#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature

Happiness is being satisfied with what you have success comes from dissatisfaction It's success worth it then Oof, I'm not sure that statement 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 to leave in the moment Happiness okay, so very complicated topic But I always like the Socrates story where he goes into the marketplace and they show him all these luxuries and fine Reason he says how many things there are in this world that I do not want, right? And that's a form of freedom. So not wanting something is as good as having it In the old story with Alexander Dionysius right Alexander's goes out and conquers the world and he meets Dionysius was living in a barrel and Dionysius says get out of the way you're blocking my son and Alexander says oh how I wish I you know could be like Dionysius in the next life and Dionysius is that's the difference. I don't wish that I could sorry diogenes Diogenes. Diogenes says I I don't wish to be Alexander so two pads to happiness and One path is success you get what you want you satisfy your material needs or like diogenes You just don't want in the first place and I'm not sure which one is more valid And it also depends which 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're here to replicate you're Driven you're motivated. You're gonna do something. You're not just gonna sit there all day Unlikely some 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've 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 better 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 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 had 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 gonna 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 I equip that the reason to win the game is to be free of it So you 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 You have many levels and are 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 Yeah, you another one of yours most of the games 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 it's 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 you don't want to do the task at hand If you were 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 it's 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 partner. 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 you were in five years ago 10 years ago 15 years ago 20 years ago And you try to remember, okay, who was I way the what was I doing? What was I feeling all my emotions what were 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 got to go on back and you know bought a stock or bought 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. Well, you end 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 the reward The journey is the only thing there is you know 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 strive 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 Then you get over it and 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 being successful There absolutely is money solves all your money problems so it is good to have money That said there are those Those stories I don't know if you've seen those 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 money solves your money problems So I don't want to be too glib about it, but I would say in general this this loop that we runs through Of desire dopamine fulfillment on fulfillment like you you have to enjoy the journey the journey is all there is Right 99% of your time is spent on the journey. So what kind of a journey is it 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 and 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 graded everything you can't be graded everything You're just going to waste your energy and waste your time Is fame a worthwhile goal It gets you invited to better parties gets you to better restaurants 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 in the pedestal it can get you what you want at a distance So I wouldn't say it's worthless obviously people wanted for a reason It's high status. So it attracts the opposite sex Especially for a man it attracts a woman That said 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 I don't know I'm famous, but you don't want to be famous That said I think fame like anything else is best produced as a or 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 famed the famed site. Yeah, exactly. So it's better that it's earned fame So for example earn respect in the tribe is you do things that are good for the tribe Who are the most famous people in human history? They're You know there 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 famous you know art class for a long time the scientists are famous They discover thing the conquerors are famous presumably because they conquered for their tribe There was someone 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 Terranical or negative like a you know jengas con is famous, but to the Mongols he was doing good to the rest of them not so much The higher level you're operating act the more people you're taking care of the more you sort of earn respect and fame And I think those are good reasons to be famous If if fame is empty if you're famous just because your name showed up in a lot of places or 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? No, you can't There's a challenge I think especially if people make very loud public proclamations about things you mentioned there about You're almost a hostage to the things that you used to say that Being able to update your opinions and change your mind 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 but so few people do it in a legitimate way I think that the grifter shill you you see this is the Smoking gun that shows that he didn't really believe that thing all along right and uh Yeah, I went to a retreat in LA a couple of years ago and there was a guy that I used to follow that a big Business and productivity advice content creator really really successful and he just totally stepped back from everything Like monk mode and focused on his business. I asked him why and he said uh I started feeling like I had to live up to imprive at the things that I was saying in public. Right. Yeah, it's a it's a What was it that uh who said it was a minkin that of um Foolish consistency is a hubgoblin of little minds right um But essentially look all life is 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 gonna 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 um 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 Uh-huh, I caught him in an error Well, I think if you catch someone in a blatant lie where there's believe one thing in this say another That's legit. That's a character flaw. This 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 a i a g. I think and I think I'm still right about But it's a different story um people who think we have achieved a g. I just failed a touring test from their side Uh, but uh 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 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. Uh, bullshit Ray does have become hypersensitized to try and work out whether or not this person means to think that they're saying yeah I mean there there a lot of people are wrong most of us are wrong most of the time especially in any new endeavor and different String being wrong and disingenuous though corrupt is free 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 Well believing 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 that's a mistake not just for the listener to mistake for themselves Because then you're going to get trapped in the hall and theirs 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 yourself you're puppeted by a person that you are not even That's right. Yeah, it's like well as a line there's you're you're basically trying to impress people who you know don't care about you So and they 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 you 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 air in Status 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 drawer of being swayed by social approval But 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 Old society let's go back hunter gather times. There was no such thing as a 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 existed was status games If you're a 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 tribe Now we have wealth creation where you can actually create a product or service You can scale that product or service and you 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 wealth creation is positive But status is limited. There's limited status to go around. It's a ranking letter. It's a hierarchy And so to rise and status somebody else has a lower in status Now you can have multiple kinds of status so you can expand some kinds 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 a wealth creation games can be Just you're creating products. You don't have to fight anybody else Yes, in the marketplace your product has to succeed But that's not quite the same as Invictive against other people or being angry with other people or feeling pushed down or pushed up or having a beef with somebody So I would argue that wealth creation games are both more pleasant They're positive sum 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 it's 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 starting in movies. They don't it's a non-profits. They go to cans or devils or what I 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 could store grain and then the industrial revolution took it to another level and not the information They just take me 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 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 It's not easy. It's not gonna fall on your lap and you have to learn something and know something and do something interesting But nevertheless it's possible to many more people Few hundred years ago your born to surf you were gonna 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 than 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 into achieve wealth If you've achieved fucking money already if you're 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 got an illustrious history biologically of wanting status and wealth is kind of novel. It's new The 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 the abilities and limitations And the advantage and disadvantages of wealth you have to use your neocortex a lot more. Does that mean it's 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 hadn't 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. I mean, this is what leaderboards are right. This is the right I choose billboard charts And it is zero sum And it is I guess you know the Forbes richest people on the planet Yeah, that was hard to climb the ladder one 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 and down and show you likes and comments and ratings. This is how much you're exactly They'll keep you running on that treadmill forever Jimmy car 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 were number 200 Versus you're number two in the world, but last year you were number one. There is this sense of The deceleration is very very tangible and um, it's why again, it goes back to evolution You know something that is bleeding eventually dies unless you stop the bleeding So you're you're 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 right If you struggle to stay asleep because your body gets too hot or too cold This is going to help just add an 8-sleep pod for ultra to your mattress like a fitted sheet And it will automatically cool down or warm up each side of your bed up to 20 degrees It's got integrated sensors to track your sleep time your sleep phases your HRV your snoring and your heart rate With 99% accuracy and it even starts cooling or heating your bed an hour before you get into it That is why 8-sleep has been clinically proven to increase total sleep up to one hour every night Best of all, they've got a 30-day sleep trial so you can buy it and sleep on it for 29 nights And if you don't like it, they will give you your money back plus the ship internationally Right now you can get $350 off the pod for ultra by going to the link in the description below Are heading to 8-sleep.com/modernwisdom and using the code modernwisdom A checkout that's e-i-g-t-sleep.com/modernwisdom and modernwisdom A checkout. The worst outcome in the world is not having self-esteem Why? 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's going to 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 a 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 at a deep core level But self-esteem issues can be the most limiting One interesting thought is that 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 far and few 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 some withy or something that I loved And that's when I'm actually ironically most proud Now that's through an explicit mental exercise But I'll bet you at some level I'm recording that implicitly So that tells me that even if I am not being loved and the way to create love is to give love To express love through sacrifice and through duty And so I think doing things like that can build up your self-esteem really 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 you think well you've got this Have you a set of overheads that you need to pay in some way? Well if being ethical we're profitable everybody would do it, right? At some level it does involve a sacrifice But that 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 a set of beliefs that if everybody in society followed them as individuals It would lead to win-win outcomes for everybody So if I am honest and you are 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 liars in the system as long as there aren't too many liars and too many cheaters A high-trust society where everybody's 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 as 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 and the Nash equilibrium The stable equilibrium there is everybody cheats And your fort the only way you can be you can play a win-win game is if you have long term iterated moves But that's not actually the most common game played in society The most common game played is one called a stag's hunt where If we cooperate we can bring down a big stag and 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 uh, and that game has two stable equilibrium's And one could be where we're both hunting the rabbit and one could be where we're hunting the stag So the high-trust society is a more 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 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 Would I go on a stag hunt with me? Correct Yeah, that's right And if you're the kind of person, if you're the kind of person who long-term signals ethics and virtues Then you will attract other people who are ethical and virtuous Whereas if you are a 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 way, the marshmallow test does not replicate I saw a big difference It got a complication crisis It was hard recently But it is about trading off the short-term for the long-term And so I think for a lot of these so-called virtues There are long-term selfish reasons to be virtuous Yeah Did you deal with self-doubt in the past? Is that something that was a hurdle for you to overcome? 