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The Joe Rogan Experience trained by day Joe Rogan podcast by night all day
Boom. Alright we lat. Thank you very much for doing this man. I really appreciate it. I've been absorbing your information and listening to you talk for quite a while now. So it's great to actually meet you. Thanks for having me. My pleasure. My pleasure. You are one of the rare guys that is your a big investor. You are you're deep in the tech world, but yet you seem to have a very balanced perspective in terms of how to live life as opposed to not just be entirely focused on success and financial success and Tech investing but rather how to live your life in a happy way. That's a it's a it's not balanced. Yeah, you know, I think the reason why people like hearing me is because like if it's like if you go to a circus and you see a bear, right that's kind of interesting but not that much if you see a unicycle that's interesting, but you see a bear on a unicycle that's really interesting right? So when you
Buying things you're not supposed to combine right get interested. It's a Bruce Lee right striking thoughts philosophy plus martial arts. And I think it's because it's some level all humans are broad. We're all multivariate but we get summarized in pithy ways in our lives and at some deep level we know that's not true. Right every human basically is capable of every experience and every thought, you know, your UFC comedian commentator podcaster, but you're also more than that. You're also father lover, you know thinker Etc. So I like the model of life that the Ancients had the Greeks the Romans right where you would start out and when you're young you're just like going to school then you're going to war then you're running a business. Then you're supposed to serve in the senate or the government. Then you become a philosopher this sort of this Arc to life where you try your hand at everything. And as one of my friends says specialization is for insects, and so everyone should
Be able to do everything and so I don't believe in this model anymore of trying to focus your life down on one thing. You've got one life just do everything you're going to do I couldn't agree more and I think that sometimes people find certain success in whatever the Endeavor is and then they think that that is their Niche and they stick with it and they never change and they did almost out of fear. Let's it's hard because there's a the analogy around mountain climbing like if you find a mountain and you start climbing you spend your whole life climbing it and you get say two-thirds of the way and then you see the peak is like way up there but you're two thirds of the way up. We still really high up but not to go the rest of the way you're gonna have to go back down to the bottom and look for another path. Nobody wants to do that. People don't want to start over. Yeah, and it's the nature of later in life that you just don't have the time. So it's very painful to go back down and look for A New Path, but that may be the best thing to do and that's why when you look at the greatest artists and creators they have this ability to start
Over that. Nobody else does like Elon will you know be called an idiot and start over do we something brand-new that he supposedly he's not qualified for or when Madonna or Paul Simon are you to come out a new album their existing fans usually hate it because they've adopted a completely new style that they've learned somewhere else. A lot of times they'll just miss completely so you have to be willing to be a fool and kind of have that beginner's mind and go back to the beginning to start over if not doing that. You're just getting older. Yeah. I mean, I don't even know if it's willing to be a fool. It's just to me that the most exciting thing is to try to get better at something to learn. Thanks. I mean, it's really exciting when you just have incremental progress in something that you're completely new to I live for the aha moment that moment when you connect two things together that you hadn't connected together before and it fits nicely in solidly and it kind of helps form a steel framework of understanding in your mind that you can then hang other ideas off of that's what I live for. Yeah. It's a curiosity.
It's what little children do to you know, my little son is always asking why why why why why and I was trying to answer him and half the times I realized actually I don't really understand why I just have a memorized answer for you, but that's not really understanding. You know, those are weird conversations right when you're talking to your kids. And you say look the reality is I don't know a lot of things. Yes. I just memorize a lot of kids and there's certain things that you just can't know. Yeah, you realize that, you know, you have you have answers for a few things that you've thought through then you sort of have cover-ups like like trapdoors. Like don't go here. This is just a cover-up. I don't really know the answer to what the meaning of life is or how we got here. Yes, and then you've got a whole bunch of memorize stuff because a lot of you are a lot of intelligence these days just the external brain pack of civilization. I know it's out there and all the answers are out there know how to look them up and I've memorized some of them and they kind of understand how money works in the federal reserve prints it and what this government thing is, but not really right so not good enough to take
Hitting University. Yeah, I think people do that with almost everything in life these days in terms of like have a like a one-page a one-sheet like a brief summary of what and the explanation for what this very complex subject might be healed. ER right? Don't give me the lecture. Give me the book. Don't give me the book. Give me the blog post on give me the blog post. Give me the Tweet don't give you the tweet. I just I already know. Yeah, I will got really fascinated by the way. You read because I thought there was something wrong with me by doing that but you you don't really just read a book to completion you read and then you pick something else up and you just kind of go based on your whims. Whatever you're interested in. Well, I was raised by my I was raised by a single mom in New York, and she used a local library as a daycare center because it was a very tough neighborhood. And so she would basically say when you get back from school go straight to the library and don't come out until I pick you up late at night. So I used to basically live in the library and I read everything.
Read every magazine. I read every pictograph read every book or every map. I just ran out of stuff to read. I just read everything. So I got over this idea of that reading a large number of books or reading a book to completion as a vanity metric because really when people are putting a photos on Twitter Instagram of look at my pile of books that I'm reading. It's a show-off things a signaling thing. Yeah. Sure and the reality is I would rather read the best hundred books over and over again until I absorb them rather than read all the books, right because your brain has finite information. And if I had space You Get Enough advice at all cancels the zero there's a lot of nonsense in books out there too. So I don't read anymore two complete books. I read to satisfy my genuine intellectual curiosity and it can be anything. It could be nonsense. It could be history could be fiction. It could be science to give you sci-fi. These days is mostly sci-fi philosophy science because that's just what I'm interested in but I will read for understanding. So a really good
Look, I will flip through I won't actually read it consecutive in order and I won't even miss even finish it. I'm looking for ideas things that I don't understand and when I find something really interesting I'll reflect on it. I'll research it and then when I'm bored of it, I'll drop it or I'll flip to another book thanks to electronic books. I've got 50 70 Books open at any time in my Kindle or iBooks and I'm just bouncing around between them. It's also a little bit of a defense mechanism to how in modern society we get too much information too quickly. And so our attention spans are very low. So you get Twitter you get Instagram you get Facebook. You just used to being bombarded with information. So you can take that to you can view that as a negative and be like, I have no attention span or you could view that as a positive. I multitask really well and I can dig really fast. I can if I find a thread that's interesting. I can follow through five social networks through the web through the libraries through the books and I can really get to the bottom of this thing very quickly. It's like the
Alexandria that I can research at my disposal. So I no longer track books read or even care about books read. It's about understanding concepts. Yeah, you brought up to awesome points. First of all, the the social media aspect of books and basically anything it's like it's such a weird way to display your life because you know, you displaying the best aspects of your life and some sort of a glass case, you know, just it's an unrealistic version of your life that you cultivate and you curate and I'm as guilty of that as anybody everybody's guilty of it. I'm guilty of it too. Yeah, you know, I mean I posed with my dog every time I run. Yeah what always signaling? Yeah. It's like rather than really looking at yourself you're looking at how other people look at you. It's like this one remove mental image and it's kind of a disease because social media is making celebrities of all of us and celebrities the most miserable people in the world, right? Because they had this strong self image that gets built up it gets built up by
It's every time somebody pays you or me a compliment and we're like, oh well, thank you, right then that builds up an image of who we are and then one idiot comes along one out of ten one out of a hundred and they can easily tear it down because it doesn't take many insults to cancel out a lot of compliments and I you carrying around this big weighty self-image and it's just very easy to be attacked and because you're famous or you're well-known people want to attack you so being a celebrity is no good. It's actually a problem like one of my tweets is and these are all reminders to myself is you want to be rich in Anonymous not pouring famous. Hmm. There's benefits to it hours, of course, but we wouldn't do it. It has unusual problems that you don't get trained for and you really will not understand unless you experience it, you know, it goes having this conversation with my wife were talking about people that just come up to you and they don't care what you're doing. They don't care if I'm with my daughter if I'm holding her if I'm feeding her for you know,
The middle of an intense conversation she's crying. She could be crying and some bro will come over and just immediately have to take a picture doesn't care his need supersede the daughter and my wife was saying that before she knew me. She used to think that that's just part of the price of being famous that people people like you that's just part of the price be famous in now when it interrupts her life and you know interrupts the children interrupts friends and you know, she now she's like this is annoying like this is not this is not healthy. This is not a smart way to interact with people and that people have this weird challenge this weird thing that if you're if you become famous, there's this weird challenge where people just want to come to you especially today because if they get a photo of you then that boost their social media profile like hey, I'm sitting here with the Vol. Look at that smile anonymity is a privilege on the other hand is self-inflicted. I mean we bought it on ourselves. Yeah. We don't think we knew what it was though. We
Did but we carry on. Yeah, it tells us you're getting something out of it. So, you know, there are times when someone approached me in public and I'm a little resentful and then other times I'm just like actually I'm really grateful that you know, I worked for this I got this right. This is the payoff just embrace it smile grin and Barrett me but you have a different sort of celebrity to right you're a you're a hero amongst investors and amongst the mean you've just been hero among young male Geeks, which is a some of my favorite people right? But that's not the kind of celebrity. I think most people set out to get its right guys. Right right want the cute females. Yeah. Yeah. I look at my brief little YouTube clips. I'd have a tiny little podcast going now and it's like 95% male. Sure. Yeah. This is very highly 18 to 35. Yeah, we do we what is the numbers isn't? Yeah. It's in the 90s. Yeah, you did it one you do that one, very small podcast. We just have small with
Three or four minute Clips. Yeah. So what it was I did a tweet storm called how to get rich without getting lucky and it got pretty popular in Twitter and it's really about wealth creation. I just use the click baby title and its trying to basically lay out Timeless principles of wealth creation that if you absorb them you become the kind of person who can create wealth create business make money and my theory behind that is like there are three things everybody wants there's actually more than three, but let's just start with three the three Basics everybody wants to be wealthy. Everybody wants to be happy and everybody wants to be fit and I know there's a lot of which you signal that goes on like we don't want them money and you know, I don't care about being happy and happiness is for stupid people, but let's face it like you want to be rich and happy and healthy. Yeah, that's the trifecta. Now, of course, you also want to internally calm State of Mind you want a loving household. So there are other things that come into it, but those three I think they can actually be taught right and a fitness. I'm not going to teach there a lot of people who you've had on here including yourself who
A heck of a lot more about fitness and health than I do but I was born poor and miserable and I'm now pretty well off and I'm very happy and I don't and I worked at those and so I've learned a few things there are some principles and so I try to lay them out but in a Timeless manner where you can kind of figure it out yourself because the end of the day I can't really teach anything. I can only inspire you and maybe give you a few hooks so you can remember things when they happen or put it put a name to them. So this podcast actually ended up explaining this tweet storm. So the Tweet storm was like 36-38 tweets got very famous got translated dozens of languages and these were principles that I came up with for myself when I was really young around 13 14, and I've been carrying them in my head for 30 years and I've been sort of living them and over time. I just realized like sadly or fortunately the thing that I got really good at was looking at businesses and figuring out the point of Maximum leverage to actually
It wealth and capture some of that and do it in a very long-term kind of way. Not the you know Banker hmm crash the economy riled up kind of way but you know build businesses and help people and provide value kind of way, especially when applied to modern technology and leverage in this age of infinite leverage that we live in so the podcast is just explaining each tweet. So these are little three four five minutes Snippets. I don't like to say the same thing twice. I don't like to explain in detail. I just I feel like if you have something original and interesting to say you should say it otherwise it's probably been said better so that podcast tries to be information dense. It tries to be very concise. It tries to be high impact it tries to be timeless and it has all the information. I think you need the principles that if you absorb these and you work hard over 10 years you get what you want. So I've got the one on wealth creation I'm going to attempt to do one on happiness is a big word, but you know happy
It's an inner peace and calm and all that because what you want is you don't want to be the guy who succeeds in life while being high-strung high stress and unhappy and leave a trail of emotional wreckage with you and your loved ones which is more common than not because you got to focus. Yes, very hard to be great at everything you want to be the guy or the gal who gets there calmly, you know quietly without struggle. You want to be the person who's the when there's a crisis going on you want to be the calmest coolest cucumber in the room who still also figures out the correct answer. Mmm. If you can be you were one of the things that you were saying is that you feel like happiness is something that you can learn and then you can teach yourself to be happy even just by adopting the mindset that you are happy person and proclaiming that to your friends. And so you've sort of developed a social contract. I'm a happy person and they'll I have to live up to that. Yeah, the I've got hundreds of techniques, but then how do you develop that one?
Well, there's this a there's social consistency right humans have a need to be highly consistent with their past pronouncements. So the way I started my first tech company was I was in in working inside a larger organization and I told everybody that I'm going to go start a company is like I hate this place and we would do my own thing. I'm going to be successful entrepreneur six months past nine months pass then people start getting you still here. I thought you were gonna go start a company. Mmm. Are you lying? Right? That was the implication? So we kind of know this right social contracts are very powerful. Like if you want to give up drinking right and you're not serious about it and say I'm going to cut back and I have only one drink at night. I'm going to only drink on weekends you tell yourself, but if you're serious, you'll announce it on Facebook. You'll tell all your friends. You'll tell your wife. You'll say I'm done drinking. I'm throwing everything out of the house. You'll never see me drink again when you say that, you know, you're serious. So I think a lot of these are choices that we make and happiness is just one of those choices.
