https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KyfUysrNaco
Modern media spreads "mind viruses" faster than ever before.
They hijack your attention with problems that aren't yours to solve.
War in Ukraine. Climate change. AI doom. Political battles.
The most dangerous part?
You're not even aware it's happening...
100 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 is trying to infect your mind in real time.
These memetic viruses are turning you into a puppet.
You're becoming obsessed with issues you can't control, while ignoring areas of your life where you actually DO have influence.
This is why Naval says:
"Your family is broken, but you're going to fix the world?"
The cost is higher than you think. Obsessing over news and world events creates an endless loop of anxiety:
Your mind becomes a battlefield of competing narratives.
You're constantly reacting to things out of your control, which creates a sense of helplessness.
This is exactly what media companies want.
Because media companies are businesses with one goal:
Capturing your attention.
They've learned that negative, inflammatory content activates your threat response and keeps you scrolling.
The headlines hitting your feed? They're carefully engineered to trigger dopamine or cortisol.
But Naval has developed a system to break free:
1. Cultivate indifference to things outside your control
"A rational person can find peace by cultivating indifference to things that are out of their control."
This isn't callousness. It's self-preservation.
It's recognizing what deserves your mental energy and what doesn't.
2. Focus on your immediate sphere of influence
The most important problems are those in your direct vicinity:
• Your work
• Your health
• Your mindset
• Your relationships
These are areas where you can create real change.
Everything else? Just noise.
3. Practice "information fasting"
Just as you're careful about what food you put in your body, be equally careful about what information you consume.
Unfollow accounts that leave you angry or anxious. Remove news apps from your phone.
4. Develop a strong mental filter
When you encounter new information, ask:
• Is this relevant to my life?
• Can I do anything about this?
• Will this matter a week from now? A year?
• Is this designed to manipulate my emotions?
If it fails these tests, let it go.
5. Remember that most problems solve themselves
As Scott Adams says: "When disasters are slow-moving, economics and society as a force solve them."
Most predicted catastrophes never materialize because humans are remarkably adaptable.
The doom you're being sold rarely arrives.
6. Keep perspective on how information reaches you
The most important insight: news isn't neutral.
Every headline, article, and social post has been filtered through someone else's agenda.
Ask yourself: "Who benefits from me believing this?"
7. Build your life around creation, not consumption
"The mind mud wrestling with itself is also a problem," Naval says.
Instead of consuming endless content, focus on creating something valuable.
Creation naturally pushes out the noise & gives you purpose beyond the news cycle.
The ultimate freedom comes when you realize:
Most of what you're worried about is manufactured. Most of what you're afraid of will never happen.
Attention is today's most valuable currency. Guard it carefully.
Once you realize this, you can flip the script:
By shifting from consumer to creator, you transform your relationship with digital media entirely.
This is why the most successful founders are building personal brands...
Because when you create value-first content that genuinely helps others:
You build trust at scale. You can spread healthier messages.
And you can harness attention to your own advantage.
This is precisely why Naval creates rather than merely consumes.
Because a personal brand is how you take back control from legacy media:
You control the narrative. And you build your own platform.
You build a loyal audience who'll support you by becoming your next customer, investor, or business partner.
Don't let the media control you.
Become the media instead:
happiness is being satisfied with what you have Success comes from dissatisfaction Is 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 they 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 fineries and 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 Dionius right Alexander goes out and conquers the world and he meets Dionius who's living in a barrel and Dionius says get out of the way you're blocking my son and Alexander says oh how I wish I you know could be like Dionius the next life and dianis says that's the difference I don't wish that I could sorry Dioynes Dioynes Dioynes says I I I don't wish to be Alexander so two paths to happiness and uh one path is success you get what you want you satisfy your material needs or like Dioynes you just don't want in the first place and I'm not sure which one is more valid um and it also depends what you define as success if the end goal is happiness then why not cut to the chase and just go straight for uh 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 going to do something You're not just going to 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 Uh I found for myself as I've become uh happier is a big word but you know more peaceful more calm more present more uh satisfied with what I have uh I still want to do things I just want to do bigger things I want to do things that are more pure more aligned with uh 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 Uh in the story of Buddha he starts out as a prince and then he sees that it's all kind of meaningless because you're still going to get old and die and then he goes into the woods looking for something more I'll take the happy route that involves material success Thank you I think it's quicker in some ways You know one of your uh insights is it's far easier to achieve our material desires than it is to renounce them And uh it depends on the person but I I think you have to try that path If you want something go get it Uh you know like I I I quipped 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 you get bored of the games You don't want to just keep looping on the same game over and over Although a lot of these games are very enticing and have many levels and are relatively open-ended Uh and then you become free of the game uh in a sense that you're no longer trying to win it You know you can win it Uh 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 gains in life come from suffering in the short term so you can get paid in the long term I think that's classic Winning the marshmallow test on a daily basis But uh there's an interesting challenge where I think people need to avoid becoming uh 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 then 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 Uh 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 the fun part right that was actually the entertaining part and I should have enjoyed it more It's a common regret Uh there's a little thought exercise I like to do which is you can go back into your own life and uh try to put yourself in the exact position you were in 5 years ago 10 years ago 15 years ago 20 years ago and you try to remember okay who was I with what was I doing what was I feeling what were 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 do differently Now you don't have new information And don't pretend you could have gone back and you know bought a stock or bought 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 uh 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 uh 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 there and 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 you're bored 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 and 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 Um that said there are those uh those stories I 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 uh 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 that's 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 I'll bet that lingers and then as I said money solves your money problem So I don't want to be too glib about it but I would say in general this this loop that we run through um of desire dopamine fulfillment unfulfillment 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 on everything judgments and everything Uh so I think just knowing that those are the source of unhappiness uh will make you be choosy about your desires And frankly if you want to be successful you have to be choosy about your desires You have to focus You can't be great at everything You can't be great at everything You're just going to waste your energy and waste your time Is fame a worthwhile goal uh it gets you invited to better parties gets you into better restaurants Uh fame So fa fame is this funny thing where a lot of people know you but you don't know them And uh it does get you put on a pedestal Uh it can get you what you want uh at a at a distance So I wouldn't say it's worthless Obviously people want it for a reason Um it's high status so it attracts the opposite sex Uh especially for men it attracts women Uh that said it is high cost It means you have no privacy Um you do have weirdos and lunatics Uh you do get hit up a lot for weird things Uh and you're on a stage so you're forced to perform so you're forced to be consistent with your past proclamations and actions and you're going to have haters and all that nonsense But the fact that we do it the fact that we all seem to want it means that it would be disingenuous to say "Oh no no I'm famous." But you don't want to be famous Um that said I think fame like anything else is best produced as a or pursued as a byproduct of something potentially more worthwhile Um wanting to be famous and craving to be famous and being famous for being famous these are sort of traps Fame for fame's sake Yeah Exactly So it's better that it's earned fame Uh so for example earn respect in the tribe is you do things that are good for the tribe Uh who are the most famous people in human history uh there uh you know there there are people who sort of transcended the self The Buddhas and the Jesuses and the Muhammads of the world Who else is famous uh the artists are famous You know art lasts 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 tyrannical or negative like uh you know Jenghaskhan is famous but uh to the Mongols he was doing good to the rest of them not so much uh the higher level you're operating at 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 if fame is empty if you're famous just cuz 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 uh pure actors and celebrities have I wouldn't want but the kind of fame that's earned because you did something useful uh why dodge that now you can there's a challenge I think especially if people make uh very loud public proclamations about things you mentioned there about um you're almost hostage to the things that you used to say that um being able to update your opinions and change your mind looks very similar to the internet as hypocrisy does No no no 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 see this is the the the smoking gun that shows that he didn't really believe that thing all along Right And uh yeah I 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 um business and productivity advice content creator really really successful and he just totally stepped back from everything and went uh 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 in private 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 mein that um foolish consistency is a hobgoblin 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 going to be wrong most of the time and you'll be updating your priors and so for example I did this Joe Rogan podcast I don't know it's like eight or nine years ago um and people will call out like the thing that didn't turn out to be correct right and it's just like and they just beat on it because it it helps them in their mind raise their status a little bit Aha I caught him in an error Well I think if you catch someone in a blatant lie where there's believe one thing and they say another that's legit That's a character flaw They shouldn't be lying But on the other hand if they just made a guess at something and they got it wrong And by the way mostly it's about the AI AGI thing And I think I'm still right about that but it's a different story Um people who think we have achieved AGI just fail a touring test from their side Um but uh it's funny how people latch on to 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 uh 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 I I I 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 uh saying things that they don't really believe And I think people are very sensitive to that Uh [ __ ] radars have become hypersensitized to try and work out whether or not this person means the thing that they're saying Yeah I mean they they a lot of people are wrong Most of us are wrong most of the time especially in any new endeavor Difference between being wrong and disingenuous though purposefully wrong Correct Exactly So I think I think that's the big difference If someone is wrong no big deal As long as they have a genuine reason for saying what they're saying or 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 it's a mistake for themselves cuz then you're going to get trapped in a hall of mirrors You yourself are going to be consistent with your past proclamations 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 it's like what was that line there's you're you're basically trying to impress people who you know don't care about you Um so 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 Uh trying to demand respect from the masses is a fool's errand status games the allure of acrewing whether it's fame actual fame or just the competition comparison trap it's always there Uh there's a real draw of being swayed by social approval How should people learn to get less distracted by status games in that way i think it it just helps to see that status games don't matter as much as they used to uh in old society let's go back hunter gatherer times there was no such thing as wealth You just had what you could carry Um there was no stored wealth So wealth games didn't really exist to wealth creation games All that existed was status games If you were high status then you got what little was available first Um but even back then you had to earn your status by taking care of the tribe Uh now we have wealth creation where you can actually create a product or a service you can scale that product or service and you can provide abundance for a lot of people Uh 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 huntergatherer times Uh wealth creation is positive but status is limited There's limited status to go around It's a ranking ladder It's a hierarchy And so it's a rise in 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 it 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 that status games are inherently limited Uh they're always combative Um they always require uh direct combat whereas uh 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 uh invective 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 Uh they're positive sum and they actually have uh concrete material returns If you have more money you can buy more Show me where 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 starring in movies they donate to nonprofits they go to KS or Davos or what have you Um and they start trying to trade the money for status So you know people always want what they don't have Uh and we are evolutionarily hardwired for status because as I said wealth creation didn't really exist until the agricultural revolution uh when you could store grain and then the industrial revolution took it to another level and now the information age is taking it to yet another level But there's never been an easier time to make money Yes it's still hard but there's never been an easier time to create wealth because there's so much leverage out there There's so much opportunity You still have to go find it It's not easy It's not going to 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 A few hundred years ago you were born a surf you were going to die a surf There was almost no way out of that That's changed And so I would argue that you're better off focusing on wealth games and status games If you're trying to um build up for example your 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 Um 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 uh people who have achieved such a level of wealth that you don't think why do you need the status given that most people use status to then try and cash in to achieve wealth If you've achieved [ __ ] money already if you're post money or uh asset heavy as it's known um why are you trying to go in the other direction well as you said because we've we've got an illustrious history biologically of wanting status and wealth is kind of novel It's new It's new Wealth is uh something that you have to understand more intellectually Yeah there's a physical component more food more survival but uh to truly understand the effects and the powers and the abilities and the limitations uh and the advantages and disadvantages of wealth you have to use your neoortex 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 had thought that through but you're right Yeah I think that's right I think you people will always want more status Uh but I think you can be satisfied at a certain level of wealth Well as well you always have this sort of sense This is what leaderboards are right this is the the billboard