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 And that was better than me for me Or that, you know, I'm an idiot or I'm not worthwhile or anything 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? Myself, a steam, should I chase this thing? Or not, I can make a fed judgment on that Is opposed to being so swayed 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, that's in the back of your mind, was it the Damon? Is that what the Ancient Greeks or something used to talk about? Yeah, also in computer science, like there's a concept of a Damon, which is a A program that's always running in the background, you can't see it Okay But yeah, it probably comes from the Ancient Greek Damon But yeah, 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 you're implicit knowledge and your knowledge that is unknown to yourself is far greater than the knowledge You can articulate and that you can communicate 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 have 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 A repost to maybe people that didn't grow up with unconditional love. Yeah in that way On 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 you remember that feeling like really sit 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 necessarily so be a little careful there I'm talking more about like love for it sometimes get complex if you're talking about past romantic love Write 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 coin. It's a little too sweet. You kind of want to push the person away. 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. It 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 pride 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 pride prevents you from saying I'm wrong. It could be as simple as you're trading stocks and then you don't admit you were wrong So you hang on to 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 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 willing 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 his financial institution that got merged into paypal It's good that you've got the domain, you know the mean yeah, exactly. I'll talk that. I'll hold on to it. He's consistent He's been using it for quite a while And he said something like along the lines of I made two hundred million dollars in the sale of paypal I put a hundred million dollars in the space x it even Tesla 20 in the solar city and I had to borrow money for rent Right this guy as a perennial risk taker. He's always willing to 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 back himself again each day back himself again each time But the key thing is he's always willing to start over Right even now when he's sort of made his his new startup as a USA, right? He's basically trying to fix it like he would fix one of his startups And I think that is a willing nested 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 they become richer they 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 a quality of life Yeah, a lot of is just you're meaming yourself into a bad 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 realities you can be smart and happy there are plenty of people in human history who are smart and happy And I think it just starts with saying yeah, you know what? I'm gonna be happy It was a guy that I met in Thailand a long time ago 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 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 and I was 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 may first you just identify yourself as actually I'm gonna be a person. It's gonna be happy I want to figure it out and you just figure it out along the way You're not gonna lose your other predilections. You're not gonna lose your ambition or desire for success I think a lot of people have this fear that oh if I'm happy then 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 the happy version is used not gonna look back at the unhappy version and say oh man that one that guy was the most success I wish that was him. You're actually trying to be successful. So you'll be happy. That's the whole point if you've gotten it backwards You unlocked one of my trap cards One of my favorite insights is that we sacrifice the thing we want for the thing that's 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 have found that the happier I get the more I am 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 An apologetically self prioritizing I guess yeah, I think everybody is Maybe I'm apologetic as the part that's that's relatively rare But I think everybody puts themselves first. That's just human nature You're you're here because you survive your separate organism. That's interesting I'm maybe but I know we like to virtue signal on pretend we're doing it for each other How many times does somebody say yeah, of course I'd love to come to the wedding They're like I don't want to be at the fucking wedding Yeah, how many times does someone say how are you doing today? I don't they don't tell you how I don't go to weddings But this is my point right so I don't think you're 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 4,000 weeks. That's your lifespan Um, and yes, we hear that but we don't remember it but uh, I guess I'm keenly aware of how little time I have so I'm just not gonna waste it How have you got more comfortable at um Being the unapologetic self-prioritizer. Yeah, I've gotten I've gotten utterly more and more ruthless on it Mainly it's that I see or hear people's freedom and then that liberates me further. So I read a Uh, I read a blog post by uh, P mark a k mark and recent where he said don't keep a 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 gonna. I'm glad you got your own time. Yeah, exactly I had to look things up at the last minute So but ironically, I don't even know if 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 gonna operate through text messaging and I put up my nasty ease. 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 there Right if you need to find me you'll find me obviously some of this is a luxury of success But some of these habits I adopted long before actually the hostile email autoresponder started a long time ago I used to own the domain. I let it go. Don't do coffee. I don't do coffee. I promise to reply from that email Just so people will get the point, but I stop being rude about it. Now I just ghost. I just disappear My wife knows not to ever book or schedule me for anything I'm not expected to go to couples dinners and I expect to go to birthdays and I expect to go to weddings If somebody tries to rope her into having me show up. She says he makes his own decisions. You gotta ask me. What about vice versa? 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 you hear the invite but make the decision Because if you're if there's fewer things and coming you're assuming that you know what's best for you I don't commit to anything in the future. So I'll say okay if that thing is interesting I'll see if I can get in that day when I'm in the mood But there's nothing worse than something coming up that your past self committed you to yourself doesn't want to do a damn it positive. Yeah, and then it destroys your entire calendar It destroys your due date because there's like oh, this is one hour slot Which is sitting like a turret on my calendar that I have to like schedule my whole day around I can't do anything at 20 minutes before the 20 minutes afterwards Even for phone calls. Does someone wants to do a phone call say okay? Just text me when you're free. I'll text you and 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 I cal whatever The the over-scheduled life is not worth living. It's not I think it's a terrible way to live life That's not how we evolve. 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 to 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 changed my life right there. You still a arm clock alarm clockless Yes, I'm alarm clockless today. I did set my alarm clock just so I wouldn't miss very important Yeah, if you but just so you know, I set the alarm clock from 11 a.m. in case I was stricken with a flu I was gonna set my alarm clock for 8 a.m. or 9 a.m. and sure enough I got up many hours 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 sync sync a little bit more into that Like kind of like that fuck you energy that self prioritizing energy because I think people rationally love the idea of this I'm gonna do what only I want to do Even if they've got the level of freedom. It's not 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 work and obligations that are genuinely important to us But don't footer away your life on randomly schedule things and things that are an 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 Optimize for that you'll 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 when I want to solve all the hard problems And the next four 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 priorities 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 I read a book or something like that So having that flexibility and freedom is really 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 in some emails done I put that off till 6 p.m. I'm rushing. I'm not gonna be productive. I'm not gonna be You're certainly not free. You know, 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 it at that moment if I'm inspired to set a tweet I want to do it that moment if inspired to solve a problem I do it 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 to 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 chat GPT 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 an hour aside because when that time arrives I might be in a different mood. I might just want to do something different So I think that spontaneity is really important. You're gonna 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 generally have a 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 with very very little tastes of that you can live your entire life that way that is a recipe for happiness It feels like efficiency that that you have the nutrition 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 it 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 that efficiency and productivity and success are Counter to happiness and freedom. They actually go together Also 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'll continue to do it and you'll 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 than just an annual physical Which is why I partnered with function they run lab tests twice a year to track over a hundred biomarkers and monitor for early signs of Thousands of diseases they even screen for 50 types of cancer at stage one which is five times more data Then you get from an annual physical you receive insights from a team of expert physicians who provided detailed written clinicians summary for all their observations And then phone consultations for any critical findings getting these lab tests done would usually cost thousands But with function it is only four hundred and ninety nine dollars and right now you can get the exact same blood panels that I get and bypass their weight list By going to the link in the description below are heading to function health calm slash modern wisdom. That's function health calm slash modern wisdom 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 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 it feels like play. It's not work So you're going to outcompete 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 byproduct to you. It's art. It's beauty. It's joy. It's it's flow. It's fulfilling You must enjoy podcasting if you didn't you wouldn't be good at it. You would have nine hundred episodes either right? If you would you if 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 to you the less competition you have you escape competition through authenticity By being your own self if I had to summarize how to be successful in life in two 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 it won't even feel like work to you. It'll feel like play to you And modern society gives us that opportunity you know if you were 2000 years ago you're born in a farm your choices are very limited 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 search function To find the people who need you the most to find the work that need 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 and also presumably Kill things that aren't working very quickly By default you should kill everything, you know, if you can't decide the answer is no And most things you just be saying no to the 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 you know, like 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 you're 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 are a lot of people out there who are into hustle culture And 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'll hustle people. They'll always be sending you requests messages. Yeah, this is a famous person problem But I have it and people 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 and you should write a forward for my book and you kind of squirm when you get this right I have 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 let it 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 inflow is if you get either very good at ignoring these things by default or closing yourself off like a hermit like our mutual friend Tim Ferris does Or you just become emotionally capable of not registering these as something that causes turbulence inside of you That not registering it emotionally thing is that a fundamental that's so fundamental is just 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 right I didn't know you 20 years ago I didn't know you as a child So I've only seen you with this holistic selfishness the integrated self prioritization whatever we I don't know what we told it selfish is fine I'll take selfish I'm very selfish person don't contact me Yeah, the emotional reality is I also get the sense too that maybe people have lived Obligation life for so long that they actually kind of struggle to tap into what it is that they want They've hidden their wants and their desires and their needs and they've deprioritized themselves so much for so long they go What do I want actually 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 marionetted 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 you with a 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're reacting from the mind Then you're not even a 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 woo way But you can even just do it through therapy you can do it through journaling you can do it anyway You would 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 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 Uh, 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 on just one overarching problem and then go solve that problem 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 whether 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 this 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? Do I want to spend the energy on this problem or do I want that going somewhere else and it doesn't have to be that over You don't have to the mind muddressing with itself is also a problem But because I love to do that. I have my problems have got problems And I have a real problem about fixing my problems. Yeah, exactly. 