Is unpopular to say because there are people who are actually depressed, you know chemically or what have you and there are people who don't believe that it's possible because then it creates a responsibility on them. It says oh now if I'm you're saying if I'm not happy, that's my fault. I'm not saying that but I'm saying that just like Fitness can be a Choice Health can be a Choice Nutrition can be a choice working hard and making money can be a choice happiness is also a choice if you're so smart. How come you aren't happy. How can you haven't figured that out? That's my challenge to all the people who think they're so smart and so capable if you're so smart and capable. Why can't you change this? Hmm. There are a bunch of people though that actually take pleasure in being miserable. There's something about the pursuit of excellence and of success that supersedes all other Pursuits that in their eyes it is it is that the peak the Pinnacle the most important thing. It's not a trade-off.
I would argue that if now when I say happy happy is one of those words that means of zillion different thing. Right? It's like love, right? What does that mean? Well, I love cheese. Yeah, we defined it a little bit more tightly. Right? So let's go back to desire right? This is old old Buddhist wisdom. I'm not saying anything original but desire to me is a contract that you make with yourself to be unhappy until you get what you want. Okay, and I keep that in front of mind. So when I'm unhappy about something I look for what is the underlying desire that I have that's not being fulfilled. It's okay to have desires your biological creature you put on this Earth You have to do something. You have to have desires. You have a mission but don't have too many. Don't pick them up unconsciously don't pick them up randomly don't have thousands of them. My coffee is too cold doesn't taste quite right. I'm not sitting perfectly. Oh, I wish you would warmer, you know my dog, you know pooped in the lawn. I don't like that whatever it is pick your one overwhelming desire. It's okay to suffer over that one, but on all the other
Do you want to let them go so you can be calm and peaceful and relaxed and then you'll perform a better job most people when you're unhappy like a depressed person. It's not that they have very clear calm mind. They're too busy in their mind. The sense of self is too strong there sitting indoors all the time their minds working working working there thinking too much. Well, if you want to be a high-performance athlete how good of an athlete are you going to be if you're always having epileptic seizures if you're always like twitching and running around and like jumping in your limbs are flailing out of control the same way if you want to be effective in business, you need a clear calm cool collected mind Warren Buffett plays Bridge all day long and goes for walks in the sun. He doesn't sit around like constantly loading his brain with non-stop information in and and getting worked up about every little thing. We live in an age of infinite leverage what I mean by that is that your actions can be multiplied a thousand fold either a broadcasting at a podcast or by investing capital or by having people work for you or by writing code.
So because of that the impacts of good decision-making are much higher than they used to be because now you can influence thousands or millions of people through your decisions or your code. So a clear mind leads to better judgment leads to better outcome. So a happy calm peaceful person will make better decisions and have better outcomes. So if you want to operate at Peak Performance, you have to learn how to tame your mind just like if the learn how to tame your body. I love what you're saying Warren Buffett might not be the best example because he drinks like I think six Coca-Cola's a day and he eats mostly McDonald's and he's still alive somehow so that shows you that low stress is more books like shit. Like how old is it? And he's a fairly old man Charlie munger's I think in his 90s, right? Yeah made it really far. I wonder what Warren's doing, you know, I mean, it's just he's got it. No that's bad for him. But if he Terrell doesn't care he doesn't care. I think he's just a little stressed. Yeah stress is the big bright. So he's just enjoys that Coca-Cola
And that's problem. Maybe there is a trade-off right? Like maybe him enjoying that junk food and that coke just ah that that pleasing of the mind is maybe better than him just eating wheat grass shots. And yeah and be pistol salads and just being yeah just super worked up about everything. It's like if you need your glass of red wine and destress and calm down. That's probably better than you flying off the rails. Right? Right, and I think that that's applicable not just in business but in probably any Pursuit and I like what you're saying about allow that one thing to be your obsession, but everything else, you know, learn how to learn how to let things go pick your battles and we like to think that we like to view the world as linear, which is I'm going to put an eight hours of work. I'm going to get back it hours of output right doesn't work that way guy running the corner grocery stores working just as hard or harder than you and me. How much output is he getting what you do who you do with how you
It way more important than how hard you work. Right outputs are nonlinear based on the quality of the work that you put in the right way to work is like a lion you don't you and I are not like cows. We're not meant to graze all day, right? We're meant to hunt like lions we're closer to carnivores in are omnivorous development than we are to herbivores. We don't tell vegans. Yeah. Sorry. Look, I wish all that stuff worked. I don't want to eat meat its future generation will look back at this as worse than slavers, you know, because the Holocaust were committing with the animals, but they'll have artificial meats and taste in her healthier is better than the real thing. So allegedly allegedly but so as a modern knowledge worker athlete as an intellectual athlete you want to function like an athlete which means you train hard then you sprint then you rest then you reassessed you get your feedback loop, then you train some more then you sprint again, then you rest then you reassess this idea that you're going to have linear output just by cranking.
Read at the same amount of time sitting that's that's machines. You know machines should be working nine to five humans are not meant work nine of us are not meant to work nine to five. No, I agree wholeheartedly but it's for people that are working for someone there's not really that option. So that's unfortunately the the rub right that that's kind of where my tweet storm starts which is first of all the first thing if you're going to make money is that you're not going to get rich renting out your time even lawyers and doctors were charging three four five hundred dollars an hour. They're not getting rich because their lifestyle slowly ramping up along with their income and they're not saving enough. They just don't have that bitter retire. So the first thing you have to do is you have to own a piece of a business you need to have Equity either as an owner and investor shareholder or a brand that you're building that accrues to you to gain your Financial Freedom. Yeah, and I was really fascinated by another thing that you were bringing up about working for yourself.
That you feel in the future, whether it's fifty or a hundred years from now virtually. Everyone is going to be working for themselves. And I believe the way you put it is that the information age is going to reverse the Industrial Age. Yeah. If you go back to hunter-gatherer times how we evolved we basically work for ourselves. We communicated and cooperated with in tribes. But each Hunter each gatherer stood on their own and then combine the resources with the family unit, but there was no boss hierarchy honey higher. Yeah, you're like the third middle manager down in the farming age. We became a little bit more hierarchical as we had to run Farms. But even those were still mostly Family Farms. It's industrial work with factories that sort of created this model of thousands of people working together on one thing and having bosses and schedules and times to show up. The reality is if you have to go I don't care how rich you are. I don't care whether you're like a top Wall Street Banker if you have to go if somebody has to tell you if somebody can tell you when to be at work and what to wear.
And how to behave you're not a free person. You're not actually rich. So we're in this model now where we think it's all about employment and jobs and intrinsic in that is that I have to work for somebody else but the information age is breaking that down. So Ronald coase is an economist who has this coase theorem, very famous theorem, but it basically just talks about why is a company the size that it is, why is it company one person instead of 10 people instead of a hundred instead of a thousand and it has to do with the internal transaction costs, which is the external transaction costs. Let's say I want to do something. Let's in building a house and I need someone to come in and provide the lumber. I'm a developer right? Do I want that to be part of my company or do I want that to be an external provider? A lot of it just depends on how hard it is to do that transaction with someone externally versus internally. If it's too hard to keep doing the contract every time externally I'll bring that in-house if it's easy to do externally and it's a one-off kind of thing. I'd rather keep it out of the house. Well information Technologies,
Get easier and easier to do these transactions externally. It's becoming much easier to communicate with people gig economy. I can send you small amounts of money. I can hire you through an app. I can rate you afterwards. So we're seeing an atomization of the firm. We're seeing the optimal size of the firm shrinking its most obvious in Silicon Valley tons and tons of startups constantly coming up and shaving off little pieces of businesses from large companies and turning them into huge markets. So what look like the small little vacation rental market on Craigslist is now suddenly blown up into Air B&B one example, that's one example, but what I think we're going to see is whether it's 10 20 50 100 years from now high quality work will be available when I talk about I'm driving an Uber we're talking about super high quality work will be available in a gig fashion where you'll wake up in the morning your phone will buzz and you'll have five different jobs for people who have worked with in the past or been referred to you. It's kind of how Hollywood already Works a little bit with how they organize for a project.
You decide what to take the project or not. The contract is right there on the spot you get paid a certain amount you get rated every day or every week you get the money delivered and then when you're done working you turn it off and you go to Tahiti or wherever you want to spend the next three months and I think the smart people have already started figuring out that the internet enables this and they're starting to work more and more remotely on their own schedule on their own time and their own place with their own friends in their own way. And that's actually how we are the most productive. So the information revolution by making it easier to communicate connect and cooperate is allowing us to go back to working for ourselves. And that is my Ultimate Dream even when I run a company and I've employees I always tell those people. Hey, I'm going to help you start your company when you're ready because I think that's the highest calling maybe not everybody will get there, but it would be fine. If we were even working at ten person company or 20% company is way better than working in a thousand person coming 10,000 person company. So this idea that we're all Factory like cogs in a machine.
Who are specialized in have to do things by rote memorization or instruction is going to go in we're going to go back to being small groups of creative bands of individual setting out to do missions. And when those missions are done, we collect our money we get rated and then we rest and reassess until we're ready for the next Sprint has there ever been a study done on happiness? And as it regards to the size of companies not that I'm aware of but to me it's obvious. It's just obvious the smaller the company that happy you're going to be the more human your relations are the lessee of rules to operate under the more flexible the more creative the more you betrayed like a human just because you're able to do multiple things. Yeah. This brings me to what is a subject that keeps getting brought up nowadays is universal basic income with the oncoming. Yeah Apocalypse of automation. This is how it's being portrayed by Andrew Yang who's running for president. I sat down and talked to him about his very compelling and he's a very smart guy and he's an entrepreneur himself.
Often when he starts talking about Automation and how it's going to just eliminate massive amounts of jobs and leave people stranded. What do you went? I know you're a guy who thinks about the future and I'm going to recognize popular point of view on this. I don't I think it's a non solution to a known problem. Hmm. And I mean that in the sense that automation has been happening since the dawn of time man, electricity came along that put a lot of people out of work did it right A lot of people carrying buckets of water and you know lighting lamps and all those kinds of things and this was the concern with factories as well wraps everything literally every single thing that comes even the printing press. Absolutely and what it does is it frees people up for new creative work. So the question is not is automation going to eliminate jobs. There is no finite number of jobs when I'm like sitting around dividing up the same jobs that were around since the Stone Age. So obviously new jobs are being created and they're usually better jobs more creative jobs. So the question is how quickly is this transition going to happen and what kinds of jobs will be eliminated and what kinds of jobs will be created.
It's impossible looking forward to predict what kinds of jobs will be created. If I told you 10 years ago that podcaster was going to be a job or that, you know, playing video games going to be a job or commentating and video games going to get job you would have left me out of the room doesn't nonsense jobs, but yet here we are. So Society will always create a new job civilization creates new jobs, but it's impossible to predict what those jobs are. So the question is how quickly is that transition happening? Well, the reality is even though everybody keeps talking about this automation apocalypse where the record low unemployment explain that where's the transition Donald Trump? That's all right. All I'm saying is it's I don't see it in the numbers. I don't see it actually happening right question is how quickly can you retrain people? So it's an education problem the problem with Ubi there's a couple of problems that you bi one is you're creating a straight you quitting a slippery slide transfer straight into socialism, right? The moment people can start voting.
Some money combined with a democracy right? It's just a matter of time before the bottom fifty one votes themselves everything the top 49. Yeah, and it just it and buy a slippery slope fallacy is not a fallacy and I know people like saying that but they haven't thought it through but the moment you start having a direct transfer mechanism like that in a democracy, you're basically doing it with capitalism, which is the engine of economic growth. You're also forcing the entrepreneurs out or telling them not to come here the estimate I saw for 15K year basic income for everybody would be 3/4 of current GDP. And of course GDP was shrinking responses all the entrepreneurs fled. So you would essentially bankrupt the country another issued Ubi is that people who are down on their luck. They're not looking for handouts. It's not just about money. It's also about status. It's about meaning and the moment I start giving money to you and put you on the Dole. I've lowered your status. I've made you a second-class citizen. So I have to give you meaning and meaning comes to education and capability. I have you have to teach a man to
Fish not to basically throw your rotting leftover carcasses at him and say here eat the scraps. So it doesn't solve the meeting problem. And lastly it's nonsense the hand 15K out to everybody you want to means test people. There's no reason to give it to you and me so you end up back towards the welfare system where you do have to figure out who needs it and who doesn't so I think the better route is that we actually establish a set of basic substance services that you have to have and we provide those in abundance to technology-based automation. So get basic housing get basic food get basic Transportation get high speed internet access can phone in your pocket. Those are the kinds of things you want to give people and finally in terms of the rate of automation. I think we can educate people very quickly one of the myths that we have today is that adults can't be re-educated we view education is this thing where you go to school you come out when you're out of college and you're done no more education. Well that's wrong. You have all these great online boot camps and coding schools.
