44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature

Oof. I'm not sure that statement is true anymore. Like, I made that statement a long time ago, and a lot of these things are just notes to myself, and they're highly contextual. They come in the moment, they leave in the moment. Happiness... Okay. So, very complicated topic, but I always like the Socrates story where he goes into the marketplace and they show him all these luxuries and fineries, and he says, "How many things there are in this world that I do not want." And that's a form of freedom. So, not wanting something is as good as having it. In the old story with Alexander and Diogenes, right? Alexander goes out and conquers the world, and he meets Diogenes, who's living in a barrel. And Diogenes says, "Get out of the way, you're blocking my sun." And Alexander says, "Oh, how I wish I could be like Diogenes in the next life." And Diogenes says, "That's the difference. I don't wish that I could..." Sorry, Diogenes says, "I don't wish to be Alexander." So, two paths to happiness. One path is success: you get what you want, you satisfy your material needs. Or, like Diogenes, you just don't want in the first place. And I'm not sure which one is more valid. Um, and it also depends what you define as success. If the end goal is happiness, then why not cut to the chase and just go straight for it? "Does being happy make you less successful?" That is a conventional wisdom. That may even be the practical, earned experience of your reality. You find that when you're happy, you don't want anything, so you don't get up and do anything. On the other hand, you know, you still got to do something. You're an animal. You're here. You're here to survive. You're here to replicate. You're driven, you're motivated. You're going to do something. You're not just going to sit there all day. Unlikely. Some people do, maybe it's in their nature. But I think most people still want to act; they want to live in the arena. Uh, I found for myself, as I've become... "happier" is a big word, but you know, more peaceful, more calm, more present, more satisfied with what I have... I still want to do things. I just want to do bigger things. I want to do things that are more pure, more aligned with what I think needs to be done and what I can uniquely do. So, in that sense, I think that being happier can actually make you more successful, but your definition of success will likely change along the way.

At least for me, I always wanted to take the path of material success first. I was not going to go be an ascetic and sit there and renounce everything. That just seems too unrealistic and too painful. Uh, in the story of Buddha, he starts out as a prince, and then he sees that it's all kind of meaningless because you're still going to get old and die. And then he goes into the woods looking for something more. I'll take the happy route that involves material success, thank you. I think it's quicker in some ways. You know, one of your insights is: "It's far easier to achieve our material desires than it is to renounce them."

It depends on the person, but I think you have to try that path. If you want something, go get it. Uh, you know, like I quipped that "the reason to win the game is to be free of it." So, you play the games, you win the games, and then you get... hopefully, you get bored of the games. You don't want to just keep looping on the same game over and over, although a lot of these games are very enticing and have many levels and are relatively open-ended. Uh, and then you become free of the game in a sense that you're no longer trying to win it. You know you can win it. Uh, and either you move to a different game or you play the game for the sheer joy of it.

If you define pain as physical pain, then it's a real thing. It happens, and you can't ignore it. But that's not what we mean by suffering. Suffering is mostly mental anguish and mental pain. And it just means you don't want to do the task at hand. Uh, if you were fine doing the task at hand, then you wouldn't be suffering. And then the question is, what's more effective? To suffer along the way, or just to interpret it in a way that it's not suffering? You hear from a lot of successful people, they look back and they say, "Oh, the journey was the fun part, right? That was actually the entertaining part, and I should have enjoyed it more." It's a common regret. Uh, there's a little thought exercise I like to do, which is you can go back into your own life and try to put yourself in the exact position you were in 5 years ago, 10 years ago, 15 years ago, 20 years ago. And you try to remember, "Okay, who was I with? What was I doing? What was I feeling? What were my emotions? What were my objectives?" And really, really try to transport yourself back and see if there's any advice you'd give yourself. Anything you'd do differently? Now, you don't have new information. And don't pretend you could have gone back and, you know, bought a stock or bought Bitcoin or whatever. But just knowing what you know now in terms of your temperament and a little bit of age-related experience, how would you have done things differently? And I think it's a worthwhile exercise to do. So, don't let me rob you of the conclusion, but I'll tell you for me: uh, I would have done everything the same, except I would have done it with less anger, less emotion, less internal suffering, because that was optional. It wasn't necessary. And I would argue that someone who can do the job, uh, at least peacefully, but maybe happily, is going to be more effective than someone who has unnecessary emotional turmoil.

You know, even success, it's human nature to bank it very, very quickly, right? Because the normal loop that we run through is you sit around, you're bored. Then you want something. Then when you want something, you decide you're not going to be happy until you get that thing. Then you start your bout of suffering or anticipation while you strive to get that thing. If you get that thing, then you get used to it, and then you get bored again. Then a few months later, you want something else. And if you don't get it, then you're unhappy for a bit, and then you get over it, and then you want something else. Right? That's the normal cycle. So, whether you're happy or unhappy at the end, it tends not to last. Now, I don't want to be glib and say that, "Oh, there's no point in making money or being successful." There absolutely is. Money solves all your money problems. So, it is good to have money. Um, that said, there are those... those stories... I don't know if you've seen those studies. I don't know how real these are. A lot of these psych studies don't replicate, but it's a fun, fun little study that shows that, uh, people who break their back and people who win the lottery are back to their baseline happiness two years later.

Again, I don't know if that's entirely true. I think money can buy you happiness if you earned it, because then along the way you have both pride and confidence in yourself, and you have a sense of accomplishment, and you, you know, set out to do something and you were right. So, I'll bet that lingers. And then, as I said, money solves your money problems. So, I don't want to be too glib about it. But I would say in general, this loop that we run through, um, of desire, dopamine, fulfillment, unfulfillment... like, you have to enjoy the journey. The journey is all there is. Right? 99% of your time is spent on the journey. So, what kind of a journey is it if you're not going to enjoy it?

You could focus. You could decide that "I don't want most things." I think we have a lot of unnecessary desires that we just pick up everywhere. We have opinions on everything, judgments on everything. Uh, so I think just knowing that those are the source of unhappiness will make you be choosy about your desires. And frankly, if you want to be successful, you have to be choosy about your desires. You have to focus. You can't be great at everything. You can't be great at everything. You're just going to waste your energy and waste your time.

Uh, it gets you invited to better parties, gets you into better restaurants. Uh, fame... So, fame is this funny thing where a lot of people know you, but you don't know them. And, uh, it does get you put on a pedestal. Uh, it can get you what you want, uh, at a distance. So, I wouldn't say it's worthless. Obviously, people want it for a reason. Um, it's high status, so it attracts the opposite sex. Uh, especially for men, it attracts women. Uh, that said, it is high cost. It means you have no privacy. Um, you do have weirdos and lunatics. Uh, you do get hit up a lot for weird things. Uh, and you're on a stage, so you're forced to perform. So, you're forced to be consistent with your past proclamations and actions, and you're going to have haters and all that nonsense. But the fact that we do it, the fact that we all seem to want it, means that it would be disingenuous to say, "Oh no, no, I'm famous." "But you don't want to be famous." Um, that said, I think fame, like anything else, is best produced as a... or pursued as a byproduct of something potentially more worthwhile. Um, wanting to be famous and craving to be famous, and being famous for being famous, these are sort of traps.

Yeah, exactly. So, it's better that it's earned fame. Uh, so for example, earned respect in the tribe is you do things that are good for the tribe. Uh, who are the most famous people in human history? Uh, there, uh, you know, there are people who sort of transcended the self: the Buddhas and the Jesuses and the Muhammads of the world. Who else is famous? Uh, the artists are famous. You know, art lasts for a long time. The scientists are famous; they discover things. The conquerors are famous, presumably because they conquered for their tribe. There was someone that they were fighting for. So, generally, the higher up you rise by doing things for greater and greater groups of people—even though it may be considered tyrannical or negative, like, uh, you know, Genghis Khan is famous, but, uh, to the Mongols he was doing good; to the rest of them, not so much— the higher level you're operating at, the more people you're taking care of, the more you sort of earn respect and fame. And I think those are good reasons to be famous. If fame is empty, if you're famous just 'cuz your name showed up in a lot of places or your face showed up in a lot of places, then that's a hollow fame. And I think deep down you will know that, and so it'll be fragile, and you'll always be afraid of losing it. And then you'll be forced to perform. So, the kind of fame that, uh, pure actors and celebrities have, I wouldn't want. But the kind of fame that's earned because you did something useful, uh, why dodge that?

No, no, no. The difference between me saying something in the past and saying something different now is perhaps I've learned, perhaps I've updated my beliefs. But so few people do it in a legitimate way, I think, that the grifter, shill... "You see, this is the... the smoking gun that shows that he didn't really believe that thing all along."

Right. Yeah. It's a... it's a... What was it that... who said it? It was Emerson, that, um, "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds," right? Um, but essentially, look, all life is... all learning is error correction, right? Every knowledge creation system works through correcting errors, making guesses and correcting errors. So, by definition, if you're learning, you're going to be wrong most of the time, and you'll be updating your priors. And so, for example, I did this Joe Rogan podcast, I don't know, it's like eight or nine years ago. Um, and people will call out like the thing that didn't turn out to be correct, right? And it's just like, and they just beat on it because it helps them in their mind raise their status a little bit. "Aha, I caught him in an error." Well, I think if you catch someone in a blatant lie, where they believe one thing and they say another, that's legit. That's a character flaw. They shouldn't be lying. But on the other hand, if they just made a guess at something and they got it wrong... And by the way, mostly it's about the AI/AGI thing, and I think I'm still right about that, but it's a different story. Um, people who think we have achieved AGI just fail a Turing test from their side. Um, but, uh, it's funny how people latch on to single proclamations. But the reality is, all of us are dynamical systems. We're always changing. We're always learning. We're always growing. And, uh, hopefully we're correcting errors. What you don't want to be doing is lying in public so that... because you're trying to look good. And I think people can smell that. I... what this world really lacks right now is authenticity. And because everybody wants something, they want to be seen as something, they want to be something that they're not. And so, you do catch a lot of people, uh, saying things that they don't really believe. And I think people are very sensitive to that.

Yeah, I mean, they... a lot of people are wrong. Most of us are wrong most of the time, especially in any new endeavor.

Correct. Exactly. So, I think that's the big difference. If someone is wrong, no big deal, as long as they have a genuine reason for saying what they're saying or believing what they're believing. But if they are lying to elevate their status or their appearance, or to live up to some expectation, that's the mistake. And that's a mistake not just for the listener, it's a mistake for themselves, 'cuz then you're going to get trapped in a hall of mirrors. You yourself are going to be consistent with your past proclamations. So, if you're lying to others, you're going to be lying to yourself.

That's right. Yeah. It's... it's like, what was that line? There's... you're basically trying to impress people who you know don't care about you. Um, so they don't like the real you. And if they saw the real you, they wouldn't care. And the people who would like the real you don't get to see the real you, so they pass you by. Right? You only want the respect of the very, very few people that you respect. Uh, trying to demand respect from the masses is a fool's errand.