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 as mental energy You're going to much more mental energy to focus on the actual problems you want to solve If you don't start unconsciously, 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 is 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 in difference the things that are out of their control Right Or a rational person can find peace by cultivating in difference 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 my mind when 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 a modern media is a delivery mechanism for mimetic viruses And not what's happened now is you know 100 years ago 500 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 of the world's problems has turned into a Mimetic virus which is going into the battlefield of the news and is trying to infect your mind in real time So that yeah, so that you become obsessed with the war in Ukraine Which is really far away you get obsessed with climate change or you get obsessed with AI doom or 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 and I would argue that large percentage of the population are essentially just infected with these mimetic viruses that are 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 are 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 gonna fix the world Right people are running out there to try and fix the world with the old lives of a mess 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 well you just kind of invalidated your whole way of life It's like that line of and no country for all men where the killer is waiting for the protagonist and The protagonist shows up in the killer says well, you know, if your set of rules brought you here then what good are your 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 like people debate intelligence for example, right? We talk about IQ tests 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 want in the first place I could want to be a you know six foot eight basketball player and I'm not gonna get that So it's wanting the wrong thing So it's wanting something that you can't get that's wanting something you can't is also wanting something that you don't want Yeah, wanting something that's a booby prize. There are plenty of booby prizes out there too, right? Yeah, that one that one that one did about 20. Yeah, prizes that are just not worth having or that create their own problems But 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 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 Tiel has this whole thing from Renatio Rard 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 go to 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 at a guilt you know guilt is just society's voice speaking in your head Socially a 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 uh Four-year cycles, you know in Silicon Valley you go join a startup. You're vest your stock over four years. That's the standard. Okay uh 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 It has like a nine-year cycle until that relationship changes Um, 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 four 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 We're going to be for ten years or five years and because a lot of discoveries path dependent where the next thing You find on the path is dependent where you were on the previous path You sort of start going down this vector that is a very long distance people decide frivolously which city to live in And that's going to decide who their friends are what their jobs are their opportunity their weather their food supply their air supply quality of life You know, it's such an important decision, but we will spend so little time thinking it through I would argue that if you're making a four-year decision spend a year thinking it through like really thinking it 25% of the time. Yeah, exactly. There's the secretary theory. I don't know if you know about one So after you've done this many people pay the best one of the next however much that's right Yeah, the secretary theorem is this computer science professor is trying to figure out how much time you should spend Interviewing secretaries and then how long to keep the secretary So let's say he's going to have a secretary for ten years. Does he keep searching for you know one year two years three years one month two 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 worked with and try to find someone that good or better. So that by the time you've gone 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. This 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 the number of candidates the number of shots you took on goal That's right. So you want to have lots and lots of iterations So that's you need to bail out quickly and you need to be decisive quickly That's right. You need to 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 after you was over Exactly. You 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 popularized this idea of 10,000 hours to mastery I would say it's actually 10,000 iterations to mastery. It's not actually 10,000 It's some unknown number But it's about the number of iterations that drives a 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, 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 are 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 imbibed what the news 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 Yeah, cynicism and 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 an evolution But within biology there's very few good explanatory theories and you know theory of evolution by natural selection It's 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 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 prey then good I get to eat one meal But if it turns to be a predator I get eaten and that's the end of that So we are hardwired to avoid ruin And you know, just dying So we are naturally hardwired to be pessimists 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 non-linear For example, when you're investing If you short a stock, the most money you can make is 2x You just lose, you know if the stock goes to 0 you double your money But if the stock is in next Nvidia and it goes 100x 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 it fails, there are 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 society is far more forgiving of failure And you just have to sort of neocortically realize and override that You have to realize that you are 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 for your husband Then you can compound it 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 it'll compound return It's okay if you had 50 small failed 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 You want to be an optimist But I would say you want to be skeptical about specific things Every specific opportunity is probably a fail But you want to be optimistic in the general In the general if you want to be like something in here is going to work How would you navigate that tension? I mean exactly as I said I'm optimistic in the general that if something fails right now Then this is a little woo 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 don't want to marry the first person you date necessarily Unless you've got very lucky But you want to investigate and explore very very quickly Until you find the match And then you have to be willing to go all in You have to be willing to move your chips at the center of the table So both those Both those approaches are required So it's a Bob L strategy It's sort of black or it's white And most people are sort of stuck in this grey bit And like half in But I'm kind of don't really know if I am And I also think like labels like pessimists, optimists, cynic, Introvert, extrovert These are very self-limiting Humans are very dynamic They're times when you feel like being introverted They're times when you feel like being extroverted They're context in which you'll be pessimistic They're context in which you'll be optimistic Leave all those 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 a sense Like obviously you're involved But motivated reasoning is the worst kind of reasoning You're not going to find truth through highly motivated reasoning You have to be objective An objective means trying to take yourself out of it as much as possible Or at least your personality out of it as much as possible And so to the extent you run with this thick identity and personality It's going to cloud your judgment It's going to try and lock you into the past If you say I'm a depressed and unhappy person Yeah, I'm going to be unhappy That's a way of locking yourself into your past Even saying I have trauma, I have PTSD Yeah, you feel something There are memories, there are flashes There are occasional bad feelings But don't define yourself by it Because then you lock it into your identity And you're 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 Adaptation is also intelligence Adaptation is survival Adaptation is kind of how you're here You're here because you're an adaptor And your ancestors are adaptors So to adapt, you'll see things clearly And if you're seeing them through your own identity It's going to cloud your judgment A quick aside, you've probably heard me talk about element before In fact, you might be thinking For f*ck's sake, Chris Will you shut up about element? And the answer is No, I won't Because when I take it, I genuinely feel the difference I genuinely believe that proper hydration Makes a massive difference to your performance So I'm going to keep talking about it Until you start drinking it Element is a tasty electrolyte drink mix With everything that you need And nothing that you don't Each grabbing your stick pack contains a signed back electrolyte ratio Obsidian, potassium and magnesium With no sugar, no coloring, no artificial ingredients Or any other junk It plays a critical role In reducing muscle cramps and fatigue While optimizing brain health, regulating appetite And curbing cravings This orange flavor in a cold glass of water Is how I've started my morning Every single day for over three years now And I genuinely feel the difference Versus when I don't Best of all, they have a no questions ask Refund ball as the With an unlimited duration So you can buy it and try it for as long as you want And if you don't like it for any reason They'll just give you your money back You don't even need to return the box That's how confident they are That you'll love it Plus, they offer free shipping within the US And right now, you can get a free sample pack Of all eight flavors with your first box By going to the link in the description below Or heading to drinklmnt.com/modem wisdom That's drinklmnt.com/ Modem wisdom [Laughter] Moving on to sort of thinking about happiness Obviously, a topic of yours that's a It's honestly the one that I feel least qualified to talk about Is it like a guy that's got long arms teaching you how to bench press Or a dude that's really tall teaching you how to deadlift Someone that feels like they came from behind the eight ball Yeah, you're asking a crazy person about their thoughts So just start it through Is 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 uh 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 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 sustained period of time They were probably doing some variation of nothing That's interesting because in the chase is this sort of lack this contingency That's right, but then you get bored If you just sit around all the time you get bored So you want to adventure, you want to 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 a electrode in And they did this with monkeys And I can put a wire in there And I can stimulate just the right part of your brain and I can put you in bliss And you would just be in bliss, would you want that? Might be nice? For how long? Do it and I'll tell you So most people will say, "Well, I don't want that, I want meaning, I don't want just bliss, I want meaning." And you're like, "Okay, well, I'll put an electrode in there and I'll give you meaning, how about that?" And if you kind of run the start experiment long enough I think most people realize actually what I want is I want surprise I want the world to surprise me and I want to wrestle with it In ways that are somewhat predictable but somewhat not And you 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 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 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, that's kind of the whole game that we're all playing here Surprises are really interesting, the sort of unpredictability, I think Total Broscience here, but I'm pretty sure that that's kind of how dopamine works That things are a bit better than you expected Within that, it means that if you For the perennial insecure overachievers that claw you for control That really want to be able to, the schedule is 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 surprise Because everything has become very contrived, prescribed, done in advance, laid out Your ability to be surprised actually diminishes Yeah, if nothing worked out the way you expected If it was all a 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 You say thinking about yourself is the source of all unhappiness 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 the source of unhappiness, is this a price that you need to pay? I need to sort of reflect inward, 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 supposedly referring to that is If you're thinking about your personality and your ego and the character of you And you're obsessing over that, that's where a lot of depression and unhappiness sort of lingers and gets cultivated So thinking about what 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, you're 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? It's the ego, but that word is so overused that I kind of hate to use the word But it's a recurring collection of thoughts that are very self-obsessed and will never be satisfied And you're very concretized as well, so they're not malleable, not particularly flexible But you're just 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 ball, I deserve this, this happened to me That person wronged me, this is who I am, this shouldn't have happened I need to go get revenge on this or I need to fix that or change this I mean that I think is where a lot of mental illness 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 worth a while If it leaves your mind busier at the end of it, then you're probably going in wrong direction Is this a justification for detachment, cultivated ignorance, distraction? Detachment is not a goal, detachment is a byproduct It's just a byproduct of just realizing, you know, what matters and what doesn't 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 a spirituality, that could be kids It could be caring about the planet, although I think people take that a little far You know, and then they get kind of oppressive and tyrannical and support of abstract concepts But so these can be taken too far, just like religion, for example, just like anything in excess Anything in excess, right? But generally the less you think about yourself, the more you can think about a mission Or about God, or about a child, or something like that So I remember Vinny Haimath, the founder of Loom, said "I am rich and I have no idea to do what to do with my life" And you replied, "God kids are mission, pick at least one" That's right, preferably all three It's very liberating Yeah, thinking, I think overthinking about yourself is probably the. 