Coming up there ones that live in pay you to go there. Now, you can educate people and mass and you can educate them into creative professions people who are talking about AI automating programming have never really written serious code coding is thinking it's automatic stretch your thinking and AI that can program as well or better than humans is an AI that just took over the world. That's endgame. That's the end of the human species and I can give you arguments. Why don't think that's coming either people who are thinking and I know it take the opposite side from some very famous people in this debate, but we're nowhere near close to General AI not in our lifetimes. You don't have to worry about it. Even in our lifetimes really? It's so overblown. It's another It's a combination of Cassandra complex, you know, it's fun to talk about the end of the world combined with a God complex, like people who have lost religion. So they're looking for meaning and some kind of end of History, right? The reason why I don't think AI is coming anytime soon as because a
Of the advances in so-called AI today are what we call narrow AI the really pattern recognition machine learning to figure out like what is that object on the screen or how do you find this signal and all that noise? There is nothing approaching what we call creative thinking to actually model general intelligence you run into all kinds of problems first. We don't know how the brain works at all number two. We've never even modeled a paramecium or an amiibo. Let alone a human brain number three. There's this assumption that all of the computation is going at the cellular level at the neuron level where its nature is very parsimonious. It uses everything at his disposal. There's a lot of Machinery inside the cell that is doing calculations that is intelligent that is unaccounted for and the best estimates are would take 50 years of Moore's Law before we can simulate what's going on inside a cell near perfectly and probably a hundred years before we can build a brain that can simulate inside the cells. So putting it at saying that I'm just going to model neuron is on or off and then use that to build a human brain is overly simplistic.
Furthermore I would posit there's no such thing as general intelligence. Every intelligence is contextual within the context of the environment that it's in see if devolve environment around it. So I think a lot of people who are peddling General AI the burden of proof is on them. I haven't seen anything that would lead me to indicate we're approaching generally. I instead we're solving deterministic close-set finite problems using large amounts of data, but it's not sexy to talk about that. If you you're talking about mirroring the actual abilities of cells or are you talking about recreating the actual mechanism like what what what is going on inside cells and and biological organism? Yeah. We just don't know how intelligence works, right? We don't know whether we have no idea. So most of the way I approach has basically say we're going to try and model how the brain works. But the model at the neuron level which is saying this neurons on that neurons often combining their signal but I'm saying the neuron is a cell inside the cell there's
Machinery going on that's operating. The neuron that is also part of the intelligence apparatus. You can't just ignore that an abstract that out. You have to model it down to the inside the cell level. It's also a part of the biological organism itself hangs on and it has all these needs that you know, the biological organism has to have food and rest and exactly is a balance going on. But when you eliminate all that when there is none of that and it's just calculations and we get to a point where it's just this thing that we've created whether you call it a computer with it doesn't have to be a moving thing even but a thing that you've created that stores virtually all the information that's available in the world stall stores all the patterns of all the thinking of all the great people that have ever lived all the writers all the people that have ever published anything on the people that have ever spoken any words stores all of their points all of their counterpoints other contradictions applies logic
And reason and some sort of sense of the future and starts improving upon these patterns and then starts acting on its own based on the information that's been provided with where's well first, you would have to actually simulate a structure of the human brain that can hold all that information. You're basically talking about tens of thousands of brains worth of information, right? We can't even build one brain the next decade or two or three well in terms of an actual physical brain, yes, but what about something that recreates the abilities of a brain? Like I said nature is parsimonious. So we've got this three-pound wetware object that can hold all this data Nature has been very efficient and evolving kind of how we get there. I just don't think computers are anywhere close to that like that. It can hold that amount of data with that complexity would like the holographic structure of the brain work in recall in many many different ways. And then I don't think you can evolve a creature.
To be intelligent outside of the boundaries of feedback in a real medium. Like if you evolve if you grazed a human being a concrete cell with no input from the outside. They wouldn't have any feedback from The Real World. They were evolved properly. So I think just dumping information into into a thing isn't enough. It has to have an environment to operate in to get feedback from it needs to have context but isn't that biological? I mean what if you if you have just the all the information that people have accumulated and the lessons that people have learned and you program that into the computer like if if we can take a computer that can beat someone a chess. The real question was Will can we make some sort of an artificial intelligence could beat someone to go Which is far more complex a chest. They figured out how to do that too. And that was a giant shock right? These are still man-made very closed bounded games. They're they're not they're not on the road to the unbounded Game of Life. They are completely artificial, but this didn't go
Didn't that give you a little bit of a pause a little bit go is not go or League of Legends of fortnight. They're not completely deterministic. Right but they're still very artificial very bounded games being good at go doesn't mean that you can then suddenly figure out how to write great poetry. Right? The creativity for sure is something that's a creativity is the Last Frontier. So I do believe that automation over a long enough period of time will replace every non-creative job or every not creative work, but that's great news. That means that all of our basic needs are taken care of and what remains for us is to be creative, which is really what every human wants. Yeah. When what are you doing right now? This is a creative job sure that that brings us back to the idea of meaning and Universal basic income. I think the idea of giving someone $15,000 a year. It doesn't necessarily cause whatever whatever one would worry about is people being on the Dole.
You would have a bunch of listless people out there with no meaning in life. But the idea is that $15,000 a year and I'm not necessarily sure. I agree with this. I'm not even endorsing this but that $15,000 a year. We just provide you with a Necessities to get by in life. It would give you food will give you shelter. Let's look at a stop at 15 because the moment people are like I'm going to 15 like they're people demand more perhaps handers are beyond the 1675. These companies are too big. Yeah, that could be it doesn't it doesn't stop it. So it just goes all the way to bankruptcy. The concern is to slide to socialism. It's obvious. Yeah, I mean Heck if I was on if I was not working and I was getting my 15-year I would happily work for the guy who would give me 20 or 25. It's just common sense. What do you say to the people that don't believe that there is such a thing of ethical as ethical or compassionate capitalism. And there's many people today that are espousing Marxism and their espousing some sort of a socialist society where they believe that capitalism is screw people over and
Eliminated the middle class and they're absolutely problems of capitalism. I think monopolies are a problem. I think that crony capitalism is a problem with the government, you know, kind of gets in bed with them and sort of forces things. I think the bankers have really, you know, raped society and the rest of us are suffering literally. Yeah, they've essentially taking huge risks where they privatize the gains and the socialize the losses. So when it fails they basically get build-out and bankrupt everybody else. So capitalism has gotten a really bad name. Let's talk about is free exchange free markets free markets and free exchange their intrinsic to humans from when the first person started a fire and somebody came along with a deer and said hey if I cook my dear on your file share some of it with you, right? So specialization of Labor we trade that's built into the human species basic math comes from accounting keeping track of debts and credits and so on we need to be able to engage in free trade. The correct criticism of capitalism is when it does not provide equal.
And so we should always strive to provide equal opportunity but people confuse that with equal outcome. When you have equal outcome that can only be enforced through violence because different people free people make different choices and when they make different choices, they have different outcomes. And if you don't let them suffer the consequences of bad choices or reap the rewards from good choices, then you are forcibly redistributing through violence. It's interesting that there isn't there are no socialist working socialist examples that exist without violence you basically need someone to show up with a gun and say, okay you're not allowed to do that you hand this over to that person. So one of the reasons why this podcast is because I believe everybody can be wealthy everybody. It's not a zero-sum game. It is a positive sum game you create something brand new you exchange it with me for something brand-new. I've created there's higher utility for both of us. The sum of the value created is positive. It's not like status where it's like you're higher up. I'm lower down your Presidents. I must be vice president. You're a plus-one. I'm a minus 1 it has to cancel.
Zero we should all be all for playing positive some ethical games. The problem is because of these looters who have ruined capitalism's name that then you get socialist coming in and saying burn the whole system down right you burn the whole system down we end up like Venezuela or the former Soviet Union, you know, you don't want to be a fail socialist states with emaciated teens hunting cats in the streets to eat. Right? That's literally what happens in some of these places. So I think it's very important not to destroy the engine of progress that brought us here. Yeah, the idea that socialism just hasn't worked yet that it needs to the did. We just need to do it. Right? If we do it, right we can now if you ever had 200 million dead. Yeah, let's keep trying all over the world. Yeah and every single time it's been implemented the have you ever had a conversation with someone who's a socialist who were many times. So my better better friends are socially really we really get into it. Yeah. And what does that mean? Does anyone have a compelling perspective at all?
I think really socialism comes from the heart right y'all we all want to be socialist capitalism comes from the head because they're always cheaters in any system. Yes, and there's incentives in any system. So when you're young if you're if you're not a socialist, you have no heart when you're older if you're not a capitalist, you have no head right? You haven't thought it through so I understand where it comes from. I always liked Nassim taleb spray become this where he said with my family. I'm a communist with my close friends. I'm a socialist, you know at my state level politics. I'm a Democrat, you know higher levels. I'm a Republican and at the federal level and a Libertarian, right? So basically the larger the group of people you have massed together who have different interests the less trust. There is the more cheating. There is the better the incentives have to be aligned the better. The system has to work the more you go towards capitalism the smaller the group you're in you're in a kibbutz your commie and you're in your house you and your tribe by all means be a socialist with my aunts.
My brother with my cousins and my uncles and my mom but yeah family. I'm a socialist. That's the right way to live a loving. Happy Integrated Life. Yes, but when you're dealing with strangers, I mean you want to be a real socialist great open all your doors and windows tomorrow, please everybody come take what you want. See how that works out. Yeah this idea of income inequality that always strikes me as a very it's a deceptive term income inequality. Well, let's flip it around. It comes from outcome inequality. Yeah and the outcome inequality is there because you made different choices now again going back if it was because you don't have the same opportunities. That's a problem. Yeah. So Society should always try to give people equal opportunities. So for example, instead of basic income what if we had a retraining program built into our basic social fabric, which said that every four years or every six years or whatever it is. Maybe it's every 10 you can take one year out and we'll pay for you to go read.
And completely and you can go into any profession you like that has some earning power and output. Hopefully a creative long-term profession and you can re-educate yourself. That would be much better for Society on all levels than basically just saying no, you're going to be the Dole for the rest of your life Mmm Yeah. I just you'd have to lead that horse to water and then make him drink. It requires people to put in some effort. Yeah, you know, we can't all just sit around it's just not well that's my perspective on income inequality. There's always effort inequality and and thought inequality there's just some people that are obsessed and if those people become successful, it doesn't mean they stole from you. It just means that they put in the amount of energy and effort that was its required to reach where they're at. And there's a lot of rich is signaling that goes on now people say, well it's because you're privileged. Yeah. Well, you know what the greatest privileges you're alive 85% of humanity is dead. Yeah. So how privileged are you then you're living in the first world and you're you know, you have four limbs Etc. So you can take that argument all the way. It's kind of a nonsense discussion. What's a very weird Progressive argument and it
As it pertains to race is always a weird one, right because white privilege to me it although you could look at what they're saying on paper like yes. Yeah. I'm sure there's more black people that are harassed by the police. I'm sure there is more black people who are treated suspiciously by shop owners and the like but the problem isn't the people who aren't treated poorly. The problem is the people who treat the people poorly. The problem is racism. The problem is not people that didn't ask to be born white or whatever they are and they don't get harassed that so this idea of white privilege or male privilege or whatever it is. That's not the problem. You're you're just looking at someone who's not a victim of this particular problem that you're highlighting but you're not looking at the perpetrators of the problem. You're making people perpetrators by simply existing and having less melanin in their skin or having their
His company's racism by another it's another lady way like being racist. Yeah, and then they say you can't be racist you it's not racist because you're white. That's right. That is this hilarious. If you can't be racist against white people that one I thought this as a variation of the whole still while I hit you argument, you know, stop struggling while I'm hitting you but it's just so silly. You just completely changed what racism mean but what's hilarious is mostly the people who are yelling racist or not the minorities what I look on my Twitter or my social media or on my news, it's white on white violence virtue signal. Yeah. It's white on white violence. Yeah mostly going on is it's elitist whites Blue State whites college-educated whites beating up on high school-educated whites. Blue-collar. It's a white collar versus Blue Collar War that's going on and the rest of us are just kind of watching like us kind of interesting. Well, it's also a side effect of the ability to broadcast right like everyone with a Twitter handle has the ability to broadcast everyone with a Facebook page has the ability to pontificate and have these long rambling.
These huge statements that people put out when you read them. It's like how much time did you put in this? And what the fuck do you put that much time of your kids? Oh, yeah, but your job with your life or your future or planning for you. You know, what? How much do you work out a day? I mean you just these some I read some people's Facebook posts. I'm like, this is a Preposterous amount of effort that you put into saying virtually nothing. Let's say humans are being creative. Yes and a I do that. Well, that's true. It is create if it's creative in a very odd way, right because it's creative and that they're trying to elicit a response from people and they're trying to raise their there's social value or raise their position in the social totem pole. It's signaling and it's easy signaling because the kind of thing that everybody has to agree with you on because nobody wants to be seen as a horrible person. Yeah. It's a very hard to make the nuanced arguments against then it is just kind of go along right? Well, it's also it's some of it is so cliche that it seems like I know one guy who
Isn't some woman on Twitter, but he does it just well obviously, yeah, what is this the named Tatiana McGrath? Yeah, how you ever got real Wick? Yeah. So is that the same guy except? Yeah, that's hilarious. I did not think killed his account. They kills account for a hundred percent sure her pretending to be transracial. That's right. They did laugh. Yeah, he basically says all the crazy stuff. Yeah people on the left say but he says the craziest version. Yeah and kind of just shows how it's okay. It's like I think I saw a tweet from Recently just said or her that it's not okay to be white. Yes, and then some people agree but it's it's so close to what they say. It's so close that it's like the most Artful form of subtle parody because it like if you replace in half of these things if you replace the word white with black or Asian, well Mike, what's the Lynch Mob descent? Yeah. Yeah. It's it's a strange time in that respect that they save us.