I think it just helps to see that status games don't matter as much as they used to. Uh, in old society, let's go back hunter-gatherer times, there was no such thing as wealth. You just had what you could carry. Um, there was no stored wealth. So, wealth games didn't really exist, or wealth creation games. All that existed was status games. If you were high status, then you got what little was available first. Um, but even back then, you had to earn your status by taking care of the tribe. Uh, now we have wealth creation, where you can actually create a product or a service, you can scale that product or service, and you can provide abundance for a lot of people. Uh, and that's not zero-sum; that's a positive-sum game. I can be wealthy, you can be wealthy, we can create things together. And clearly, since we are all collectively far, far wealthier than we were in hunter-gatherer times, uh, wealth creation is positive. But status is limited. There's limited status to go around. It's a ranking ladder. It's a hierarchy. And so, if it's a rise in status, somebody else has a lowering in status. Now, you can have multiple kinds of status, so you can expand some kinds of status, but it's not like wealth creation, where it can go infinitely, where we can all be, you know, living in the stars and moon bases or Mars colonies or what have you. So, just realize that status games are inherently limited. Uh, they're always combative. Um, they always require, uh, direct combat, whereas, uh, wealth creation games can be just you're creating products. You don't have to fight anybody else. Yes, in the marketplace, your product has to succeed, but that's not quite the same as, uh, invective against other people or being angry with other people or feeling pushed down or pushed up or having a beef with somebody. So, I would argue that wealth creation games are both more pleasant, uh, they're positive-sum, and they actually have, uh, concrete material returns. If you have more money, you can buy more.

Exactly. Yeah. It's... it's vague and it's fuzzy. Now, you see people get rich, they have money. What do they want? They want status. So, they go to Hollywood, start starring in movies, they donate to nonprofits, they go to Cannes or Davos or what have you. Um, and they start trying to trade the money for status. So, you know, people always want what they don't have. Uh, and we are evolutionarily hardwired for status because, as I said, wealth creation didn't really exist until the agricultural revolution, uh, when you could store grain. And then the Industrial Revolution took it to another level, and now the information age is taking it to yet another level. But there's never been an easier time to make money. Yes, it's still hard, but there's never been an easier time to create wealth because there's so much leverage out there. There's so much opportunity. You still have to go find it. It's not easy. It's not going to fall on your lap. And you have to learn something and know something and do something interesting. But nevertheless, it's possible to many more people. A few hundred years ago, you were born a serf, you were going to die a serf. There was almost no way out of that. That's changed. And so, I would argue that you're better off focusing on wealth games than status games. If you're trying to, um, build up, for example, your following on a social network and get famous and then get rich off of being famous, that's a much harder path than getting rich first, um, and then go for your fame afterwards would be my advice.

Well, as you said, because we've... we've got an illustrious history biologically of wanting status, and wealth is kind of novel. It's new. It's new. Wealth is, uh, something that you have to understand more intellectually. Yeah, there's a physical component: more food, more survival. But, uh, to truly understand the effects and the powers and the abilities and the limitations, uh, and the advantages and disadvantages of wealth, you have to use your neocortex a lot more.

That's a good observation. I hadn't thought that through, but you're right. Yeah, I think that's right. I think people will always want more status, uh, but I think you can be satisfied at a certain level of wealth.

Exactly. They... they keep you running on that treadmill forever.

So, you grip tightly.

Yeah, that's a tough one. Uh, well, I look at the people—and I don't want to offend anybody—but I look at the people who don't like themselves, and that's the toughest slot. Because they're always wrestling with themselves, and it's hard enough to face the outside world. Um, and no one's going to like you more than you like yourself. So, if you're struggling with yourself, then the outside world becomes an insurmountable challenge. And it's hard to say why people have low self-esteem. It might be genetic. It might just be circumstantial. A lot of times, I think it's 'cuz they just weren't unconditionally loved as a child. And that sort of seeps in at a deep core level. Um, but self-esteem issues can be the most limiting. Uh, one interesting thought is that, you know, to some extent, self-esteem is a reputation you have with yourself. Um, you're watching yourself at all times. You know what you're doing, and you have your own moral code. Everyone has a different moral code. But if you don't live up to your own moral code—the same code that you hold others to—uh, it will damage your self-esteem. So, perhaps one way to build up your self-esteem is to live up to your own code very rigorously. Have one, and then live up to it. Uh, another way to raise your self-esteem might be to do things for others. Uh, if I look back on my life and, you know, "What are the moments that I'm actually proud of?"—there's very far and few between, and it's not that often, and it's not the things you would expect. It's not the material success. It's not having learned this thing or that. It's when I made a sacrifice for somebody or something that I loved. And, uh, that's when I'm actually, ironically, most proud. Now, that's through an explicit mental exercise. But I'll bet you at some level, I'm recording that implicitly. So, that tells me that even if I am not being loved, the way to create love is to give love, to express love through sacrifice and through duty. And so, I think doing things like that can build up your self-esteem really fast.

Well, if being ethical were profitable, everybody would do it, right? So, uh, you, at some level, it does involve a sacrifice. Uh, but that sacrifice can also be thought of as you're thinking for the long term rather than the short term. Um, for example, the virtues are the set of... Virtues are a set of beliefs that if everybody in society followed them as individuals, it would lead to win-win outcomes for everybody. So, if I am honest and you are honest, then we can do business more easily. We can interact more easily because we can trust each other. So, even though there might be a few liars in the system, as long as there aren't too many liars and too many cheaters, uh, a high-trust society where everybody's honest is better off. And I think a lot of the virtues work this way, right? If I don't go around sleeping with your wife and you don't sleep with mine, and you know, if I don't take all the food that's at the table first, and so on, then we all get along better and we can play win-win games. Uh, in game theory, the most famous game is Prisoner's Dilemma. But that's all about everybody cheating, and the Nash equilibrium, the stable equilibrium there, is everybody cheats. And you're... the only way you can be... you can play a win-win game is if you have long-term iterated moves. But that's not actually the most common game played in society. The most common game played is one called a Stag Hunt, where if we cooperate, we can bring down a big stag and both have big dinners. But if we don't cooperate, then we have to go hunt like rabbits and we each have small dinners. So, most of... and that game has two stable equilibriums. And one could be where we're both hunting the rabbit, and one could be where we're hunting the stag. So, the high-trust society is a more... most... more virtuous society, where I can trust you to come hunt the stag with me and show up on time and do the work and divide it up properly. So, you want to live in a system where everybody has their own set of virtues and follows them, and then we all win. But I would argue you don't need to do that for sacrifice. You don't need to do that for other people. You can do it just purely for yourself. You will have higher self-esteem. You will attract other high-virtue people.

Correct. Yeah, that's right. And if you're the kind of person... if you're the kind of person who long-term signals ethics and virtues, then you will attract other people who are ethical and virtuous. Whereas if you are a shark, you will eventually find yourself swimming entirely amongst sharks. And that's an unpleasant existence. But again, this goes back to the equivalent of the marshmallow test. And by the way, the marshmallow test does not replicate. I saw it replication crisis hard recently. But it is about trading off the short term for the long term. Uh, and so I think for a lot of these so-called virtues, there are long-term selfish reasons to be virtuous.

Yes and no. I think I... I dealt with self-doubt in the sense that, "Oh, I don't know what I'm doing, and I need to figure it out." Um, but I didn't doubt myself in the way of, "Somebody else knows better than me for me," or that, "You know, I'm an idiot," or "I'm not worthwhile" or anything like that. I guess I had the benefit of... I grew up with a lot of love. Like, the people around me loved me unconditionally. And so that just gave me a lot of confidence. Uh, not the kind of confidence that would say, "I have the answer," but the kind of confidence that, "I will figure it out," and "I know what I want," or "Only I am a good arbiter of what I want."

Yeah. Also in computer science, like there's a concept of a daemon, which is a, uh, a program that's always running in the background. You can't see it.

Um, but yeah, it probably comes from the ancient Greek daemon. Uh, but yeah, I... what you know that you don't even know you know is far greater than what you know you know. Right? You can't even articulate most of the things you know. There are feelings you have that have no words for them. There are thoughts you have that are felt within the body or subconsciously that you never articulate to yourself. You don't really... You can't articulate the rules of grammar, yet you exercise them effortlessly when you speak. So, I would argue that your implicit knowledge and your knowledge that is unknown to yourself is far greater than the knowledge you can articulate and that you can communicate. And so, at some level, you're always watching yourself. That's what your consciousness is, right? It's the thing that's watching everything, including your mind, including your body. So, if you want to, uh, have high self-esteem, then earn your own self-respect.

Yeah. In that way... On the love thing, one of the interesting things about love is you can try to remember the feeling of being loved. So, go back to when someone was in love with you or someone did love you, and like really remember that feeling. Like, really sit with it and try to recreate it within yourself. And then go to the feeling of you loving someone, and when you were in love. And I'm not even talking about romantic love necessarily. So, be a little careful there. I'm talking more about like love for... it can sometimes get complex if you're talking about past romantic love, right? A sibling or a child or something like that, or a parent. And, uh, think about when you felt love towards someone or something. And now, which is better? And I would argue that the feeling of being in love is actually more exhilarating than the feeling of being loved. Being loved is a little cloying. It's a little too sweet. You kind of want to push the person away. It's a little embarrassing. And you know that if that person is too much into it, that you feel constrained. On the other hand, the feeling of being in love is very expansive. It's very open. It actually makes you a better version of yourself. It makes you want to be a better person. And so, you can create love anytime you want. It's just that craving to receive it that's the problem.

Oh, that was a recent one. Uh, I tweeted that just because I think that, uh, pride is the enemy of learning. So, when I look at my friends and colleagues, the ones who are still stuck in the past and have grown the least are the ones who were the proudest. Because they sort of feel like they already had the answers, and so they don't want to correct themselves publicly. And so, this goes back to the fame conversation. You get locked into something you said. It made you famous. You're known for that, and now you want to pivot or change. So, pride prevents you from saying, "I'm wrong". What's pride in this context here? It could be as simple as you're trading stocks and then you don't admit you were wrong, so you hang on to a lousy trade. Uh, it could be that you, uh, made a decision to, uh, you know, marry someone or move somewhere or enter a profession, it doesn't work out, and then you don't admit that you were wrong, so you get stuck in it. Uh, it's mostly about getting trapped in local maxima as opposed to going back down and climbing up the mountain again.

Yeah. You're just stuck at a suboptimal point. Uh, it's going to cost you money. It's going to cost you success and time. And time. Uh, the great artists always have this ability to start over. Whether it's Paul Simon or Madonna or U2—and I'm dating myself a little bit. Um, but even the great entrepreneurs, they're just always willing to start over. Uh, I'm always struck by the Elon Musk story where, you know, he, uh, he did PayPal as X.com originally. Actually, it was his financial institution that got merged into PayPal.

Yeah, exactly. I'll park that. I'll hold on. He's consistent. He's been using it for quite a while. Um, and he said something along the lines of, uh, "I made $200 million from the sale of PayPal. I put $100 million into SpaceX, 80 million [into] Tesla, 20 into Solar City, and I had to borrow money for rent". Right? This guy is a perennial risk-taker. He's always willing to start over. He doesn't have any pride about being seen as successful or being seen as a failure. He's willing to put it all in.