chart right and it is zero sum and it is I guess you know the Forbes richest people on the planet That one's harder to climb the ladder on But uh 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 felt This is how much you're up Exactly They they keep you running on that treadmill forever Jimmy Carr has this cool idea where he says trajectory is more important than position So if you are number 101 in the world but last year you 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 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 evolve in conditions where we're so close to just not surviving uh 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 EightLe Pod 4 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° It's got integrated sensors that track your sleep time your sleep phases your HRV your snoring and your heart rate with 99% accuracy It even starts cooling or heating your bed an hour before you get into it That is why eight has been clinically proven to increase total sleep up to 1 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 they ship internationally Right now you can get $350 off the Pod4 Ultra by going to the link in the description below or heading to 8LE.com/modernwisdism and using the code modernwisdom a checkout That's eigle.com/modernwisdom and modernwisdom a checkout The worst outcome in the world is not having self-esteem Why yeah that's a tough one Uh well I I 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 Um 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 low self-esteem It might be genetic It might just be circumstantial A lot of times I think it's cuz they just weren't unconditionally loved as a child And that sort of seeps in at a deep core level Um but self-esteem issues can be the most limiting Uh one interesting thought is that you know to some extent self-esteem is a reputation you have with yourself Um 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 uh 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 Uh another way to raise your self-esteem might be to do things for others Uh 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 and it's not the things you would expect It's not the material success It's not having learned this thing or that It's when I made a sacrifice for somebody or something that I loved And uh 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 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 say "I sacrificed 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 uh yeah I wonder whether if self-esteem is you adhering to your internal your your actions and your values aligning um 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 uh heavy set of overheads that you need to pay in some way Well if being ethical were profitable everybody would do it right so uh you at some level it does involve a sacrifice Uh but that sacrifice can also be thought of as you're thinking for the long term rather than the short term Um for example the virtues are the set of uh 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 uh 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 that's at the table first and so on then we all get along better and we can play win-win games Uh in game theory the most famous game is prisoners dilemma But that's all about everybody cheating and the Nash equilibrium The stable equilibrium there is everybody cheats and you're for 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 as one called a stags 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 and that game has two stable equilibriums 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 it replication crisis hard recently But it is about trading off the short term for the long term Uh and so I think for a lot of these so-called virtues there are long-term selfish reasons to be virtuous Yeah Uh did you deal with self-doubt in the past is that something that was a a hurdle for you to overcome yes and no I think I I dealt with self-doubt in the sense that oh I don't know what I'm doing and I need to figure it out Um but I didn't doubt myself in the way of somebody else knows better than me for me or that you know I'm an idiot or I'm not worthwhile or anything that I 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 Uh not the kind of confidence that would say I have the answer but the kind of confidence that I will figure it out and I know what I want or only I am a good arbiter of what I want Yeah That level of self-belief I suppose allows you to determine what is it that matters to me my self-esteem should I chase this thing or not i can make a fair judgment on that as 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 The Yeah Also in computer science like there's a concept of a demon which is a uh a program that's always running in the background You can't see it Okay Um but yeah it probably comes from the ancient Greek demon Uh but yeah I what you know that you don't even know you know is far greater than what you know you know right you can't even articulate most of the things you know There are feelings you have that have no words for them There are thoughts you have that are felt within the body or subconsciously that you never articulate to yourself You don't really you can't articulate the rules of grammar yet you exercise them effortlessly when you speak So I would argue that your implicit knowledge and your knowledge that is unknown to yourself 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 M so if you want to uh have high self-esteem then earn your own selfrespect I had this idea the internal golden rule So the golden rule says treat others the way that you should be treated You want to be treated The internal golden rule says treat yourself like others should have treated you and it was a 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 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 can sometimes get complex if you're talking about past romantic love right a sibling or a child or something like that or or a parent and uh 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 than the feeling of being loved Being loved is a little clawing It's a little too sweet You kind of want to push the person 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 expansive 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 How come oh that was a recent one Uh I I tweeted that just because I think that uh 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 What's pride in this context here 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 trait Uh it could be that you uh made a decision to uh 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 Uh it's mostly about getting trapped in local maxima as opposed to going back down and climbing up the mountain again Mhm 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 you're just stuck at a suboptimal point Uh it's going to cost you money It's going to cost you success and time and time Uh the great artists always have this ability to start over Whether it's Paul Simon or Madonna or you two and I'm dating myself a little bit Um but even the great entrepreneurs they're just always willing to start over Uh I'm always struck by the Elon Musk story where you know he uh he did PayPal as X.com originally Actually it was his his financial institution that got merged into PayPal It's good that you've got the domain You know what I mean yeah exactly I'll park that I'll hold on He's consistent He's been using it for quite a while Um and he said something like along the lines of uh I made $200 million from the sale of PayPal I put $100 million into SpaceX 80 million Tesla 20 into Solar City and I had to borrow money for rent Right this guy is a perennial risk taker He's always willing to start over He doesn't have any pride about being seen as successful or being seen as a failure He's willing to put it all in Back himself again each time 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 is a USA right he's basically trying to fix it like he would fix one of his startups And I think that is a willingness to look like a fool and that is a willingness to start over And a lot of people just don't have that They become successful or they become rich or 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 I think lots of people have become unusually familiar with suffering silently in that sort of a way of not having a high bar for your expectation for quality of life Uh yeah a lot of it is just you're memeing 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 quip was if you're so smart why aren't you happy why can't you figure that one out um the reality is you can be smart and happy There are plenty of people in human history who are smart and happy Uh and I think it just starts with saying yeah you know what I'm I'm going to be happy There was a guy that I met in Thailand a long time ago and uh he used to work for Tony Robbins uh you know he had a great attitude and uh we were sitting around and he said you know uh he said I realized one day that someone out there had to be the happiest person in the world like there 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 I was like wow that's pretty good that's a good frame right he knew how to reframe things and so I think a lot of happiness is just a choice uh in the sense that you make first you just identify yourself as actually I'm going be a person that's going to be happy I'm going to figure it out And you just figure it out along the way You're not going to lose your other predilictions You're not going to lose your ambition or your 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 of you is not going to look back at the unhappy version and say "Oh man that that guy was going to be more success I wish I was him." You're actually trying to be successful so you'll be happy That's the whole point you have you've gotten it backwards You you unlocked one of my trap cards Um 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 and you just sort of stripped success off from both sides the at least in my own life I have not found there 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 Uh I'm going to try and put this across as delicately as I can I would say from the bit of time that we'd spent together you have a really interesting trait of holistic selfishness Uh you're sort of prepared to put yourself first um you seem largely unfazed by saying or doing things that might might result in other people feeling a little bit awkward if it's truthful for you Uh it's like unapologetically self-prioritizing I guess Yeah I think everybody is Uh maybe unapologetic is the part that's that's relatively uh rare but I think everybody puts themselves first That's just human nature You're you're here because you survive You're a separate organism That's interesting I um maybe but I know we like to virtue signal and pretend we're doing it for each other How many 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 [ __ ] wedding." How many times does someone say "How are you doing today?" And they don't tell you how many I don't go to weddings But this is my point 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 you're wast everyone's wasting their time on it Um don't do something you don't want to do Why why are you wasting your time there's so little time on this earth Life goes fast What is it 4,000 weeks That's your lifespan Um and 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 going to 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 Ma 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 aka Mark Andre 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 in my head If I can't remember it I'm not going to add you here on time Yeah exactly Um I had to look things up at the last minute Uh so but ironically I don't even know if Mark himself follows that but he made the correct point Uh I read a little story about Jack Dorsey doing all his business off his uh iPhone and iPad and not even going into a Mac and I said okay I want to do that So I'm going to operate through text messaging and not put up my nasty email Does that feel like more freedom it does Yeah Cuz you're on the go Um so I have a nasty email autoresponder that says I don't check email and don't text me either Right If you need to find me you'll find me Obviously some of this is a luxury of success but some of these habits I adopted long before actually the hostile email autoresponder started a long time ago Um I used to own the domain I let it go I don't do coffee.com I used to reply from that email uh just so people would get the point But I stopped being rude about it Now I just ghost I just disappear Um my wife knows not to ever uh book or schedule me for anything Uh I'm not expect I'm not expected to go to couples dinners I'm not expect to go to birthdays I'm not expect to go to weddings If somebody tries to rope her into having me show up she says he makes his own decisions You got to ask him directly What about vice versa well are you 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'll hear the invite but make the decision because if you're if there's fewer things in coming you're assuming that you know what's best for you 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 that your present self doesn't want to do God damn it Past Yeah And then it destroys your entire calendar It destroys your your day because there's like oh this 1 hour slot which is sitting like a turd on my calendar that I have to like schedule my whole day around I can't do anything the 20 minutes before the 20 minutes afterwards Even for phone calls if someone wants to do a phone call say "Okay just text me when you're free I'll text you when I'm free." and we'll just do it on the fly It's a much better way of living than this overly scheduled uh you know cal.com or iical whatever The uh the overscheduled life is not worth living It's not I think it's a terrible way to live life That's not how we evolved It's not how we grew up Um it's not how how we were as children hopefully uh unless you're a helicopter parent or a tiger mom Um your natural order is freedom Uh I had a friend who uh said to me once you know uh 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 arm alarm clockless yes I'm alarm clockless Today I did set my alarm clock just so I wouldn't miss this Very important Yeah If you still but just so you know I set the alarm clock from 11:00 a.m in case I was stricken with a flu that day I wasn't going to set my alarm clock for 8:00 a.m or 9:00 a.m And sure enough I got up many hours before that Um 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 Just sink a little bit more into that like kind of like that [ __ ] you energy that self- prioritizing energy because I think people rationally love the idea of this I'm going to do what only I want to do uh even if they've got the level of freedom it's not [ __ ] 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 fritter away your life on randomly scheduled things and things that aren't important don't matter and events and weddings and you know tedious dinners with tedious people that you don't want to go to To the extent you can bring freedom into your life optimize for that you'll actually be more productive You won't just be happier and 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 uh the first 4 hours are when I have the most energy and that's when I want to solve all the hard problems And the next 4 hours are when I kind of want to you know do some more outdoorsy activities or I want to work out or maybe I can you know have some meetings but I'll try to do those last second based on whatever the day's priorities demand the last 4 hours I kind of want to wind down I want to hang out with the kids and I want to play games or 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 Uh and instead if I have like a meeting at 2 p.m and then I have to like get a thing and some emails done I put that off till 6 p.m I'm rushing I'm not going to be productive I'm not going to be uh You're certainly not free You're not I'm definitely not free But also another thing that I really believe is that inspiration is perishable Act on it immediately So when you're inspired to do something do that thing If I'm inspired to write a blog post I want to do it at that moment If I'm inspired to send a tweet I want to do it at that moment If I'm 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 I solve it right there If I want to learn something I 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 ChatGpt 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 going to learn best when you're having fun when you generally are enjoying the process not when you're forced to sit there and do it How much do you remember from school you know you were forced to learn geography history mathematics on this schedule at this time according to this person Didn't happen All the stuff that sticks with you is you learned it when you wanted to when you genuinely had the desire And that freedom that ability to act on something the moment you want to is so liberating that most of us go through our lives with very very little tastes of that If you live your entire life that way that is a recipe for happiness It feels like efficiency that that you have efficient also You have the inspiration that is going to be the most frictionless time to ever do that particular task So oh I've had the inspiration to do that I'll put that off until a 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 How so the happier you are the more you can sustain doing something the more likely you're going to do something that will in turn make you even happier and you'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 100 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 