If you want to see who rules over you see who you're not allowed to criticize. Mmm. Excellent. Yeah, that is a that's so true. Right? Yeah, that's so true. I wonder where this is going. I really do. I wonder because this is it seems like this newfound ability to broadcast that we have with with you have a YouTube page or whether you have Twitter whatever you're doing this newfound ability to spread whatever you're trying to say to so many people with very little understanding on the most part from what I think it's actually a great thing overall. Yes. I do not want means that any human can broadcast to any other human on the planet at any time. So for example, if you know a totalitarian dictator would have come to power and someone was beating up, you know had fascist beating up an old women like that would get broadcast out instantly there would be an instant outrage. He wouldn't cry rallying. So in that sense it helps bring attention to the plight of anybody, but right now,
Into the phase where we have this newfound power to assemble mobs and people don't know how to deal with that. So it becomes very easy to set up a mob and have it attack. Somebody take all the context out like even this conversation. I'm sure people will take out Snippets put him on social media and try and get somebody outraged of course and so you have to learn how first of all Society just has to get over this idea of outrage like to me like outraged people are the people get easily outraged the stupidest people in social media those the people I block instantly. It's just kind of very low level thinking right. These are the foots the these are the foot soldiers in the mob eventually Society just has to get over it. They have to understand that these are all Snippets being taken out of context. These are doctored video clips. These are just someone who's trying to get outraged over something.
Eventually, they will also be anti mob tactics like for example, if I go to someone's twitter feed and all it is is full of political ranting raving conspiracy theories. Do I want to work with this person do an associate with this person do only friends with this person. Their mind is just cluttered with junk now, I don't necessarily blame them. I think that the human brain is not designed to absorb. All of the world's breaking news 24/7 emergencies injected straight into your skull with clickbait headline news. If you pay attention to that stuff, even if your well meaning, even if your sound of Mind and Body it will eventually drive you insane. This is goes back to Clockwork Orange where he's you know, has his eyes opened up is forced to watch the news, but I think that's what's happening right now because these are addictive right believe in Twitter Facebook Instagram. These are weaponized you have social statisticians and scientists and researchers on people in lab coats literally best minds of our generation of figuring out how to addict' you too.
News. Yes, and if you fall for it, if you get addicted your brain will get destroyed and I think this is the modern struggle like the modern struggle. So the ancient struggle used to be the tribal struggle. You had your tribe of friends and family you had your religion you had your country you had your loyalty your nationality at least you had meaning and support but now you would struggle against other tribes Modern Life were so free. Everything's become atomized. We stand alone you live in your apartment alone. You live in your house alone your parents don't live near by your friends. Don't live nearby. You don't have any tribal meaning you don't believe in religion anymore. You don't believe in country anymore. It's fine. You got a lot of freedoms fantastic, but now when they come to attack you you're alone and you can't resist. So how do they attack you? It's all well-meaning. I don't fault capitalism. I love capitalism. But look at how it happened social media. They've massage all the mechanisms to addict' you like a Skinner pigeon or a rat who's just going to click click click click click. Can't put the phone down.
Food they've taken sugar and they weaponized it. They put it into all these different forms and varieties that you can't resist eating drugs, right? They've taken Pharmaceuticals and plants and they have synthesized them. They've grown them in such a way that you can't you get addicted. You can't put him down porn, right? If you're a young male you wander on the internet It'll like sap away your libido and you're not going out in Real Life Society anymore because you've got this incredibly stimulating stuff coming at you video games another way to Dick people. So you have this you have entire large factories of people that are working to addict' you to these things and you stand alone. So the modern struggle is an individual's learning how to resist these things in the first place drawing your own boundaries, and there's no one there to help you roof. That's terrifying. I mean it is I said my new road that needs to be navigated by young people that are there's no map. There's no guidebook on how to handle this. Our generation is the transition.
I think our kids will know how to handle it better because it will grow but I hope I hope I hope to use you're seeing some ridiculous behavior for people today. That's so common. I mean, I don't know if you've been paying attention to this but there was a guy who he made a video of turns out it wasn't even him that made the video at least that's not what he said, but it was a video where he sort of doctored Nancy Pelosi talking and made it look like she was drunk and then a bunch of people retweeted it like, oh my god, look she's drunk and and so one of the online Publications some website tracked him down and Doc's him and turned out he's just a day laborer who is an African-American Trump fan and thought it would be funny to do that and it turns out that he didn't even at least according to him. He actually just put it up on his Facebook page. What's even more disturbing is Facebook gave up his information to this website.
For what because he made something funny that made people seem drunk. There's a million of those about me. I mean, you could find them mean I think Facebook and Twitter and a bunch of these other social media platforms are committing slow-motion suicide through these kinds of activities. That was a stunning one though that they would give up this guy who's a labor because he made a parody video or a made someone look foolish with editing. Well, you're not have basically the media views it as their job to go after individuals. They don't like yeah, I used media with air quotes in that regard is I don't think this is something that the New York Times would have done us anything is possible but the media is getting more and more desperate right because what happened was before the internet you could have to local newspapers in every town and you could have two local news stations TV stations in every town and then CNN came along and started commoditizing the news 24/7 broadcast and then the internet came along that was the final nail in the coffin because what the internet did was it said actually if there's a fact that's news you can distribute that immediately it can go on Twitter it
Go on Facebook. It gets reprinted in Google News a thousand times. You know, you're going to Google News. You're like, okay, what's the piece of news which source and 3,000 other articles you many right? Yeah. So news has become commoditized. So the entire news media has shifted into peddling opinions and entertainment. Yes. And so now they've become a variation between like cheerleaders shock troops enforcers, you know Talking Heads. So these are now tribal these are not propaganda machines signaling for their tribes as a right-wing one is left wing one, right? There's the alt-right there's a control left and the two of them were just fighting it out using their various media organs in memes. So basically when you see one of these news organizations doxing individual that's like a tank running over Soldier. I mean, that's what's going on. It's just war and so there's no there's no such thing anymore Les a neutral media commentator the the illusion of objectivity that journalism had is lost. There's no longer one guy like a Walter Cronkite that everyone's in to listen to It's
All just shock troops fighting Wars with each other. How does this play out? Have you thought about it? Yeah a little bit. So what the internet does a lot of this is internet driven what the internet does is the internet creates one giant aggregator or two for everything one taxi dispatcher one e-commerce store one search engine one, you know one social media site for friends and family one for business Etc. So the internet is this giant aggregator where it creates one big hegemon for everything and it creates an atomized long tail of millions and millions of individuals. What it gets rid of is the medium medium sized ones in the middle. So, for example, you might have had like seven Hollywood Studios was all gonna be Netflix you had, you know, like ten large e-commerce players are Commerce players from Walmart Costco to you know, Kmart and whatever not just going to be Amazon and a ton of small.
Brands so that's the world that we're headed towards one hegemon and millions of individuals. So we're ends up long term is Media will be a few gigantic Outlets, you know could be the New York Times. It could be Facebook if you like that and there's going to be just a really long tail of millions of independent people. So this idea of who's a journalist and who's not, you know, it's Assange and journalists or not. Everyone's a journalist. That's the world that we're headed towards. I do think that extreme power the most powerful people in the world today and this is not well known but the most powerful people in the world today or the people who are writing the algorithms for Twitter and Facebook and Instagram because they're controlling the spread of information. They will literally rewriting people's brains. They are programming the culture and they're doing it very subtly like Google. I believe that, you know, one of their execs got up in front of Congress and the congressman asked him, you know, do you manipulate search results? He said no, we do not manipulate search results. Really that's your job. That is
Really? All Google does Google has one job which is to manipulate search results to pull him out of the noise and rank them properly and the out the precise algorithms of how they do that is very hidden very complex, but influences the hearts and minds of everybody including all the voters. Now if Google Facebook and Twitter have been smart about this, they would not have picked sides. They would have said we're Publishers whatever go through our pipes go through a pipes if it's illegal will take it down. Give us a court order. Otherwise, we don't touch it. It's like the phone company if I call you up and I say something horrible to you on the phone. The phone company doesn't get in trouble. But the moment they started taking stuff down that wasn't illegal because somebody's screen. They basically lost the right to be viewed as a carrier and now all of a sudden they're they've taken on liability. So they're sliding down the slippery slope into ruin slope into ruin where the left wants him to take down the right the right ones to take down the left and now they have no more friends. They have no allies traditionally the libertarian leaning Republicans and Democrats.
Stood up in principle for the common carriers, but now they want so my guess is as soon as Congress in this is this day is coming. If not already here. It might even been here today actually because this saw something related in the news the day is coming when the politicians realize that these social media platforms are picking the next president the next Congressman, they're literally picking and they have the power to pick so they will be controlled by the government in what way how do you think they're going to be controlled? We you think they're going to have to adhere to strict principles of freedom of speech. No, no first Organics and fortunately as head of the opposite direction right after I wish it was freedom of speech much more likely they're going to be in the short to medium term. They going to be hauled in for hearings. They're going to be pressured massively do this. Don't do that. My my concern about that is the hearings that I saw with Zuckerberg. Those people were completely incompetent. They don't seem to understand they don't but they're just applying pressure. They're just trying to scare him. So he will do what they want. And what do they want them to do?
I want him to basically suppress the other side. So if you're right wing, you want to suppress the left wing or left wing you want to suppress the right wing and if you just see where these companies are headquartered in Silicon Valley all the sensors and that's really what they are. There are sensors working inside these companies. They're just called The Call by different names obviously rights doublespeak you call it. The department defense was the department of War. So in this case the department of safety and Trust when really it's the department of censorship the sensors are inside Silicon Valley. So it's going to reflect silicon Valley's politics, which is extremely Progressive left ring. Yeah, and if you're not that you really have no place there's anything right try being a conservative and open conservative at Google. Good luck. Now you get lynched. Yeah, it's crazy. I mean, I don't think that there was ever a thing like that. That was so influential and so politically ideologically one-sided. Yeah. There's a there's a little saying on the internet think it's called Conquest law that any organization that's not explicitly
Of the right wing eventually becomes left wing and I don't know why that's true, but it does seem to me to be true. What's that? It's a fascinating battle that's going on right now me really is and conservatives in as far as social media is concerned. They're just getting chopped off at the hams left and right what will eventually happen is that whenever you suppress speech the organism metastasizes, then it has to start turning towards other means if you're unlucky goes towards violence, if you're lucky to find other outlets, I think what will happen is we will start creating decentralized media that's not owned by any single entity that can't be suppressed or shut down that will then start spreading these various things and that will take the place of Twitter or Facebook or what have you but it's going to take ten years twenty years. It's not overnight. Well, you know Twitter took 10 years to get to the point where it's at this mess right now, but it was so interesting to to have Jack Dorsey and to talk to him about where it's going where he thinks is go and then his own principles.
Which he believes that it's a fundamental, right? And he believes that freedom of speech is something that we all should have and that these platforms should essentially be like like utilities like the electric company Jack is correct and he has the right Vision. It's just he's in an organization where the other individuals in the organization feel differently very differently. So the organization itself can get hijacked and his timeline for changing things. It's like it's decades. I mean, I don't know I shouldn't say decades but I mean I was like, when do you think that something what there's a part that was one idea of having an uncensored Twitter like one Twitter? That's the wild west like you can have regular Twitter. All you could try Wild West Twitter like well that that already exists is in network called gab. Yeah switch Gap isn't even Wild West Twitter. They when people docks people they remove things like that. Yeah. I mean, I think there's certainly lines around violence and immorality that
One across but yes Gap is closer to free speech platform, but it's still not decentralize it can still get shut down. It's a good take it out. What's also suppress heavily? Yes, so that so there and the people on there right now are extremely right-wing so it's not a pleasant place for someone like me to hang out. What's all the people that have been kicked off of something. That's right. So that's right. Try going over there and being moderate try going over there. He's there's no room for you. Yeah, unfortunately because I don't identify as any party or any not read, you know, it doesn't work for me. Is that a problem in Silicon Valley when you don't identify as anything, did you get pressure it totally it used to be? Okay, it's not okay anymore. When was it? Okay, ten years ago. I would say it was okay and then you start seeing a shift. Yeah, and now you have to pick sides. Otherwise, you're automatically the enemy really a struggle sessions and all that struggle sessions. I'm exaggerating for effect, but it definitely has that oppressive feeling to it. Right and you also have to be politically outspoken. Yeah. It can't be something that you just stay neutral about right. It's like when Tim Ferriss
They get some point put out a tweet about how you can't just say anything anymore and you know, people are being suppressed and a whole bunch of people who love them from Silicon Valley piled in and said, what is it that you can't say? What are you afraid to say? You can say whatever you want him. Go ahead. What are you afraid of like beating? What was he trying to say? Wow, we have to put him in that box. What if someone who's thinking about saying something I shouldn't have said exactly now, we know one great tweet. I saw was, you know, the left one the culture wars and other just driving around shooting the survivors. Wow, that's hilarious. Yeah. I wonder I wonder who as has won the culture War the certainly a battle that's been one in terms of like control social media control. Social media is absolutely laughs. Well, this is unfortunate for conservatives. But technology is a force that also pushes left. So if you look all throughout human history, like the left is essentially grows and grows and grows, right? Why is that? Why is it inexorably that as some commentators have said Leviathan slouches left right from my Earth in is the government. Why does this
Left and I think a lot of that has been because of technology technology has made it so that it makes more like industrial revolution technology. We all band together. We're Ward's of the state right contraception is a technology that kind of helps lean left word. It takes away from the family unit abortion is a technology. It wasn't possible thousands of years ago. So technology actually empowers the individual the individual means that you have the breakdown of family structure and religion and all that and I'm not necessarily opposed to that but it does mean that there's a leftward shift to it. Now. We are getting a small set of technologies that actually can take you more right word encryption is an example because encryption makes it easier to have privacy. It makes it easier to have money that is outside of the state Guns 3D printing of guns and example of a technology that is more of a rightward shift, but generally technology leads the world left.
