swinging, back and forth and in modern economics, the way that manifest is between thought of Marxism and capitalism, right? Marxism is like from each according to his ability to each, according to his needs, we're all equal.
There's a millennial project, we're all going to be equal in the end and and you know, don't try and stand out but do what's good for everybody? And there's a religious aspect to it and then the the capitalist individual is is like a Libertarian, every man for himself. You just each do what you want and will work out for the greater good. That's Adam Smith. You know, the Invisible Hand of the market will feed you, the baker should bake and the butcher should Butcher and the Candlestick maker should make candlesticks and all work out. Each person does their best and they trade and so which is it which which which which theory is correct and I think there's always going to be a battle between the two
To and I think the interesting thing is, what's going on, there's a modern flavor to it, which changes it. The modern flavor is that the individual is getting more powerful because they're becoming more leverage. So someone like an eel on Moss can have the leverage of tens of thousands of brilliant engineers and producers working for him. He can have factories of robots, manufacturing things he can have hundreds of billions of dollars of capital behind him.
You can project himself through media, to hundreds of millions of people that is more power than any individual could have had historically. So the great men of history are becoming greater that said that same Leverage is increasing the gap between the Haves and Have Nots. So, in the wealth game, more people are winning overall in the average is going up, but in status game, they're essentially more losers. There are more invisible men and women who are getting nothing out of life and have no leverage. Relatively speaking objectively speaking. They might be better off this.
I'll have phones in the still have TVs and it's not
absolute his creatures that were relative,
correct? And so, to the extent that we're relatives creatures, they're more losers than winners. And in a democracy, those people will outnumber the winners and they will vote the winners down. Yep. And so that's the battle that kind of goes on and the democracy has gotten very Broad and so one of my other quips is that it's not the right to vote that gives you power its power that gives you the right to vote. So we have confused the two. So
What happened was, you know, voting started as a way for people who had power to divide up. The power not fight amongst themselves, the winners of the Revolution, the winners of the war, the people in the House of Lords, and the House of Commons, they divide up our amongst themselves to say, hey, we have all the money, we have the power, We Are the nights, we have the swords, we have the Warriors, we could kill everybody, but we don't want to just fight each other all day long. We don't to be Game of Thrones forever. So we're going to divide up power by vote amongst ourselves. But then a society goes on and becomes more and more peaceful that.
Franchise for voting gets spread to get, spread to people who don't have land, who don't have power, who may not be able to inflict physical violence, and then eventually you get to the point where everybody is voting. Everybody's voting, and everybody's voting for candy and fairies, and, you know, all the free things in life and then eventually people start voting to oppress each other, the 51 percent in any domain vote to suppress the 49th attorney the majority. But not all of them are willing to back that up with physical power. And so you can end up in a situation where people
People who don't have physical
power or using the institutions of the state to control. The people who do have physical power. As a simple example, taking the United States, to people who don't have guns voting to disarm, the people that do have guns, right? Well if the people who do have guns, get Coordinated, Care enough, you can't do that, right? So I think, eventually these societal structures are unstable, they break down and they break down because eventually the people who have the power and say, no, wait a minute, you don't get to vote. You only got to vote because you had power and now you don't have power in your
Somehow trying to vote all of nature, all the society, all of capitalism. All of human Endeavors are underpinned by physical violence and that is very hard, truth to swallow and hard to get away from nature is red in tooth and Claw. If you don't fight you don't survive, you don't live you die and that's true of everything alive. Today and humans are no different. So giving up physical power. And then thinking you can exercise political power fails, which is why every Communist Revolution, which is all about equality, and Kumbaya, and brothers and sisters.
End up being run by a bunch of thugs. Because if you don't have a way to divide up, the wealth based on Merit, then it's always going to be based on power and influence. The thugs with the guns, always win in the end. So the question is just, can you keep the Thugs and the with the guns, paid and happy and successful Society or you're allocating based on Merit because if you can't, then you, I do it based on power. So I do think that this battle is not over, but that's because it never stopped. It's always been there from day one. It will
continue. Is it a battle to not care about
The Muse, in an age of news saturation, all of this stuff, headlines, 24 hours a day stream directly into your Consciousness through a device in your pocket. You know, a lot of what we've spoken about today is freedom freedom, from having to think about things or care about things that you do not have control over all that, you shouldn't do that. You don't want to and yet people are just like submerged up to the bottom of their nostrils. Basically drowning in worry. So how? Yeah it is. It is it a battle to sort of stay out of the news when your saturated in it?