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, yeah, you have this, you're the prisoner and the prison guard at the same time And I had Abigail Shryer on the show She was to wrote this book called Bad 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 we're getting perilously close to some really evidence-based stuff here But the more that I've 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 Therapy is great if it lets you vent and it solves the thing and then accession later is you're done You're clear, but if you're just looping on the same thing forever then it's actually the opposite You're bathing in it, you're indulging in it Yeah, yeah How have you all 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 you're a little status It reveals that you're a little status So someone who's basically trying to show off comes across as a little status The same way someone who's trying to be happy is sort of saying "I'm unhappy" and creating that frame So it's better just to not even think in terms of- You 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 not done the procedural systematic sort of step-by-step-by-step This is what it is and then come out the other side I don't think there are any formulas, I think it's unique to each person It's like asking a successful person, how does 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 narrow-tized 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- you shouldn't be asking somebody who is successful What they do to continue their success now You should be asking them 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 They just went and did it They just 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 It's a tweet of yours that was people who are good at making wealth Or people who 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 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- if you don't lie awake at night thinking about it, you don't want it badly enough Yeah, I think- I've heard you talk before about how The unclosed loops problems that you're working on can cause you to be sleepless And uh, this- I'm not a good sleeper, tell me about that Oh, I mean, my eight sleep hates me, it's all it's not me I feel that sleeping again, Brian Johnson thinks I'm gonna die early, he's probably right But how much do you reckon you sleep at night, you got any idea? Oh, it's so random, some nights I sleep eight hours, some nights I sleep four hours But it's literally just random Are you bothered about that? You're trying to optimize, you go sleep coach, teaching you how to- I don't vlog myself over things If I want to sleep, I'll 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 gonna beat myself up over it It'll come a point where it's important to me, and when it's important to me, I'll just do it You know, most of- like for example, you look at 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've got lung cancer I mean, it's dead as lung cancer and they drop it immediately So I think a lot of change is more about desire and understanding than it is about forcing yourself or trying to domesticate yourself It's 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 getting caught up in a half-desire or a 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 mean time, just doing it because other people tell you you should do it or society tells you you should do it Or you feel slightly guilty about it These are half-hearted efforts and half-hearted efforts don't get you there As you get older, one thing that becomes harder to ignore is your testosterone levels They impact everything from your energy, to your mood, and how well you recover However, there are signs, back supplements, like Toncat that support testosterone, strength, and recovery And that is why I'm such a huge fan of Mertensis product Because they make the only NSF-certified Toncatally on the planet That means it's so rigorously tested that even Olympic athletes can use it and why I partnered with them Because they make the most carefully tested, highest-quality supplements on Earth This is a huge part of my brain, body, and sleep stack Which makes a big impact on my cognition, my strength, and my recovery And if you're still unsure, Mertensis offers a 30-day money-back guarantee So you can buy it and try it for 29 days if you don't love it They'll give you your money back Plus, the ship internationally Right now, you can get 35% of your subscription and that 30-day money-back guarantee By going to the link in the description below I'm heading to livemomentis.com/modernwisdom and using the code "modernwisdom@checkout" That's l-i-v-e-m-o-m-e-n-t-o-u-s.com/modernwisdom And "modernwisdom" A checkout You mentioned anxiety before Imagine how effective you'd be if you weren't anxious all the time Is one of yours, and anxiety is the emotion to sure of the 21st century And 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, 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 Stress is when, like, if you look at an iron beam When an iron beam is under stress, it's because it's being bent in two different directions at the same time So when your mind is under stress, it's because it has two conflicting desires at once So for example, 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 You don't want to go to work, but you want to make money So you're under stress 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 then 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 And the reason for that is because you have so many unresolved problems Unresolved stress points that have piled up in your life That you can no longer identify what the problems are There's this mountain of garbage in your mind And it's 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 write down what the possible causes could be Let me meditate on it 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 Then I think that helps get rid of anxiety A lot of the anxiety is 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 To indulge them Well, 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 just Ruminating on death I think that's a good one You're going to die It's all going to zero You cannot take anything with you And I know this is trite And I know that 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? What's it meeting alive? What is it all about? You know, is there Santa Claus? Is there God? But then as adults we're taught not to think about these things We're given up on them But I think the big questions are 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 to zero What's your distress about? Yeah, for better or worse, life is very short How should people deal with its briefness? Enjoy it Make the best of it 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 there for it If you're stressed out Or you're anxious Or you're thinking about something else You missed it So 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 living in some imagined 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 the what is the 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 It's 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 Then it'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 Or 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 reality 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 waste of time The time that you are not present for When you are not there for it When you are not Doing the thing you want to do To the best of a kit but is such that you are immersed And 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 their life Has been not being here in any case That's right But I think people crave being here for it And when you're here for it You're actually not thinking about yourself You are more immersed in the thing That the moment the task at hand We don't want peace of mind We want peace for our mind That's right Yeah, you don't Peace The mind is what killed each you alive If you let it And there's more to you than the mind How so? Well, I mean It's very I don't want to disassemble the body So speak right Because please go on Yeah, at the end of the day Everything arises within your consciousness Right, you You got nowhere else to experience it Sorry You've got 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 from your body From your mind to the world To everything is within that consciousness And that thing that base layer of being And this is what the Buddhist 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 Life is 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 Is up to you And different people Interpret them in different ways Yeah I see you all lying about two people walking down the street They're having the exact same experience One is one is one is happy one is sad Right it's a narrative in their heads It's how they 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 negative 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 can 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 their 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 easiest and best way to do that Is to observe your own mind and your own thoughts And be a little not not necessarily critical But be observing of yourself more objectively And then you kind of realize your own loops and patterns It takes time, it's not overnight, it's not instantaneous 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 want to live like a god and everything's going to be perfect And be a Buddha sure you can let go But I think in practice it's 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 to do Or society expects you to do or what you might just think Kid should 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 Hellistic selfishness We can clip that little I'm telling you about being selfish Yeah, yeah, yeah Just keep running in bad guy Ah 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 It's taste The aggregate is aggregated And it could be aggregated through evolution And it's in your genes in your DNA Or it could be aggregated through your experiences And what you've thought through The mind is good at solving new problems And new problems in the external world That have 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 it 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 It can happen much faster Which is why And you have less time to Yeah, and all people It's more set in their way as a consequence They know what they want They know what they don't want So it takes time to develop your gut instinct and 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 Or I wanted to get a different thing out of it Then 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 trap you Yeah, wishful thinking It traps you into a Into a pathway that just choose up 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, Orlando Botan 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 they 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 And the Dale Carnegie School of Public Speaking I don't know, I never went through it I heard the second hence, 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 a lot 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 develop 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 or memorize anything You just listen to a student Stumbling over the language And it's a better way to learn Because you yourself Don't feel flustered You're being tested Grated, not in your own head as much Correct, you're not in your own head And you might even be laughing at the student Or you might be agreeing with the teacher Or vice versa Or sympathizing with the student But because you are a passive observer You're 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 To be positive or imperfect Yeah, exactly Not to insult them or be negative or critical When 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 praise worthy Don't forget to praise them Like definitely go out of your way to praise And it'll be genuine It has to be genuine It 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 praise worthy 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 their potential or the idea of them And that's the You know, they show such great promise Look at their ability for change and growth 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 Like, well, if you're asking me It sure is 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 And they start reading out his or her resume Right, that's also a bad sign So what do you mean? Oh, it's like, oh, we have so much in common We like to golf together It's like, it's not a basis for a relationship Or, oh, is, you know, she's a ballerina Or, you know, he went to Harvard Or what have you This is a resume item So that's not who the person actually is What's the better answer? 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 Defineable the reasons are You're together the worst they are The ineffable is actually what the sort of true love lies Because real love is a form of unity It's a form of connection It's connecting spirits Oh you too, my consciousness meets your consciousness It's a, the underlying drive In love, in art, in science, in mysticism Is the desire for unity It's the desire for connection As, you know, Bore has famously wrote In every human there's a sense That something infinite has been lost You know, there's a god-shaped hole in you You're trying to fail And so we're always trying to find that connection Love is trying to find it in one other person And saying, okay, you're male, I'm female or whatever And, you know, whatever your petalictions are And now we connect, now we form a hole Connected hole or in mysticism It's like, it's all about, okay, sit down, meditate And you'll feel the hole in science It's like, oh, you know, Adam's bouncing is mechanics But that generates heat So thermodynamics and motion Or kinetics are one combined theory That's a hole Electricity and magnetism are one thing That's the whole, creates that sense of all In art, it's like, I feel in emotion I create a piece of art around it And then you see that painting Or do you see the cysteine 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 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 cannot decide The answer is no And the reason is Modern society is full of options Yeah Knowing this rationally Sounds great But having the courage to commit to it In reality, I think it's a different task And cutting your losses quickly And the big three relationships, jobs and locations Is hard What would you say to someone who may Surreiberally be able to agree with you and say I understand the answer My cousin said this about me He said that He said what I really He says what I've really noticed about you Is your ability to walk away From situations that are Just not great enough for you Or not good enough for you Yes And I think that is a characteristic That I have I will not accept second best outcomes in my life Ultimately, you will end up Wherever is acceptable to you You will get out of life Whatever 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 I have 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're starting The answer is by default always no Secondly, if you have two decisions If you have A or B And both seem like very equal Take the path that's more painful in the short term The one 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 Taleb Surgeon Taleb Surgeon where you want the Surgeon doesn't look as good Because he's more likely to be a good Surgeon Yeah, it's similar In that appearances we're deceiving Because you're avoiding conflict, you're avoiding pain So take the path is more painful in the short term Because your brain is creating this illusion The short term pain is greater than the long term pain Because it's long term Yeah, you commit your future self to all kinds of long term Maniana, maniana Exactly, maniana So take the more short term painful one And then finally the last one Which I would try to copy Gupta with Is that you want to take the choice That will leave you more equanimous in the long term By equanimous, he means like more peace More mental peace in the 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 probably 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 three decisions 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 think pretty hard about it And people do some of these unconsciously You know who you're with very often in the cycle, we were in a relationship We stumbled along, it felt okay, it had been enough time So we got married, right? Not great reasons Maybe not terrible reasons either I mean, some people who overthink 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 closed 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, you can't lose at it Get some leverage, try to find some practical application of it and go into that And then where you live, where you live is really important I don't think 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 or I visited one weekend I really liked it You really want to think it through Because where you live really constrains and defines your opportunities It's going to determine your friend's circle It's going to determine your dating pool It's going to determine your job opportunities It's 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'll live based on that And I think people choose that one probably more poorly Than they put a lot less 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 We're living together, we've got a dog, we've got a kid we were married, we would do And yeah, they're one of your 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 Than the most important thing in the world To use half that other person Whether you like them or not Yeah Jeffrey Miller 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 I'm a big believer in genetics Yes, I do think a lot