than you get from an annual physical You receive insights from a team of expert physicians who provide a detailed written clinician summary of 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 $499 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 or heading to functionhealth.com/modernwisdom That's functionhealth.com/modernwisdism This is related to another insight of yours The less you want something the less you're thinking about it The less you're obsessing over it the more you're going to do it in a natural way the more you're going to do it for yourself You're going to do it in a way that you're good at and you're going to stick with it The people around you will see the quality of your work is higher But this seems like a difficult tension to navigate because an obsessive attention to detail is a competitive advantage of your work as well So you have these two things sort of conflicting with each other No one is going to beat you at being you if it 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 out compete them because you're doing it effortlessly You're doing it for fun They're doing it for work They're doing it for some byproduct To you it's art It's beauty It's joy It's it's flow It's fulfilling Uh you must enjoy podcasting If you didn't you wouldn't be good at it either right if you would you would 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 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 2,000 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 Uh 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 needs you the most to find the place you're 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 5 years invested into that you might have just completely missed You might just end up in the wrong profession the wrong place or the wrong people for 30 years of 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 Uh and most things you should 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 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 Uh for example you know there 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 are always asking me for things And I kind of squirm when I get these messages and I'm sure you get these two text messages emails saying "Hey Chris my friend so and so should really be on your podcast or you should come to my event You should write a forward for my book." And you kind of squirm when you get this right you 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 in flow 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 uh it's fundamental That's so fundamental to so many things in life Okay Can we dig into that a little bit is 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 um so I've only seen you with this holistic selfishness the in integrated self- prioritization whatever we I don't know what we called it selfish is fine I'll take selfish I'm selfish I'm very selfish person don't contact me uh yeah that emotional reaction 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 dep prioritized themselves so much for so long they go "What do I want actually what what is it do I want to go to this thing or not?" Because all I've done is be [ __ ] puppeted right i've been marionetted by other people's desires for so so so long I can't even tap into that anymore And saying no feels like a war crime So 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 would a third party's statements And uh if you just take your mind to be you and they're integrated in one and the same at all times and you're reacting from the mind then you're not even going to 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 any way you would like you can just take long walks you don't have to meditate and do lotus position uh all that is unnecessary But if you can observe your own thoughts and view them a little objectively then you can start being uh 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 are 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 It's 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 it doesn't have to be that overt You don't have to the mind mud wrestling with itself is also a problem but because it loves 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 have 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't affect So uh you know another one of my little quips was uh you know um a rational person uh can uh sort of a rational person should should cultivate indifference to things that are out of their control right uh or a rational person can find peace by cultivating indifference to things that are out of their control Uh 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 um you have to step away from that And uh modern media is a delivery mechanism for mimetic viruses And now 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 mimemetic 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 or 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 Cassandra complex at global scale Cassandra complex at global scale Well and I would argue that large percentages of the population are essentially just infected with these mimetic viruses that have taken over their brain and are causing them to do incredible girration about things that probably aren't even true or are greatly exaggerated But even to the extent they are true they're things that that person can do nothing about And they should put their own house in order first So you know another little line I have for myself is your family is broken but you're going to fix the world Right people are running out there to try and fix the world when their own lives are a mess Oh my god Right and and I think it defies credibility if you can't fix your own life first I'm not going to take you seriously if you can't fix your own life Like all these philosophers who you know seem like people you emulate and so smart or like these brilliant celebrities and they go off and commit suicide Well you just kind of invalidated your whole way of life It's like that line of in No Country for All Men where the killer is waiting for the protagonist and protagonist shows up and the killer says "Well you know if your set of rules brought you here then what good are your rules?" I didn't work Um I I I I am self I'm holistically selfish in in that I want to be objectively successful in everything I set out to want Mhm Yeah Uh you have one life Don't settle for mediocrity Don't settle for mediocrity And 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 6'8 basketball player and I'm not going to get that So it's wanting the wrong thing So that's wanting something that you can't get That's wanting something you can't get 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 I haven't heard that word in about 20 years Yeah Prizes that are just not worth having or that create their own problems Well 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 Uh how many people and and usually I think people end up there because they are uh going on autopilot with sort of societal expectations or other people's expectations So uh you know or out of guilt or out of like uh mimemetic desire You know Peter Teal has this whole thing from Rene Gerard about how mimemetic desires are desires are picked up from other people Uh 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 Um or they might be from watching what your friends are doing and you know the other monkeys are doing Um or it might just be you know what your parents expectations are I might be a guilt You know guilt is just society's voice speaking in your head socially programmed so you'll be a good little monkey and do things that are good for the tribe Um but I think the 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 vest your stock over four years That's the standard Okay um uh in u uh college you know you go for four years High school you go for four years Um some things take longer You know you have children they hit puberty 9 years later That's like a 9-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 or 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 3 months deciding one month deciding on a job where we're going to be for 10 years or 5 years And because a lot of discovery is path dependent where the next thing you find on the path is depend on where you were on the previous path You sort of start going down this vector that is a very long distance 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 people 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 through 25% of the time Yeah Exactly There's the secretary theorem I don't know if you know that one Computer science After you've done this many people pick the best one of the next however many That's right Yeah The secretary theorem is this computer science professor is trying to figure out uh how much time he should spend interviewing secretaries and then how long to keep the secretary So let's say he's going to have a secretary for 10 years Does he keep searching for you know one year 2 years 3 years 1 month 2 months what is the optimal time uh 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 gotten 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 onethird of the time It's iteration based 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 means that 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 uh probably the biggest regret will be staying in the relationship after you knew it 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 uh 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 embied what the news or or the negative people around us have said or it's a bit more kind of endogenous than that It's just sort of in us It's the way that we see the world How can people avoid cynicism and pessimism within themselves yeah Synism and pessimism is a tough one It's we're naturally hardwired for it Again I go back to evolution I I'm sorry to keep harping on evolution but within biology there's very few good explanatory theories And you know theory of evolution by natural selection is probably the best one So if you can't explain something about life or psychology or human nature through evolution then you probably don't have a good theory for it And I would say that pessimism is another one that comes out of this which is in the natural environment you're 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 out to be a predator I get eaten and that's the end of that So we are hardwired to avoid ruin um and and uh 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 uh and the opportunities on the upside are nonlinear For example when you're investing if you short a stock you the most money you can make is 2x You just lose You know if the stock goes to zero you double your money But if the stock is the next Nvidia and it goes 100x or a,000x you make a lot of money So upside through because of leverage is nearly unlimited Uh 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 neoccortically realize and override that You have to realize that you're much more running a search function to find the thing that'll work And then that one thing will pay off in massive compounding Once you find your mate for the rest of your life you find your wife or your husband then you can compound in that relationship It's okay if you had 50 failed dates in between The same way once you find the one business you're meant to plow into and it'll compound returns 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 It's you want to be an optimist But I would say you want to be you want to be skeptical about specific things Every specific opportunity is probably a fail But you want to be optimistic in the general In the general you want to be like something in here is going to work out How do 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 woowoo 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 And you don't want to marry the first person you date necessarily unless you got very lucky Um but you 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 to the center of the table So both those uh both those uh approaches are required So it's a barbell strategy It's sort of black or it's white And most people are sort of stuck in this gray bit And I'm like half in but I'm kind of don't really know if I am I also think like labels like pessimist optimist cynic introvert extrovert these are very self-limiting Humans are very dynamic There are times when you feel like being introverted There are times when you feel like being extroverted There are contexts in which you'll be pessimistic There are contexts 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 in a sense Like obviously you're involved but motivated reasoning is the worst kind of reasoning Uh you're not going to find truth through highly motivated reasoning You have to be objective And 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 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 you feel something There are memories There are flashes There are occasional bad feelings But don't define yourself by it because then you'll lock it into your identity and you're just going to loop on it It's better to stay flexible because 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 adapter and your ancestors were adapters So to adapt you will be able to 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 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 grab-and-go stick pack contains a sciencebacked electrolyte ratio of sodium 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 3 years now and I genuinely feel the difference versus when I don't Best of all they have a no questions asked refund policy 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 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 drinklnt.com/modernwisdom That's wisdom 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 eightball Yeah Is you're you're asking a crazy person about their thoughts So just thought 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 on getting something from the outside world Ironically I think most people if you were to ask them when they were happiest for a sustained period of time not for a brief moment because pleasure can override happiness and create kind of this illusion of happiness But if you ask people when they were happy for a sustained period of time they were probably doing some variation of nothing That's interesting because in the chase is this sort of 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 adventure you want surprise Like there's a funny thought experiment of the bliss machine right which is suppose I could drill a hole in your head and put 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'll just be in bliss Would you would you want that would that be nice for how long do it and I'll tell you Right 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 this thought experiment long enough I think most people realize actually what I want is I want surprise I want and I want the world to surprise me and I want to wrestle with it in ways that are somewhat predictable but somewhat not And you kind of end up back where you started So I I don't know if necessarily for some people Pure happiness is the ultimate goal They want to you know just be blissfully happy wherever they are whenever they are But I think other people most people would say well I'm here in this world I'm here in this life I don't understand it or why but I want to be I want to be engaged I want to be surprised I want to do things I want to accomplish things I want to want things and then get them Right that's kind of the whole game that we're all playing here Surprises are really interesting the sort of unpredictability I think total bro science here but I'm pretty sure that that's kind of how dopamine works That things are a bit better than you expected That within that it means that if you for the perennial insecure overachievers that uh cloy 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 uh very contrived prescribed done in advance laid out your ability to be surprised actually diminishes Yeah If if nothing worked out the way you expected if it was all serendipity and you didn't want that you would just be a ball of anxiety On the other hand if everything worked out as you expected and wanted you'd be so bored you might as well be dead So there's some you know the 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 is a 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 specifically referring to that is if if you're thinking about your personality and your ego and the character of you and uh you're obsessing over that That's where a lot of depression and unhappiness sort of lingers and and gets cultivated Uh so uh thinking about woe 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 Um but it's like a it's a recurrent collection of thoughts that are very self-obsessed and will never be satisfied Very concretized as well So they're not malleable not particularly flexible So you're just adding to them by thinking about them all the time You're creating narratives and stories and identities Um 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 Nal 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 is is you know comes from So it depends if you are thinking about something to solve a problem and get it off your chest and get it off your mind If it leaves your mind clearer at the end of it then I think it was worthwhile If it leaves your mind busier at the end of it then you're probably going the wrong direction Is this a a justification for detachment uh cultivated ignorance uh distraction Detachment is not a goal Detachment is a byproduct It's it's just a byproduct of just realizing you know what matters and what doesn't Uh and and just for one moment on the self thing I think everybody craves