Back himself again each time. But the key thing is he's always willing to start over. Right? Even now, when he's sort of made his... his new startup is USA, right? He's basically trying to fix it like he would fix one of his startups. And I think that is a willingness to look like a fool, and that is a willingness to start over. And a lot of people just don't have that. They become successful or they become rich or they become famous, and that's it. They're stuck. They don't want to go back to zero. And creating anything great requires zero to one. And that means you go back to zero, and that's really painful and hard to do.

Uh, yeah, a lot of it is just you're memeing yourself into a bad outcome because you think that somehow suffering is glorious or that it makes you a better person. Or, you know, my old quip was, "If you're so smart, why aren't you happy? Why can't you figure that one out?" Um, the reality is you can be smart and happy. There are plenty of people in human history who are smart and happy. Uh, and I think it just starts with saying, "Yeah, you know what? I'm going to be happy". There was a guy that I met in Thailand a long time ago, and, uh, he used to work for Tony Robbins. Uh, you know, he had a great attitude. And, uh, we were sitting around and he said, you know, uh, he said, "I realized one day that someone out there had to be the happiest person in the world. Like, there just... that person just has to exist." He said, "Why not me? I'll take on that burden. I'll be that guy". And I heard that, I was like, "Wow, that's pretty good. That's a good frame". Right? He knew how to reframe things. And so, I think a lot of happiness is just a choice, uh, in the sense that you make... First, you just identify yourself as, "Actually, I'm going to be a person that's going to be happy. I'm going to figure it out". And you just figure it out along the way. You're not going to lose your other predilections. You're not going to lose your ambition or your desire for success. I think a lot of people have this fear that, "Oh, if I'm happy, then I won't want to be successful". No, you'll just want to do things that are more aligned with the happy version of you, and you'll be successful at those things. And believe me, the happy version of you is not going to look back at the unhappy version and say, "Oh man, that guy was going to be more... I wish I was him". You're actually trying to be successful so you'll be happy. That's the whole point. You have... you've gotten it backwards.

Yeah, I think everybody is. Uh, maybe "unapologetic" is the part that's... that's relatively, uh, rare, but I think everybody puts themselves first. That's just human nature. You're... you're here because you survived. You're a separate organism.

I don't go to weddings.

Yeah, I just view it as you're wast... everyone's wasting their time on it. Um, don't do something you don't want to do. Why... why are you wasting your time? There's so little time on this earth. Life goes fast. What is it? 4,000 weeks? That's your lifespan. Um, and... and yes, we hear that, but we don't remember it. But, uh, I guess I'm keenly aware of how little time I have, so I'm just not going to waste it.

Yeah, I've gotten... I've gotten utterly more and more ruthless on it. Mainly it's that I see or hear people's freedom, and then that liberates me further. So, I read a, uh, I read a blog post by, uh, P-Mark, aka Marc Andreessen, where he said, "Don't keep a schedule." And I took that to heart. So, I deleted my calendar and I don't keep a schedule. I try to remember it all in my head. If I can't remember it...

Yeah, exactly. Um, I had to look things up at the last minute. Uh, so, but ironically, I don't even know if Mark himself follows that, but he made the correct point. Uh, I read a little story about Jack Dorsey doing all his business off his, uh, iPhone and iPad and not even going into a Mac. And I said, "Okay, I want to do that." So, I'm going to operate through text messaging and not put up my nasty email.

It does. Yeah. 'Cuz you're on the go. Um, so I have a nasty email autoresponder that says, "I don't check email, and don't text me either." Right? "If you need to find me, you'll find me." Obviously, some of this is a luxury of success, but some of these habits I adopted long before. Actually, the hostile email autoresponder started a long time ago. Um, I used to own the domain—I let it go—idontdocoffee.com. I used to reply from that email, uh, just so people would get the point. But I stopped being rude about it. Now I just ghost. I just disappear. Um, my wife knows not to ever, uh, book or schedule me for anything. Uh, I'm not expect... I'm not expected to go to couples dinners. I'm not expect[ed] to go to birthdays. I'm not expect[ed] to go to weddings. If somebody tries to rope her into having me show up, she says, "He makes his own decisions. You got to ask him directly."

No, no, I'm freeing up all my time. So, my entire life is serendipity. I get to interact with whoever I want, whenever I want, wherever.

So, I'll say, "Okay, if that thing is interesting, I'll see if I can get in that day when I'm in the mood." But there's nothing worse than something coming up that your past self committed you to that your present self doesn't want to do. "God damn it, Past [Naval]." And then it destroys your entire calendar. It destroys your... your day because there's like, "Oh, this one-hour slot which is sitting like a turd on my calendar that I have to like schedule my whole day around. I can't do anything the 20 minutes before, the 20 minutes afterwards." Even for phone calls, if someone wants to do a phone call, [I] say, "Okay, just text me when you're free. I'll text you when I'm free." And we'll just do it on the fly. It's a much better way of living than this overly scheduled, uh, you know, cal.com or iCal, whatever. The, uh, the overscheduled life is not worth living. It's not. I think it's a terrible way to live life. That's not how we evolved. It's not how we grew up. Um, it's not how... how we were as children, hopefully, uh, unless you're a helicopter parent or a tiger mom. Um, your natural order is freedom. Uh, I had a friend who, uh, said to me once, you know, uh, "I never want to have to be at a specific place at a specific time." And I was like, "Oh my god, that's freedom." When I heard that, that changed my life right there.

Yes, I'm alarm clock-less. Today I did set my alarm clock just so I wouldn't miss this. Very important.

But just so you know, I set the alarm clock for 11:00 a.m. in case I was stricken with a flu that day. I wasn't going to set my alarm clock for 8:00 a.m. or 9:00 a.m. And sure enough, I got up many hours before that. Um, but it was sort of a backup, emergency alarm. In fact, sometimes when I [have] something that I need to do, I don't want to look at a calendar, so I'll just set an alarm for it.

It's not "[...] you" energy in the sense that... I think everyone should live their life that way, to the greatest extent possible. Obviously, we have our requirements around work and obligations that are genuinely important to us. But don't fritter away your life on randomly scheduled things, and things that aren't important, don't matter, and events, and weddings, and, you know, tedious dinners with tedious people that you don't want to go to. To the extent you can bring freedom into your life, optimize for that. You'll actually be more productive. You won't just be happier and more free; you will be more productive. Because then you can focus on what is in front of you, whatever the biggest problem of that day. When I wake up in the morning, uh, the first four hours are when I have the most energy, and that's when I want to solve all the hard problems. And the next four hours are when I kind of want to, you know, do some more outdoorsy activities, or I want to work out, or maybe I can, you know, have some meetings. But I'll try to do those last second based on whatever the day's priorities demand. The last four hours, I kind of want to wind down. I want to hang out with the kids, and I want to play games or read a book or something like that. So, having that flexibility and freedom is really important. So, you can just put whatever is most needed into the slot at that moment. Uh, and instead, if I have like a meeting at 2:00 p.m. and then I have to like get a thing and some emails done, I put that off till 6:00 p.m. I'm rushing. I'm not going to be productive. I'm not going to be, uh... You're certainly not free.

I'm definitely not free. But also, another thing that I really believe is that inspiration is perishable. Act on it immediately. So, when you're inspired to do something, do that thing. If I'm inspired to write a blog post, I want to do it at that moment. If I'm inspired to send a tweet, I want to do it at that moment. If I'm inspired to solve a problem, I do it that moment. If I'm inspired to read a book, I want to read it right then. If I'm inspired to solve a problem, I solve it right there. If I want to learn something, I... I do it at the moment of curiosity. The moment the curiosity arrives, I go learn that thing immediately. I download the book. I get on Google. I get on ChatGPT, whatever. I will figure that thing out on the spot. And that's when the learning happens. It doesn't happen because I've scheduled time, because I've set an hour aside. Because when that time arrives, I might be in a different mood. I might just want to do something different. So, I think that spontaneity is really important. You're going to learn best when you're having fun, when you generally are enjoying the process, not when you're forced to sit there and do it. How much do you remember from school? You know, you were forced to learn geography, history, mathematics on this schedule, at this time, according to this person. Didn't happen. All the stuff that sticks with you is you learned it when you wanted to, when you genuinely had the desire. And that freedom, that ability to act on something the moment you want to, is so liberating that most of us go through our lives with very, very little tastes of that. If you live your entire life that way, that is a recipe for happiness.

Efficient also.

Procrastination is because you don't want to do that thing right now. You want to do something else. Go do that something else. I reject this frame that efficiency and productivity and success are counter to happiness and freedom. They actually go together.

The happier you are, the more you can sustain doing something, the more likely you're going to do something that will in turn make you even happier, and you'll continue to do it, and you'll outwork everybody else. The more free you are, the better you can allocate your time and the less you're caught up in a web of obligations and commitments, and the more you can focus on the task at hand. This is related to another insight of yours: "The less you want something, the less you're thinking about it, the less you're obsessing over it, the more you're going to do it in a natural way, the more you're going to do it for yourself. You're going to do it in a way that you're good at, and you're going to stick with it. The people around you will see the quality of your work is higher ." But this seems like a difficult tension to navigate because an obsessive attention to detail is a competitive advantage of your work as well. So, you have these two things sort of conflicting with each other.

No one is going to beat you at being you. So, one of the things I like to say is like, "Find what feels like play to you but looks like work to others". So, it looks like work to them, but to you, it feels like play. It's not work. So, you're going to outcompete them because you're doing it effortlessly. You're doing it for fun. They're doing it for work. They're doing it for some byproduct. To you, it's art. It's beauty. It's joy. It's... it's flow. It's fulfilling. Uh, you must enjoy podcasting. If you didn't, you wouldn't be good at it either, right? If you... if you decided that the right way to get ahead in life was to go write books, you would... nobody would have heard of you. Chris Williamson's book would be a complete flop. That's not who you are. You're a podcaster. You enjoy talking to people. You enjoy interviewing them. The more you do things that are natural to you, the less competition you have. You escape competition through authenticity, by being your own self. If I had to summarize how to be successful in life in two words, I would just say: "Productize yourself". That's it. Just figure out what it is that you naturally do, that the world might want, that you can scale up and turn into a product. And it'll be... it'll eventually be effortless for you. Yes, there's always work required, but it won't even feel like work to you. It'll feel like play to you. And modern society gives us that opportunity. You know, if you were 2,000 years ago, you're born on a farm, your choices are very limited, right? You're going to do stuff on that farm. Now, you can literally wake up and you can move to a different city. You can switch careers. You can switch jobs. You can change the people that you're with. Uh, you know, you can change so many things about who you are and who you're with and what you're doing, that there is infinite opportunity out there for you. Literally infinite. And so, it's much better to treat this like a search function: to find the people who need you the most, to find the work that needs you the most, to find the place you're best suited to be at. And it's worthwhile to spend time in that exploration before diving into exploitation. The biggest mistake in a world with so many choices is premature commitment. If you prematurely commit to being a lawyer or a doctor, and now you've got like, you know, five years invested into that, you might have just completely missed... You might just end up in the wrong profession, the wrong place, or the wrong people for 30 years of your life, grinding away. And yes, the best time to figure that out was before, but the second best time is now. So, just change it.