of behavior is downstream of genetics And I think we underplay that We like to overplay nurture and underplay nurture For a sort of say, we're 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 get changed You want to securely attach 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 going to be with someone who's unhappy And then make them happy down the road Or if you're okay with them being unhappy But there are other things you like about them that's fine But this goes back to talking to their unhappiness with other things And 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 are set of things you won't compromise on Values are 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, do we give the children money or do we not? Do we move across the country to be closer to our family Or do we stay put where we are? Do we argue about politics? Do we care or do we not? Right, the values are way more important than checklist items And I think if people were to align much more in their values They would have much more successful relationships The emotional pain of a fearing change I have this thing to job, the location, the partner 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 feel If all of loss of ocean, it's just painful separating yourself In front of your friends, it's embarrassing And how would you advise people to get past themselves with that loss of ocean? The fearing of change, oh my god, I'm going to Yes, the hardest thing in the world Starting over It's back to the zero to one thing It's 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 One is so badly, they're willing to go back and start over Again and again, whether in their career Or in their relationships or in anything else The most seriously you take yourself The unhappier you're going to be You've learned how to take yourself last seriously Well, fame doesn't help on that one Because that is one of the traps of fame People are 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 I'm a break dancer Right, that's going to be met with a lot of scorn and ridicule But what if I want to be a break dancer? I'd back you if you want to make that happen Yeah, the truth is if I want to be a break dancer I'd be a break dancing But you know, like I'm starting a new company Zero to one again, from scratch Let's do it, you know, one more time And not just going and 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 exist So I think that you constantly just have to force yourself 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 You still have a lot of the same Partilictions and desires and wants You've got a nice veneer on it But one of the nice things when you have kids Is you realize how much closer they are to you In personality and knowledge and know how Like I look at my son who's, you know, he's eight And I just noticed like wow He probably has 60 to 80% of my knowledge And development with him and he's a lot more freedom And he has a lot more spontaneity In some ways he's smarter And there's not a big gap here left to close This kid's going to be, you know, done very soon I've 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 Because 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 that, 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 something 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 And a lot of the time people ask questions Like what advice do you wish that you would give yourself ten years ago People ask themselves that question Almost invariably The advice that you would give yourself ten years ago Is 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 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, yeah, 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 that You say, "Who, what would you tell a friend that was going through this?" Right And then you try and turn the advice to the friend Around on to yourself You always think, "Well, I'm not the friend Y'all kept you ten years ago There's enough distance in that Y'all, I actually am still that person There's just a single line between that And related to this story Is I think understanding is way more important than discipline Now, Jocco 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 deeply respect them If it was, you know, really good behavior That maybe was observed unintentionally So, when we really do see something clearly 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 lung cancer example is a good one Right? Someone close to you Or anytime someone close to you dies Or you even hear about someone dying You hear about someone dying What's the first thing you do? The first thing, assuming that you weren't that close to them Obviously you're close to them It's different But if you weren't that close to them But, you know, you hear about someone in your extended society dying You immediately start trying to distinguish yourself from them You know, like, oh well How old was this person? You know, did they have a, were they a smoker? You know, did they have an issue? Do I have that issue? Right? You immediately start comparing And 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're like, oh my god, this person was the same age as me And they died And that's starting to happen in my age Where I'm starting to hear about, you know, extent circle people Just reminds you time is really short There's a truth there There's a truth there That you cannot actually understand yourself There's a truth there that you cannot unsee You know, or, for example, I think Were you into bodybuilding or something back when? I don't know Just like, it has like, bro lifting stuff It's like, bro lifting stuff without a skinny bitch Right, but there probably was a point Where you were being really aggrowing the jam And you injured yourself Many times Right And each one of those was a deep understanding Of don't go beyond this point Right, there was a truth there So, again, 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 Interspection 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 an inescapable lesson You're going to do what you're going to do 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 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 accessed it already? Exactly You know, all the philosophy that's out there, for example It's almost trite Like most people, they look at philosophy like Until they discovered for themselves 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 That would 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 Untitiable Lessons I've been thinking about a special category of lesson One which you cannot discover without experiencing it first hand There is a certain subset of advice That for some reason we all refuse to learn through instruction These are untitiable lessons No matter how arduous or costly or effortful it is going to be For us to find 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 To never new insights about how to put up level shelves Or charmingly introduce yourself at a cocktail party Instead we spend most of our lives learning first hand The most important lessons that the previous generations already warned us about Things like money won't make you happy Fame won't fix yourself worth You don't love that pretty girl She's just hot and difficult to get Nothing as 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 b*tch 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 Or gone through a breakup Start to proclaim these facts 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 refuse to learn these lessons We even refuse 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 the 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 in a landscape would be solved By skirting around the most well known wisdom of the ages No no no I can thread this needle properly Watch me dance through the minefield And avoid all of the trip wise that everyone else kicks And then you kick one And you share a knowing look The kind that can only occur between two people who 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 untitled It's a good idea to say I think one of the reasons why these lessons are untitled is Because they're too broad They have to be applied in context A number of the ones that you let out 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 my to be happy It's like well okay then give it up pitch Right So In reality I think many of these contradict each other And it's like if you went to school And you just studied philosophy for four 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 through all of the issues To figure out what it is that you want What's the context in which some of these things apply And some of them don't Yes you want to visit your parents more often But you don't want to live with your parents And you don't want to necessarily see them every day Or every weekend 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 maxims that apply to you And then you'll have a specific experience that helps you remember it And actually execute on it And you can also phrase it in a way where it's not trite anymore So like it's possible Yeah so a lot of my Maxim's and those to self are carved in a way that they're modernized They're saying something true Which might be trite if I didn't say it in a new way Or in an interesting way that is more relevant to me today There 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, you have to be said again Has to be recontextualized for the modern age Things do change Technology changes Things culture changes People change On that 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 Wrote memorization Masquerading is inside and wisdom I'd certainly feel that A lot of the show for me I think has been Was and still is A redemption arc from this Decade of my life where I completely suppressed any intellectual curiosity It's like okay, I'll be a 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 the cool parties or whatever it might be Seems like it worked out okay It did in some ways I mean it's not fun It was a good way to spend my 20s But to sort of Come back above Put your head above water Two degrees, one of which was a master's And then this like Just shut down any of that learn I mean I did that while I was at uni While I was at uni, I was running the events So it was actually a decade and a half And 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 And so much of it This white really resonates with me When you're memorizing things It indicates that you don't understand them Or that sort of Yeah, wrote to memorization And regurgitation Masquerading is wisdom Because People use fluency as a proxy For truthfulness and insight They use the complexity of your language And your communication Yeah There's a lot of jargon out there I think it's the mark of a Charlotte And to explain 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 And obfuscate Or they don't understand themselves But there's 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 interesting I think I've talked about this before I needed to turn off Podcast Chris When I stepped into therapy Because most of the time That I spend one-on-one In a deep conversation That's undistracted throughout the week I trained myself over When I started doing it 700 episodes Now 900 and whatever And I I knew what I could do To say to this therapist 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 your eyes light up a little bit Like a little grin Or a self-deprecating joke Or whatever Like, you're not here You're performing You're doing this You're doing the Chris Williamson thing With the sort of jazz hands So I have my own version Okay, tell me Okay, so you have podcast Chris Uh-huh I have podcast guests in the wall But 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 podcasts of all And then I just realized That's just How it comes out So it might as well just be okay with it Now do you know the reason I'm on this podcast You know, I haven't done a proper Formal interviews Straight up top Whatever, 10, 20 podcast in a long time Since Rogan maybe Probably since Rogan Yeah, I went out at the top Right, that was a theory Well, it's still at the top Yeah, yeah, I know And then, you know, I've done some stuff with Tim Tim Ferris, good friend But there's been more co-hosting I haven't been a guest And then I did one or two random things Where I just stumbled into a thing Where I, 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 me for podcasts 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 wall 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 podcasts I think I've seen some snippets here and there But for some reason You were the guy In the podcast In podcast in the wall And so I was like Oh, I might as well just do it So I reached out to you I wonder if this will close that loop Or 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 so I don't get away from him Yeah, there are enough people that I Turned out where I said I'm just not doing podcasts I feel bad about that I got to go back and do those podcasts But I probably wear out my luck I might have nothing to talk about So I don't know what I'm going to say Well, I appreciate you said On Rogan And this was something You know, to kind of pay it back to you I had a Five-headed Mount Rushmore of guests Before I started this show And it was Jordan Peterson, Sam Harris Alander Boton from the School of Life You and Rogan And that was my Hydra of a Mount Rushmore And I knew I think Someone that asked you at some point Maybe it was a tweet or something after Rogan Or maybe even set 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 You said it was Eight or nine years ago It wasn't as long ago as you know I have a terrible memory Yeah, yeah You're right, 2019, right before COVID 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 insights So, well, you know, in the space of six years Since you were on Joe A lot of these say Well, I'm coming out of the Actually, the first thing I said to you today You're like Ah I'm not convinced that I actually fully agree With that thing that I used to say Which is cool, right? That's you Yeah Showing that the um position that you Put in the ground previously is not a tether It's not you being held to it anymore Well, 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 startup air chat Which is all about conversations And conversations to me are more genuine They're 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 don't do it They absolutely do do it But for some reason in my mind I had you as a guy That I would actually have a conversation with And sure enough you just read me your essay Which I don't think anybody else would really do Right? That implies as a give and take There's a genuine curiosity And I think that's useful Because then Certain Inexplicit knowledge that I had Will be surfaced for myself And I think that's helpful Well, you're seeing You know, to kind of break the fold 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 trap No guru is 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 They're self-esteem or the way they look at relationships or what they want to do They kind of life they want or the 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're 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're maybe seeing reflected back to you some You know this sort of Percolated Very meandering insight from however long ago that something's happened and maybe in you know Five years time you'll be like you know that thing that you said about the lessons of the blah blah blah blah And then I don't know it's cool. That's 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 attractor for the smartest people in the world And despite all of the many problems the city had because mismanaged beyond belief um, 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're 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 through the combinatorics 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 you have you can't be a guru mentality if I'm with somebody And they're listening to every word I say and hanging on it. That's not interesting for