Yeah, it's also usually Highly Educated people that are involved in technology in the first place. And I think when you look at universities in particular, they tend to lean left in this country as well. Well universities what happened with University is very interesting University's first when you know became the arbitrator's of data and intellectualism and what's right and wrong so there's a time period when it was like should we be doing that or not? Well, let's look at the University. What do they have to say? What are the smartest people the professor's the think tanks have to say and the University's got this credibility from the hard Sciences. So they got this from you know, physics and math and computer science and chemistry because these deliver real things the Manhattan Project the microprocessor the space vehicles and so on the electric car, so they gain this mantle of authority and legitimacy from the hard Sciences. So then come the social sciences kind of
Can then you get economy economics and microeconomics is a real discipline real science real math behind it logic reason and then you get macroeconomics which can be politicized little bit more Voodoo. And then you get social studies and then you get gender studies and then you get blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah. And so what happened is that because we took scientists to be the high Priests of our new world science itself has gotten corrupted and the social sciences and you can tell they're fake science is because they're the word science tacked on at the end have come in and hijack the universities and become the new think tanks. And so essentially what you see going on today in the University's is a war between the social sciences and the physical sciences and the crossover point is biology right where you can see like the whole gender is a social construct movement is attacking biology and evolutionary biology just like in the social sphere that coming after the comedian's right, but you can see the struggle going on the universities and I would say the physical sciences are essentially losing that war.
What can be done or is it just something that has to play out? Is it do we have to realize the consequences of the foolishness? The good news is the physical sciences have a reality on their side. Yeah, but it's not even in many ways. It's not respected. Yeah, but you at the end of the day your aircraft still has to fly, you know, your microprocessor still has to compute. So there's only so far they can they can take it but I do see for example in biology. A lot of biologists are facing this difficult thing where they have to say things that they know are not true to keep their job. Like what? Oh, you had Brett Weinstein on here. Mmm, right so that's it. That's a clear example. So if there's just the crossover line of what is acceptable and what's not is entering into a biology and biology will probably suffer the most synthetic biology for example, will you know, a lot of this will end up in China because it won't be you won't be able to map facts and reality and actions together. You won't be able to get grants you won't
Well to get the adulation of your peers. I don't know enough here Sonam and shaky territory, but it's just my sense that that crossover Battleground right now is an evolutionary biology economics lost. Well it certainly in terms of gender and that that sort of that seems to be one of the major Battlegrounds. Yeah. It's also going to happen. For example Blank Slate Theory, you know, are we nature are we nurture its kind of socially unacceptable to say that, you know, a lot of it is nature and not nurture vice versa depending on which side you're on right those kinds of discussions get corrupted. They do get corrupted and it's really unfortunate because that's a unbelievably important thing to understand like what makes a person a sociopath what makes a person a super successful person a winner. What makes a person a drug addict. What are these factors? You can't have a reasonable conversation about climate science anymore, right? Not a science alternate a size 2 can't even bring it up. It's got there -
Made up already. Well, it's uncomfortable to me is people have their minds made up and they don't even have the data on most of these topics. People are talking past each other. Anyway talking about different things like when you get into, you know, when you when you get into gun control for example, right one side is talking about the right to bear arms in case a tyrannical ruler or King tries to take over the country. The other time the other side is talking about school shootings and you know protecting people in their homes right from crime. So they're just talking about two different things. Right and it's just not politically acceptable to even talk about the same thing or when you gets to immigration. The right is talking about, you know, the left is like bundling together illegal immigration and legal immigration into one thing. Yes, right. Where's in the on the right? Sometimes you got racist hiding in there. So it doesn't help their cause right there talking about two different things if they were talking about the same thing, which is how many immigrants should we let into the country and you know, what are the criteria for that? That would be a very different conversation.
Station then no immigrants are everybody comes in. And then also on the left, you know, you have this benefit that everybody who's currently coming in at legal. He's going to vote for the left because of where they're coming from and their socio-economic circumstances to me the test of any good system is you build a system hand it over to your enemies to run for the next decade. So for example, if you want to censorship on Twitter or Facebook, you should build that system and then hand it over to the other side to run. So if your left Winger who's promoting censorship, let somebody else running same with immigration. If you want immigration system build a system then hand it over to the other side to running. There's a you know, it's a good system. There's no room for nuance when you're dealing with these political Battlegrounds when you're dealing with right versus left and one side has a clearly established stance that you're supposed to take particular gun controls great example that right. There's no room for what about mental health? What about the fact that so many of these people
Or on psych medication, right? What why is that not being a Scott? We're running one of the greatest mental health experiments in history when we're building everybody up and ssris. Yeah, and you know, maybe if you give 30 million people ssris may be like twenty nine point nine million or a lot happier. And then you have a fraction that commit suicide or detonate. Yeah, you're basically trading the mean for the variance right? You have blow up risk. Yeah. There's no room for nuance which is why I stay out of politics largely do they drag you in though? Sometimes let's try I mean even conversation this conversation you get to get Dragged In sure but I'm sure there's going to be some people that here's the thing about politics because there we have a first-past-the-post system what that means is like whoever wins 51% of the vote in this country gets a lot of the power right? It's not like proportional representation where the greens have 10% and you know Libertarians of 3 percent or whatever. It's just like you're all Democrat in power now are all Republican because of that to win. You have to pick one of these two sides right you have you have to choose you can't just
You can't just make it you can't just basically say I'm going to be you know nuanced about it. You can't vote for a third party that's throwing away your vote. Right? I'm afraid of trying to fix that. I started this thing called a good party where like you kick start your vote. So you combine all your votes you hold them in reserve and then when you have enough to win, then you vote that person in power right? You don't do don't throw away your boat, but outside of those hacks. We're never gonna get a third party elected. So because of that all of your beliefs have to neatly fit into the Democrat bundle other Republican bundle. And so when you get into that tribe if you signal outside of that truck out of that bundle you get attacked. Yeah, so it's literally it's making you into an unclear thinker. It's making you into a muddle thinker if all of your beliefs line up into one political party, you're not a clear thinker if all your beliefs of the same as your neighbors and your friends, you're not a clear thinker, you're literally just your beliefs are socialized they're taken from other people. So if you want to be a clear thinker you cannot pay attention to politics it will destroy your ability to think.
But what dread look at the most of Modern Life all our diseases are diseases of abundance not disease of scarcity right old times. I may have starved. I'm you know both times if I got sugar that was a wonderful thing. I should have eaten all the sugar you get my hands on if I gotten a piece of news or gossip that was interesting data, that would have helped my life and move me forward if I'd gotten some brief amount of entertainment whether through video games or magazines or whatever that would have been good. Now, it's all diseases of abundance. We are Overexposed to everything. So the way to survive in modern society is to be an ascetic it is to retreat from society. There's too much Society everywhere you go Society in your phone Society in your pocket Society in your ears, you're being socialized right now by listening to this podcast. We're socializing you we're programming you everyone's trying to program everybody. The only solution is turn it off. The only solution is to turn it off and concentrate on your breathing meditation. Yeah. Yes. I mean that's works. It's been a lifesaver for me.
I do it and I do it whenever I get like spare time. I was at the doctor's office this morning and I knew it was going to be 20 minutes. So I just sat there with my eyes closed for 20 minutes and I meditated, you know, when I was growing up there was this statement. I think it was Pascal. He said, you know all of man's problems arise because he cannot sit by himself in a room for 30 minutes alone. And it's very true. I always needed to be stimulated. And when the iPhone came along boredom was dead, I would never be bored again everything from standing in line. I'm on my iPhone and I thought it was great. And when I was a kid, I used to try and overclock my brain back how many thoughts can I think it once the answer is only one but I would try to like think multiple thoughts at once and as you proud of that as proud that my brain was always running this engine was always moving and it's a disease. It's actually the road to misery and now that I'm older I realize that you actually want to again rest your mind. You want to learn how to settle into your mind and now I look forward to solitary confinement. You leave me alone for a day. It'll be like the happiest day I've had in a while.
And that is a superpower that I think everybody can attain the superpower of learning to be alone and enjoying it. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I think it's critical and I do think that this these times where you just think about things just be alone and think about things are so rare these days and I think during those rare times is when you really get to understand what you actually believe or don't believe. Yeah, it's funny when I first started meditating it was really hard right because everybody I think a lot of people who listen this broadcast ever heard of meditation that has a good reps. Everybody tries it this struggle the kind of give it up. It's one of those things that everybody says they do but nobody actually does right. It's like not eating sugar, right? Everyone talks about how yeah, I don't need sugar with like, yeah, then right then the dessert tray rolls around and everyone's going for the cookies. Yeah, right. Yeah, so it's become one of those thing and in fact, it's not even become a signaling thing where it's like, oh, how much did you meditate I meditate.
This much or you know, there are people now wearing headbands saying with Tweety Birds are chirpin them when they're in deep meditation. I don't know how they make it work, but they'll be like I got a lot of trips today. How many troops did you get? Oh my god. Oh, your meditation technique is wrong - right but really all it is is the Art of Doing Nothing. Okay, and it's important because I think when we when we grow up, right, it's all the stuff happening to you in your life and some of it you're processing some of your absorbing and some of it you should probably think a little bit more about and work through but you don't you don't have time so it gets buried in you and it's all these preferences and judgments and unresolved situations and issues and it's like your email inbox. It's just piling up email after email after email is not answered going back 10, 20 30 40 years. And then when you sit down to meditate those emails start coming back at you. Hey, what about this issue? What about that issue? Have you solved this? Do you think about that your regrets there? You have issues there and that gets scary people don't want to do that. So like it's not working. I can't clear my mind. I better get up.
Not do this, but really what's happening is it's self-therapy. It's just that instead of paying a therapist to sit there and listen to you you listening to yourself and you just have to sit there as those emails go through one by one you work through each of them until you get to the magical inbox zero and there comes a day when you sit down you realize the only things you're thinking about or things that happened yesterday because you've processed everything else not necessarily been resolved it but at least listen to yourself and that's when meditation starts and I think it's a it's a very powerful thing that everybody should experience and that's when you arrived upon the Art of Doing Nothing. Well, I think it's even a problem that most people are getting their meditation from a nap. I will not use a nap. It's Sneaky. I mean Sam Harris is a very good meditation app. I should say that but you should be able to just do it and many people can't it is literally The Art of Doing Nothing. Yeah. All you need to do for meditation is just sit down close your eyes comfortable position, whatever happens happens. If you think you think if you don't think you don't think don't put effort into it don't put effort against it all you
Do you concentrate on your breath or do you have a specific technique? Nothing nothing now? Is this a set you just sit? I think about my breath. That's all I do. I just try to only concentrate on breathing. I used to do that but it some level all the concentration every meditation technique is leading you to the same thing, which is just witnessing. Yeah and concentration is a technique to steal your mind enough that you can then drop the object of concentration. So you could also just try going straight to the end game the problem with what I'm talking about, which is not focusing on your breath is you will have to listen to your mind for a long time. It's not going to work. Let's do at least an hour a day and preferably at least 60 days before you kind of work through a lot of issues so it'll be hell for a while. But when you come out the other side, it's great. You get rid of the chatter.
Or when the chatter comes it's in the background, it's dimmer. It's smaller. You've heard it before you see the patterns. It's more recent. It's something you need to resolve any way and you will get moments of actual silence. What is your what's your ultimate State when you meditate like is there a state where you've achieved rarely if ever where you just you you're in Bliss or you're in harmony or you're an Enlightenment like with its kind of a kind of indescribable because when you're really meditating you're not there when there's no thoughts. There's no experience or there's nothing there's just nothing so it's hard to describe but I would say that it's like a you can definitely in every psychedelic state that people encounter using so-called plant medicines can be arrived at just through pure meditation and I've definitely had some of those States you've hit some Transcendent psychedelic states where you're usually eating the whole deal.