thinking about something more than themselves If you want to be you know happy to some extent you have to forget about your personal problems and one way to do that is take on other problems bigger problems uh and that could be a mission that could be that could be spirituality that could be kids um 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 and tyrannical in 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 um 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 Vinnie Himmath uh the founder of Loom said uh I am rich and I have no idea to do what to do with my life and you replied God kids on mission pick at least one That's right Preferably all three It's very liberating Um yeah thinking I think overthinking about yourself is probably the it's it may not be the cause of depression but it certainly doesn't help Rumination Yeah I I kind of had a self-induced Stockholm syndrome from this sort of a thing cuz 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 um you're the prisoner and the prison guard at the same time And I had Abigail Shrier on the show She was 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 I'm 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 a thing and then x session later 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 your become happy techniques developed over time yeah I used to have a lot of them Uh 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 low status It reveals that you're low status So someone who's basically trying to show off uh comes across as low 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 there had you have 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 did you become successful each one of them will give you a different story uh you can't follow anyone else's path and most of them are even probably telling you some narratized 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 um it's 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 that tweet of yours that was uh 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 Another one is you know the uh the people who actually know how to make money don't need to sell you a course on it There is um yeah there's lots of variations on it But I if you don't Another one is if you don't lie awake at night thinking about it you don't want it badly enough Yeah I think you I've heard you talk before about how um sort of 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 always on me I failed at sleeping again Brian Johnson thinks I'm going to die early He's probably right But I How much do you reckon you sleep a night have you got any idea oh it's so random Some nights I'll sleep 8 hours Some nights I'll sleep 4 hours But it's literally just random Are you bothered about that you trying to optimize are you your sleep coach teaching you how to I don't fogg myself over things uh 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 or wrong You don't label it good night bad night No I work out every day because I think it gives me more energy and I've gotten into a good habit with it Maybe I'll do the same thing with sleep Maybe I'll develop a good habit but I'm not going to beat myself up over it there'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 overeating 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 [ __ ] I've got lung cancer my dad has lung cancer and they drop it immediately so I think a lot a lot of change is more about desire and understanding than it is about uh 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 it's not getting caught up in a in a half desire or a mimemetic 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 In the meantime 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 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 sciencebacked supplements like Tonat that support testosterone strength and recovery And that is why I'm such a huge fan of Mentis' product because they make the only NSFcertified Tonkat Ali 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 Momentous 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 they ship internationally Right now you can get 35% off your subscription and that 30-day money back guarantee by going to the link in the description below or heading to live momentous.com/modernwisdomd and using the code modernwisdom at checkout That's li i v m o m n o.com/modwisdom and modernwisdom a checkout You mentioned anxiety before Uh imagine how effective you'd be if you weren't anxious all the time is is one of yours Anxiety is the emotion dour of the 21st century And lots of driven people very anxious very paranoid That's what's caused them to be affected 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 uh 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 know you you want to be liked but you want to do something selfish and you can't reconcile the two and so you're under stress Uh you want to do something for somebody else you want to do something for yourself right these are examp you you don't want to go to work but you want to make money so you're under stress right so you have two conflicting desires and I think one of the ways to get through stress is to acknowledge that oh I actually have two conflicting desires and either I need to resolve it I need to pick one and then be okay losing the other or I will decide later But at least just being aware of why your stress can help alleviate a lot of stress And 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 I think the reason for that is because you you have so many uh unresolved problems unresolved stress points that have piled up in your life that you can no longer identify what the problems are And there's this mountain of garbage in your mind and a little bit of it poking out the top like an iceberg and that's anxiety But underneath there's a lot of unresolved things And so you just need to kind of go through very carefully every time you're anxious Like okay why am I anxious this time i don't know why Oh well let me sit here and just think about it Let me let me write down what the possible causes could be Let me meditate 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 uh 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 yourself to indulge them Well if if 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 Um you know one one big anxiety resolver 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 trit And I know the the we don't spend enough time thinking about the big questions We kind of give up on them when we're very very young You know a little child might ask the big questions like why are we here what's the meaning of life what is this all about you know is there Santa Claus is there God but then as adults we're taught not to think about these things or we've given up on them But I think the big questions are the big questions for good reasons And uh 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 there to stress about yeah For better or worse life is very short How should people deal with its briefness enjoy it Make the best of it You know it's it's even briefer than that Each moment just disappears it's gone There's only a present moment and it's gone instantly So if you're not if you're not there for it if you're stressed out or you're anxious or you're thinking about something else you missed it So you're any moment when you're not in that moment you are dead to that moment You might as well be dead because your mind is off doing something else or you know living in some 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 a what is a waste of time so I don't like to waste time but what is wasted time and everything is wasted time in a sense because nothing matters in the ultimate Uh 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 there are things that have more value than others within this life but this life is very short and bounded So the true wasted time is a time that you're not present for when you are not there for it When you're not doing the thing you want to do to the best of your capability such that you're immersed in it 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 is spent not being here in any case That's right But and I think people crave being here for it And and and when you're here for it you're actually not thinking about yourself You are more immersed in the thing the 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 can eat you alive if you let it And there's more to you than the mind How so well I mean the very I don't want to disassemble the body so to speak right because please go on Yeah At the end of the day like everything arises within your consciousness right you you got nowhere else to experience it Sorry You've got nowhere else to experience Nowhere else to experience it And that consciousness is uh relatively static in the sense that it's been exactly the same from 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 to everything is within that consciousness Uh and that thing that base layer of being and this is what the Buddhists will tell you is the real thing Everything that comes and goes in the middle including your mind including your body is unreal And trying to find stability in those transient things is 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 The old line about two people walking down the street They're having the exact same experience One is h experience One is happy one is sad right it's a narrative in their heads It's how they choose to interpret Um 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 Uh 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 uh the easiest and best way to do that is to observe your own mind and your own thoughts and and be a little not not necessarily critical but um be observant of yourself more objectively and then you'll kind of realize your own loops and patterns It takes time It's not it's not overnight It's not instantaneous So you mean letting go is not a one-time event Yeah And and there's letting go is not necessarily even the right answer Like yes if you're trying to be an enlightened being and you know you want to live like a god and everything's going to be perfect and be a Buddha sure you can let go But uh I think in practice it's actually quite hard to do Um I think I would say that it's uh 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 should be done by default Um you know I think most older successful people will tell you that their life was best when they lived it unapologetically on their own terms Be selfish Holistic selfishness We can clip that little selfish Yeah Yeah Yeah Keep running back Bad guy Great I 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 bottomup 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 Um the head is kind of what rationalizes it afterwards The gut is the ultimate decision maker If it doesn't and and what is the gut the gut is refined judgment It's taste aggregate aggregated and it could be aggregated through evolution uh and it's in your genes and 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 uh new problems in the external world that have defi defined edges you know beginnings and ends and and objectives What the mind is actually really bad at is making hard decisions So when you have a hard decision to make I find it's better to yes you ruminate on it You think through all the pros and cons but then you sleep on it You wait a couple of days You wait until the gut answer appears with conviction and it feels right And when you're younger it takes longer because you just don't have as much experience And when you're older uh it can happen much faster which is why you know and you have less time to Yeah And old people just more set in their ways as a consequence right they know what they want They know what they don't want Um 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 Uh 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 than I thought I was going to than I knew I was going to get but I just wanted it." So sometimes desire will override your judgment and then trap Yeah Wishful thinking It traps you into a into a pathway that chews up time What's that uh inside of yours u 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 Alanderon says that uh 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 is to tell them to change In fact uh the Dale Carnegie School of Public Speaking you know the way that operates is uh they get you up there and they realize that the number one problem with public speaking is uh that uh people are very self-conscious and so uh people who are practicing in the Dale Carnegie School of Public Speaking I don't know I never went through I heard this secondhand so I could be wrong but I like the story where they get up and they start speaking and the people in the audience are only allowed to compliment them genuine compliments not fake compliments on things that they did well but you're not allowed to criticize them on things that they did poorly and eventually they kind of get through it and they develop the self-confidence the same way uh 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 It's a better way to learn because you yourself don't feel flustered You're being tested graded Oh so you're not in your own head as much Correct You're not in your own head and you're just you might even be laughing at the student or you might be agreeing with the teacher or vice versa or sympathizing with the student But because you are a passive observer you can be more objective about it and you aren't threatened or fearful and you can learn better And coming back to the original point of you can't change people If you do want to change someone's behavior I I think the only effective way to do it is to compliment them when they do something you want Not to positive 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 praiseworthy don't forget to praise them Like definitely go out of your way and and it'll be genuine It has to be genuine It can't be a fake thing uh this is not you know one of those uh just dropping compliments type thing eventually that people will see through that They want authenticity but just don't forget to praise people when they do something praiseworthy and you'll get more of that behavior There was a 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 They they look at their look at their ability for for for change and growth They they they they're on the right path The partner matching thing is so hard Uh you know when people come and ask me like "Oh should I be with this person?" Like "Well if you're asking me the answer is clearly no." Right because you wouldn't have to ask if you were with the right person or when you ask someone like why they're uh in a relationship with somebody and they start reading out his or her resume right that's also a bad sign 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 you know she's a ballerina or you know he went to Harvard or what have you These are resume items That's not who the person actually is What's a better answer i just love being with this person I just trust them I you know I I enjoy being around them I I I love how capable he is I love how kind kind she is You know I love her spirit I love his energy uh the more the the more materially and concretely definable the reasons are you're together the worse they are Uh the ineffable is actually where the sort of true love lies because real love is a form of unity It's a form of connection It's connecting spirits Oh you two my consciousness meets your consciousness It's a the the the underlying drive uh in love in art in uh science in uh mysticism is the desire for unity It's a desire for connection As you know Bourhees 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 fill 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 predilictions are and now now we connect now we form a hole uh connected hole Or in mysticism it's like it's all about okay sit down meditate and you'll feel the whole In science it's like oh uh you know atoms bouncing is mechanics but that generates heat So thermodynamics and motion or kinetics are one combined theory that's a whole Electricity and magnetism are one thing that's that's the whole creates that sense of awe Uh in art it's like I feel an emotion I create a piece of art around it and then you see that painting or you see the cysteine chapel or you read the poem and you feel that emotion M so again it's it's creating unity it's creating connection and I think everybody craves that and so when you really love somebody it's because you you feel a sense of wholeness by being around them Uh 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 [ __ ] about Uh 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 sounds great but having the courage to commit to it in reality I think is a different task And cutting your losses quickly in the big three relationships jobs and locations is hard What would you say to someone who may cerebrally be able to agree with you and say "I understand." My cousin said this about me He said that uh 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 And I think that is a characteristic that I have I will not accept second best outcomes in my life Um ultimately you will end up wherever is acceptable to you You will get out of life whatever is acceptable to you Um 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 uh so in decision-m I have a few heristics for myself Other people can use their own but mine are 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 uh 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 Talib surgeon Uh tell surgeon where you want the surgeon that doesn't look as good because he's more likely to be a good surgeon Yeah it's similar in that appearances are deceiving because you're avoiding