纳瓦尔最新访谈3小时完整版 - 关于人性的44个残酷真相

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. though 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.

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 a

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 one 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 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.

Sadus 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 hunter

gatherer 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 and so they go to Hollywood start

starring in movies they donate to

nonprofits they go to cans 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 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

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. That's

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 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 evolved 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

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checkout. The worst outcome in the world

is not having

self-esteem. Why? Yeah, it'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 because 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'll 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 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.

[Music]

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. So if

you want to uh have high self-esteem

then earn your own self-resect.

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 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 the line, 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 and I

was like wow that's pretty good that's a

good frame but he knew how to reframe

things and so I think a lot of happiness

is just a choice uh in the sense that

you make first you just identify

yourself as actually I'm going going to

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'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,

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'm 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. I don't 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 hate

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 I 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. doesn't 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. So, you 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 at

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 now. You still uh arm alarm

clockless? Yes, I'm alarm clockless.

Today, I did set my alarm clock just so

I wouldn't miss it. 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 have 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 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 four 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 2:00

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. Yeah, I'm 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 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

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functionhealth.com/modernwisdom. That's

functionhealth.com/modernwisdom. 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. 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. You

would, right? If you would, you if if

you decided that the right way to get

ahead in life was to go write books. You

would, nobody would have heard of you.

Chris Williamson's book would be a

complete flop. That's not who you are.

You're a podcaster. You enjoy talking to

people. You enjoy interviewing them. The

more you do things that are natural to

you, the less competition you have. You

escape competition through authenticity.

by being your own self. If I had to

summarize how to be successful in life

in two words, I would just say

productize yourself. That's it. Just

figure out what it is that you naturally

do that the world might want that you

can scale up and turn into a product and

it'll be it'll eventually be effortless

for you. Yes, it there's always work

required, but it won't even feel like

work to you. It'll feel like play to

you. And modern society gives us that

opportunity. You know, if you were 2,000

years ago, you're born on 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 it because again I've only seen you

as you, right? I didn't know you 20

years ago. I didn't know you as a child.

Um so I've only seen you with

this holistic selfishness, the

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 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 I love to do that. I

have my problems have got problems and I

have a real problem about fixing my

problems. Yeah. Exactly. So you just

you're going to be much happier and much

more focused. Again, I think happiness

and focus and success can kind of

complement each other. You're going to

have much more energy. Just think about

as mental energy. You 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, uh, 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 And I would

argue that large percentages of the

population are essentially just infected

with these mimetic viruses that are

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 in uh 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?"

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

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, but 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 our 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 you should

spend interviewing secretaries and then

how long to keep the secretary. So let's

say he's going to have a secretary for

10 years. Does he keep searching for you

know 1 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 got about a

third of the way through, you have,

excuse me, seen enough that you now have

a sense of what the bar is. And then

anybody who meets or exceeds that bar is

good enough. And this applies to dating,

this applies to jobs and careers, 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 at 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 the labels alone.

It's better just to look at the problem

at hand. Look at reality the way it is.

try to take yourself out of the equation

in 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 and unhappy person.

Yeah, I'm going to be unhappy." That's a

way of locking yourself into your past.

Even saying, "I have trauma. I have

PTSD." Yeah, you 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

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drinklnt.com/modernwisdom. That's

drinklnt.com/m modern

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. I'm getting something

from the outside

world.

Ironically, I think most people if you

were to ask them when they were happiest

for a sustained period of time, not for

a brief moment, because pleasure can

override happiness and create kind of

this illusion of happiness. But if you

ask people when they were happy for a

sustained period of time, they were

probably doing some variation of

nothing.

That's interesting because in the chase

is this sort of 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. M 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

recurring collection of thoughts that

are very self-obsessed and will never be

satisfied and very concretized as well.

So, they're not malleable, not

particularly flexible. Well, 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. Mhm. 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 s 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 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. What's 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, you don't need to

sell you a course on it. There is um

yeah, there's lots of variations on it.

But if you don't Another one is if you

don't lie awake at night thinking about

it, you don't want it badly enough.

Yeah. I think you I've heard you talk

before about how 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 I How much do you reckon you sleep

a night? 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 right 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

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mus.com/modernwisdom 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 you're 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 it's a

little bit of it poking out the top like

an iceberg and that's anxiety. But

underneath there's a lot of unresolved

things. And so you just need to kind of

go through very carefully every time

you're anxious. Like, okay, why am I

anxious this time? I don't know why. Oh,

well, let me sit here and just think

about it. Let me 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 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 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 whole 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.

Exactly. We can clip that little

selfish. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Just 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 are more set in their way 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? Uh we think we can't

change ourselves but we can. We think we

can change other people but we can't.

Exactly. Uh 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 But 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 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. 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. 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 a 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. So

again, it's it's creating unity. It's

creating connection. Uh 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 the answer." 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 heruristics for myself. Other

people can use their own, but minor. If

you can't decide, the answer is no. If

you're offered an opportunity, if you

have a new thing that you're saying yes

or no to that is a change from where

you're starting, the answer is by

default always no. Secondly, 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

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

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'm a big

believer in genetics. Yes, I do think a

lot of behavior is downstream of

genetics and I think we underplay that.