Had trippier visuals. I've had the kind of the lights and colors. I'm helping the so-called downloads. I've had the realizations. I've had the Bliss. So I've had the light of at the colors but not every time no it's rarely. And in fact, I would say that's a that's a that's also like an experience that you can start craving which will then actually take you out of meditation where you really I am not enlightened or anything close to it. So not even the ballpark but my own experience in this is just personal experience is the place where I end up the most that is really the one that I want to be at is peace. Hmm. It's just peace peace happy. Yeah peace to me peace is happiness at rest and happiness is kind of peace and motion. You can convert piece to happiness anytime you want but peace is what you want most of the time that's interesting. You can convert piece to happiness and time you want. Yeah, if you're a peaceful person anything you do will be happy activity.
Hmm and by the way, being on social media engaging politics will not bring you peace. There is nothing less peaceful. Right and they won't today's day and age the way we think you get peace is by resolving all your external problems, but there's unlimited external problems. So the only way to actually get pieces on the inside by giving up this idea of problems who thinks you can get Peace by resolving external problems other than politicians everybody. That's what everybody's struggling to do. Right? Why are you trying to make money to solve all your money problems? Hmm, why try to win a politics because then you'll be at peace because your people will have one who it's a daunting task to get your shit together. It's easier to change yourself in a change the world that's true and the best way to change the world is to change yourself. Exactly. It's all yeah, it's all these people who are shouting on social media. The best way is just to actually live the life that you want other people to live. Like, I went out in New Zealand and there's this guy that I met with and you know, everyone's on social media
Shouting about environmentalism and conserve and sustain and I go to this guy's house and he was doing a very quietly very gently. He was doing a two week long zero waste experiment where he was throwing out nothing. So every package that he opened he would keep and he would like clean it up so he could keep his Amazon boxes or keep the look at him a tea bag. If you open the tea bag he has to figure out how to compost the tea inside how to make the tea itself useful how to make the tea bag like a little storage item. So there was no trash he was literally living with 0 trash waste and he was doing it and it was really inspirational meeting people like him made me far more environmentally conscious then you know any amount of people yelling at me on social media ever. Will how long did he do that for? I think it was two weeks. It was hard. What the fuck you gonna do with tea bags. He had quite the collection its EU actually filling them with little things. He sounds like a crazy hoarder like a hoarder person was facts of tea bags in his house. Very impressive. Yeah, that's a strange way to go about things.
Appreciate it. I mean look it is entirely possible to somehow or another engineer all of our cups and all of our things and all are about to be biodegradable it had you know, the struggle with the modern environmental movement is that they identify the correct problem which is finite or worth spaceship or at this is only God don't ruin it, but they don't have the solution. So what they say is no growth no growth. No growth on the problem is you got three billion Indian and Chinese who aren't going to stay in poverty. They're gonna throw whether you like it or not. So you can yell at them you can scream at them. You can yell at us and scream at us, but that's not gonna happen. So the only way out unfortunately is again through technology, which is you have to build green technology and I give musk a lot of credit, you know for being one of the few people who's out there trying to do that. So you build things that are biodegradable and good for you and healthier and everybody wants to be healthier Chinese want to be healthier Indians want to be healthier. They want to be cleaner. If you say I can clean up your Rivers I can clean up.
Your forests I can have your children not get sick with cholera and diphtheria and typhoid. I can cure your diseases that can help make your immune system stronger. I can give you clean drinking water like that is what causes people to become environmentalist not shouting and screaming at them that they shouldn't grow and they should stop pumping things into the sky and you know, they have no concept of that. They're trying to get out of poverty. So I think the modern environmental movement identifies the correct problem, but then doesn't come up with the right set of solutions that are appealing to people people are not going to give up the economic growth. They're going to have to get rich first. Mmm. That's yeah, that's a very good point. But how do you do? How do you do both you lower the price of creating clean Technologies massively. So you basically make clean Technologies cost-competitive to subsidy Technology Innovation. Ideally, you can subsidize in the short to medium term until the Innovation curve is crossed. I mean like Tesla doesn't have any patents, right? Right. Are they
Freely, give away their patents. That's the example of how you can do it. So, you know someone in if you want to get rid of plastic such straws. Yeah, you can do it here and there you can get San Francisco to ban plastic straws, but China's not going to blend ban plastic straws not until you build a paper straw that is, you know, same cost good durability. And then you in the new educate and Chinese like hey, this is petroleum, you know this plastic that your dream is patrolling. This is bad for you. Here's the chemical composition. Here's the things that are going into the bloodstream and they want healthy happy kids also, so they're going to have their kids use paper straws maybe straws aren't the best example, but you can you know, this is true with fossil fuels for example, that's that's probably the best one or replacing a lot of plastics and glass and paper and so on. Yeah, there's a new technology. That was just Rhonda Patrick out under Twitter today about they're able to convert plastic waste into Fuel and that there's companies that are actively trying to do that now, so then in that way
Race will become valuable right? It'll become a commodity it would become something that people are resource. Now. There are certain problems. This doesn't solve this doesn't solve carbon. This doesn't solve deforestation, you know, so there you kind of have to step in with other means so for example, you look at the Amazon, right? Everyone's complaining about the Amazon being deforested. Well, you're not the poor Brazilian farmer, right? So you're sitting here and you're comfortable chair like social media hammering away at you know, the evil Brazilians for deforesting the Amazon, but the Amazon has incredible resources. If we really care about it. We should turn it into an incredible tourist Park and put your money where your mouth is start doing ecotourism in the Amazon start paying for it. And then maybe take the future rights for all the Pharmaceuticals that are to come out of all the incredible plants there and start selling those off so that people so that maybe give the pharmaceutical companies an incentive to preserve the biodiversity the Amazon say, hey, if you buy this patch of the Amazon you can serve it and you can serve it whatever plant medicines that come out of there that you can then license you get the patent for 20 years or 30 years or whatever.
So I think there are solutions where we as the first world leaders who have money can put our money where our mouth is and go and rescue these kinds of properties. That's a very interesting solution, but I could see immediately pushback from people that don't think the pharmaceutical company should have the rights to this natural plant orders or the or the government. Does it in the government gets the patents and the government will auction off the patents later or they'll worse or the licensing or whatever it is. Right? Well, that's the often like just this the often the problem is there is no really good solution. There's a bunch of solutions that also have drawbacks. That's life. Yeah, that's a trade-off. So that's being a human. Yeah, very messy. Yeah. It's a constrained environment. Obviously. I skew more towards a private property capitalist type Solutions because even though they're not perfect. They have been proven to actually work right when something is your property you take care of it. Yeah, you're not going to you're not going to crap all over your own house, but it should probably be temporary property.
Permanent property you see a lot of countries in the world not doing this no foreign ownership of land thing. For example, or Mexico has no private ownership of beaches, right? So you can draw the line at certain points. Yeah. Do you enjoy doing this kind of thing where you break things down and give your perspective on things and try to illuminate certain complex subjects. I'm not trying to illuminate so much as you know talking to you. I learned as much as I say and I learned it for myself because I'm being forced to articulate it. I can sit around and think my thoughts all day long, but it's a lot of it's going to be nonsense. It's not I'm going to consider their gaps in thinking where you make leaps because you're kind to yourself that you don't realize you're making but when you're forced to write it down and this is why I tweet or when your have to talk to somebody you have to complete those gaps and make it a proper logical chain and the mistake that I made when I was young was, you know, I was want to seem like the smartest kid in there.
You know, like just like you probably want to seem like the funniest kid in the room where the toughest kid in the room, right? We're all losers starting out. We want to be a winner. So we picked the thing. We're good at and we double down on it. So I was one of the smartest kid in the room. So what did I do? I read a lot of books. I memorize a lot of things and then whatever I hadn't memorized is pretty Google. I made it up. So it's Hanukkah. Okay, very cool after Google fact-checking started and I have to get better. Right? So Google improve me that way a lot of people exactly. So now what I realize is that the biggest mistake was memorization, right? Because when you're actually trying to live your life in congruence with reality, you you want to have a deep understanding of what you do and why you do it and so it's much more important to know the basics really. Well that is to know the advanced knowing calculus wouldn't help you today doesn't help you in business doesn't help you in most things but doing arithmetic really will help you really whether it's at the Corner Grocery Store counting change to figuring out the value of your podcast business to figuring out how to do the probability math on
Some action that you want to take so understanding basic mathematics cold is way more important than memorizing calculus Concepts and the problem is and this is true of I think all reasoning it's much better to know the basics from the ground up solid foundation of understanding a steel frame of understanding that is to just have a scaffolding. We just memorizing advanced concepts. This is why there's a lot of people I'm sure that you listen to who are really smart. They use a lot of jargon and you can't quite follow their reasoning. You don't know how they're putting things together and you this deep-down suspicion to a don't even really understand. So if you look at the the most powerful thinkers, especially the ones where money or life is on the line, they have to understand the basics really really well Richard feinman the famous physicist was able to he had this piece in one of his lectures where he takes you from counting numbers on your hand all the way to calculus in four pages of text in the orally but written down is four pages of text and it's a complete unbroken logical chain that takes you through geometry.
Trigonometry precalculus analytic geometry graphs everything all the way to calculus. He understood numbers at a core level. He didn't have to memorize anything when you are memorizing. It's an indication that you don't understand you should be able to re-derive anything on the spot. And if you can't you don't know it. So do you apply that to things other than mathematics and related to everything everything don't even make attempt to memorize things just make an attempt to understand them. You can't help but memorize things right if you can't and this is where Twitter is great for me as I try to understand something and then I try to write it down in such a way that I could remember it just to brace hook that will Point towards the deeper understanding and I'm forced to explain it to people and that's how I know. I understand something. So this is what I meant. Originally we talked about reading a good book. I'll read one page in a night and then I'll spend the rest of the night thinking about it or I'm chasing down references and Wikipedia or weird blog post trying to understand it.
You know, so for example, there was a I was dealing with this is a few months back. I was dealing with a question of stupid topic but the meaning of life, right? What's the mean? How could that be stupid though? Well, it's right. It's right. You're not supposed to think about it. It's something you ask your parents when you're young they tell you don't worry about it, or they still get a job. Yeah. Exactly. Good job, you frickin hippie or hears. God God is the meaning of life, right? And so I was just trying to resolve for myself. Like what could the answer be right not what is the answer but what could the answer be? And so at a core level? I was forced to kind of hunt down all these weird little things and really understand for myself. It's gotta be personal right but as the established for myself what it could and could not be and that gave me some level of Peace. So now I have to keep asking that question of what is the meaning of life.
I mean you should I think the question is more interesting than the answer everyone should explore this on their own but let me just explore a few parts with you. Right? So first is if I gave you an answer if I said the meaning of life is to please God. Well, which God okay. Judeo Christian God. Well, okay why that one why this thing the problem is, it's a why question you can keep asking why forever right? Any answer I give you you'll just ask why again? Why again like a kid? That's right and you end up in a place called Agrippa stroll Emma. Okay, this is a philosophical exercise, but I kind of thought it through then Googled around and there's a thing called a grip has troll Emma and a group of astronomers says that any questioning like this y will always end in one of three places. Okay. First is infinite regress, right? Why because of this why that what in this keep going forever. The second is circular reasoning. Well a ya because it b y b because of a you're trapped in that or the third is an axiom and the
Popular Axiom is God but it could be anything because of math because the science because the Big Bang because the simulation right? These are all axioms. These are all just stopping points saying simulation. We're in a simulation or saying it's the big bang is just another way of saying God, it's just God's a dirty word. So we don't use it as much anymore but same thing so you end up in one of these three dead ends essentially, right? So there is no answer. The real answer is because right. What is the meaning of life? Yeah, you get to make up your own answers the beauty if there was a single answer we would not be free. We would be trapped because then we would all have to live to that answer then we be Borg like robots each one competing with each other to fulfill that single meaning more than the others back to signaling like I'm better at than you are but luckily there is no answer. So you just do whatever you want the meaning of life. It's funny that
That what let's the basis of all existential angst that you don't you don't know why you're here and you have this feeling that it could be meaning less it is. I mean if you when you start pondering the Multiverse the universe the galaxies the solar system the planet the organism the cells inside the organism the bacteria the parasites the symbiotic relationship we have to our environment and you start going Jesus Christ. What am I just a little piece of this thing? It's like well the answers to all the great questions our paradoxes. Yeah. So for example, you're asking like do I matter? That's like really the question you asked right? Well, how do I matter in this infinite Universe? Well, you know on the one hand you're separate know two points are the same every point is every two points are infinitely different. You're completely separated. No one will have your thoughts your emotions your feelings your experience. So your life is a single-player game you're trapped inside your head and you're just aware of a bunch of things going on.