By default, you should kill everything. You know, "If you can't decide, the answer is no." Uh, and most things you should just be saying no to. The part of my keeping my calendar free is just by default saying no to everything. Do I want to create a calendar just to add your event, right, or to add your need or your desire? One of the other things about... you know, early on in life, you're looking for opportunities. So, you're saying yes to everything. And that is a phase that you go through. That is the exploration phase. Later, when you've found the thing you want to work on, you're in the exploitation phase. You have to say no to everything by default. And if you don't say no to everything by default, if you have to even explicitly go out of your way to say no to something, that will take up time. Uh, for example, you know, there... there are a lot of people out there who are into hustle culture. And a big piece of hustle culture is like, "Well, you're not going to get something if you don't ask for it." So, they'll hustle people. They'll always be sending you requests, messages. Yeah, this is a famous person problem, but I have it. And people are always asking me for things. And I kind of squirm when I get these messages, and I'm sure you get these too—text messages, emails saying, "Hey Chris, my friend so-and-so should really be on your podcast," or "You should come to my event," "You should write a forward for my book". And you kind of squirm when you get this, right? You have to figure out how to say no. And one of the things I learned along the way is that if you wouldn't ask somebody else to do it, and then you get that request yourself, you can just dismiss it. You don't have to respond. You don't... you don't even let it enter your brain. You have to be able to delete emails and text messages without flinching if you want to scale. And scaling is very important. Scaling your time is really important. Every interruption will take you out of flow. So, the only way you can remain in flow is if you get either very good at ignoring these things by default or closing yourself off like a hermit, like our mutual friend Tim Ferriss does, or you just become emotionally capable of not registering these as something that causes turbulence inside of you.

"Selfish" is fine. I'll take selfish. I'm selfish. I'm a very selfish person. Don't contact me.

So... so, I think it's really good to be able to view your own mind and your own thoughts objectively. And that is the big benefit of meditation. It creates a small gap between your conscious observation self and your mind. And that lets you then look at your thoughts and evaluate them a little bit, like you would a third party's statements. And, uh, if you just take your mind to be you and they're integrated in one and the same at all times, and you're reacting from the mind, then you're not even going to question things that come into your mind. Anything that comes in that creates a reaction will immediately create a reaction. But if you can observe your thoughts a little bit—and not in some woo way, but you can even just do it through therapy, you can do it through journaling, you can do it any way you would like, you can just take long walks. You don't have to meditate and do lotus position. Uh, all that is unnecessary. But if you can observe your own thoughts and view them a little objectively, then you can start being, uh, a little more choosy, a little more critical. And you can realize that there are no problems in the real world, other than maybe things that inflict pain on your body. Everything else has to become a problem in your mind first. You have to view it and interpret it and create a narrative that it is a problem before it becomes a problem. And then you realize that a lot of your emotional energy is spent on reacting to things that your mind is automatically saying are problems. Uh, and you don't need all those problems. Do you really need that many problems in your life? Again, I would say try to focus on just one overarching problem, and then go solve that problem. It's like if you want to be successful, define success very concretely. Focus on that. In everything else, when it enters your mind, it becomes a problem. Whether it's a judgment about the girl walking down the street, or the car that just cut in front of you, or whether it's like, you know, "this... your accountant did this stupid thing"... like, yes, it's going to trigger you. But observe for a moment that like, "It's triggering me. I've created a problem. Do I really want to have this problem right now? Do I want to spend the energy on this problem, or do I want that going somewhere else?" And it... it doesn't have to be that overt. You don't have to... The mind mud-wrestling with itself is also a problem, but because it loves to do that.

Yeah, exactly. So, you just... you're going to be much happier and much more focused. Again, I think happiness and focus and success can kind of complement each other. You're going to have much more energy. Just think about it as mental energy. You have much more mental energy to focus on the actual problems you want to solve if you don't start unconsciously, subconsciously, reactively picking up problems everywhere. So, before anything can be a problem that takes up your emotional energy, you have to accept it as a problem. You can be choosy about your problems. And I'm not saying I'm perfect in that regard, but I think I'm better than I used to be.

We have that going on. And then even worse is we take on problems that we can't affect. So, uh, you know, another one of my little quips was, uh, you know, um, "A rational person, uh, can, uh, sort of... a rational person should cultivate indifference to things that are out of their control". Uh, or "A rational person can find peace by cultivating indifference to things that are out of their control". Uh, and I'm as guilty as anybody of doom-surfing on X or social media and getting worked up about things that I can't do anything about. Right? Like, do I want to be fighting those battles in my mind when I literally cannot do anything about it? So, if you find yourself looping on a problem, like you're watching the news too much and you're getting caught up in a problem you can't do anything about, um, you have to step away from that. And, uh, modern media is a delivery mechanism for mimetic viruses. And now, what's happened now is, you know, 100 years ago, 500 years ago, if something wasn't happening in your immediate vicinity, you wouldn't hear about it. It wouldn't be a problem for you. But now, every single one of the world's problems has turned into a mimetic virus, which is going into the battlefield of the news and is trying to infect your mind in real time , so that, yeah, so that you become obsessed with the war in Ukraine, which is really far away, or you get obsessed with climate change, or you get obsessed with AI doom, or you get obsessed with whatever. And there's nothing as riveting as the old religion: "The world is ending. The world is ending. Pay attention. The world is ending."

Cassandra complex at global scale. Well, and I would argue that large percentages of the population are essentially just infected with these mimetic viruses that have taken over their brain and are causing them to do incredible gyrations about things that probably aren't even true or are greatly exaggerated. But even to the extent they are true, they're things that that person can do nothing about. And they should put their own house in order first. So, you know, another little line I have for myself is, "Your family is broken, but you're going to fix the world." Right? People are running out there to try and fix the world when their own lives are a mess. Oh my god. Right? And... and I think it defies credibility if you can't fix your own life first. I'm not going to take you seriously if you can't fix your own life. Like all these philosophers who, you know, seem like people you emulate and so smart, or like these brilliant celebrities, and they go off and commit suicide. Well, you just kind of invalidated your whole way of life. It's like that line in No Country for Old Men where the killer is waiting for the protagonist, and the protagonist shows up and the killer says, "Well, you know, if your set of rules brought you here, then what good are your rules?" I didn't work. Um, I... I am self... I'm holistically selfish in that I want to be objectively successful in everything I set out to want. Mhm. Yeah. Uh, you have one life. Don't settle for mediocrity. Don't settle for mediocrity. And... and I think the only... like, people debate intelligence, for example, right? We talk about IQ tests and all that. But I think the only true test of intelligence is if you get what you want out of life. And there are two parts to that. One is getting what you want, so you know how to get it. And the second is wanting the right things. Knowing what to want in the first place. I could want to be a, you know, 6'8" basketball player, and I'm not going to get that. So, it's wanting the wrong thing.

That's wanting something you can't get. Is also wanting something that you don't want. Yeah. Wanting something that's a booby prize. There are plenty of booby prizes out there, too.

Yeah. Prizes that are just not worth having or that create their own problems. Well, if you're not careful, you can end up in a place in life not only that you don't want to be, but one that you didn't even mean to get to. That's if you're kind of proceeding unconsciously. Uh, how many people... and usually, I think people end up there because they are, uh, going on autopilot with sort of societal expectations or other people's expectations. So, uh, you know, or out of guilt or out of like, uh, mimetic desire. You know, Peter Thiel has this whole thing from Rene Girard about how mimetic desires are... desires are picked up from other people. Uh, and some of those are automatically baked into society, like, "You know, go to law school, go to med school, go to whatever, go to business school." Um, or they might be from watching what your friends are doing and, you know, the other monkeys are doing. Um, or it might just be, you know, what your parents' expectations are. It might be guilt. You know, guilt is just society's voice speaking in your head, socially programmed so you'll be a good little monkey and do things that are good for the tribe. Um, but I think the... the best outcomes come when you think it through for yourself and decide for yourself. And I don't think people spend enough time deciding. For example, we run on these, uh, four-year cycles. You know, in Silicon Valley, you go join a startup, you vest your stock over four years. That's the standard. Okay. Um, uh, in, uh, college, you know, you go for four years. High school, you go for four years. Um, some things take longer. You know, you have children, they hit puberty 9 years later. That's like a 9-year cycle until that relationship changes. Um, but we're used to these fairly long cycles, multi-year cycles in which we are committed to things. You go to law school, you know, four- or five-year cycle. You go be a lawyer, 40-year cycle. These are very long cycles. The amount of time we spend deciding what to do and who to do it with? Very short. Very, very short. Right? We spend, you know, 3 months deciding, one month deciding on a job where we're going to be for 10 years or 5 years. And because a lot of discovery is path-dependent, where the next thing you find on the path is dependent on where you were on the previous path, you sort of start going down this vector that is a very long distance. People decide frivolously which city to live in. And that's going to decide who their friends are, what their jobs are, their opportunity, their weather, their food supply, their air supply, quality of life. You know, it's such an important decision, but people spend so little time thinking it through. I would argue that if you're making a four-year decision, spend a year thinking it through. Like, really thinking it through.

Yeah, exactly. There's the secretary theorem. I don't know if you know that one. Computer science...

That's right. Yeah. The secretary theorem is this computer science professor is trying to figure out, uh, how much time he should spend interviewing secretaries and then how long to keep the secretary. So, let's say he's going to have a secretary for 10 years. Does he keep searching for, you know, one year, 2 years, 3 years, 1 month, 2 months? What is the optimal time? Uh, and it turns out that the optimal time is somewhere around a third. About a third of the way through, you take the best person you've worked with and try to find someone that good or better. So that by the time you've gotten about a third of the way through, you have, excuse me, seen enough that you now have a sense of what the bar is. And then anybody who meets or exceeds that bar is good enough. And this applies to dating, this applies to jobs and careers, this applies generally. But the interesting thing about the secretary theorem is that it's actually not time-based. It's not based on one-third of the time. It's iteration-based. The number of candidates, the number of shots you took on goal. That's right. So, you want to have lots and lots of iterations. So, that means that you need to bail out quickly and you need to be decisive quickly. That's right. You need to... you need to take opportunities quickly and bail out quickly. Correct. Like, if you go back and you look through failed relationships, uh, probably the biggest regret will be staying in the relationship after you knew it was over. Exactly. You should have left sooner. The moment you knew it wasn't going to work out, you should have moved on. So, in that sense, I think Malcolm Gladwell popularized this idea of 10,000 hours to mastery. I would say it's actually 10,000 iterations to mastery. It's not actually 10,000; it's some unknown number. But it's about the number of iterations that drives a learning curve. And iteration is not repetition. Repetition is a different thing. Repeating is doing the same thing over and over. Iteration is modifying it with a learning and then doing another version of it. So, that's error correction. So, if you get 10,000 error corrections in anything, you will be an expert at it.