me. I'm not going to learn anything um, 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 as higher status as smarter than them The flip side of that is I'm not really impressed by high status people like I don't Just because always been guys pretty much in fact most of my friends have gone on to become very Famous and successful the more famous successful. They've been the less I spend time with them Um partially because they get surrounded by an army of sycophants. It just gets hard to break through And because I don't want anything from them and I don't like that I don't like these situations in which transactional relationships are implied I can be a gift though to people who are of that because the higher that they climb up that hierarchy the fewer and fewer people don't want anything from them So in that way, yeah, you can be an 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 it's also by choice because you know, it's You can be your own problem. Yeah, you can be your own best friend too. I am my own best friend actually So I really do enjoy spending time with myself. Yeah, the smartest people aren't interested in appearing smart and don't care what you think is Yeah, I mean a lot a lot of life is not giving a shit, you know a lot of the best things in life come out of that Hmm. Does this mean It's sort of talking about that Rotemememorization Masquerading as wisdom and insight thing which I think perhaps almost certainly Podcasts like this will have contributed to you know, you hear a anilander boton 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 confuse 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. Yeah, one of the funny things that right before this Podcast was I thought maybe I should go back and read my old tweets Just sort of remember what I said and I can articulate it well Then I realized that's this performance. I would just be memorizing my whole stuff to perform Well, that's an extra special level of exactly how that you've descended into exactly and I'm really memorizing me to be more me Bingo and to live up to some expectations or some Famous personality that I now have to become some straight jacket that I have to put on. Yeah. I'm having to Live up to and private the things that I put 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. I think that's that's you know your meditation Practice at work that that mindfulness gap to be like huh. Yeah, there's that thing again. Exactly. Exactly. Hello So it's not about changing your thoughts. It's not about fixing your thoughts. It's 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 it you trying to change yourself is very circular The mind trying to change the mind the mind doesn't like wrestling with itself. I don't I don't think it gets you anywhere You've spent a lot of time either creating wealth of thinking about how to create wealth what if you learned uh the best places To spend wealth the spend wealth. Yeah. Yeah. How you spend this time creating this wealth. Yeah Accumulating how just 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 love them on profits are grifty or it's people who didn't earn it Trying 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 physicists But that's that's my non-physicist. Yeah, that's that's my nonprofity thing But uh and I've been and I've actually underwritten Media and some physics stuff and I like to talk about it So I don't 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 film thromics Yeah, exactly and then people look at 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 to schools. They have enough money. I believe seven of money and they don't know how to spend it So I think the best use of money is I think a good business creates a product for people that they voluntarily buy And they get value out of so in that sense, I think Steve Jobs and Elon and and entrepreneurs like that have created 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 I'm applying 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 exist. You've spoken about this yet or is it still talk about it? It's so early. It's yeah Maybe I'll show it to you in a few months. Cool. Hopefully six months And I'm excited about it and that's a good use of money. What about the worst places to spend wealth? What is the old line if it flies floats or fornicates? Very nice way to change the final laugh. Very impressive. That's the way I heard it. Okay, I'm pretty sure it's fine But yeah, yeah, I think that was Maybe it was it's Felix Dennis. Okay, who had that quote? Yeah, he said if it flies floats or fornicates rented I think the last one was a little too It's wrong 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 in 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're the best and they expect the best But overall, I think a good use of money is to take risks and build 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 then I'm already in perpetual retirement Because work is just a set of things you want to do 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 and I can use that to make instantiate them into reality And I don't want to say make the world a better place because that's too tight 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 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 to be honest That that 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 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 Territate part 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 not in philosophy not Yes, my life is very hacked to be very unique But I don't think that's where my specific knowledge is my specific knowledge is in 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 and what is not likely to work clubhouse not with standing Um 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 wants to to get the big score um You know peter teal started paypal, but he made else money on Facebook right now he's done more since then obviously, 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 input together two return more than three through input together You're operating in a highly leveraged intellectual domain. So the outcomes are going to be non-linear 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 where I'll say Oh, this is not going to work because you the entrepreneur are doing this for the wrong reasons You're 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 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 investing 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 of course, I'll be wrong too, but I've just seen a lot of data. I have my theories around it And that's where I feel very comfortable operating the problem is when I have to talk about how to create wealth and how to get rich She's a clickbait title or 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. It's back to philosophy But when I if I can get specific about it, you know, that's when that's when the real knowledge you can be like a wealth of 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 We're 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 got copied there's thousands of us now right thousands of people spitting it out chat GPT trying to create these things all day long Although I 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 redrive 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 if you have to memorize something is because you don't understand it and if you understand something you don't have to memorize it Hmm Yeah, I again, you know, just to sort of call out a lot of what I tried to do this redemption arc thing Of if I sound smart that's like being smart, right? You know well chat GPT is memorized the entire internet Good luck competing with that You're not going to be the memorization you're not even going to be the library of memorization Yeah, you're not going to beat any 10 books in memorization so memorization is not the thing understand memorization is going down by the day. It's already so low Understanding is the thing being able to being able judgment is the thing. Tase is the thing and understanding judgment tastes 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 and anything literally anything Will lead you to being a philosopher you just have to stick with it long enough and generalize the truths back out And these are universal truths. It's back to the unity in variety You can find you can find unity in anything if you go deep enough And that's why the tripe stuff Unfortunately sort of keeps coming back around. You like well look. This is cliche for kind of a risk. It's cliche for reasons But you know sometimes you learn new things sometimes you do figure out new things too Even even in philosophy for example science is advanced as science as advanced is actually expanded our boundaries of philosophy When we used to think that You know the earth was a 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 tested against reality That will lead you to a different philosophical outlook If you think humans are created by God as opposed to humans evolved from some you know unicellular organism Yeah, it still doesn't solve the original problem who created that but at least it takes you further back on the road Even same theory is an attempt at reforming 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 moral philosophy involves right There was a time when every culture practically that was a conquering culture practice slavery Now almost all cultures are more slavery that's moral philosophy having evolved You know, there was even like This sounds too ludicrous to be true and I don't know if it fully is true But there were a fairly large group of doctors based on studies who believed until the 1980s That babies couldn't feel pain And so even to this 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 They 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 through a little bit Is that there are these timeless old questions that we run into Where the answers seem 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 So all the meaning there is on the other hand you're going to die it all goes to zero heat death 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 on 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 you answer the question And question should be answered at the level at which they're asked So if you ask the question is there a meaning you Chris are asking that question Yes, yes to Chris there is meaning there is meaning right here This is a meaning you interpret any meaning you want onto it Don't ask the question as Chris and then answered as God or as a 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 The question is answered at the wrong frame so they ask 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 and I'm doing something there's my free will So answer the level at which you're asked of course I have free will because I feel like I have free will And I treat you like you're free will and you treat me like I free will We have free will the problem then is you start trying to answer the question as 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 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 if God asked the question is there free will no there is no free will the universe asks the question There's no free will but if an individual asks the question right now then yes, there is free will So a lot of these paradoxes resolve themselves Philosophical paradoxes the people have been struggling with since the being of time When you just realize there you're you're answering them at a scale and time different than they were asked Speaking of updating beliefs. Is there anything that you've changed in mind around recently? Very recently. I mean all the time But are you talking about like philosophical existential things or like technological things? Yeah philosophical existential things or anything that comes to mind if there's anything that's front of mind where you go Yeah, that's a pretty big I'm less less updated Yeah, I'm less lazy fair than I used to be on a societal level I think that culture and religion are good cooperating systems for humans And so if you want to operate in a high-trust 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, pure libertarians get out competed and die Well they get overrun because they're every man for himself. They can't coordinate. They can't coordinate exactly right So the coordination problems like 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 any 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 a broader set of things that I've changed my mind on A fair bit. I used to be much more lazy fair 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 lazy fair But I'm much more realized like kids are gonna be kids and you kind of let them do their thing. You've gotten the debate with them Is it a talent that has the ascending levels of like anarchism versus conservatism is that his inside like at the local level? I'm this it seems like you've gone the other way. It's like at the child level. I'm an anarchist the societal level Yeah, no he he was quoting somebody else some brothers. I forget which ones, but he 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 you're a communist At maybe the the extended family level you're a socialist at the local level, you know, you're kind of a Democrat and so on until at the federal level you're a libertarian, right? So you've done it the other way You know being a libertarian with the kids and you're being Religious and so many of it's societal. No, 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 yeah, yeah, that's simple What else have 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're starting to show evidence of kind of Reasoning at some levels, but I don't think they do creativity. I think modern AI You know what I'm so just on that one of my favorite takes is from Dwakash battalion. He says If you gave any human on the planet not point not not not not one percent of the consumption that LLM has any LLM they would have come up with Thousands of new ideas, right. Give me one new idea one fundamental new idea that's being generated Yeah, like I'm big into poetry every poem ever written by an LLM is garbage I think even their fiction writing is terrible even the new GPT 405 with all due respect to Sam and crew I think they're terrible terrible writers. I find them really bad at summarizing. They're really good extrapolating, you know, paperwork They're very bad at actually distilling the essence of something and what's important They don't have an opinions or a point of view But they're still unbelievably powerful breakthroughs. They solve search They solve natural language computing. They make English programming language. They solve driving. They solve Simple coding and backup coding. They solve translation. They solve transcription They are a fundamental breakthrough in computing is a different way to program a computer Rather than you explicitly speak its language to write the code and then run through the data through it Use this run of data through it until it figures out how to write the program. That's huge But are they are they AGI not yet? And I don't see a direct path from here to there Maybe we'll 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 I'm not an AI Doomer I think that's such a flawed line of reasoning But let's say that you know you came out of the less wrong calm 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 ASI yeah, and it seems like LLMs 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 it's additional branch. I think Stephen Wolfram puts it better. It's a different form of intelligence It's like if you see a jaguar in the jungle it has a different form of intelligence and you're like a plant has a form of intelligence How can like photosynthesize and grow it's a different form of intelligence It's not an intelligence again like love or like happiness is overload 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 even have a life. It doesn't even want anything. It's a different thing Um, 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 critically wrong one time out of ten correct It doesn't even know when it's wrong And maybe they'll get that one out of ten down to one out of a hundred But you'll kind of always want human oversight for critical critical things. I I always feel so bitter. Yeah, it's I'm petty sometimes my my less equanimous version of me is petty And I always want to like teach you the lesson if it gets something wrong Like how the fuck like no, he was so confident. I'm treating it But I'm for boss sizing 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 air 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 that Right so because and and same way like certain kinds of coding the creative side of coding I think it 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 Weimo would you bet on software or hardware for self-driving? Yeah, so the I think Tesla is in the stronger longer term position But it's hard to argue with what's working right now and Weimo 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 Weimo is way ahead in that regard, but Tesla's camera only approach if it works Is a superior it's much more scalable and Tesla knows how to print cars, 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's screwed you mentioned Kids there and you had a tweet that said I'm not convinced that declining fertility needs to be proactively fault I forgot that one you're gonna have to I'm I don't date. Um, why? Well, I mean think back like it was at 30 years ago 20 years ago Everybody was saying overpopulation of the earth. It's gonna be a problem Alphausian ending we're gonna have too many people and now we're gonna have too few people So part of it is just the doom or is a meme is always alive and well, right? Or just get three pockets. 