Yeah.
I mean, as you're saying, the human brain is not evolved to handle, all the world's emergencies breaking in real time and you can't care about everything and you'll go insane. If you try does it mean you shouldn't care at all? There's no, should I mean if you want to care, go ahead and care. I would just say that you're probably better off only caring about things that are local or things that you can affect. So if you really care about something that's in use, then by all means care about it. But make a difference, go do something about it and make sure that it's your overwhelming desire. And you don't have five other
Desires, at the same time. Also just realize the consequences of it, you're going to be unhappy until that thing gets fixed and then think it will often be out of your control.
I don't know. I was a contract being happy until you get what you want. But exactly for the most part, that's something that is in your life. It's like till I lose the weight until I get the job and be outside to it either. Yeah. If it's until the carbon dioxide parts per million or below this particular number. It's like that's a
that's a tough one there. All the people would Trump derangement syndrome right here living rent-free in their heads and driving them. Insane.
And I get it. I mean there are politicians who have definitely driven me insane as well, but it comes at a very high cost is something that is out of your control that you cannot really influence. So it's probably good to at least be conscious of it.
You mentioned historians before on, my friends has a question, his equivalent of Peter Tales question of, what is it that you believe that most people would disagree with his is? What do you think is currently ignored by the media but will be studied by historians.
Ian's.
You're asking me that question, right now. What do I think is ignored by the media but will be studied by historians.
well, I mean the media is only focused on
Very timely things, right? So it depends if you want talk about timely or Timeless, right? But as a simple example, if I just look at things that maybe the next five or ten years that are going to make a massive difference that people are not focused enough on and I think within two years this will be obvious. So like the make a prediction and predictions
are tough but you're gonna have to eat it in a few years younger to
eat this in a few years. So I'm probably wrong but two things that I pay attention to that. I don't
A lot of people do pay attention to. Well there's a couple one is I think just how bad modern medicine is. I think people just put a lot more faith in modern medicine than is warranted like our best ideas for a lot of things are surgery, just cutting things out, right? Treating things that are extraneous like oh you don't really need a gallbladder, you don't really need an appendix so you don't need tonsils. All that's
false. I'm supposed to require human body is
very, very efficient. All those things are needed, you know. So I think that think the state of modern medicine, still pretty bad. We don't have many good experiences.
Natori theories in biology, we have germ theory of disease, we have Evolution, we have cell theory, we have DNA, genetics, morphogenesis, embryogenesis, and not much else. You know, there's not much else. Everything else is rules of thumb memorization if x because defects see if XD, but we don't understand their underlying explanation. It's all just words pointing towards pointing towards. So biology is still in a very sorry State and because we are not allowed to take a risk that might
O people, we just don't experiment enough in biology. So a lot of treatments or just outright banned by law and Regulatory bodies. So we just don't have the Innovation. So I think we're still in the Stone Age when it comes to biology and we got a long ways to go and I think people will look back against at this and I think this is Brian Johnson's point. He's like, you know, let's be more more extreme. Let's try to live forever. Mental, you must be more experimental and all starters and of want to start experimenting on myself in. But, even there, I disagree with Brian and many things like, you know, taking a huge amount of supplements.