We like to overplay nurture and

underplay nurture for 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 can change a 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 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 uh 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 a break dancer? 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 who

what would you tell a friend that was

going through this right and then you

try and turn the advice to the friend

around 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 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 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 in 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 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.

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 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 me 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 study

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 my personal 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 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 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 was 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

her 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 a 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 Ferris, 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,

"Oh, I might as well just do it." So I

reached out to you. I wonder if this

will close that loop or further entrench

it. I wonder if you've made it way worse

now and you're just 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. 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 of the

blah blah blah and then I don't know

it's cool that's like synthesis right

it's this sort of blending of the reason

I spend a lot of time in San Francisco

is because it's a gravitational

attractor for the smartest people in the

world and despite all 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 a gift to

people who are of that because the

higher that they climb up that

hierarchy, the fewer and fewer people

don't want anything from them. So in

that way you can be an even better

friend, right? But they get they get

surrounded by people who do want things

from them and are so good at pretending

they don't that it's just not worth my

time to try and break out from that

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

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 Alander

boton 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 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. that 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 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. uh you trying to change yourself

is very circular. Um the mind trying to

change the mind is the mind doesn't want

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. 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 it. 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 gets rented." I I think

the last one was a little

too It's wrong that he he didn't have a

family, he 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 Oh, 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 is

like a wealth counselor for people.

Yeah. Part of the reason why I started

doing podcasts and you know, this is ego

at play. 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. Mh. 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. Mhm. You're not going to beat

memorization. You're not even going to

beat a library of 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 back 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

involves right uh there was a time when

every culture practically that was a

conquering culture practice slavery now

almost all cultures abore 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 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're 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? Uh 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. Mhm. 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 conser. 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 religious conservative but

societal. No, that's that's that's a

that's a funny way of looking at it. I

don't I don't know if the scale is that

that simple. Um what else have I changed

my mind on? I mean, I think the modern

AI is really cool. I think it's but I

think these are natural language

computers. Um they are 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 Dwark Ash 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 anthropolicizing

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.

Althusian 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 cuz

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 they're 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? 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 cuz 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

more resources. It's like everyone wants

this. 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? Uh, kids make your life

better in every possible way. If you

want, 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. That's it. Yeah,

that's it. Right. So I can be loved or I

am loved unconditionally. Is that one of

the things? I want my kids to feel

unconditionally loved and I want them to

have high self-esteem.

Mhm. As a consequence of that. Mhm. 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. was talking about um uh 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 of

multiple rooms. Yeah. Exactly. Put them

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 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

ideation 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 high-powered 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. 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

a 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 child raising.

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 the most nal

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 as

so much is about immune system

optimization. That's about pathogens.

junk DNA in bacteria and crisper was

discovered because in bacteria their DNA

is evolved to fight viruses and the way

it does that is by taking viral DNA and

snipping it up every time there's a

viral attack and storing it in their own

DNA so they have a copy so they can

recognize it next time it attacks and

you know and so on. 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 uh

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

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 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]

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. They

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. They

get spread to people who don't have

land, who don't have power, who may not

be able to inflict physical violence.

And then eventually you get to the point

where everybody's voting. Everybody's

voting and everybody's voting for candy

and fairies and you know all the free

things in life. Uh and then eventually

people start voting to oppress each

other. The 51% in 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 red

in tooth and claw. If you don't fight,

you don't survive. You don't live, you

die. And that's true of everything alive

today. And humans are no different. So

giving up physical power and then

thinking you can exercise political

power fails. Which is why every

communist revolution which is all about

equality and kumbaya and brothers and

sisters end up being run by a bunch of

thugs. Because if you don't have a way

to divide up the wealth based on merit,

then it's always going to be based on

power and influence. The thugs with the

guns always win in the end. So the

question is just can you keep the thugs

and the with the guns paid and happy and

successful society where you're

allocating based on merit because if you

can't then you're going to do it based

on power. So, I do think that this

battle is not over, but that's because

it 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 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 arrangement 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 u historians before. One of my

friends has a a question, his equivalent

of uh Peter Tilliel'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 5 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 the I

make a prediction and predictions are

tough, but you're going to have to eat

it in a few years. Yeah, I'm going have

to 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. All that's false

every 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. A affects B because

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 a gasast 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. Let's 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 in 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 as 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 is why would you have an

armed force that's there's gonna 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. By 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 and 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. 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 now have

tried these things. I think that's the

number that 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 pharma. 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 diialysis 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 in a way

that's safer and some versions of these

like laglutai 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 though. 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 and 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 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 we'll 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.

Because if you're because if you're a

loser, then you'll want to be a winner

and then you'll develop all the

characteristics that 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 dashed. 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. Nal, 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 nal way that we

could have finished this, dude. It's uh

it's been a long time coming and I I

really do appreciate you for being here

today. But I do hope to deliver

something. Oh, I think you have. So,

thank you. Thanks for having me. Thank

you, too. Thanks for getting in my mind.

And hopefully now you're out. We'll see.

I might be 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 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

right

here. Go on, press it.