conflict You're avoiding pain So take the path is more painful in the short term because your brain is creating this illusion that the short-term pain is greater than the long-term pain Because long-term yeah you you'll commit your future self to all kinds of long-term mana Mñana exactly mñana So take the more short-term painful one And then finally the last one which I would credit Kapo Gupta with uh is that you want to take it take the choice that will leave you more equinimous in the long term By quantumous he means like more at peace more mental peace in the long term So whatever clears your mind more and will have you having less self-t talk in the future if you can model that out that is probably the better route to go And then I would focus decision-m down on the three things that really matter because everything else is downstream of these 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 you want to think pretty hard about it And people do some of these unconsciously You know who you're with very often it's like well we were in a relationship 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 people who overthink these things sometimes don't get the right answer But maybe here if you're 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 um 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 Um get some leverage try to find some practical application of it and go into that And then where you live uh 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 uh 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 Um it uh it it's going to determine your friend 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 Um 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 Weather you know quality of life How much do you stay inside or outside how long are you going to 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 I 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 got a dog we got a kid we were married and you know yeah And then when you have kids because then that's half of you and half of them running around you're never going to separate yourself from that So once you have a child with somebody then the most important thing in the world to you is half that other person whether you like them or not Mhm Yeah Uh 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 am 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 sorry underplay nature for societal reasons but nature is a big deal Um the temperament of the person you marry is probably going to be reflected in your child by default people want securely attached kid pick a securely attached partner Well the secret to a happy relationship is two happy people right so I would say if you want to be happy then uh 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 the unhappiness with other things Yes And actually we we talked a little bit about how people do connect successfully you know on spirit and 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 a 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 in a nursing home uh you know the ch do we give the children money or do we not uh you know do we um do we move across the country to be closer to our family or do we stay put where we are uh you know do we argue about politics do we care or do we not right the values are way more important than checklist items uh and uh I think if people were to align much more on their values they would have much more successful relationships the emotional pain of of fearing change I have this thing the 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 aversion that that we really feel evolved loss aversion It's just painful separating yourself in front of your friends It's embarrassing And how how would you advise people to uh get past themselves with the loss aversion that fear of change Oh my god am I going to Yeah it's the hardest thing in the world Uh starting over It's back to the zero to one thing It's uh it's the mountain climbing thing You're not going to find your path to the top of the mountain in 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 want it 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 more seriously you take yourself the unhappier you're going to be You learned how to take yourself less 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 Um you can't do new things anymore You know tomorrow I 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 back i'd back I'd back you if you want to make that Yeah The truth is if I want to be a break dancer I'd be break dancing But uh you know like I'm starting a new company 0ero to one again from scratch Let's do it you know one more time uh 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 You have to remind yourself Um look deep down you're still the same Chris you were when you were 9 years old Deep down you're still a kid Uh you know you're still curious about the world You're still have a lot of the same predilictions 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 knowhow Like I look at my son who's uh you know he's eight and uh I just noticed like wow he's probably has 60 to 80% of my knowledge and development wisdom and he has 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 It 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 it's just an illusion It's is 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 Um so it it just goes back to the you know don't think about yourself too much There's a special type of pain in realizing that the advice that you need to hear right now is 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 You know a lot of the time people ask questions like um what advice do you wish that you would give yourself 10 years ago people ask themselves that question almost invariably the advice that you would give yourself 10 years ago 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 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 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 what would you tell a friend that was going through this right and then you try and turn the advice to the friend around onto yourself but you always think well I'm not the friend you go okay you 10 years ago there's enough distance in that you go oh I actually am still that person there's just a single line between that and and related to this story is I think understanding is way more important than discipline now Jaco 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 Um so when we 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 um 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 uh if you are uh you know the 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 social dying you immediately start trying to different distinguish yourself from them you're like oh well how old was this person you know did they have were they a smoker you know did they have an issue do I have that issue right you immediately start comparing and what what you're 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 if you're like "Oh my god this person was the same age as me and they died." And that's starting to happen at my age where I'm starting to hear about you know extended circle people just reminds you time is really short There's a truth there There's a truth there that you cannot action There's a truth there that you cannot unsee Uh you know or for example I think were you into bodybuilding or something back when i don't know Like bro lifting stuff be less of a skinny [ __ ] Yeah Right But there probably was a point where you were uh being really aggro in the gym and you injured yourself many times right and each one of those was an deep understanding of don't go beyond this point right there was a truth there So again when you when you see these things in such a way that you can't unsee them that changes your behavior instantly And I would argue that that introspection to find those truths is actually very useful Is that a justification for more experimentation exploration experience in life sort of trying to find serendipity because all of these experiences are going to teach you a inescapable lesson You're going to do what you're going to do I mean your level of exploration I think is sort of up to you But life is always throwing truth back at you Uh it's about whether you choose to see it whether you choose to acknowledge it Uh even if it's painful Truth is often painful right if it wasn't we'd all be seeing truth all the time Reality is always reflecting truth That's all it is Why would you not have accessed it already exactly Uh you know all the all the philosophy that's out there for example uh it's almost trit Like most people they look at philosophy like until they discover it for themselves and because because wisdom is the set of things that that cannot be transmitted If they could be transmitted you know we'd read the same five philosophy books and we'd all be done We'd 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 twominute essay that I wrote uh a couple of weeks ago So it's called unteable lessons Okay I've been thinking about a special category of lesson one which you cannot discover without experiencing it firsthand There is a certain subset of advice that for some reason we all refuse to learn through instruction These are unteachable lessons No matter how arduous or costly or effortful it is going to be for us to find out ourselves we prefer to disregard the mountains of warnings from our elders songs literature historical catastrophes public scandals and instead think some version of "Yeah that might be true for them but not for me." We decide to learn the hard lessons the hard way over and over again Unfortunately they all seem to be the big things too It's never new insights about how to put up level shelves or charmingly introduce yourself at a cocktail party Instead we spend most of our lives learning firsthand the most important lessons that the previous generations already warned us about Things like money won't make you happy Fame won't fix your self worth You don't love that pretty girl She's just hot and difficult to get Nothing is as important as you think it is when you're thinking about it You will regret working too much Worrying is not improving your performance All your fears are a waste of time You should see your parents more You'll be fine after the breakup and will 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 [ __ ] trite it is These are all basic [ __ ] 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 grandio 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 a time including right now where I convinced myself that I am the exception to the rule That my particular mental makeup or life situation or historical wounds or dreams for the future render me immune to these lessons being applicable No no no My inner landscape would be solved by skirting around the most well-known wisdom of the ages No no no I can thread this needle properly Watch me dance through the minefield and avoid all of the trip wires that everyone else kicks And then you kick one And you share a knowing luck the kind that can only occur between two people 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 unable It's a good essay I I think one of the reasons why these lessons are unteachable is because uh they're too broad They have to be applied in context A number of the ones that you laid 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 to be happy It's like well okay then give it up [ __ ] right uh so in reality I think many of these contradict each other and they 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 Uh 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 Um 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 Um that said I I 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 uh 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 trit anymore So like Yeah So so a lot of my maxims and notes to self are carved in a way that they're modernized They're saying something true which might be trit 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 uh everything worth saying may have been said before but given that nobody was listening it must be said again Yeah It has 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 uh you talk about the difference between seeming wise and being wise that uh you tried to appear smart as a kid uh by sort of do wrote memorization masquerading as insight and wisdom and uh I I certainly feel that you know a lot of the show for me I think has been was and still is a redemption arc from this you know decade of my life 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 out VIP wristbands and have access to all of the pretty girls or you know the cool parties or whatever it might be Seems like it worked out Okay it did in some ways I mean isn't that fun it's it it was look it was a good way to spend my 20ies but to sort of come back above put your head above water two degrees one of which was a masters and then this like just shut down any of that learn I mean I I did that while I was at uni While I was at uni I was running the events So it's actually a decade and a half And uh I think there was a big redemption arc within this show And I 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 why it really resonates with me Um when you're memorizing things that indicates that you don't understand them or that sort of yeah wrote memorization and regurgitation masquerading as wisdom Um 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 it's it's the mark of a charlatan 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 offiscate or they don't understand it themselves Well 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 an interesting I think I've talked about this before Um 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 you know when I started doing it 700 episodes now 900 whatever Uh and I I knew what I could do to say to this therapist some you know to just sort of veer off a little and create some nice story put a bow on it push it across the table and watch your eyes light up a little bit like a little grin or a self-deprecating joke or whatever I'm like you're not here You're 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 I have podcast guest Naval Precisely So very often I'll uh 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 podcastal and then I just realized that's just how it comes out So I might as well just be okay with it Now do you know the reason I'm on this podcast no You know I haven't done a proper formal interview straight up top whatever 10 20 podcasts in a long time Since Rogan maybe Probably since Rogan Yep Yeah it went out at the top right that was the theory Yeah Well it's still at the top Yeah Yeah I know And and then you know I've done some stuff with Tim Tim Ferrris a good friend but that's been more co-hosting I haven't been a guest Um 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 vault 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 And so I was like 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 gonna have Well first off it was a dream and now it's reality plus a dream and I can't get away from him Yeah there are enough people that I turned down 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 have nothing new to talk about So I don't know what I'm going to say Well I appreciate you You said on Rogan and this was something you know to kind of pay it back to you Uh I had a a fiveheaded Mount Rushmore of guests before I started this show and it was Jordan Peterson Sam Harris Alanderon from the School of Life you and Rogan and that was my uh hydra of Mount Rushmore And uh I knew I think someone had asked you at some point maybe it was a tweet or something after Rogan or maybe even said it on Rogan where you said uh I don't like to say the same thing twice at least not in the same way I don't like sequels Yeah Yeah And I really really respected that You know that was 2019 You said it was uh eight or nine years ago It wasn't as long ago as you I have a terrible memory Yeah Yeah Um you're right 2019 right before co Yes And uh 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 the audience will have already heard but uh caring enough about having novel insights or at least having a new perspective on similar insights to say oh well you know in the space of six years since you were on Joe a lot of these well I'm coming at them actually the first thing I said to you today like I'm not convinced that I actually fully agree with that thing that I used to say which is cool right that's you 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 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 Mhm This is why I was doing my last startup air chat which was 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 there's a give and take There's a genuine curiosity And I think that's useful because then uh 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 fourth wall a bit you're seeing very much of uh 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 Is a 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 uh 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 and maybe rightly so Um but if you're able to find someone and you see in them a little bit of you maybe not even much of you but like oh that bit of them their self-esteem or the way they look at relationships or what they want to do the 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 uh 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 5 years time you'll be like you know that thing that you said about the lessons 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 the many problems the city had is mismanaged beyond belief Um it does just seem to pull in the young smart creative people Uh not just the ones who are building