It's I think we just don't know it supplements outside their natural context, like just eat liver, man. All right, but this fine and I wouldn't be vegan either, but you know, it's I really appreciate that. He's experimenting is good-natured about me to there's everything. So we need more people like that. So I think the state of biology people will look back and say wow that was in the Dark Ages. I think another, another thing that we'll look back on it, I think we we still continue to underestimate how important drones are going to be in Warfare. The
Feature of all Warfare is drawn, still be nothing else on the battlefield because I think of the end state of drones is autonomous bullets, not even guided autonomous like their self directed. And so, if that's the future, we are headed towards. And that's,
it is just like with you have an armed Force, that's there's
gonna be. No, there's gonna be no aircraft. Carriers will be no tanks. There's gonna be no infantryman. They're just going to be autonomous Bullets by a Timeless Blitz against your times bullets. Whichever ones win the other side. Just Surrender is because over
I think that's the second piece of it. I think a
a
third piece that is going to be kind of, unexpected is the GOP ones which I know you and I probably discussed before. I think these are the most breakthrough drug since antibiotics, they're probably more important than statins. They're sort of Miracle drugs. They seem to be there are downsides, but the down side and side effects are so minor compared to the upsides Beyond just weight loss. They also seem to be addiction Breakers. It seemed to lower many kinds of cancer. They almost metabolically reverse aging up to a certain point, and I think they're going to
And the curve on health care costs and the big question people going to be asking. For the next five years is why are Americans paying thousands of dollars a month for this when people overseas are getting them for free? Or I can order them from China for free or whatever and maybe it like, if I were Bernie Sanders, the platform I would be running on is I would say okay we're going to pay 30 zombie, you know, hundreds of billions of dollars to Novo and Eli Lilly. And we're just going to make these free or there's hundreds of analogs of these things that work. These are not going to be you know limited to just
the few that are still that are
being used today. Just take one of them or two of them. They can
free and I think it'll make a big difference
and as you and I were discussing earlier, this does bend a lot of people out of shape who got there the old-fashioned way and they want to see obesity as a moral failing on people's parts and it lowers their status if they
are the only signal is less of a signal. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah.
So they are incented to say oh well you don't know the downsides you know it's irresponsible to suggest it's going to cause cancer have fun losing bone and muscle
Yes, but none of that stuff is really true. The cancer stuff is actually beneficial on. I know people who are now taking these things for anti-aging reasons, they're already fit, but they just want to age better and have a stronger insulin metabolism and there's evidence. Not these things are, you know, they put off dementia, Alzheimer's colon cancer. It's insane. Cardiovascular disease, like, the list of benefits is insane. There's no free lunch, but
This is a class of drugs that prevents you from taking other drugs into your body. It prevents you from taking, you know, too much sugar too much too many calories in an era of abundance. Prevents you from smoking prevents you from even there's an organization called Casper. That is not doing a study on heroin addictions and they're showing that this can lower opioid overdoses and heroin addiction. So there's a lot of overwhelming medical evidence
coming out. And I
think
I don't know the exact number, but I think something like 10% of the population might not have tried. Yes,
thing, I think that's the number. That is one massive. So I think it's about 50% of the population say that they would like to try it.
Exactly. So I think the body positivity movement is dead and we always kind of knew it was a scam and I mean, it's dying very, very quickly. Yeah. Equipped like you can never be too rich, too thin or too clean, right? And immediately, like a whole bunch of people went nonlinear my mentioned like, what do you mean too thin? And what about the hygiene hypothesis? And, you know, obviously there's always exceptions, but
People want to be thin fit and people want to be clean back to the pathogen discussion that we had.
So I think overall that
there's going to be a huge demand for these things and our modern medical
system is not built to supply these. Well I'm not I'm not.
I don't hold it against the farmers. I think the farmers did their job by creating the thing but I think next we need to step up and figure out how to make it broadly and cheaply available as opposed to just milk it for only for, you know, people on Obesity, you can get Medicare to sign off for it.
More people paying out of pocket at very, very high prices. Yeah. The benefits of societal distribution of the safer, glp ones is so large that whichever politicians are tackles that is going to be richly rewarded.
Well, obesity is the number one source of malnutrition worldwide this twice as many people that are obese than a starving. So about half a billion, people are starving and Billy immediate problems are Downstream of that. Like, you
know, look at how much of the federal budget goes and dialysis because the kidney failure. And why is that? It's because diabetes.
He's right. So, so many of the problems that we have in modern society are Downstream of obesity. And, you know, this like Fitness is so important. And yes, there's some in some people, these things called must cause muscle, and bone loss, but not in the people who are eating high protein and working out hard, so it can be taken away that's safer and some versions of these like little glue tied, the original one. They've been around for decades and the others have been around for about a decade. So and we already have, as you said, 10 percent of the population taking them, so they're already quite widely.