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 in both directions 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 that they lose their fertility or the microplastics and the testicles, right? No, it's people are having less kids because they're choosing to have less kids, right? Women have gotten emancipation independence and the workforce and they're making more money People don't need kids as insurance policies. They have less kids Maybe they're living here in the stick lives god bless them, right? They want a more fun. They want a less 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 so 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 of the voters vote you out So this slowly strangled the economy So what do you do then you have a bunch of immigration and then the whole culture changes You end up in a low trust society and people start fighting over Limited resources and how do you control which immigrants come in and 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 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 the flip side where every kid is a lottery ticket in my 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 this is great law which causes the Adams 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 to 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 protects 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 were having too many kids it would be complaining about how there's no housing and there's no land So they'll 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 a situation? It may be self-correcting too, which is that if there are too few kids in society and they're returned to having kids Literally might just go up it might just be easier to have kids Be incentive to now have a child because there's so few around they're going to get the best job They're going to have more self-inducency sources like everyone wants to everyone's happy to see 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 the 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 go okay, well that's a pretty fucking good incentive That's a good incentive I also think that people have been meamed in the thinking that kids make your life worse And that's a pretty pretty bad What's your experience being like kids make your life better in every possible way If you want an automatic building meeting to life have kids And I think there are these bad psych studies like most psych 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 They don't 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 has 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 it would be 99 to 1 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 it's incredibly rare to meet a parent that regretted having children It's pretty good odds It's 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 kid that 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 And they're pushing them around in a stroller, right? What is that? That's a sublimated desire for children Yeah, Malcolm Collins says that having a pet is to children is using porn is to sex He basically thinks that it's sort of a surrogate It's definitely in that direction And you know I don't have to 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 about child rearing kids What do you hope that your kids learn from that childhood? Oh, this is 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 different right then learn learn versus goals It's not necessarily what do they want what do 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 your kids. Yeah, that's it Right, so I can be loved or I am loved unconditionally is that one of the things that my kids to feel unconditionally loved And I want them to have high self esteem Mm-hmm 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't choose how they behave. I can't choose what they want. I can't choose what they turn out to be And down stream from that. That should be freedom There should be a degree of freedom that comes from the self esteem that comes from the unconditional They should make their own mistakes and learn their own lessons and have their own desires and fulfill them as is appropriate I'd 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 You replied to my friend 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 i-y-i science? i-y-s and the seam tell them it's how intellectual yet idiot These are people who are overeducated and they deny like basic common sense Okay, so there's a lot of that that goes on child rearing Thanks to really bad studies and and bad public medical directive. So for example, you know a few A few parents you may be 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 they're co-sleeping Having them in the bed. Yeah exactly or they're you know the the modern proclamation And so because of that they say well don't co-sleep with your kids Well the kids in every society through all of human history co-slet with their parents. Where else do you think they were sleeping? They weren't how's the multiple rooms in the other times. Yeah, exactly. We'll put them in their tent We'll 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 and cow milk can be dangerous for your kids And co-sleeping is dangerous for your kids and cry it out is a right answer. All of that is nonsense. I mean, it's very clear that We raised children throughout human history without These interventions and to me the idea that like you're gonna 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 the finally gives up. I mean a kid left by itself to cry it out in the wild business It's gonna get it's gonna get eaten right it's gonna get eaten by a tiger So this kid is starting off on the wrong foundation the the one I mentioned earlier about the idea that babies don't feel pain like that's ludicrous, right? I've never heard that the spot that's such a wild yeah, I'm not saying that's 100% true. I read it I read it in the cheat quite hard and 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 confirmations on it before talking about it But there definitely some people who believe that they're enough that it was a thing In certain circles for a while, but I think we just go through these You know, these IYI beliefs these 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 these are junk science. These are low-power studies on You know on very certain contexts that then get over applied behavioral psych is very guilty of this, but it's true across 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 it come from good sources did they run enough high-powered studies that widely accepted And there are a whole bunch of things we're just not supposed to talk about you're not supposed to say like you don't say Like you 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 overdone. So the same way there's this whole sids things sudden infant death syndrome, right? I was like no, there's kids don't suddenly mysteriously die like more likely There was neglect or there was a problem and then whoever was a caretaker doesn't want to admit to the problem We didn't recognize a problem, but kids don't just spontaneously die 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 die of sids where they roll over and they can't get back I mean it's just all this craziness around town racing It's a real minefield It's a minefield and and you know you have these scared parents they're having a kid for the first time and they open a book and they start reading how to raise children I would argue that your natural instincts and what to do with your child Are actually pretty good. It's funny when my wife and I had her first baby. I remember you know at the hospital Sorry, the first was a natural birth at the birthing center. We went home. I was like there you go. That's it. And we're like What do we do? Where's the instruction manual you take them home? And then you relax and you just actually Instincts are pretty good, you know, if the kid cries check to see the clean feed them 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 like and encourage you to give it to them Yes, it's usually 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 you communicate to you. You can't 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 Having the members Yeah, the most novel solution. 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, right? So the first one Well, 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, right? 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 looking to a microscope at anything Like, ah There's creepy crawlies everywhere and I got to watch out for them And then, you know, you can talk about how if you look at humans like our real enemy are pathogens I think a lot of aging in 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 mix up your genes But if you look at how bacteria and viruses mutate through just random mutations They're mixed 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 asexual replication mutation They're their evolutionary rate is roughly equivalent to ours So we're in a red queen race where we're both running at the roughly the same speed 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 to run in 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 and snipping it up every time There's a viral attack and storing it in their own DNA so they have a copy so they can recognize it next time it attacks and you know and so on A lot of the population structure of species Determines how long their life spans are so very So if if in a given species there's a very high rate of infection then you'll have these older Members of the population are 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 live the entire population So the older ones don't infect the younger ones. That's a hypothesis amazing. It's 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 fundamental part of our makeup Our temperature pH blood pressure and so on under a homeostasis But if you if you engage in it kind of signaling like you take a peptide for example That's a signaling molecule. You take a hormone externally the body will counteract it You take testosterone the body will counteract well down regulates own 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 this 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 back really hard on because like did I just get infected or 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 they can't coordinate to pulse So your body can coordinate to pulses a macroscopic object, but microscopic objects can't coordinate to create the same pulse Oh, that's cool. Yeah, so there's all I mean So you know that it's coming from you is that one correct? You know that the dodgenous rather than exogenous So I never knew that that's why we resist a lot of exogenous treatments a lot of our medical treatments don't work Anyway, so this there's there's there's a bunch more I could go on, but I think that a lot of You know you see this in cancers where a lot of bacteria show up at the Epstein bar 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 compared to us like we are the 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 bacteria and viruses So if you can teach children this philosophy at an early age you shortcut all the debates how effective if you Been at teaching that philosophy to children that one I think I've been pretty effective. I've drilled that one at home The one I haven't quite gotten around to yet is evolution Like I'm starting to do little bits of that, you know like we came from monkeys. What does that mean? Um already got them thinking about some of the deeper questions. I did ask my you know young son like You know can nothing exist. I thought it was a fun question. So I had to throw a fun house as you know like full free No, no, he's he's a oh right what an eight-year-old and a six-year-old so I asked them both like can nothing exist and they had pretty good answers Right Another one we played with the other day was like what is the matrix? Okay, you know, what is 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 with 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 that move past it so quickly and you don't take joy You know, what's the meta 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 too hard to teach people things. I don't want to be I don't want to be didactic. He helps them to arise. Yeah correct correct 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 want to solve the problem Right, so sometimes it's have to play dumb Like why is my wife not working on my computer? I'm 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 Yeah, that to step in 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 is agency I want them to preserve their agency. They're born naturally Agentech and willful But a lot of child raising can beat that out of them by essentially domesticating them And I would rather have wild animals and wolves than have well-trained dogs Because I'm not going to be around to take care of them Yeah, so they're going to have to be able to look after them exactly. Yeah, if a friend of mine Parsa on on air 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 the left had won the culture war and now they're just driving around shooting the survivors 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 won early around 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 so there's these Different forces through history right historians will argue about this But there's a fear of the great man of history thing where it's like oh you have the Einstein's you have the Teslas you have the The Jenga's cons and the Caesars right they determine the flow of history and then there's the other Point of view that no there are these massive forces at play you know demographics and geography and so on And then the particular great man doesn't matter. They just come and go Napoleon doesn't matter. They would have been somebody else The specific names are not important and because of kind of the leftists turn that our institutions took in the last few Decades they now only subscribe to the great forces theory of history and not the great man theory of history But I think now we're seeing the two play out where you're seeing you know Trump and Elon and other individuals rising up and saying no we resist. Yeah, that's interesting and I think that Unfortunately the and so the battle be we look at these these collectivists and great