Yeah. Cynicism and pessimism is a tough one. It's... we're naturally hardwired for it. Again, I go back to evolution. I'm sorry to keep harping on evolution, but within biology, there's very few good explanatory theories. And, you know, theory of evolution by natural selection is probably the best one. So, if you can't explain something about life or psychology or human nature through evolution, then you probably don't have a good theory for it. And I would say that pessimism is another one that comes out of this. Which is, in the natural environment, you're hardwired to be pessimistic. Because let's say that I see something rustling in the woods. And if I move towards it and it turns out to be food and prey, then good, I get to eat one meal. But if it turns out to be a predator, I get eaten, and that's the end of that. So, we are hardwired to avoid ruin, um, and... and, you know, just dying. So, we are naturally hardwired to be pessimists. But modern society is very different. Despite whatever problems you may have with modern society, it is far, far safer than living in the jungle and just trying to survive. Uh, and the opportunities on the upside are nonlinear. For example, when you're investing, if you short a stock, you... the most money you can make is 2x. You just lose... You know, if the stock goes to zero, you double your money. But if the stock is the next Nvidia and it goes 100x or 1,000x, you make a lot of money. So, upside, through... because of leverage, is nearly unlimited. Uh, also in modern society, because there's so many different people you can interact with, if you go on a date and it fails, there are infinite more people to go on a date with. In a tribal system, there might have been 20 people, and you can't even get through all of them. So, modern society is far more forgiving of failure. And you just have to sort of neocortically realize and override that. You have to realize that you're much more running a search function to find the thing that'll work. And then that one thing will pay off in massive compounding. Once you find your mate for the rest of your life, you find your wife or your husband, then you can compound in that relationship. It's okay if you had 50 failed dates in between. The same way, once you find the one business you're meant to plow into and it'll compound returns, it's okay if you had 50 small failed ventures or 50 small failed job interviews. It doesn't... the number of failures doesn't matter.

And so, there's no point in being a pessimist. It's... you want to be an optimist. But I would say you want to be... you want to be skeptical about specific things. Every specific opportunity is probably a fail. But you want to be optimistic in the general. In the general, you want to be like, "Something in here is going to work out."

I mean, exactly as I said. I'm optimistic in the general that if something fails right now, then—this is a little woo-woo—but it wasn't meant to be. It was a learning experience. It was an iteration. As long as I learned something from it, then it's a win. If I didn't learn from it, then it's a loss. But as long as you're learning and you keep iterating fast and cutting your losses quickly, then when you find the right thing, you have to be optimistic and compound into it. So, you don't want to jump into the first thing. And you don't want to marry the first person you date necessarily, unless you got very lucky. Um, but you... you want to investigate and explore very, very quickly until you find the match. And then you have to be willing to go all in. You have to be willing to move your chips to the center of the table. So, both those, uh, both those, uh, approaches are required. So, it's a barbell strategy. It's sort of black or it's white. And most people are sort of stuck in this gray bit. And I'm like half in, but I'm kind of... don't really know if I am. I also think like labels like "pessimist," "optimist," "cynic," "introvert," "extrovert"—these are very self-limiting. Humans are very dynamic. There are times when you feel like being introverted. There are times when you feel like being extroverted. There are contexts in which you'll be pessimistic. There are contexts in which you'll be optimistic. Leave all those labels alone. It's better just to look at the problem at hand. Look at reality the way it is. Try to take yourself out of the equation in a... in a sense. Like, obviously you're involved, but motivated reasoning is the worst kind of reasoning. Uh, you're not going to find truth through highly motivated reasoning. You have to be objective. And objective means trying to take yourself out of it as much as possible, or at least your personality out of it as much as possible. And so, to the extent you run with this thick identity and personality, it's going to cloud your judgment. It's going to try and lock you into the past. If you say, "I'm a depressed, unhappy person," yeah, I'm going to be unhappy. That's a way of locking yourself into your past. Even saying, "I have trauma. I have PTSD." Yeah, you... you feel something. There are memories. There are flashes. There are occasional bad feelings. But don't define yourself by it, because then you'll lock it into your identity and you're just going to loop on it. It's better to stay flexible because reality is always changing and you have to be able to adapt to it. Adaptation is also intelligence. Adaptation is survival. Adaptation is kind of how you're here. You're here because you're an adapter and your ancestors were adapters. So, to adapt, you will be able to see things clearly. And if you're seeing them through your own identity, it's going to cloud your judgment. Moving on to sort of thinking about happiness. Obviously a topic of yours. That's... it's honestly the one that I feel least qualified to talk about. Is it like a guy that's got long arms teaching you how to bench press? Or a dude that's really tall teaching you how to deadlift? Someone that feels like they came from behind the eight ball?

Yeah. Is... you're asking a crazy person about their thoughts. So just thought it through... Is happiness still more about peace than it is about joy?

It's just one of those overloaded words that means different things to different people. So, I'm not even sure we're communicating the same language. But, uh, what is happiness? I think it's just basically being okay with where you are. Not wanting... not wanting things to be different than the way they are. Not having the sense that anything is missing in this moment. Needing something to change... your current positive situation being contingent on an adjustment, on getting something from the outside world. Ironically, I think most people, if you were to ask them when they were happiest for a sustained period of time—not for a brief moment, because pleasure can override happiness and create kind of this illusion of happiness—but if you ask people when they were happy for a sustained period of time, they were probably doing some variation of nothing.

That's right. But then you get bored. If you just sit around all the time, you get bored. So, you want adventure, you want surprise. Like, there's a funny thought experiment of the bliss machine, right? Which is, suppose I could drill a hole in your head and put [an] electrode in. And they did this with monkeys. And I can put a wire in there and I can stimulate just the right part of your brain, and I can put you in bliss. And you'll just be in bliss. Would you... would you want that? Would that be nice? For how long?

Right? So, most people will say, "Well, I don't want that. I want meaning. I don't want just bliss. I want meaning." And you're like, "Okay, well, I'll put an electrode in there and I'll give you meaning. How about that?" And if you kind of run this thought experiment long enough, I think most people realize, "Actually, what I want is I want surprise. I want... and I want the world to surprise me. And I want to wrestle with it in ways that are somewhat predictable, but somewhat not." And you kind of end up back where you started. So, I don't know if necessarily... for some people, pure happiness is the ultimate goal. They want to, you know, just be blissfully happy wherever they are, whenever they are. But I think other people... most people would say, "Well, I'm here in this world. I'm here in this life. I don't understand it or why. But I want to be... I want to be engaged. I want to be surprised. I want to do things. I want to accomplish things. I want to want things and then get them." Right? That's kind of the whole game that we're all playing here.

Yeah. If... if nothing worked out the way you expected, if it was all serendipity and you didn't want that, you would just be a ball of anxiety. On the other hand, if everything worked out as you expected and wanted, you'd be so bored you might as well be dead. So, there's some... you know, the... the river of life kind of flows between these two banks, and... enjoy it.

What I'm specifically referring to there is if... if you're thinking about your personality and your ego and the character of you, and, uh, you're obsessing over that, that's where a lot of depression and unhappiness sort of lingers and... and gets cultivated. Uh, so, uh, thinking about, "Woe is me. This happened to me. That happened to me. I have this personality. I have this issue. I deserve this. I didn't get that"... That's... you're just strengthening a little beast in there that is insatiable. And that's where I think a lot of unhappiness comes from. What's the beast? It's the ego. But that word is so overused that I kind of hate to use the word. Um, but it's like a... it's a recurrent collection of thoughts that are very self-obsessed and will never be satisfied.

So, you're just adding to them by thinking about them all the time. You're creating narratives and stories and identities. Um, but that's different from solving personal problems. So, if you encounter something, you learn from something, you're reflecting upon the learning, then you can reflect upon it, absorb it, and then just move on. But sitting there saying, "I'm Chris. I'm Naval. I deserve this. This happened to me. That person wronged me. This is who I am. This shouldn't have happened. I need to go get revenge on this, or I need to fix that or change this"... I mean, that, I think, is where a lot of mental illness is... is, you know, comes from. So, it depends. If you are thinking about something to solve a problem and get it off your chest and get it off your mind... If it leaves your mind clearer at the end of it, then I think it was worthwhile. If it leaves your mind busier at the end of it, then you're probably going the wrong direction.

Detachment is not a goal. Detachment is a byproduct. It's... it's just a byproduct of just realizing, you know, what matters and what doesn't. Uh, and... and just for one moment on the self thing... I think everybody craves thinking about something more than themselves. If you want to be, you know, happy to some extent, you have to forget about your personal problems. And one way to do that is take on other problems, bigger problems. Uh, and that could be a mission. That could be... that could be spirituality. That could be kids. Um, it could be caring about the planet, although I think people take that a little far, you know, and then they get kind of oppressive and... and tyrannical in support of abstract concepts. But... so, these can be taken too far, just like religion, for example. Just like anything in excess. Anything in excess, right?. Um, but generally, the less you think about yourself, the more you can think about a mission, or about God, or about a child, or something like that.

That's right. Preferably all three. It's very liberating. Um, yeah, thinking... I think overthinking about yourself is probably the... it's... it may not be the cause of depression, but it certainly doesn't help.

Yeah.

Therapy is great if it lets you vent and it solves a thing, and then x session later, you're done. You're clear. But if you're just looping on the same thing forever, then it's actually the opposite. You're bathing in it. You're indulging in it. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, I used to have a lot of them. Uh, now I kind of try not to have any, because I think the techniques themselves are kind of a struggle. It's sort of like bidding for status implies you're low status. It reveals that you're low status. So, someone who's basically trying to show off comes across as low status. The same way, someone who's trying to be happy is sort of saying, "I'm unhappy," and creating that frame. So, it's better just to not even think in terms of...

Yeah. I don't even think in terms of happiness/unhappiness anymore. I just kind of just do my thing.

I don't think there are any formulas. I think it's unique to each person. It's like asking a successful person, "How did you become successful?" Each one of them will give you a different story. Uh, you can't follow anyone else's path. And most of them are even probably telling you some narrativized version of it that isn't quite true.

That's not my experience. But if you look at... You shouldn't be asking somebody who is successful what they do to continue their success now. You should be asking them, "What did they do to attain their success when they were where you were?" And the people who are really extraordinarily successful didn't sit around watching success porn. They just went and did it. They just had... they had such an overwhelming desire to be successful at the thing that they were doing that they just went and did that thing. They didn't have time to study and learn and listen. They just did it. It's the overwhelming desire that's the most important, and the focus that comes from that.

Yeah. "You don't need mentors, you need action". That was one of them. Another one is, you know, the, uh, "The people who actually know how to make money don't need to sell you a course on it". There is, um, yeah, there's lots of variations on it. But I... if you don't... Another one is, "If you don't lie awake at night thinking about it, you don't want it badly enough".

This... I'm not a good sleeper.

Oh, I mean, my Eight Sleep hates me. It's always on me. I failed at sleeping again. Brian Johnson thinks I'm going to die early. He's probably right. But I...

Oh, it's so random. Some nights I'll sleep 8 hours. Some nights I'll sleep 4 hours. But it's literally just random.