We distributed sample size. Yeah, it's a great sample size. What more do you need? Like if you if you have a bacterial infection, that's eating you. I don't say oh I have this anybody but it's going to raise your blood pressure. It's like no take the antibiotic. If you're going to kill yourself, I say take this antipsychotic and stay alive a little longer and solve it. I don't say oh it's going to, you know cause your heart rate to go up by three beats a minute. I don't worry about that. So similarly if you're poisoning yourself with toxins and overuse of substances that you shouldn't be using either heroin alcohol, cigarettes sugar or just
Cal take this glp-1, they also improve digestion, you just have less calories, just less food matter, going through stomach, the lower cancer risks across the board. There's quite a few cancers or lower cardiovascular. I mean, I don't know what else to tell
you. I've been very surprised by the negative reception. Whenever you have a conversation about glp ones and I think a lot of it may be people who indeed, I think about how many sacred cows are
being gored, right? All the people
Who are basically saying you should work harder, you should be fit. Like I did, right? It's lowering their status. Think about all the nutritionists and doctors and trainers, who are now being, you know, it's too easy. There being put out of business in a way, right? It's kind of what is the American Military? Keep buying aircraft carriers, right? In age of drones, there's an incentive bias is a very strong, motivated reasoning, but it doesn't matter. 10% people are on it. Everybody wants to be fit. It's going to spread like
Fire, mmm. We've, I was just thinking as you were talking that, you know, when we think about health and a lot of people kind of get captured by the way that they were brought up the, the habits that they had from their childhood or what Mom and Dad did, or genetic predisposition and stuff like that. I think you have as many reasons as as many people to sort of feel hard done by by challenges that you had earlier on in your life is getting past your past, a skill sort of not being owned.
Today, by your history, sort of not having that victim, Hood Mentality.
Yeah, I did have a tough childhood but I don't think about it, you know, I think there are a couple of things going on. There one is, I did process it quite a bit. I thought about
it, but I thought about it to
get rid of it. I didn't think about it. I dwell on it or like
old. Yeah, yeah, I wanted to be
successful. I wanted more than anything else to rise past that. And so, I couldn't have that as a burden on me, so I had to get rid of it. So, to the extent that I dealt with it, it was too, it was
For the express purpose of getting rid of it, not to create an identity or story or the reflect upon it. Or to say, look at me, look at what I've accomplished and look how great I am and what I've done. So I got rid of it and I think at some point you you wrestle with that thing and you just realize like you're never going to untangle the whole thing. It's a gordian knot problem. Like Alexander, you know, found that Tangled knot in India and it said, oh the famous conquer will come and will untie this knot. Nobody else can untie the knot in. Took one look at the pull out his sword and just cut it. So at some point you have to cut your past if your past is boss.
During you you will eventually get tired of trying to untangle the knot and you will just drop it because you will realize life is short and the more you have more you want to accomplish in this life actually the less time you have to unravel that thing. So I just want to essentially get things done so I had no time to deal with it. So I just cut it. It's like a really bad relationship but in this case, the bad relationship with your own history. So you just drop
it. Mmm. Yeah. I think, you know, so much of what we've spoken about today is,
On the shortness of life. And the fact that every moment is precious you had to take about the most fundamental resource in your life, is not time and attention. That's
right. I used to think, you know, the currency of life, right. People think it's money. And yes, money is important, and it does let you trade certain things for time, but it doesn't really buy you time as Warren Buffett. How much time money can buy you or Michael Bloomberg there? You know, rich is Scrooge and creases but they can't buy more time, right?
Johnson notwithstanding, so you can't trade money for time. Money is not the real currency of life. And time, itself doesn't even mean that much, because as we talked about before, a lot of time can be wasted because you're not really present for it, you're not paying attention. So the real currency of life is attention. It's what you choose to pay attention to and and and what you do about it. And so, back to the point about the news media, you
Can put your attention on the news but that's how you're spending the real currency of life. So just be aware of that if you want to that's fine. There's no, there's no right or wrong here, like maybe it is your destiny to pick something in the news. Learn about that problem, adopt that problem, and solve it. But just be careful because your attention is the only thing that you have and
that can also be captured by your own
past it. Yes, you can Fritter it away, on anything. You like,
is there an advantage to starting out? There's a loser.