technology but they're exploring every facet of life and they're weird and sometimes it's repulsive and it's bizarre but you talk to these people and you just see a very intelligent person coming at life in a completely different way um putting it through the cominatorics 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 in 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 or smarter than them The flip side of that is I'm not really impressed by high status people like I don't just because the case pretty much in fact uh most of my friends who have gone on to become very uh famous 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 sickop fans which gets hard to break through uh and because I don't want anything from them and I don't and I don't like that I don't like these situations in which transactional relationships are implied that can be a though to people who are up 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 you have 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 group Um so it does get lonely at the top so to speak But it's also by choice because you know it's you can 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 a lot of life is not giving a [ __ ] You know a lot of the best things in life come out of that Does this mean sort of talking about that wrote memorization masquerading as wisdom and insight thing which I think perhaps almost certainly uh podcasts like this will have contributed to you know you hear a an Alanderoton who's you know like a painter with words Uh 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 uh right before this uh podcast was I thought maybe I should go back and read my old tweets to sort of remember what I said and I can articulate it well But then I realized that's just performance I would just be memorizing my whole stuff to perform I Well that's an extra special level of hell that you've descended into I wrote memorizing me to be more mely Bingo And and to live up to some expectation or some uh famous personality that I now have to become some straight jacket that I have to put on I'm having to live up to in private the things that I prefer That's right So of course pretty quickly I saw through that you know it's nonsense and it also constrains my time and it's just work and it I think that's that's you know your meditation practice at work there that mindfulness gap to be like huh yeah there's that thing again in Exactly Exactly 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 you trying to change yourself is very circular Um 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 or thinking about how to create wealth What have you learned are the best places to spend wealth to spend wealth Yeah Yeah How you you spend this time creating this wealth accumulating how does 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 Um so what I would like to you know you could give it to nonprofits but a lot of nonprofits 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 nonprofit A young physicist Yeah that that that's my nonprofit thing But uh and I've been and I've actually uh underwritten uh media and some physics stuff I don't 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 Makes it less philanthropic 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 Ivy Leagues have enough 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 uh 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-unding it Um I'm plying a lot of money into it I'm going to build something that I think is beautiful that I want to see exist Um I really want to see exist Have you spoken about this yet or is it still dark mode it's so early It's Yeah maybe I'll show it to you in a few months Uh hopefully 6 months Um and uh 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 Well very nice way to change the final F Very impressive That's the way I heard it Can't take credit for that I'm pretty sure it's Fox but yeah Yeah Yeah I think that was u Maybe it was uh Felix Dennis Okay Who who had that quote Yeah He said "If a flies floats or fornicates rented I I think the last one was a little too it's wrong that he he didn't have a family didn't have kids." So you know he missed the big one Um but yeah there there are lots of bad ways to spend money Uh I I I believe in investment you know I don't believe in consumption Uh yes you can you're born with a short housing position You close that out you get yourself a nice house Um get yourself some help to free up your time so you're not doing uh things that other people can do better Um treat people well You know always overpay and expect the best Uh pay them like they're the best and expect the best Um 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 Uh I'm not going to retire That's a that's a waste of whatever time I have left on this earth Um and if I'm doing something I enjoy then I'm already in perpetual retirement Um because work is just a set of things you want to do that that that you have to do that you don't want to do So if you want to do it it's not work Um 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 cuz that's too trit 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 otherwise 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 uh 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 [ __ ] like just one if I could go in and edit and add one more in or or No there's like 10,000 things I could talk about that topic forever to be honest like 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 um 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 tear it apart or you can re and then reassemble it properly um and I like to think that That is actually where I have specific knowledge and expertise My specific knowledge expertise is not in happiness 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 notwithstanding 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 once to to get the big score Um you know Peter Thiel started PayPal but he made all his money on Facebook right and 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 n put together Two will return more than three through put together you're operating in a highly leveraged intellectual domain So the outcomes are going to be nonlinear Um so I I know a lot about that 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 B Just go to B." Or "You're doing this to make money." when really the person who's doing this because they love the product is going to beat you or you're raising money from the wrong people who are in it for the wrong reasons or your co-founder is not in it for the right reasons or you don't have the right kind of co-founder or your vesting schedule is wrong or you're starting the business in the wrong place or you're approaching it from this angle instead of that angle and and of course I'll be wrong too but I've just seen a lot of data I have my theories around it uh 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 is a clickbait title 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 could be like a counselor for people Yeah part of the reason why I started doing podcasts and you know this is ego at play so I'll admit it freely when I was tweeting you know I kind of pioneered philosophy Twitter if you will or a certain kind of practical philosophy Twitter where in 140 characters I would try to say something true in an interesting way that was insightful to me at the time but then that 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 um although I like to say I like to think that my stuff is incompressible I'm saying it in the tightest way possible Um which is kind of a little failed poetry background Um 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 rederive 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 It's solid It's locked in there And so on a podcast I can unload much more deeply about some of these topics Um 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 I just really love that heristic of if you're having to memorize something it's because you don't understand it You don't understand it That's right If you if you if you have to memorize something it's because you don't understand it And if you understand something you don't have to memorize it Yeah I again you know just to sort of call out a lot of what I tried to do this redemption arc thing of if I sound smart that's like being smart right you go well chat GPT has memorized the entire internet Good luck competing with that You're not going to beat it in memorization You're not even going to beat a library at memorization You're not going to beat any 10 books in memorization So memorization is not the thing Understand the value of memorization is going down by the day It's already so low Understanding is a thing Being able to being able Judgment is the thing Taste is a thing Um and understanding judgment taste these come out of having real problems and then solving them and then finding the commonalities What is philosophy everyone you live long enough you'll be a philosopher Philosophy is just when you find the hidden generalizable truths among the specific experiences that you've had in life and then you know how to navigate future specific experiences based on some heristics and you create a philosophy around that Any subject pursued deeply enough will eventually lead to philosophy Mastery in anything literally anything will lead you to being a philosopher You just have to stick with it long enough and generalize the truths back out And these are universal truths It's back to the unity and variety You can find you can find unity in anything if you go deep enough And that's why the trit stuff unfortunately sort of keeps coming back around You're like well look this is cliche for kind of a reason It's cliche for reasons Uh but you know sometimes you learn new things Sometimes you do figure out new things too Uh even even in philosophy for example science has advanced as science has advanced it's actually expanded our boundaries of philosophy Um when we used to think that uh you know the earth was the center of the universe you would actually have a different philosophical outlook than when you think the universe is vast and we're infantestimally small It will give you a different philosophical outlook uh the same way if you think that uh 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 Uh if you think that knowledge is something that is passed down from above and through generations versus 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 down the down the road Even sim theory is an attempt at reformulating philosophy based on what we know about computers even though it kind of leads to a lot of the same conclusions as you know creator But it it it is at least philosophy that is informed by technology and by science So philosophy can also invol evolve moral philosophy evolves right uh there was a time when every culture practically that was a conquering culture practice slavery now almost all cultures abort slavery that's moral philosophy having evolved um 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 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 day I think circumcision is done without anesthesia and because under the theory that you know very young children babies don't feel pain and that's ludicrous and there was a study that came out in the 80s that said no 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 uh as an example one of the realizations that I had and this is thanks to uh David Deutsch and my friend James Pierce and also thinking it through a little bit is that there are these timeless old questions that we run into where the 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 there 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 you're right here You create your own meaning This this moment has all the meaning you could imagine It's 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 and now at a certain scale and a certain time and then you're answering it from the viewpoint of the universe over infinite time So you pull the trick You switch the level at which you're answering the question And questions should be answered at the level at which they're asked So if you ask the question is there meaning you Chris are asking that question Yes Yes To Chris there is meaning There's meaning right here This is the meaning you can interpret any meaning you want onto it Um don't ask the question as Chris and then answer it as God or as the universe That's the trick that you're playing That's why it seems paradoxical The same way you can say do I have free will people debate free will all day long This 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 at the level at which you were asked Of course I have free will because I feel like I have free will and I treat you like you have free will and you treat me like I have 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 a question there is no free will But if an individual asks a question right now then yes there is free will So a lot of these paradoxes resolve themselves philosophical paradoxes that people have been struggling with since the beginning 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 your mind around recently very recently I mean all the time Uh 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 ah yeah that's a pretty big OS update 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 sizefits-all doesn't work for everybody Moved up a little bit from libertarian Yeah I think pure libertarians get out competed and die right they get overrun because they're every man for himself They can't coordinate They can't coordinate Exactly Right Um so the coordination problems right culture exists to solve fundamental coordination problems Religion solves coordination problems Ethnicity solves coordination problems historically Um and when you uh break down those coordination systems too fast and don't replace them with anything else you get societal breakdown So you can have very malfunctioning societies you know go to Japan versus go to any western city and you can see the difference being a a culture that's working and a culture that's not Um so I I think that that's like a a broader set of things that I've changed my mind on uh a fair bit I used to be much more lazy fair on that stuff Let's put it that way Mh Um what else i mean on child raising I've gotten a lot looser You know I'm still not like completely less afair but I'm much more realized like kids are going to be kids and you kind of let them do their thing The debate with them Is it a Talib that has the ascending levels of like anarchism versus conservatism is that his insight 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 and the societal level I'm a conservative No he he was quoting somebody else some brothers I forget which ones but he was making the point eloquently as he often does uh that uh at you know at at the family local level he's a communist At the family level you're communist uh at maybe the the extended family level you're a socialist At the local level you know you're kind of a uh a democrat and so on until at the federal level you're a libertarian right so you've done it the other way You're being a libertarian with the kids and you're being a religious conservative and societal No that's that's that's a that's a funny way of looking at it I I don't know if the scale is that that simple Um what else have I changed my mind on i mean I think a modern AI is really cool I think it's but I think these are natural language computers Um they're starting to show evidence of kind of uh reasoning at some levels but I don't think they do creativity I think modern AI one of so just on that one of my favorite takes is from Dwash Patel and he says um uh if you gave any human on the planet 0.0 0 0 0.1% of the consumption that a 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 been 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 GPT45 with all due respect to Sam and Crew uh I I think they're terrible terrible writers I find them really bad at summarizing They're really good at extrapolating you know paperwork um 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 a programming language They solve driving They solve uh simple coding and backup coding They solve translation They solve transcription Um they are a fundamental breakthrough in computing It is a different way to program a computer rather than you explicitly speak its language and write the code and then run the data through it You just run enough data through it until it figures out how to write the program That's huge Um but are they are they AGI not yet And I don't see a direct path from here to there Um 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 thing as uh artificial super intelligence where it has some kind of intelligence that humans can't fathom Okay Uh yeah it seems like I don't know if you're from the boss room camp or whatever in No 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.com like slate style codec 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 ASIS 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 traditional branch I think Steven Wolf puts it better it's a different form of intelligence it's like if you see Jaguar in the jungle it has a different form of intelligence in your like a plant has a form of intelligence how it can like photosynthesize and grow It's a different form of intelligence It's not and intelligence again like love or like happiness is this overloaded word that means many things to many people But by my definition where you know the true test is you get what you want out of life It doesn't 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 critical confidently wrong one time out of 10 Correct And it doesn't even know when