That's it on the other hand. I cannot say the words Joe Rogan without invoking the entire universe Joe Rogue. Alien comes along says, what's that? Joe Rogan? What's Joe? Rogan's a human? What's a human bipedal ape? What's an ape on the earth? What's the Earth planet? What's a planet solar system? Where was the carbon made inside starts? Right? It's a I have to create the entire universe to just say the words Joe Rogan. So in that sense, you're connected to everything. It's Inseparable. So the answer to that question of do I matter is I am nothing and I'm everything and you'll find this with all the great questions. The answers are all paradoxes, which is why it's some level it's sort of pointless to pursue them to find eight right answer like I'm giving but the act of pursuing them is actually really useful because then it gives you certain intrinsic understanding in your life that brings a level of peace.
I feel like there's with many people this stress of this question is also accentuated by unhappy lives. It's on Section accentuated by unhappy choices by being trapped. There's a big difference between not knowing what the meaning of life is and God I got to get the fuck out of this job. I have to I can't live my life this way. What's the meaning of life if this is my life, which is why I always start with let's get you rich first hmm. That's why very practical about it because look, you know Buddha was a prince. Okay, he started out really rich and then he got to go off in the woods and in the old days. What happened was if you want it to be peaceful inside' you would become a monk. You would renounce everything you would become an ascetic. You would give everything up you renounce women men, you'd renounce children, you'd renounce money. You do nounce politics science technology everything and you would go out in the woods by yourself you to give everything up to be free inside. Well today we have this wonderful invention called money, or you can just store stuff up in her bank account.
And you can basically save you can you can work really hard you can do great things for society and Society will give you money for giving it things that it wants and it doesn't know how to get and then you can save that up and you can live well below with your means and you can find a certain freedom in that and that will give you the time and the energy to pursue your own internal peace and happiness. So, I believe the solution to making everybody happy is to give them what they want. Let's get them all rich Let's get them all fit and healthy and then let's get them all happy is are those things even possible can ever leave everyone can be rich everyone can be right everyone. Here's my thought exercise for now. It seems like we're in an infomercial. Everyone can be right not selling any my home. This is my Rolls-Royce. Yeah, so that's a good point. So everything that I've ever created on this topic of how to make money. I will never charge a dollar for hmm because that would ruin it that would show that I'm just another huckster who's gonna get rich off of you. There are no get-rich-quick schemes. That's just somebody else trying to get rich off of you. Right? So it's
So to me, it's more of a philosophical contribution where for it to have beating and to be legit. You can't charge you anything for it. But yes, everybody can't be rich and let me give you a thought exercise. Okay, imagine if tomorrow we could wave a wand and everybody was trained as a scientist or an engineer everybody. Even if you weren't very good you had enough understanding computers. You can write some code you could build some hardware and don't tell me people can't do it because they can that's just a tourney of soft expectations. That's just you looking down on somebody else they can do it. They just have to be educated now if they're educated all this Hardware software Engineers scientists biologists technicians hard Sciences, not the social sciences. We would all be done within five years robots would be doing everything from cleaning toilets to cooking food to flying airplanes and driving lubbers and what we will be doing we would be doing all creative jobs to entertain each other and researching Science and Technology. We would have wonderful lives. So it is really just a question of Education nothing else.
Is this a scale issue though? I mean you're talking about it as if this would work with 300 million people it'll work with 10 billion people. It'll work really spacefaring race with a hundred trillion people. Just we have the resources. We have the ability. The universe is infinite resources, you build it, you know, have you heard of a Dyson Sphere, you know, you pull the Dyson Sphere on a star and you gather all its energy like that. There's so much energy out there one asteroids got all the minerals that we need one son one solar system has got all the power we will need for a long long time. You know, we can extract it of nuclear fusion, you know, we're not that far from those kinds of Technologies working. It's just a question of gut and you know and interest like we should be building nuclear fusion test plans on the Moon. The Moon should be littered with thefts. No downside, right? Yeah, if you could how would that work? Well, it is a send a bunch of people up there to work on the problem with robots the problem with fission nuclear fission. Is that nature?
Creates energy through nuclear energy, right like the sun creates energy nuclear energy. Now for transmission with these photons because photons don't interact and so photons are great for information transmission, but they're actually not great for energy transmission for energy creation you want nuclear to work and the problem is because nuclear energy, you know, we built it with a bomb we have dirty nukes all those kinds of problems with Fukushima Three Mile Island Chernobyl. We don't innovate anymore nukes. Imagine if when the first steam engine blew up we said Oh No More Steam Engines for a while, right very carefully regulated billion dollars or regulation. You can't innovate that way when the first airplane crashed. We said no more innovation in their planes, right? So we need a way to iterate on nuclear fission and eventually fusion and get them working safely. Cleanly passive say failure Etc. If we're going to find our way out of the energy trap and the best place to do that is someplace like on the moon or Mars. Do you think there's actually a possibility that they could
Get nuclear power to the point where it's not a detriment because what everyone's worried about is a meltdown, right? And we do have these old plants that are running that are running on this. This is 50 year old technology. It's crazy because they there's no ability to shut them off right very old technology. They do now have Jen for nuclear reactors that are passive failsafe. So in other words when they fail they fail into a pull the plug on them, they fell into a state where there's no leakage that little problem right there default is a positive outcome as opposed to the current ones. The old ones were if you unplug them like and these Stephen these Jen for our justjan for they're not gen5 and I just sat Jen hundred where we are microprocessors, right? And that should be something that people are working towards I hope so. I mean, I'm an Ideal World we would just now the problem is if you have nuclear energy on the moon how to get it home, right? So what you actually got to do is you gotta rev it on the moon and you're using it there may be to launch more satellites more Rockets further out into the solar system and that's the initial use
Is but then eventually the technology gets so good. You can bring it home. Now. I want to go back to this idea of getting people Rich that somehow or another that's going to make people happy with how do you stop that? The natural progression that people have of you know, oh, you know, I have got a nice Chevrolet. Yeah, but I really want to BMW. I've got a nice BMW but now I want a Mercedes I have mercy I want a Ferrari. How do you stop that material possession trap? Because you can't at some level but I think most smart people over time. We realize that possessions don't make them happy night. It's just you have to go through that. You have to buy your stupid car to realize that it doesn't attract attractive girls that actually just attracts other dudes who are like hey, I like the car man, right? Like you have some expensive cars out there. Some fancy cards. Tell me how you know how much that attracts women versus men. Well marry, those are for me. No, I just enjoy machines. Yeah, so that neither
Toys that's a particular thing. We enjoy machines, but I think very as you get older you just realize that there's no happiness in material possessions. Now lack of material possessions can make you very unhappy. Yeah. So being poor can make you unhappy but being rich is not going to make you happy and what happens in fortunes a lot of people struggle through their whole lives to make money. They make some they're exhausted and then they're like well now why am I not happy? I guess I'm just not a happy person and smart. People are happy. That's like a great little way to people feel better about it. They say well if you're smart, you're not happy, right? Where's I positively the other way if you're smart, you should be able to figure out how to be happy. Otherwise, no not that smart. Yeah, that is an offensive statement that if you're smart, you're not happy. I've heard that before and I just do not understand the logic that other than self-justifying. I understand where it comes from it comes from if you're smart is usually because you thought things through and you were very busy mind. Yeah and so busy mind can often rob you of peace of mind because what the piece that we seek is not peace of mind. It's peaceful.
Mind right. So if you look at all the crazy activities you do to be happy right? Whether it's like trying to get laid and have an orgasm or you know, extreme sports or looking at something beautiful or taking a psychedelic. You're trying to get out of your own mind. You're trying to get your monkey mind to stop chattering at you for a moment. You're trying to get piece from the mind and there are other better ways to do that most of the ways we try to get peace from mind are indirect. Whereas if you understand things if you see things properly you will naturally slowly develop piece from mind. Hmm. So if I went on a tangent there no, it's a good tangent. It's a good tangent because I think that oftentimes the pursuit is what's thrilling to people and the possibility that one day they'll be able to rest and that they'll Reach This goal. That's the fundamental delusion that there is something out there that will make me happy people forever. Yeah golden years. There is called death. Oh
I'll take care of everything. That's the great leveler. But when people look at particularly social media with bring back to that when you see someone who you know, you see them posed in front of their mansion with their beautiful car and they're leaning against it with her designer clothes on their expensive watch. He I want that that's what I want. What you really want is freedom you want freedom for your money problems, right? And I think that's okay. So people once someone can solve their money problems either by lowering their lifestyle or by making enough money and you know it essentially what you want to get everybody to the retirement but not retirement in the I'm 65 years old sitting in a nursing home collecting a check retirement different definition retirement is when you stop sacrificing today for some imaginary tomorrow. Hmm. Yes when today is complete in and of itself you're retired. Yeah, and so, how do you get there? Well one is you can have so much money.
Saved up that just your passive income off of that without your having to lift a finger covers your burn rate. Keep your burn rate. Low, right a second is you just drive your burn rate down to zero you become a monk. A third is you're doing something you love you. Enjoy it so much. It's not about the money. Right? So there are multiple ways to that path. But the most common is people to say I need to make more money and the kind of wealth creation that I talked about is about creating Timeless principles and adapting yourselves that make money won't be an issue and you can do it by doing what you love right? Like we get into this model of I must work for other people work my way up the ladder. I must like do what that person is doing to make money, but really today in society you get rewarded for Creative work for creating something brand new that Society didn't even know yet that it wanted that doesn't know how to get other than through you. So the most powerful money makers are actually individual brands people like yourself or Ilan or Kanye or Oprah or Trump, right? These are individual Brands eponymous name brands.
Who themselves are leveraged like you're leveraged you have pride cast media going out to everybody that's leverage the podcast work for you. And you sleep they have knowledge that. Nobody else has which is your knowledge is the knowledge of being Joe Rogan. I mean who else is a UFC fighter and a commentator and podcaster and a comedian and you know interested in all these things in those all these people can't replace you so we have to pay you what you're worth and was I never fought me off see though. Oh, you didn't okay, sorry, or you know, your whatever you're involved in that whole scene. You just have a unique set of skill sets. So because of this unique what I call specific knowledge because of the accountability that you have with your name because the leverage that you have through your media your money-making machine your I'm sure at this point I could make you start over tomorrow wipe out your bank account you'd be rich again in no time because you have all the skill sets. So once people have those skill sets and the beauty is the way you've done it is you don't have any competition. There's no substitution. If Joe Rogan were to disappear off the air tomorrow. It's
Like random podcast at number 12 with step in and fill that thing. No, it's just gone. So the way to get out of that competition trap is actually to be authentic. The winner retire is actually to find the thing that you know how to do better than anybody and you know how to do that better than you because you love to do it. No one can compete with you. If you love to do it be authentic and then figure out how to map that to what Society actually wants apply some leverage put your name on it. So you take the risks, but you gain the rewards have ownership and equity in what you do and then just crank it out. I think people have to be very careful to not get trapped along the way with things that you can afford with your current lifestyle like the way you're living in the the way you're earning but they're also imprisoning you in the fact that you are now going to have to work this 40 hour week job in order to get this thing that you can afford but now you are saddled down to this job you have no you're not saving you're not you're not putting things in a good place and you're working for these things.
Working for things as rewards is a real trap that a lot of people fall into it's the biggest one Nassim taleb also says that there are two great addictions heroin and a monthly salary. Hmm, and that's why you can't get rich renting out your time because even when you start charging more and more for your time, it's a slow upgrade Loop and then you upgrade your house the same time the car at the same time you move in the neighborhood. You really also have to get used to ignoring your peers or upgrading or changing the definition of your peers a lot. A lot of people here who are poor here, but there would be rich if they were living in Thailand in Bali and if they have the luxury of a remotely doable job, they may want to be living there and saving up money, but the ignoring the peers is an issue because the keeping up with the Joneses is a real phenomenon. Yeah, and he makes the world go round. Yeah, and then there's this other thing that people have to avoid even allowing their mind to think when they're hearing what you're saying and you all this logic
Fantastic advice there's the six dirty words, that's easy for you to say. Yeah, that is a terrible trap. Look, I grew up as a first generation immigrant in Jamaica Queens with zero money single mom two kids working day and night go to school. You know, I watch dishes I was kid. I was working catering jobs. I was Mowin Lawns. I was working since the age of 11 on and off here and there then I have two cents to rub together. You know, I had to borrow $400 to go to college like literally, I'm short $400 400 had to find $400 and have it, you know got rejected from a job at Dunkin Donuts. Like okay, it's not to say that it's easy. It's not easy. It's not actually really freaking hard. It is the hardest thing you will do but it's also the rewarding thing, you know, look at the kids who are born rich no meaning to their lives. You're terrible Place. Yeah. Yeah, you're real.