I don't flog myself over things. Uh, if I want to sleep, I'll sleep. If I don't want to sleep, I don't sleep. It's not a... I don't think I'm doing anything right or wrong.

No. I work out every day because I think it gives me more energy, and I've gotten into a good habit with it. Maybe I'll do the same thing with sleep. Maybe I'll develop a good habit, but I'm not going to beat myself up over it. There'll come a point where it's important to me, and when it's important to me, I'll just do it. You know, most of... like, for example, you look at people with addictions, right? Overeating or smoking or whatever. They can kind of go through all the different methods, but it's half-hearted. And then one day they're like, "Oh, [...] I've got lung cancer," "My dad has lung cancer," and they drop it immediately. So, I think a lot... a lot of change is more about desire and understanding than it is about, uh, forcing yourself or trying to domesticate yourself.

Yeah. It's not... it's not getting caught up in a... in a half desire or a mimetic desire. It's really just being aware of what it is that you actually want at this point in time. And when you want something, then you will act on it with maximal capability. And that's the time to act on it. In the meantime, just doing it because other people tell you you should do it, or society tells you you should do it, or you feel slightly guilty about it... These are... these are half-hearted efforts, and half-hearted efforts don't get you there. You mentioned anxiety before. Uh, "Imagine how effective you'd be if you weren't anxious all the time" is... is one of yours. Anxiety is the emotion du jour of the 21st century. And lots of driven people [are] very anxious, very paranoid. That's what's caused them to be effective. It pays so much attention, detail-oriented, not letting things go, staying up at night thinking about it. That's the paranoia coming in. What have you come to learn about anxiety and dealing with it?

So, anxiety and stress are interesting. They're very related. Stress is when, uh, like if you look at an iron beam, when an iron beam is under stress, it's because it's being bent in two different directions at the same time. So, when your mind is under stress, it's because it has two conflicting desires at once. So, for example, you know, you... you want to be liked, but you want to do something selfish, and you can't reconcile the two, and so you're under stress. Uh, you want to do something for somebody else, you want to do something for yourself, right? These are examp... You... you don't want to go to work, but you want to make money, so you're under stress. Right? So, you have two conflicting desires. And I think one of the ways to get through stress is to acknowledge that, "Oh, I actually have two conflicting desires. And either I need to resolve it, I need to pick one and then be okay losing the other, or I will decide later." But at least just being aware of why you're stressed can help alleviate a lot of stress. And then anxiety, I think, is sort of this pervasive, unidentifiable stress, where you're just kind of stressed out all the time and you're not even sure why. And you can't even identify the underlying problem. I think the reason for that is because you... you have so many, uh, unresolved problems, unresolved stress points that have piled up in your life, that you can no longer identify what the problems are. And there's this mountain of garbage in your mind, and a little bit of it [is] poking out the top like an iceberg, and that's anxiety. But underneath, there's a lot of unresolved things. And so, you just need to kind of go through very carefully every time you're anxious. Like, "Okay, why am I anxious this time? I don't know why." "Oh, well, let me sit here and just think about it. Let me... let me write down what the possible causes could be. Let me meditate on it. Let me journal. Let me talk to a therapist. Let me talk to my friends. Let me just kind of see, like, when does that stress go away?" If you can kind of identify and unravel and resolve these issues, then I think that helps get rid of anxiety. Uh, a lot of the anxiety is piled up because we move through life too quickly, not observing our own reactions to things. We don't resolve them. So, this goes counter to what I was saying earlier about not reflecting too much on things. But you reflect on the problems to observe them and solve them. You don't reflect on them to feel better about yourself, to indulge them.

Um, you know, one... one big anxiety resolver for me is just ruminating on death. I think that's a good one. You're going to die. It's all going to zero. You cannot take anything with you. And I know this is trite. And I know the... We don't spend enough time thinking about the big questions. We kind of give up on them when we're very, very young. You know, a little child might ask the big questions like, "Why are we here?" "What's the meaning of life?" "What is this all about?" You know, "Is there Santa Claus?" "Is there God?" But then as adults, we're taught not to think about these things, or we've given up on them. But I think the big questions are the big questions for good reasons. And, uh, if you can keep the idea in front of you at all times that you're going to die and that everything goes literally to zero, what's there to stress about?

Enjoy it. Make the best of it. You know, it's... it's even briefer than that. Each moment just disappears, it's gone. There's only a present moment, and it's gone instantly. So, if you're not... if you're not there for it, if you're stressed out or you're anxious or you're thinking about something else, you missed it. So, you're... any moment when you're not in that moment, you are dead to that moment. You might as well be dead, because your mind is off doing something else or, you know, living in some imagined reality that is just a very poor substitute for the actual reality. So, one of my recent realizations was, what is wasted time? What is a... what is a waste of time? So, I don't like to waste time. But what is wasted time? And everything is wasted time, in a sense, because nothing matters in the ultimate. Uh, but in each moment, the thing matters. In each moment, it's the only thing that matters. Actually, the... what's happening in front of you literally has all the meaning in the world. And so, what matters is just being present for the thing. So, if you're doing something that you want to do and you're fully there for it, then it's not wasted time. If you don't want to do it and your mind is running away from it and you're reacting against it and you're wishing you were somewhere else and you're thinking about some other thing or you're anticipating some future thing or regretting some past thing or being fearful of something, then that's wasted time. That's time that's being wasted when you're not actually present for the reality in front of you. So, my definition of wasted time... yes, I do want some material things in life and I, you know, there... there are things that have more value than others within this life, but this life is very short and bounded. So, the true wasted time is the time that you're not present for, when you are not there for it. When you're not doing the thing you want to do to the best of your capability such that you're immersed in it. If you're not immersed in this moment, then you're wasting your time.

That's right. But... and I think people crave being here for it. And... and when you're here for it, you're actually not thinking about yourself. You are more immersed in the thing, the... the moment, the task at hand.

That's right. Yeah. You don't... peace... The mind is what can eat you alive if you let it. And there's more to you than the mind.

Well, I mean, the very... I don't want to disassemble the body, so to speak, right? Because...

Yeah. At the end of the day, like, everything arises within your consciousness, right? You... you got nowhere else to experience it.

Nowhere else to experience it. And that consciousness is, uh, relatively static in the sense that it's been exactly the same from the moment you were born to the moment you die. And everything that you experience—from your body, from your mind, to the world, to everything—is within that consciousness. Uh, and that thing, that base layer of being—and this is what the Buddhists will tell you—is the real thing. Everything that comes and goes in the middle, including your mind, including your body, is unreal. And trying to find stability in those transient things is... is your castle that you're building on sand that's going to crumble. Life is going to play out the way it's going to play out. There will be some good and some bad. Most of it is actually just up to your interpretation. You're born, you have a set of sensory experiences, and then you die. How you choose to interpret those experiences is up to you. And different people interpret them in different ways.

Um, so I think when I said that, it was a long time ago. I was talking more about having positive interpretations and negative interpretations. But these days, I think it's better just not to have any interpretations and to just allow things to be. You're still going to have interpretations, you can't stop it. Uh, and nor should you try. But even that, having an interpretation, is just a thing you can leave alone.

Well, I don't want to tell anybody how to live their life. I would just say that to the extent that you want to improve your quality of life, the, uh, the easiest and best way to do that is to observe your own mind and your own thoughts and... and be a little... not necessarily critical, but, um, be observant of yourself more objectively. And then you'll kind of realize your own loops and patterns. It takes time. It's not... it's not overnight. It's not instantaneous.

Yeah. And... and there's... letting go is not necessarily even the right answer. Like, yes, if you're trying to be an enlightened being and, you know, you want to live like a god and everything's going to be perfect and be a Buddha, sure, you can let go. But, uh, I think in practice, it's actually quite hard to do. Um, I think I would say that it's, uh, you're going to find a lot of fulfillment out of life by just doing what you want to do and genuinely exploring what it is that you want, rather than doing what other people expect you to do, or society expects you to do, or what you might just think should be done by default. Um, you know, I think most older, successful people will tell you that their life was best when they lived it unapologetically on their own terms. Be selfish.

We can clip that. Little...

I think the gut is what decides. Um, the head is kind of what rationalizes it afterwards. The gut is the ultimate decision-maker. If it doesn't... and what is the gut? The gut is refined judgment. It's taste, aggregate... aggregated. And it could be aggregated through evolution, uh, and it's in your genes and your DNA. Or it could be aggregated through your experiences and what you've thought through. The mind is good at solving new problems and, uh, new problems in the external world that have defi... defined edges, you know, beginnings and ends and... and objectives. What the mind is actually really bad at is making hard decisions. So, when you have a hard decision to make, I find it's better to, yes, you ruminate on it. You think through all the pros and cons. But then you sleep on it. You wait a couple of days. You wait until the gut answer appears with conviction and it feels right. And when you're younger, it takes longer because you just don't have as much experience. And when you're older, uh, it can happen much faster.

Yeah. And old people [are] just more set in their ways as a consequence, right? They know what they want. They know what they don't want. Um, so it takes time to develop your gut instinct and judgment. But once you've developed them, don't trust anything else, because you can't go against your gut. It'll bite you in the end. Uh, usually in relationships that failed, you can look back and say, "Oh, actually, I knew it was going to fail because of this reason, but I kind of went ahead anyway because I wanted it to be this way." Right? "I wanted this person to be a different way than they are," or "I wanted to get a different thing out of it than I thought I was going to... than I knew I was going to get, but I just wanted it." So, sometimes desire will override your judgment. And then...

Exactly. I think to add to that: you can't change other people. You can change your reaction to them. You can change yourself, but other people only change through trauma or their own insight on their own schedule, and never in a way that you like.

Absolutely. Yeah. The fastest way to kind of alienate somebody is to tell them to change. In fact, uh, the Dale Carnegie School of Public Speaking, you know, the way that operates is, uh, they get you up there and they realize that the number one problem with public speaking is, uh, that, uh, people are very self-conscious. And so, uh, people who are practicing in the Dale Carnegie School of Public Speaking—I don't know, I never went through, I heard this secondhand, so I could be wrong, but I like the story—where they get up and they start speaking, and the people in the audience are only allowed to compliment them—genuine compliments, not fake compliments—on things that they did well. But you're not allowed to criticize them on things that they did poorly. And eventually, they kind of get through it and they develop the self-confidence. The same way, uh, there's like the Michel Thomas school of language learning. And on that one, what they do is you listen to a teacher talking to a student. They're not teaching you. You're not expected to remember or memorize anything. You just listen to a student stumbling over the language. It's a better way to learn because you yourself don't feel flustered. You're being tested, graded.

Correct. You're not in your own head, and you're just... you might even be laughing at the student, or you might be agreeing with the teacher, or vice versa, or sympathizing with the student. But because you are a passive observer, you can be more objective about it and you aren't threatened or fearful, and you can learn better. And coming back to the original point of you can't change people: If you do want to change someone's behavior, I... I think the only effective way to do it is to compliment them when they do something you want. Not to... positive... Yeah, exactly. Not to insult them or be negative or critical when they do something you don't want. And we can't help it. It's obviously in our nature to criticize, and I do it as well. But it just reminds me that like, when somebody does something praiseworthy, don't forget to praise them. Like, definitely go out of your way and... and it'll be genuine. It has to be genuine. It can't be a fake thing. Uh, this is not, you know, one of those, uh, just dropping compliments type thing. Eventually... people will see through that. They want authenticity. But just don't forget to praise people when they do something praiseworthy, and you'll get more of that behavior.