it's wrong Uh and maybe they'll get that one out of 10 down to one out of 100 but you'll kind of always want human oversight for critical critical things I I always feel so bitter It's I'm petty sometimes My my less economist version of me is petty and I always want to like teach it a lesson if it gets something wrong like how the [ __ ] like no you were so confident I'm treating it but I'm anthropomorizing anthropology it doesn't have a point of view and they are going to get a lot better and they might get to the point where the error rates are so low that you can put them into certain bounded problems like self-driving I think will be solved completely uh 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 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 Whimo would you bet on software or hardware for self-driving yeah So the I think Tesla's in the stronger longer term position but it's hard to argue with what's working right now And Whimo 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 Whimo is way ahead in that regard But Tesla's camera only approach if it works uh 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 uh kids there and you had a tweet that said "I'm not convinced that declining fertility needs to be proactively fought." I forgot that one You're going to have to I'm I dug deep Um why well I mean think back like what was it 30 years ago 20 years ago everybody was saying overpopulation of the earth is going to be a problem Malthusian ending we're going to have too many people And now all of a sudden we're going to have too few people So part of it is just the doomerism meme is always alive and well right or it just gets repackaged 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 Uh there's no progress in technology AI is 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 did they lose their fertility the microplastics in 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 in the workforce and they're making more money Um people don't need kids as insurance policies They have less kids Maybe they're living hedonistic lives God bless them right they want to have more fun They want to have 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 Uh it's because of retirees It's because a large percentage of the population is essentially retiring at the guaranteed age of 65 or 70 thanks social security And so they need other people to pay for it They need more workers in the workforce And if the workforce is shrinking then you have a small number of people Exactly who are supporting a large number of retirees And in democracies you can't take pensions away The voters vote you out So they slowly strangle 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 in kind of this trap where the low fertility rate is upstream of the downstream problems that are cultural and societal But I'm not sure that you're going to solve that by making people have more kids How are you going to meme 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 there's a flip side where every kid is a lottery ticket and an 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 has this great law which calls the Adams law of slowmoving disasters When disasters are very slowm moving like peak oil or global warming or population collapse and everyone can kind of see them coming economics and society as a force solve them because enough individual people has incentives to go solve them So I don't know exactly how it gets solved but I think it could get solved in various ways Uh one example could be um 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 everybody be complaining about how there's no housing and there's no land right 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 it may be selfcorrecting too which is that if there are too few kids in society and the returns to having kids literally might just go up It might just be easier to have the 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 opportunity resources It's like everyone wants to everyone's I suppose if you could come at it from a pain side which is you look at all of the other people around who don't have kids Let's say that um pensions completely drop off and the only way that old people are able to survive is if their children pay them some sort of stipend like reverse you know send send money back up the generations You go okay well that's a pretty [ __ ] good incentive That's a good incentive I also think that people have been me'd into thinking that uh kids make your life worse and that's a that's a pretty pretty bad what's your experience been kids make your life better in every possible way If you want to if you want an automatic built-in meaning to life have kids Uh 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 or they don't even 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 to1 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 uh you know then they can't admit that they didn't want kids that that that they should have had kids It's kind of late in the game Um but you know a lot of times you see everybody who has a pet right uh and they're pushing them around in a stroller right what is that that's a sublimated desire for children Yeah Uh Malcolm Collins says that uh having a pet is to children is using porn is to sex He basically thinks that it's sort of a surrogate It It's definitely in that direction And you know 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 their childhood they should just be happy and do what they want I don't I don't I don't have particular goals in mind for them I think that's a that's another route to unhappiness Having That's different though right than learn versus goals It's not necessarily what do they want what 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 i want my kids to feel unconditionally loved and I want them to have high self-esteem Mhm As a consequence of that but I don't get to choose any All I get to choose is 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 downstream from that there should be freedom There should be a degree of freedom that comes from the self-esteem that comes from the unconditionality They should make their own mistakes and learn their own lessons and uh have their own desires and fulfill them as is appropriate Uh I like any parent I wouldn't want them to be hurt I wouldn't want them to be unhappy But I cannot control these things Uh you replied to my friend Rob Henderson He was talking about um how kids fall asleep more quickly when they're being carried and uh you said cry it out and co-sleeping is dangerous What's IYI science iy is Nim TB He talk about intellectual yet idiot These are people who are overeducated and they deny like basic common sense Okay Uh so there's a lot of that that goes on in child rearing uh thanks to really bad studies uh and and bad public medical directives So for example you know uh a few uh a few parents you maybe they're drunk or they're high or they're just other issues and you know they roll over their kid when they're sleeping the kid suffocates or they neglect their kid and then is that co-sleeping having them in the bed Yeah Exactly Or or there 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-slept with their parents Where else do you think they were sleeping they weren't houses in multiple rooms Yeah Exactly Put in the other tent We'll put It's just nonsense Co-sleeping has been around since the dawn of time So has uh feeding kids cow milk when or goat milk when breast milk is runs out or is not available Um yet we're told formula you know made with soy and and and corn syrup which was invented recently is somehow better than uh cow milk And cow milk can be dangerous for your kids and co-sleeping is dangerous for your kids and cry it out is the right answer All of that is nonsense I mean it's very clear that um we raise children throughout human history without uh these interventions And and to me the idea that like you're going to let your kid cry it out I get why that's done for practical reasons so that you know you can get some sleep and you can go to work in the morning but the reality is when you let the kid cry it out you're letting the kid ball until it finally gives up I mean the kid left by itself to cry it out in the wild It's going to get it's going to get eaten right it's going to get eaten by a tiger Um 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 um I've never heard that before That's such a wild idea Yeah I'm not saying that's 100% true I read it on the child in the cheek quite hard And that's an academy 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 I talk about it Um but there are definitely some people who believe that there enough that it was a thing um in certain circles for a while But I think we just go through these you know the these IYI beliefs these intellectual beliefs come from people who uh 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 uh 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 Um so even with science you have to be skeptical You have to look very carefully at you know does it apply in the right context or not is it come from good sources did they run enough highpowered studies widely accepted and there are a whole bunch of things you'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 vaccines So it gets overdone So the same way there's this whole SIDS thing sudden infant death syndrome right it's 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 the caretaker doesn't want to admit to the problem or didn't recognize the problem but kids don't just spontaneously die in the crib right um so they talk about swaddling babies You swaddle babies you know basically tie them up mummify them Uh so you constrict them so they die of SIDS where they roll over and they can't get back I mean it's just all this craziness around fundraising It's a real minefield It's a minefield And and and you know you have these scared parents or having a kid for the first time and they open a book and they start reading how to raise children when I would argue that your natural instincts on what to do with your child uh are actually pretty good It It's funny when uh my wife and I had our first baby I remember you know at the hospital sorry the first one was natural birth um at the birthing center We 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 realize actually instincts are pretty good You know if the kid cries check to see if they clean feed them all that It's like your your basic instincts are actually very very good And kids instincts are actually very very good They know what they want and they want things for a reason and they can encourage you to give it to them Yes It's usually it children are not deficient adults who can't reason Uh and to some extent that's true but mostly it's not true Mostly they have very good reasons for what they want and you as a parent mostly have communication problems with them They can't yet communicate to you You can't communicate to them They can't communicate to you So early on with my kids I tried to focus on teaching them you know basic explanatory theories as opposed to having them memorize things That's just the most Yeah the most nol solution I'll give you I'll give you a very simple example right okay So this is Twitter and this is this is the how to get rich without getting lucky thread 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 Um you know clean up after yourself Don't touch that Wash your hands after you do this um don't eat food off the floor right but all of these are subsumed under the germ theory of disease right so if you instead go on YouTube and show them videos of germs or if you have them look under a microscope at anything they're like "Ah they can infer what's going Yeah there's creepy crawies everywhere and I got to watch out for them." Uh 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 and disease are actually downstream of our competition with pathogens over time uh to a point that people still don't fully appreciate Um 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 their mixup 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 their their evolutionary rate is roughly equivalent to ours So we're in a red queen race where we're both running at 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 as 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 Um a lot of the population structure of species uh determines how long their lifespans are So very uh 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 and I think it's true It's an interesting hypothesis um uh homeostasis within the human body how we're always returning to a given level of things like that's a that's a fundamental part of our makeup our temperature pH blood pressure and so on under homeostasis But if you if you engage in any 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 will downregulate its own production very fast Uh and the body releases its own hormones in pulses rather than steady state Why is that well that's because uh bacteria and viruses can infect your body and trick your body They can take it over Like toxoplasmosis does this rabies does this They 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 those defense mechanisms is homeostasis Anytime you see something getting out of whack you immediately push back really hard on it because like did I just get infected is 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 uh 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 pulse as a macroscopic object but microscopic objects can't coordinate to create the same pulses Oh that's cool Yeah So there's all I mean so you know that it's coming from you Is that why correct It's endogenous rather than exogenous So I never knew that And that's why we resist a lot of exogenous treatments A lot of our medical treatments don't work Um anyway so this these are there's there's a bunch more I could go on but I think that a lot of uh you know you see this in cancers where uh a lot of uh bacteria show up like the Epstein bar virus shows up in a lot of cancers and um you know now it seems like the gut microbiome influences so many things Basically uh bacteria and viruses are at the top of the food chain compared to us Like we are top of the well-known food chain but bacteria and viruses eat us Fungus eats us So these microscopic predators are our natural predators And so a lot of aging societal structure hygiene religious strictctures 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 have 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 uh you know can nothing exist i thought that was a fun question So I like to throw a fun like four three No no he's he's eight Oh right An 8-year-old and a six-year-old So I asked them both like "Can nothing exist?" And they had pretty good answers right um another one we played with the other day was like "What is the matrix?" Okay Uh you know what is what is this what is all this um 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 uh or continue to question the basic structure of reality and not move past it so quickly also to 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 arrive at it Yeah Correct Correct Dad 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 most of the time they just want me to solve the problem right so sometimes they have to play it dumb It's like why is my Wi-Fi not working on my computer i'm like I don't know Did you click on that thing look you've got like a rebellious sovereign child Sovereign as they may be but sometimes they still need the dad 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 agentic and willful but a lot of child raising can beat that out of them by essentially domesticating them That's right 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 themselves Exactly Yeah A friend of mine uh Parsa on uh on Air Chat uh he had a great saying He said uh he wants his uh children to be quick to learn and hard to kill [Laughter] thought that was pretty good Yeah that was 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 Right After the last 6 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 war looks like it's not over yet Um they definitely won earlier rounds They took over institutions I think now it's much more of a fair fight um where you have people like Elon you know kind of supporting uh so so there there's these different forces through history right historians will argue about this Uh but there's a theory of the great man of history thing where it's like oh you have the Einsteins you have the Teslas you have the um the Jangaskhans and the Caesars right they determine the flow of history And then there's the other uh 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 uh the specific names are not important and because of kind of the leftist turn that our institutions took in the last few uh decades they now only subscribe to the great forces theory of history not the great man theory of history but I think now we're seeing the two play out where you're seeing you know Trump and Elon and other individuals is rising up and saying no we resist Yeah that's interesting And um I think that unfortunately and so the battle between kind of these these these collectivists and great forces versus individuals it's as old as 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 we're somewhere in the middle And the human race is always kind of bouncing between the two We like strong leaders We like to be led Um we like to coordinate our forces and and and mass and and do things Uh 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 a leader and there's always status games going on So u we're 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 Um and there's a religious aspect to it And then the the capitalist