You're real resume is just a cataloging of all your suffering. All right, if I were to ask you to describe your real life to yourself and you look back on your deathbed, you're gonna go back and say what are the interesting things I've done and it's all going to be around the sacrifices that you've made in the hard things that you did anything. You're given doesn't matter. Yeah, you you have your four limbs. You have your brain. You have your head you have your skin yet? That's all for granted. So you have to do hard things any way to create your own meaning in life making money is a fine one. Yeah struggle. It is hard. I'm not going to say it's easy. It's a really hard but the tools are all available. It's all there. There's also these traps that people sort of establishing their own mind of giving themselves excuses or giving themselves in unsurmountable obstacles insurmountable paths, Victoria mentality. Yeah, somebody else's fault. It's my father's fault. It's the system's fault. Yeah. Those people are sinking. I feel bad for them. I want to shake them out of it and say,
Actually, you can get out of it. You just have to stop thinking it's everybody else all to the perspective. Yeah, it's so difficult for people to do. It's one of the most difficult things for people to do is to change the way they approach approach reality itself at the end of the day. I do think even despite what I said earlier life is really a single player game. It's all going on in your head. You know, whatever you think you believe will very much shape your reality both from what risks you take and what actions you perform but also just everyday experience of reality if you're walking down the street and you're judging everyone you're like, I don't like that person because their skin color I don't like that that now she's she's not attractive that guy's fat. This person's a loser. Oh who put this in my way, you know, the more you judge the more you're going to separate yourself and you'll feel good for an instant because you'll feel good about yourself. I'm better than that, but then you're gonna feel lonely and then you just going to see negativity everywhere the world just reflects your own feelings back at you reality is neutral.
Reality has no judgments to a tree. There's no concept of right or wrong or good or bad. Right? You're born. You have a whole set of sensory experiences and stimulations and lights and colors and sounds and then you die. Yeah and how you choose to interpret that is up to you. You do have that choice. So this is what I meant that happiness is a choice if you believe it's the choice, then you can start working on it and I can't tell you how to find it because it's your own conditionings that are making you unhappy so you have to uncondition yourself. It's just like I can't fix your eating habits for you can use some general guidelines, but you gotta go through the heart habit-forming of How to Eat Right, but you have to believe it's possible and it is absolutely possible. I was miserable. I'm happy as a clam. It's not just the money. I got there before the money you got happy before the money. Mostly. Yeah. How did you get happy before the money? I started getting older. You know, I just realized like life is short. I'm going to die again. Try try. Try it in many ways. Yeah. Well Confucius had a great saying that, you know, every man has two lives and the second starts when he realizes he has just one.
Wow, and I read that it was one of those book dropping lines, you know, it's like mic drop Confucius had a lot of Mike drops fuchsias is a bad motherfucker you eyes that's a crazy one. That was a great one or another one is next time you get sick, you know because everybody gets sick every now and then it's like a happy person wants ten thousand things a sick person just wants one thing. All right. So it's your it's your unlimited desires are clouding your peace your happiness have desires your a biological creature to stands up and says I can do something. I move I resist I live but just be very careful of your desires. This is the oldest most right wisdom desire is suffering. That's what it means. Right every desire you have is an access where you will suffer. So just don't focus on more than one desire to time. The universe is rigged in such a way that if you just want one thing and you focus on that you'll get it but everything else you gotta let go. Did you make a gradual shift to happiness, or was it?
Radical change its ongoing its gradual everyday. So you're happier today than you were a month ago. Yeah allegedly. Yeah.
Yeah, I'm very happy these days deliriously. So it's actually hard for me to hang out with normal people really so you've made a significant shift over the period of like how many years I've had eight years eight years. Yeah.
Wow, and is this something that you've pursued through certain books or is it just like you've made understanding or gained an understanding in your own mind and then started pursuing it based on that understanding? Yeah, it's very very personal. It's basically you have to decide it's a priority and then I tried every hack. I possibly could I used to you know, I tried all the I tried meditation I tried witnessing, you know, even try to necessarily just to see what it would feel like, how did it feel it was it turned me from a pessimist an optimist, but I didn't like the physical side effects nor did I want to get a drug for sustained basis? Hmm. So I dropped it and I felt it turn you into an optimist. Yes enter time. I used to be a pessimist. Yeah, I started doing things like I would start looking at the you know in every moment in everything that happens. You can look on the bright side of something right and so used to do that forcibly. And then I trained it until it became second nature. So for example, like a friend of my wife's was over and she when we were dating and she took all these photos.
Hundreds of photos and then she sends them all to us. And my immediate reaction was like, why are you dumping hundreds of photos on my phone? I don't need hundreds of photos have some judgment. That's an immediate reaction and then I could say actually how nice of her she said me hundreds of photos. I can pick the one that I like right. There are two ways of seeing almost everything. There are a few things that are like high suffering so you can't do that other than just saying. Well, this is a teacher right but I slowly work through every negative judgment that I had until I saw the positive and not second nature to me. I also realized that like, what you want is you want to clear mines you want to let go of thoughts happy thoughts disappear at ahead automatically very easy to let go of them negative thoughts linger. So if you interpret the neck the positive and everything very quickly. You let it go right you let it go much faster. It's simple hacks get more sunlight right learn to smile more learn to hug more these things actually release serotonin and reverse. They aren't just outward signals of being happy. They're actually feedback loops to being happy spend more time in nature you
these are obvious watch your mind watch your mind all day long Watch what it does not judge it and I try to control it but you can meditate 24/7 meditation is not a sit down close your eyes activity meditation is just basically watching your own thoughts like you would watch anything else in the outside world and say why am I having that thought does that serve me anymore is that conditioning from when I was 10 years old like for example getting ready for this podcast you got ready I didn't all right good I did what I did but I did you can help it and what happened was the few days leading up to this my mind was just running and normally my mind is pretty calm and it was just running and running and running and every thought I would have I would imagine me saying it to you my brain couldn't help but rehearse what it's doing is just rehearsing all the time to talk to you and then I was even rehearsing rehearsed telling you about the rehearsal hmm right so is it all playing all these meta games and I was like shut up stop it what is going on and it took me a
Have to figure out. Oh, yeah, you know what it is when I was a kid in Queens and I had no money and I had nothing and I need to save myself the way I got out was by sounding smart not being smart sounding smart. That was the skill I perfected. So I am hardwired to always rehearse things. So I will sound smart. It's a disease that keeps me from being happy. So but when you see that when you realize that when you understand something then it naturally calms you down to after that. I stop rehearsing as much WoW, but still a train habit that is a really interesting point that you want to sound smart that that many people do that and especially young people and as you see someone who is smart or someone who appears smart, they say smart things. I kind of want to sound smart. I want people to think about me the same way I think about that person that that is my disease. That is my feeling is what clutters my mind is the thing I have to ask myself now is
If I can would I still be interested in learning this thing if I couldn't ever tell anybody about it? That's how I know. It's real. That's how you know, it's something I actually want. That's a common thing though. I know I suffered from that when I was young the desire to sound smart.
That's it's very it's very common. Well all of us start out, you know, every everything you're the winner now in your life you were to lose it's because you were a loser at some point, right if you had gotten all the girls if you had all the money if you had everything you want, you're a good-looking and in junior high or High School, you wouldn't have done anything with your life and you would have peaked early. It's like the Bruce Springsteen's Glory Days song, right your the married her high school sweetheart, you'd be living in your hometown. You know, you'd be a manager at the local McDonald's. Whatever the first dream job you had thank God we didn't all get what we wanted When We Were Young right or we would be trapped in that so you have to be able to break out of where you came from. I don't know where I was going that is interesting too about people who Peak too early. Yeah, or maybe those people that Peak too early can do the Elan Mustang and just abandon it and start something new and then learn the de joys of sucking at something. Yeah and actually the in our
And especially when you're high visibility, the problem with peaking is that you then get drowned in Death of a Thousand Cuts people's expectations of uh-oh. Can you come to my event? Hey joking you look at my business plan. He joking give me advice on this. Can you you know talk to my friend. Can you come in this podcast? You just being assaulted all the time with inbound opportunities. So you have no time to start over with anything. So you have to ruthlessly ruthlessly disappoint everybody eliminating clear your schedule drop all the meetings not even respond to the emails. The only way you're going to start over with anything. Yeah, and I we talked about this that I'd love your approach to meetings that if they're not mean life or death. I have the same way. I avoided a good one recently. And this was someone that was just tracking me down as a high-profile person in a big organization and I'm like, can we just talk on the phone? And we talked to the phone was there was nothing to say it was just they wanted to get me in the office. And yeah and meeting probably be phone calls phone call should be
Ells and yeah, well she just be text right many of them right with meetings. I mean, I despise meetings I used to own the domain. I don't do coffee.com. I eventually let go but I used to respond from Nevada. I don't do coffee, you know. Oh that's hilarious. It was a little bit of a jerk move. But really what it comes from is when I was young one of my principles was I knew I had to make money. It was my overwhelming desire and one of the things I did was I said, okay. I'm never going to be worth more than what I think I'm worth. Okay, no one's gonna pay me more than what I think I'm worth. So what am I worth so I picked an hourly rate for myself that I was worth and I said, I'm never going to squander my time for less than this. So if original is 500 bucks an hour, then I upgrade to 5,000 bucks an hour and you know, it's ludicrous but pick an aspirational hourly rate aspirational has to be a little ludicrous and then what I would do is if I have to return something I'm standing in line to return something and it's below my hourly rate. I'll throw it away if I have to if I or give it away if I have to do some task and I
hire somebody to do it for less than my hourly rate I would hire them and so I just became extremely jealous of my time which doesn't mean you can't have fun rest Leisure spending time with your friends and family that's all great don't count that but if you're doing anything you don't want to do which is the definition of work it's a set of things that you have to do that you don't want to do if you're working it better be for your hourly rate otherwise don't do the work and so once it came out of that then I just realize the cost of meetings the cost of meetings is so high especially given all the people who are in there right one person's talking seven people listening you're literally just dying an hour at a time so you have to just drop non urgent meetings or forgot to be more efficient with them if you can do anything great the extreme example is business travel getting on a plane to fly halfway around the world for one meeting which never amount to anything and then like wasting your whole little life there and then flying back so about five years ago I resolved I am never going to travel for business
And I haven't traveled for business since I only travel if the travel experience will be so entertaining and joyous because I have friends or to place. I want to see or whatever that it will be complete in and of itself because I know that whatever the business meeting I came from is never worth it. Wow, and actually that principle applies larger than just travel it applies to life in general the this one of the secrets to happiness is to really Embrace what you're doing in that moment that's trite but where that where that comes from is saying I only want to do actions that are complete in and of themselves, right? If I'm looking for some ulterior motive down. The line is not going to materialize and and if you think it is maybe even if it does it'll be very short-lived anything you want in your life, whether the car or whether it was a girl over those money when you got it a year later, you're back to zero your brain had hedonic we adapted to it and you were looking for the next thing that's a great statement had dynamically.
It that's that is what happens to people you get a custom to whatever it is. I realized that when I first got a new apartment, it was a nice apartment after a while you get used to it was like okay. This is just an apartment just where I live. I'm used to it's nice, but I'm used to it. Yeah, we all go through this learning. It's you know, it's riding the ferris wheel of life. It's like you get out the bottom like I want to get the top. This is so exciting you write it up you get a little dopamine rush and get a little serotonin. Then you write it back down as that wears off. Then you need another high then you write it back up and write it back down. And in fact, the more high as you get the harder it gets to go around the wheel more board you get a bit in the harder it goes to go back up. So what lights your fire now like what what gets you motivated to do things and to act art art, this is Art. Okay art is this creativity? It's just anything that's done for its own sake. So what are the things that are done for their own sake there's nothing Beyond loving somebody creating something playing.
Art to meet creating businesses play I create businesses early stage because it's fun because I I'm into the product even when I invest it's because I like the people I like hanging out with them I learned from them and I think the product is really cool. So these days I will pass on all kinds of great Investments because I'm like, I just the products not interesting. It's boring. I'm not going to learn anything. That's a beautiful luxury. It is a luxury art and learning. Yeah. It is a luxury. These are not hundred percent 020 things, right? You can in your life start moving more and more towards that right, but it's a goal. It's a goal when I was younger. I used to be so desperate to make money that I would have done anything, right if you'd shown up and said, hey, I got a sewage trucking business and you're going to go into that was a great let's do and what to make money.
Thank God no one gave me that opportunity. I'm glad that it went down the road of technology and science which I genuinely enjoy. Hmm. And so I got to the combine my vocation and my avocation mean what are you doing? You're playing you're having fun. You're doing art. You're not you're not working. No, that's what I always say when people say I work hard and like sort of not really I'm always working but it looks like work to them, but it feels like play to me and that's how I know. No one can compete with me on it.
Because I'm just playing 16 hours a day and if they want to compete with me and they're going to work they're going to lose because they're not going to do it 16 hours a day 7 days a week. Listen, man. There are some gems of wisdom in this conversation and I hope people pull things out of this and apply them to their own life, and I'm certainly going to listen to you again and and try to apply some of this to my own life stuff that I'm not already applying but I really appreciate your time and I really appreciate you coming in here. Thanks for having me. And please tell people you do small little podcast is just the novel podcast, right? Yeah. Best way to find me is on Twitter actually. Okay, just act of all then I have a website at nav Al. I have a YouTube channel of all and I have a podcast in the well, that's it. Well, thank you very much. Thank you for really appreciate it. Thank you. Bye everybody. Thank you for tuning into the show and thank you to our sponsors. Thank you to Blue Apron get yourself some delicious food and cook it up with and without all the hassle go.
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