Absolutely.
Yeah. Yeah because if you're because if you are looser than you'll want to be a winner and then you'll develop all the characteristics that will help you be a, you know, quote unquote winner in life that said, I wouldn't sentence. My kids to it. Like I don't think an artificially do that, you know, it's sort of like imagine that you were, you know, 300 years ago, you're born to Surf and then somehow you managed to escape off the farm and you become a landowner and then eventually become minor nobility an aristocrat. You're going to put your kids back on the farm and say you're gonna be a surf again. I know they all like those stories, the kids themselves.
Like those stories because it says, I came from School of Hard, Knocks. My dad. I'd be go shovel. Hey, for a summer. It's not real. I mean, you're not going to trick them. I think what you can all you can
do is kind of cultivate and
appreciation and gratitude for what you have. And the only way to do that is just evidence that yourself, right? Just show yourself how you spend money, how you respect it, what you do with it, how you take care of people who you're responsible for and and the more resources you have, the greater the tribe, you can take care of the
More of the tribe, you can take care of. So when you have no resources, you're struggling to take care of yourself. And at that point, it's good to be selfish because you can't save somebody else. If you can't even save yourself. Yes. So, you take care of yourself and you become the best version of yourself. But there are too many men who are able fit, and have some money who are doing nothing with their lives. Were just sitting at home doing nothing, just indulging in themselves, maybe they go on dates. In the get doordash like have no respect for that. I think there's nothing worse than Society than lazy man because he's sort of
He sort of leaving it on the table, he's leaving his potential new tables bad for him. So, the next thing you do is you go and you have a family and you take care of your family, take care of that tribe. Then you take care of your extended family, to take care of your cousins Brothers, uncles, grandmothers, aunts, you know, sisters everybody that you can and then if you have more resources beyond that, then you go take care of your local tribe. You take care of your people. You start trying to do some good for the world and if you have more resources that you go take care of you and bigger tribe and that's how you earn both respect and self confidence and you live up to your potential.
So, the more you have, the more is rightfully expected of you. And I think it's a good compact with society, when highly capable of people Express and flex that capability by giving more and more, and by doing more and more, and Society rewards them with the one thing they can't get otherwise it's just status, right? Society should give you status in exchange for it, they should say, okay, you did a good job, you took care of more people than just yourself and just the people immediately around you. And that's what an alpha male to me as
As an alpha male is not the one who gets to eat first. The alpha male eats last the alpha male feeds, everybody else first, and then gets to eat last and they do that. Got of their own self respect. And pride in the society rewards them by calling them in Alpha and giving them
status. Hmm, I wonder whether some of the pushback that we've got against Rich. Wealthy powerful. People is disincentivizing it is like, who is it
suck? Who you know, don't have money is like a Burg generals hospital and they weren't to pull his name off of it. I mean,
that's I didn't see that, but that's really kind of stuff
backfires
You should reward people for doing what you're saying
before, you don't just need to. In fact actually, actively avoid castigating people. If you want the behavior to change, when they get something wrong, look reinforcing it. When they get something right. Correct happening at a societal level as
well, correct. I mean, like the guys who make a lot of money and go out and buy sports teams, I wouldn't do that, right? But the one who goes out and builds a hospital or bills a rocket to take people to the Moon, you know, rescue some astronauts you should be rewarding.
I'm for that
of all, I really appreciate you. I hope that this is lift up to whatever we had Daydreams. You've been having, what have you got coming up? What can people expect from you over the next? However,
long expect nothing.
That's the most novel way that we could have finished it. Dude, it's, it's been a long time coming. And I really do appreciate you for being here today, but I do hope to deliver something. I think you have. So
thank you. Thanks for having me. Thank you, too. Thanks for getting in my mind and hopefully now you're
out. Let's see.
Maybe even worse. Now you've got the real memories to stick, I
don't know. The reason to win the game is to be free of
it. The reason the reason I do all right.