individualist is like libertarian Every man for himself You just each do what you want and it'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 it'll all work out Each person does their best and they trade and so which is it 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 of 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 halves and have nots So in the wealth game more people are winning overall and the average is going up But in the status game there are essentially more losers There are more invisible men and women who are getting nothing out of life and have no leverage Relatively speaking Objectively speaking they might be better off They still have phones and they still have TVs and they're not absolutist creatures though We're relative creatures 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 Yep Um 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 um it's not the right to vote that gives you power it's power that gives you the right to vote So we've confused the two So what happened was you know voting started as a way for people who had power to divide up the power not fight amongst themselves The winners of the revolution the winners of the war the people in the House of Lords and the House of Commons they divide up power amongst themselves to say "Hey we have all the money We have the power We are 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 It gets 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 was voting for candy and fairies and you know all the free things in life Uh and then eventually people start voting to oppress each other The 51% in every in any domain vote to oppress the 49s the 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 United States 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 these societal structures are unstable they break down and they break down because eventually the people who have the power and say no wait a minute you don't get to vote you 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 read in tooth and claw If you don't fight you don't survive You don't live you die And that's true of everything alive today And humans are no different So giving up physical power and then thinking you can exercise political power fails Which is why every communist revolution which is all about equality and kumbaya and brothers and sisters end up being run by a bunch of thugs Because if you don't have a way to divide up the wealth based on merit then it's always going to be based on power and influence The thugs with the guns always win in the end So the question is just can you keep the thugs and the with the guns paid and happy and successful society where you're allocating based on merit because if you can't then you do it based on power So I do think that this battle is not over but that's because it 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 streamed 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 has 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 Um doesn't 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 uh and make sure that it's your overwhelming desire and you don't have five other desires at the same time Um also just realize 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 Desire is 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 It can be outside too 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 with Trump derangement syndrome right he's living rentree in their heads and driving them insane And I get it I mean there are politicians who have definitely driven me insane as well Um but it comes at a very high cost and it's something that is out of your control that you cannot really influence Um so it's probably good to at least be conscious of it You mentioned uh historians before One of my friends has a a question his equivalent of uh Peter Thiel's question of uh 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 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 as a simple example if I just look at things that maybe the next five or 10 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 they make a prediction and predictions are tough but and I have to eat it in a few years Yeah I'm going have to eat eat this in a few years So I'm probably wrong but uh two things that I pay attention to um that I don't think uh 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 or you don't really need tonsils Oh that's false every the surplus requirement 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 still pretty bad we don't have many good explanatory theories in biology um we have germ theory disease we have um evolution we have uh cell theory we have DNA genetics um morphogenesis embryogenesis and not much else you know there's not much else everything else is rules of thumb memorization Affects B cuz affects C affects D but we don't understand the underlying explanation It's all just words pointing to words pointing to words So biology is still in a very sorry state and because we are not allowed to take risk that might kill people um we just don't experiment enough in biology So a lot of treatments are just outright banned by large regulatory bodies So we just don't have the innovation So I think we're still in the stone age when it comes to biology and we got a long ways to go Uh and I think people will look back agass 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 It must be more experimental and I'll start as end of one and start experimenting on myself and um but even there I disagree with Brian on many things like you know taking huge amounts of supplements I think we just don't know supplements outside of their natural context like just eat liver man right um but that's fine and and I wouldn't be vegan either but you know it's it's I I really appreciate that he's experimenting he's good naturatured about he shares everything so we need more people like that Um so I think the state of biology people will look back and say wow that was in the dark ages Um I think uh another uh 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 on 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 a it is dist Why would you have an armed force that's there's going to be no there's there's gonna be no aircraft carriers there's going to be no tanks there's going to be no infantry men there's just going to be autonomous bullets Buy autonomous bullets against your autonomous bullets Whichever ones win the other side just surrenders cuz it's over Um I think that's the second piece of it I think a a a third piece that is going to be uh kind of unexpected is the GLP1s which I know you and I have privately 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 there there are downsides but the downsides 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 going to bend the curve on health care costs And uh the big question people are going to be asking over the next 5 years is why are Americans paying thousands of dollars a month for this when people overseas are getting them for free or I can order them from China for free or whatever Um and maybe it like if I were Bernie Sanders the platform I would be running on is I would say okay we're going to pay you know hundreds of billions of dollars to Novo and Eli Liy and we're just going to make these free or there's hundreds of analoges of these things that work These are not going to be you know limited to just the few that are that are being used today Just take one of them or two of them make them free and I think it'll make a big difference And uh as you and I were discussing earlier uh this does bend a lot of people out of shape who got there the oldfashioned way and they want to see obesity as a moral failing on people's parts and it lowers their status if they are suddenly signal is less of a signal Yeah Correct Absolutely Yeah So so they're incented to say "Oh well you don't know the downsides you know it's irresponsible to suggest it's going to cause cancer Have fun losing bone and muscle mass But none of that stuff is really true The cancer stuff is actually beneficial on I know people who are now taking these things for anti-aging reasons Um they're already fit but they just want to age better and have a stronger insulin metabolism Um and there's evidence now these things are you know they put off dementia Alzheimer's colon cancer It's insane Cardiovascular disease like the 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 uh you know too much sugar too many calories in an era of abundance prevents you from smoking prevents you from even uh there's an organization called Casper that is now doing a study on heroin addictions and they're showing that this can lower opioid overdoses and heroin addiction So there's a lot of overwhelming medical evidence coming out and I think I don't I don't know the exact number but I think something like 10% of the population might not have tried these things I think that's the number that I'd say as well It's massive I think it's about 50% of the population say that they would like to try it Exactly So uh I think the body positivity movement is dead and we always kind of knew it was a scam I mean it's dying very very quickly Yeah Equipped like you can never be too rich too thin or too clean right and immediately like a whole bunch of people went nonlinear my 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 Um so I think overall that there's going to be huge demand for these things and our modern medical system is not built to supply these Well I'm not I'm not I don't hold it against the phases 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 who can get Medicare to sign off for it or people paying out of pocket at very very high prices Yeah Um the the benefits of societal distribution of the safer GLP ones is so large that whichever politicians uh 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 are starving So about half a billion people are starving in a billion So many problems are downstream of that Like you know look at how much of the federal budget goes into dialysis because of kidney failure And why is that it's because of diabetes right so so many of the problems that we have in modern society are downstream of obesity And you know this like fitness is so important Uh and yes there's in some people these things call mus cause muscle and bone loss but not in the people who are eating high protein and working out hard So it they can be taken a way that's safer And some versions of these like literal glutai 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 A good sample size Yeah it's a great sample size What more do you need like if if you if you have a bacterial infection that's eating you I don't say "Oh I have this antibiotic but it's going to raise your blood pressure." It's like "No take the antibiotic." If you're going to kill yourself I say "Take this antisycchotic and stay alive a little longer and solve it." I don't say "Oh it's going to you know cause your heart rate to go up by three beats a minute I don't worry about that." So similarly if you're poisoning yourself with toxins and overuse of substances that you shouldn't be using either heroin alcohol cigarettes sugar or just sheer calories um take this GLP1 Uh they also improve digestion You just have less cal just less food matter going through your stomach They lower cancer risks across the board There's quite a few cancers that lower Um cardiovasc 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 GLP1s and I think a lot of it may be people who and you well think about how many sacred cows are being gored right all the people who are basically saying uh 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 uh it's kind of like why does the American military keep buying aircraft carriers right in the age of drones um there's an incentive bias There's a very strong motivated reasoning Uh but it doesn't matter 10% people are on it Uh everybody wants to be fit It's going to spread like wildfire M we I was just thinking as you were talking that you know when we think about health and a lot of people kind of get captured by the way that they were brought up the the 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 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 I did have a uh tough childhood but I don't think about it You know I 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 to like indulge 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 realize like you're never going to untangle the whole thing It's a Gordian knot problem uh like Alexander you know found that tangled knot in India and uh they said oh the famous conqueror will come and will untie this knot nobody else can untie the knot and he took one look at it pulled 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 it's a 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 uh the fact that every moment is precious You had to take about um that 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 you time Ask Warren Buffett how much time money can buy you or Michael Bloomberg They're you know rich as Scrooge and and Chris but they can't buy more time right brian Johnson notwithstanding Um so you can't trade money for time Money is not the real currency of life And time itself doesn't even mean that much because as we talked about before a lot of time can be wasted because you're not really present for it You're not paying attention So the real currency of life is attention It's what you choose to pay attention to and and and what you do about it And so back to the point about the news media you can put your attention on the news but that's how you're spending the real currency of life So just be aware of that If you want to that's fine There's no there's no right or wrong here Like maybe it is your destiny to pick something in the news learn about that problem adopt that problem and solve it But just be careful because your attention is the only thing that you have and that can also be captured by your own past It Yes You can fritter it away on anything you like Is there an advantage to starting out as a loser uh absolutely Yeah Yeah cuz 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 will help you be a you know quote unquote winner in life That said I wouldn't sentence my kids to it Like I don't think you can artificially do that You know it's it's sort of like imagine that you were you know 300 years ago you're born a surf and then somehow you managed to escape off the farm and you become a land owner and then eventually you become 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 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 Um I think what you can all you can do is kind of uh cultivate an appreciation and gratitude for what you have And the only way to do that is just evidence it 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 of yourself And at that point it's good to be selfish cuz 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 They're just sitting at home doing nothing just indulging in themselves Maybe they go on dates and they get Door Dash Like I have no respect for that I think there's nothing worse in 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 You 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 Um you start trying to do some good for the world And if you have more resource than that you go take care of an even 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 people express and flex that capability by giving more and more and by doing more and more And society rewards them with the one thing they can't get otherwise which is status Right so society should give you status in exchange for it Um they should say "Okay you did a good job You took care of more people than than just yourself and just the people immediately around you." Uh and that's what an alpha male to me is 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 And society rewards them by calling them an alpha and giving them status I wonder whether some of the push back that we've got against uh rich wealthy powerful people is disincentivizing Uh it is like who was it zuck who you know donated money at Zuckerberg General's hospital and they wanted to pull his name off of it I mean that's I didn't see that but that's that kind of stuff backfires right you you should reward people for doing what were you saying before you don't just need to in fact actually actively avoid castigating people if you want their behavior to change when they get something wrong Look at reinforcing it when they get something right It's happening at a a societal level as well Correct I mean like the the guys who make a lot of money and go out and buy sports teams I wouldn't do that right but the one who goes out and builds a hospital or builds a rocket to take people to the moon uh you know rescue some astronauts you should be rewarding him for that Mhm Naval I really appreciate you Uh I hope that this has lived up to whatever weird daydreams you've been having Um what have you got coming up what can people expect from you over the next however long expect nothing That's the most naval way that we could have finished this dude It's uh it's been a long time coming and I really do appreciate you for being here today But I do hope you deliver something Oh I think you have So thank you Thanks for having me Thank you too Thanks for getting in my mind And hopefully now you're out We'll see Maybe even worse now you've got the real memories to stick I don't know The reason to win the game is to be free of it The reason the reason to do the podcast is to be is to be done with it All right Wow You made it to the end Congratulations Well if you enjoyed that you're going to love my fulllength conversation with the one and only Alander Boton from the School of Life