forces versus individuals It says all the humanity itself and 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 Grace is always kind of bouncing between the two. We like strong leaders. We like to be led We like to coordinate our forces and and mass and 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 Well, there's a pendulum that's always swinging back and forth and in modern economics the way that manifests is between sort 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 capitalist individualist is like libertarian every man for a self You just each do what you want and you'll 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 I'll 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 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 Elon Musk 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 a capital behind him And he 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 knots So in the wealth game more people are winning overall and the average is going up But in the status game they're essentially more losers There are more invisible men and women who are getting nothing out of life And I have no leverage relatively speaking Objectively speaking they might be better off. They still have phones and they still have TVs And it's not absolutely to scream so we're relative to correct And so to the extent that we're relatives creatures there are more losers than winners And in a democracy those people will outnumber the winners and they will vote the winners down 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. It's power that gives you the right to vote So we'll confuse 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 power amongst themselves to say hey we have all the money we have the power We're the knights 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 have to be game of thrones forever So we're going to divide up power by voting among ourselves But then as 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's 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% in every in any domain vote to suppress the 49 So tyranny 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 who don't have physical power Are using the institutions of the state to control the people who do have physical power As a simple example taking the notice is the 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 and care enough you can't do that Right, so I think eventually the societal structures are unstable They break down and they break down because eventually the people who have the power and say no way of it You don't get to vote You only got to vote because you had power and now you don't have power and you're somehow trying to vote All of nature all of 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 and 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 brother 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're going to 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 news 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 or that you shouldn't or 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, is it is it a battle to sort of stay out of the news when you're 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 the news 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 really the consequences of it. You're going to be unhappy until that thing gets fixed And that thing will often be out of your control I have desires a contract to be unhappy 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 in the outside too But yeah if it's until the Carbon dioxide parts per million are below this particular number. It's like that's a That's a tough one or all the people that trumped a rangeman syndrome right? He's 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 one of my friends has a question his equivalent of Peter Till's 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? Hmm 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 to 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 Um, and I think within two years this will be obvious so like the Then I make a prediction and predictions are tough, but you're gonna have to eat it in a few years Yeah, I'm gonna eat this in a few years. So I'm probably wrong, but uh two things that I pay attention to That I don't think 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 uh 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 really need tonsils. Oh, that's false So it's request human body is very very efficient all those things are needed Um, you know, so I think I think the state of modern medicine is sort of pretty bad We don't have many good explanatory theories and biology We have germ theory 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 A effects B because effects C effects D, but we don't understand the underlying explanation It's all just words point to words point to words. So biology is still in a very sorry state and because we are not a lot to take risk That might kill people We just don't experiment enough in biology. So a lot of treatments are just outright banned by lowering the three 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 a gas 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. It must be more experimental And I'll start its end of one to start experimenting on myself in Um But even there I disagree with Brian and many things like, you know, taking huge amounts of supplements I think we just don't know it supplements outside of the natural context like just eat liver man Right But it's fine and that wouldn't be vegan either, but you know, it's I I really appreciate that he's experimenting He's good nature to about me shares everything. So we need more people like that So I think that state of biology people will look back and say wow, that was in the dark ages Um, I think uh another Another thing that we'll look back on is I think we we still continue to underestimate how important drones are going to be in warfare The future of all warfare is drones. There will be nothing else in the battlefield Um, because I think of the end state of drones is autonomous bullets not even guided autonomous like they're self-directed Uh, and so if that's the future we're headed towards and that's if it is just don't you have an unfolds that's there's gonna be no There's gonna be no aircraft carriers. There's gonna be no tanks. There's gonna be no infantry men They're just gonna be autonomous bullets by autonomous bullets against your autonomous bullets whichever ones win the other side Just surrenders because over um I think that's the second piece of it. I think a third piece that is gonna be uh kind of unexpected is the GLP ones Which I know you and I've probably discussed before. I think these are the most breakthrough drugs since antibiotics Um, they're probably more important than statins. They're sort of miracle drugs. They seem to the they're there There are downsides, but the downside and side effects are so minor compared to the upsides beyond just weight loss Um, they also seem to be addiction breakers. They seem to lower many kinds of cancer They almost metabolically reverse aging up to a certain point um, and I think they're gonna bend the curve on health care costs and The big question people can be asking over the next five years is Why are Americans paying thousands of dollars in one for this when people overseas are getting them for free? Or I can order them from China for free or whatever um, and maybe it like if I were Bernie Sanders the platform I would be running on is I would say okay, we're gonna pay freels. I'm you know hundreds of billions of dollars to novo And Eli Lilly and we're just gonna make these free or there's hundreds of analogs of these things that work These are not gonna be you know limited to just the few that are that are being used today Just take one of them or two of them making free. 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 certainly a signal is less of a signal. Yeah, so yeah So they're incentive to say oh well, you don't know the downsides, you know, it's irresponsible suggests It's gonna cause cancer have fun losing bone and muscle mass. But in none of that stuff is really true The cancer stuff. It's 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 and an ear 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 it's gonna 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, I think that's the number that it's 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 scared. I mean, it's dying very very quickly Equipped like you can never be too rich too thin or too clean right and immediately like a whole bunch of people went Not only to my mention 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 and fit and people want to be clean back to the pathogen discussion that we had So I think overall that there's gonna be huge demand for these things and our modern medical system is not built to supply these well 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 or people paying out of pocket at a 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. There's twice as many people that are obese than a starving so about half a billion people are starving and so many 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 because of diabetes? So so many of the problems that we have in March side are downstream of obesity and you know, this like fitness is so important And yes, there's in some people these things call mus- cause muscle and bone loss but not in the people who eating high protein and working out hard So it they can be taken away that's safer and some versions of these like little glutide 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% of the population taking them so they're already quite widely distributed Example 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 antibiotic, but it's gonna raise your blood pressure It's like no tick the antibiotic if you're gonna kill yourself I say take this anti-psychotic and stay alive a little longer and solve it I don't say oh, it's gonna 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 sheer calories Take this GLP one They also improve digestion you just have less calorie just less food matter going through stomach the lower cancer risks across the board There's quite a few cancers are 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 And do you well think about how many sacred cows are being gourd 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. They're being put out of business in a way, right? It's kind of like what is the American military keep buying aircraft carriers Right in the age of drones There's an incentive bias. It's 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 wildfire 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 habits that they had from their childhood or what mom and dad did or genetic predisposition and stuff like that I think um 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 victimhood 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 to dwell on it or like 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 to it was for the express purpose of getting rid of it Not to create an identity or story or to 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 then you just realized like you're never going to untangle the whole thing It's a Gordian not problem like Alexander, you know found that tangled knot in India and It said oh the famous conqueror will come and will untie this knot nobody else can untie the knot And took one look at it pull out a sword and just cut it So at some point you just have to cut your past if your past is bothering you You will eventually get tired of trying to untangle that 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 wanted to actually 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 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 have to take about The most fundamental resource in your life is not time it's 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 your time as Warren Buffett how much time money can buy you or Michael Bloomberg They're you know richest scrooge and and crisis, but they can't buy more time right Brian 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 Yes, you can fit it away on anything you'd like Is there an advantage to starting out as a loser? Absolutely. Yeah, yeah, because if you're because if you're a loser then you'll want to be a winner And then you'll develop all the characteristics that'll 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 you can artificially do that You know, it's it's sort of like imagine that you were you know 300 years ago your born a surf And then somehow you managed to escape off the farm and you become a landowner and then eventually you become a minor Nobility and aristocrat are you going to put your kids back on the farm and say you're going to be a surf again I know they all like those stories the kids themselves like those stories because it says I came from the school of hard knocks My dad made me go shovel hay 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 a gratitude for what you have and the only way to do that is just evidence at 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 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 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 So you're just sitting at home doing nothing just indulging in themselves Maybe they go on dates and they get door to ash like I have no respect for that I think there's nothing worse than society than a lazy man because he's sort of He's sort of leaving it all on the table he's leaving his potential on the table. It's 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 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 than that you go take care of your new and bigger tribe And that's how you earn both respect and self confidence and you live up to your potential So the 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 Reward them with the one thing they can't get otherwise which is 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 then then just yourself and just the people immediately around you And that's what an alpha male to me 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 out of their own self respect and pride in the society rewards Them by calling them an alpha and giving them status. Hmm. I wonder whether some of the pushback that we've got against Rich wealthy Powerful people is disincentibizing It is like who is a Zuck who you know donated money is Zuckerberg generals hospital and they wanted to pull his name off of it I mean, that's I didn't see that but that's really kind of stuff backfires right you should reward people for doing what you 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 Reenforcing it when they get something right correct happening at a societal level as well correct I mean like the guys will 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 builds a rocket to take people to the moon You know rescue some astronauts. You should be rewarding him for that Naval I really appreciate you. I hope that this is lift up to whatever weird daydreams you've been having um What have you got coming up? Well, can people expect from you over the next however long expect nothing That's the most Naval way that we could have finished this did it's it's been a long time coming in. I really do appreciate you for being here today But I do hope to deliver something. Oh, I think you have so thank you. Thanks for having me. Thank you Thanks for getting in my mind and hopefully now you're out We'll see I'm 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 to do the podcast is to be done with it All right I get asked all the time for book suggestions people want to get into reading fiction or non-fiction or real-life stories And that's why I made a list of 100 of the most interesting and impactful books that I've ever read These are the most life-changing reads that I've ever found and there's descriptions about why I like them and links to go and buy them And it's completely free and you can get it right now by going to chriswillx.com/books that's chriswillx.com/books