And that's the, you know, "They show such great promise. They... they look at their... look at their ability for... for change and growth. They... they... they're on the right path." The partner matching thing is so hard. Uh, you know, when people come and ask me like, "Oh, should I be with this person?" Like, "Well, if you're asking me, the answer is clearly no." Right? Because you wouldn't have to ask if you were with the right person. Or when you ask someone like why they're, uh, in a relationship with somebody, and they start reading out his or her resume, right? That's also a bad sign.

Oh, it's like, "Oh, we have so much in common. We like to golf together." It's like, it's not a basis for a relationship. Or, "Oh, you know, she's a ballerina," or "You know, he went to Harvard," or what have you. These are resume items. That's not who the person actually is.

"I just love being with this person." "I just trust them." "I, you know, I... I enjoy being around them." "I... I love how capable he is." "I love how kind she is." "You know, I love her spirit." "I love his energy." Uh, the more... the more materially and concretely definable the reasons are you're together, the worse they are. Uh, the ineffable is actually where the sort of true love lies. Because real love is a form of unity. It's a form of connection. It's connecting spirits. Oh, you two... my consciousness meets your consciousness. It's a... the... the underlying drive, uh, in love, in art, in, uh, science, in, uh, mysticism, is the desire for unity. It's a desire for connection. As, you know, Borges famously wrote, "In every human, there's a sense that something infinite has been lost." You know, there's a God-shaped hole in you you're trying to fill. And so, we're always trying to find that connection. Love is trying to find it in one other person and saying, "Okay, you're male, I'm female," or whatever. And, you know, whatever your predilections are. "And now... now we connect. Now we form a whole... connected whole." Or in mysticism, it's like, "It's all about... okay, sit down, meditate, and you'll feel the whole." In science, it's like, "Oh, uh, you know, atoms bouncing is mechanics, but that generates heat. So, thermodynamics and motion or kinetics are one combined theory. That's a whole." "Electricity and magnetism are one thing. That's... that's the whole." Creates that sense of awe. Uh, in art, it's like, "I feel an emotion. I create a piece of art around it. And then you see that painting or you see the Sistine Chapel or you read the poem, and you feel that emotion." So, again, it's... it's creating unity. It's creating connection. And I think everybody craves that. And so, when you really love somebody, it's because you... you feel a sense of wholeness by being around them. Uh, and that sense of wholeness probably doesn't have anything to do with what school they went to, you know, or what career they're in.

My cousin said this about me. He said that, uh, he said, "What I really..." He says, "What I've really noticed about you is your ability to walk away from situations that are just not great enough for you or not good enough for you." And I think that is a characteristic that I have. I will not accept second-best outcomes in my life. Um, ultimately, you will end up wherever is acceptable to you. You will get out of life whatever is acceptable to you. Um, and there are certain things to me that are very, very important where I will not settle for second best. But then there are a lot of other things I just don't care about, because if I spend all my time caring about those things, I don't have the energy for the few things that matter. And, uh, so in decision-m... I have a few heuristics for myself. Other people can use their own, but mine are: If you can't decide, the answer is no. If you're offered an opportunity, if you have a new thing that you're saying yes or no to that is a change from where you're starting, the answer is by default always no. Secondly, uh, if you have two decisions, if you have A or B and both seem like very equal, take the path that's more painful in the short term. The one that's going to be painful immediately. Because your brain is always trying to avoid pain. So any pain that is imminent, it is going to treat as much larger than it actually is. This is kind of like a decision-making equivalent of Taleb's surgeon. Uh, "Taleb surgeon," where you want the surgeon that doesn't look as good because he's more likely to be a good surgeon. Yeah, it's similar in that appearances are deceiving because you're avoiding conflict. You're avoiding pain. So, take the path [that] is more painful in the short term, because your brain is creating this illusion that the short-term pain is greater than the long-term pain. Because long-term, yeah, you... you'll commit your future self to all kinds of long-term... mañana. Mañana, exactly. Mañana. So, take the more short-term painful one. And then finally, the last one, which I would credit Kapil Gupta with, uh, is that you want to take it... take the choice that will leave you more equanimous in the long term. By equanimous, he means like more at peace, more mental peace in the long term. So, whatever clears your mind more and will have you having less self-talk in the future, if you can model that out, that is probably the better route to go. And then I would focus decision-m... down on the three things that really matter, because everything else is downstream of these... these three decisions. Especially these are early life decisions. Later in life, you have different things to optimize for. But early in life, you're trying to figure out who you're with, what you're doing, and where you live. And I think on all three of those, you want to think... you want to think pretty hard about it. And people do some of these unconsciously. You know, who you're with, very often it's like, "Well, we were in a relationship. We stumbled along. It felt okay. It had been enough time, so we got married." Right? Not great reasons. Maybe not terrible reasons either. I mean, people who overthink these things sometimes don't get the right answer. But maybe here, if you're the kind of person that's not going to settle for second best, you iterate. You iterate on a closed time frame so you don't run out the clock. And then you decide. Um, on what you do: You try a whole bunch of different things until you find the one that feels like play to you, looks like work to others. You can't lose at it. Um, get some leverage, try to find some practical application of it, and go into that. And then where you live: Uh, where you live is really important. I don't think people spend enough time on that one. I think people pick cities randomly based on where I went to school, or where my family happened to be, or where, uh, my friend was, or "I visited one weekend, I really liked it." You really want to think it through, because where you live really constrains and defines your opportunities. Um, it, uh, it... it's going to determine your friend circle. It's going to determine your dating pool. It's going to determine your job opportunities. It's going to determine the food and air and water quality that you receive. Um, it's going to determine your proximity to your family, which might be important as you get older and have kids. So, very, very, very important decision. Weather, you know, quality of life. How much do you stay inside or outside? How long are you going to live based on that? And I think people choose that one probably more poorly than... they put a lot less thought into that one than the other two.

Yeah. And then when you have kids, because then that's half of you and half of them running around, you're never going to separate yourself from that. So, once you have a child with somebody, then the most important thing in the world to you is half that other person, whether you like them or not.

That I am a big believer in genetics. Yes, I do think a lot of behavior is downstream of genetics, and I think we underplay that. We like to overplay nurture and underplay... nurture for... sorry, underplay nature for societal reasons, but nature is a big deal. Um, the temperament of the person you marry is probably going to be reflected in your child.

Well, the secret to a happy relationship is two happy people, right? So, I would say if you want to be happy, then, uh, be with a happy person. Don't think you're going to be with someone who's unhappy and then make them happy down the road. Or if you're okay with them being unhappy, but there are other things you like about them, that's fine. But...

Yes. And actually, we... we talked a little bit about how people do connect successfully, you know, on spirit and... and those things. But that's maybe a little too abstract. If you want to get a little more practical, it could be based on values. And values are a set of things you won't compromise on. Values are the tough decisions of, "Oh, my parent got sick. Do they move in with us, or do we put them in a... in a nursing home?" Uh, you know, "The ch... do we give the children money, or do we not?" Uh, you know, "Do we, um... do we move across the country to be closer to our family, or do we stay put where we are?" Uh, you know, "Do we argue about politics? Do we care, or do we not?" Right? The values are way more important than checklist items. Uh, and, uh, I think if people were to align much more on their values, they would have much more successful relationships.

Evolved loss aversion. It's just painful. Separating yourself in front of your friends, it's embarrassing.

Yeah, it's the hardest thing in the world. Uh, starting over. It's back to the zero to one thing. It's, uh, it's the mountain climbing thing. You're not going to find your path to the top of the mountain in the first go-around. Sometimes you go up there, you get stuck, and you come back down. And the difference between all the successful people and the ones who are not, is the ones who are successful want it so badly they're willing to go back and start over again and again, whether in their career or in their relationships or in anything else.

Well, fame doesn't help on that one. Because that is one of the traps of fame. People are always talking about you, they have a certain view of you, and you start believing that, and then you take yourself seriously. And then that limits your own actions. You can't look like a fool anymore. Um, you can't do new things anymore. You know, tomorrow I announce I'm a break dancer, right? That's going to be met with a lot of scorn and ridicule. But what if I want to be...

Yeah. The truth is, if I want to be a break dancer, I'd be break dancing. But, uh, you know, like I'm starting a new company. Zero to one again from scratch. Let's do it, you know, one more time. Uh, and not just going and raising a big VC fund or retiring or what have you. But that's because I want to build the product. I want to see it exist. So, I think that you constantly just have to force yourself. You have to remind yourself. Um, look, deep down, you're still the same Chris you were when you were 9 years old. Deep down, you're still a kid. Uh, you know, you're still curious about the world. You still have a lot of the same predilections and desires and wants. You've got a nice veneer on it. But one of the nice things when you have kids is you realize how much closer they are to you in personality and knowledge and know-how. Like I look at my son who's, uh, you know, he's eight. And, uh, I just noticed like, "Wow, he probably has 60 to 80% of my knowledge and development wisdom, and he has a lot more freedom, and he has a lot more spontaneity." In some ways he's smarter, and there's not a big gap here left to close. This kid's going to be, you know, done very soon. He's caught up to me. And so, to the extent that I think I know better, or that I'm somewhere, or that I'm someone, it's... it's just an illusion. It is... it's just a belief. What's the lineage between that and taking yourself too seriously? I shouldn't take myself too seriously because there's nothing here to take that seriously. And if I take myself too seriously, then I'm going to get trapped. I'm going to get... I'm going to circumscribe myself again into a limited set of behaviors and outcomes that keep me from being free, keep me from being spontaneous, keep me from being happy. Um, so it... it just goes back to the, you know, "Don't think about yourself too much."

Absolutely. That's why I did that exercise of thinking back, you know, 10 years, 20 years, 30 years ago, "What advice would I give myself?" For me, it's just "Be less emotional. Don't take... don't take everything so seriously. Do the same things, but do them without all the emotional turbulence." And so that's the advice I'm giving myself going forward.

And related to this story is, I think understanding is way more important than discipline. Now, Jocko would have a fit. But, you know, on physical things, discipline is important. If I want to build a good body, I got to work out on a regular basis. But on mental things, I think understanding is way more important. Once you see the truth of something, you cannot unsee it. All of us have had experiences where we've seen a behavior in a person, and then it just changes what we think about that person. We no longer want to be friends with them, or we deeply respect them if it was, you know, really good behavior that maybe was observed unintentionally. Um, so when we... when we really do see something clearly, it changes our behavior immediately. And that is far more efficient than trying to change your behavior through repetition.

Um, if you were... let's say that, you know, you have a friend and then that person turns out to be a thief. You see that person stealing something, you're done with them. Uh, if you are, uh, you know, the... the smoking lung cancer example is a good one. Right? Someone close to you... or anytime someone close to you dies or you even hear about someone dying... You hear about someone dying, what's the first thing you do? The first thing, assuming that you weren't that close to them—obviously, if you're close to them, it's different—but if you weren't that close to them, but you know, you hear about someone in your extended social [circle] dying, you immediately start trying to... distinguish yourself from them. You're like, "Oh, well, how old was this person? You know, did they have... were they a smoker? You know, did they have an issue? Do I have that issue?" Right? You immediately start comparing. And what... what you're doing there is you're sort of just trying to see if there's an overlap here. But if you see the truth in something... if you're like, "Oh my god, this person was the same age as me and they died." And that's starting to happen at my age, where I'm starting to hear about, you know, extended circle people... just reminds you time is really short. There's a truth there. There's a truth there that you cannot unsee. Uh, you know, or for example, I think... were you into bodybuilding or something back when? I don't know. Like bro lifting stuff...

But there probably was a point where you were, uh, being really aggro in the gym and you injured yourself many times, right? And each one of those was a deep understanding of, "Don't go beyond this point." Right? There was a truth there. So again, when you... when you see these things in such a way that you can't unsee them, that changes your behavior instantly. And I would argue that that introspection to find those truths is actually very useful.

You're going to do what you're going to do. I mean, your level of exploration, I think, is sort of up to you. But life is always throwing truth back at you. Uh, it's about whether you choose to see it, whether you choose to acknowledge it. Uh, even if it's painful. Truth is often painful, right? If it wasn't, we'd all be seeing truth all the time. Reality is always reflecting truth. That's all it is.

Exactly. Uh, you know, all the... all the philosophy that's out there, for example, uh, it's almost trite. Like most people, they look at philosophy like... until they discover it for themselves. And because... because wisdom is the set of things that cannot be transmitted. If they could be transmitted, you know, we'd read the same five philosophy books and we'd all be done. We'd all be wise. You have to learn it for yourself. It has to be rediscovered for yourself in your own context. You have to have specific experiences that then allow you to generalize and see the truth in those things in such a way that you're not going to unsee them. But each person is going to see them in a different way. I can tell you that Socrates story, and it's not going to resonate until there's something that other people desire that you realize you yourself don't want. And the moment that happens, then you'll see the truth in the general statement.

That's... It's a good essay. I... I think one of the reasons why these lessons are unteachable is because, uh, they're too broad. They have to be applied in context. A number of the ones that you laid out contradict each other. Like, "Spend more time with your parents" and, "You know, don't work so hard," but, you know, at the same time, you do want to be successful. Right? I think... I think a lot of these lessons come from down on high from, as you said, like the famous movie star or the billionaire saying, "Oh, you don't need to be happy." It's like, "Well, okay, then give it up, [...]" Right? Uh, so in reality, I think many of these contradict each other and they... it's like if you went to school and you just studied philosophy for four years, you would not know how to live life because you wouldn't know which philosophical doctrine to apply in which circumstance. Uh, you have to actually live life, go through all of the issues to figure out what it is that you want, what's the context in which some of these things apply and some of them don't. Um, yes, you want to visit your parents more often, but you don't want to live with your parents, and you don't want to necessarily see them every day or every weekend. Depending on the parent, you might not get along with one of them. So, I think it is highly contextual. Um, that said, I... I would argue that once you figure it out for yourself, you can kind of carve these variations on these maxims that apply to you. And, uh, then you'll have a specific experience that helps you remember it and actually execute on it. And you can also phrase it in a way where it's not trite anymore. So like... Yeah. So, so a lot of my maxims and notes to self are carved in a way that they're modernized. They're saying something true, which might be trite if I didn't say it in a new way or in an interesting way that is more relevant to me today. There was a Nobel Prize winner who said something to the effect of, uh, "Everything worth saying may have been said before, but given that nobody was listening, it must be said again." Yeah.

Yeah. There's a lot of jargon out there. I think it's... it's the mark of a charlatan to explain a simple thing in a complex way. And so, when you see people using very complicated language to explain simple things, they're either trying to impress you and obfuscate, or they don't understand it themselves.

So I have my own version.

Okay, so you have "Podcast Chris," I have "Podcast Guest Naval." Precisely. So, very often I'll, uh, think of something. I'll have some, what I think is an insight, and I want to tweet it or write it down. But in my mind, I'm talking about it on a podcast. That's kind of how my mind registers it. And for a while, I thought this was a bad thing, and I tried to eradicate "Podcast Naval." And then I just realized that's just how it comes out. So, I might as well just be okay with it. Now, do you know the reason I'm on this podcast?

You know, I haven't done a proper formal interview, straight up, top... whatever, 10, 20 podcasts in a long time. Since Rogan, maybe? Probably since Rogan.

Yeah. It went out at the top, right? That was the theory.

Yeah. Yeah, I know. And... and then, you know, I've done some stuff with Tim. Tim Ferriss [is] a good friend, but that's been more co-hosting. I haven't been a guest. Um, and then I did one or two random things where I just stumbled into a thing where I, you know, there was a reason, but it wasn't like this. And I reached out to you for this one. Right? I have lots of people reaching out to me for podcasts. I do not answer them. I reached out to you. And the reason is a really funny one. It's because when I am playing "Podcast in the Vault" in my head, for some reason, you're on the other side. And I don't know why. I literally don't know why. It's not like I've even seen many of your podcasts. I think I've seen some snippets here and there. But for some reason, you were the guy in the podcast in "Podcast Naval." And so, I was like, "I might as well just do it." So, I reached out to you.

At least not in the same way. I don't like sequels.

Yeah. Yeah. Um, you're right. 2019, right before COVID.

Well, I... I think the reason why I wanted to be on this is because for some reason I have the impression that you engage in conversations. And I like conversations. I don't like interviews. Mhm. This is why I was doing my last startup, AirChat, which was all about conversations. And conversations to me are more genuine. They're more authentic. There's a give and take. There's a back and forth. There's a genuine curiosity. It's not to say the other podcasters don't do it. They absolutely do it. But for some reason, in my mind, I had you as a guy that I would actually have a conversation with. And sure enough, you just read me your essay, which I don't think anybody else would really do. Right? That implies there's a give and take. There's a genuine curiosity. And I think that's useful because then, uh, certain inexplicit knowledge that I had will be surfaced for myself. And I think that's helpful.

No, guru is a trap. Do not follow me. Do not bow to me. Do not do any of the other things to me. But, uh, if you see resonance in another person—and I think this is what we're all trying to find... You know, people can complain about the mountains of content creation that happens, and... and maybe rightly so. Um, but if you're able to find someone and you see in them a little bit of you, maybe not even much of you, but like, "Oh, that bit of them, their self-esteem, or the way they look at relationships, or what they want to do, the kind of life they want, or the level of peace of mind that they want to have," or whatever it might be... If you find in somebody else a little bit of that, it's kind of like what you're saying before: you can't... you can no longer be unconvinced of that, and it... it steps in and becomes a part of you. And, uh, yeah, you're maybe seeing...

The reason I spend a lot of time in San Francisco is because it's a gravitational attractor for the smartest people in the world. And despite all the many problems the city had—it's mismanaged beyond belief—um, it does just seem to pull in the young, smart, creative people. Uh, not just the ones who are building technology, but they're exploring every facet of life. And they're weird, and sometimes it's repulsive and it's bizarre. But you talk to these people, and you just see a very intelligent person coming at life in a completely different way, um, putting it through the combinatorics of human DNA, which are uncountable, and giving you a weird perspective that can twist your mind around. And to do that, you always have to be learning. You... you have... You can't be in a guru mentality. If I'm with somebody and they're listening to every word I say and hanging on it, that's not interesting for me. I'm not going to learn anything. Um, I want people who are intelligent, who will say something back that is a little different. And I may not agree with it, but it's going to leave a mark. It's going to leave an impression. And it's going to leave an impression to the extent that both... that they are correct and that I choose to listen. And I'll choose to listen if I don't view myself as higher status or smarter than them. The flip side of that is I'm not really impressed by high-status people. Like, I don't... just because... [that's] pretty much the case. In fact, uh, most of my friends who have gone on to become very, uh, famous, successful... the more famous, successful they've been, the less I spend time with them. Um, partially because they get surrounded by an army of sycophants, which gets hard to break through. Uh, and because I don't want anything from them. And I don't... and I don't like that. I don't like these situations in which transactional relationships are implied.

Right. But they get... they get surrounded by people who do want things from them and are so good at pretending they don't, that it's just not worth my time to try and break out from that group. Um, so it does get lonely at the top, so to speak. But it's also by choice because you know, it's... you can... Yeah, you can be your own best friend, too. I am my own best friend, actually. So, I really do enjoy spending time with myself.

Yeah, I mean, a lot of life is not giving a [...]. You know, a lot of the best things in life come out of that.

Of course. Yeah. A lot of my stuff is more polished. Like, one of the funny things... yeah, one of the funny things that, uh, right before this, uh, podcast was I thought maybe I should go back and read my old tweets to sort of remember what I said and I can articulate it well. But then I realized that's just performance. I would just be memorizing my old stuff to perform.

Bingo. And... and to live up to some expectation or some, uh, famous personality that I now have to become, some straightjacket that I have to put on.

That's right. So, of course, pretty quickly I saw through that. You know, it's nonsense, and it also constrains my time, and it's just work. And it...

Exactly. Exactly. So, it's not about changing your thoughts. It's not about fixing your thoughts. It's not about changing yourself. It's just about being observant of yourself so that you can then... it'll automatically change. Whatever change needs to happen will happen. You trying to change yourself is very circular. Um, the mind trying to change the mind... the mind doesn't like wrestling with itself. I don't... I don't think it gets you anywhere.

To spend wealth? Yeah. Yeah. How you... you spend this time creating this wealth, accumulating... how does... what are the best ways for you to put it back out?

I actually think Elon had this one figured out, which is he plowed his own money back into his own businesses to go and do bigger and better things for humanity. Um, so what I would like to... you know, you could give it to nonprofits, but a lot of nonprofits are grifty, or it's people who didn't earn it trying to spend it, or they don't have tight feedback loops on having a good effect. So, one of the things I want to do as an aside is I want to create a little school for young physicists. But that's... that's my nonprofit... A young physicist? Yeah, that... that's my nonprofit thing. But, uh, and I've been... and I've actually, uh, underwritten, uh, media and some physics stuff. I don't like to talk about it. So, I don't... I don't talk about my whatever-so-called philanthropy because I think that makes it less real. That makes it more status-oriented.

Yeah, exactly. And then people look at how charitable my charity is. And then people also come hunting for money. So, there's all that disease. I don't believe in giving to schools. They have enough money. Ivy Leagues have enough money and they don't know how to spend it. So, I think the best use of money is... I think a good business creates a product for people that they voluntarily buy and they get value out of. So, in that sense, I think Steve Jobs and Elon and... and, uh, entrepreneurs like that have created a lot of value for the world. So, one of the things I can do is I can take my own money and I can invest it in myself to go and build the next great thing that I think needs to exist. And that's basically what I'm doing right now. I'm doing a new business. I'm self-funding it. Um, I'm plowing a lot of money into it. I'm going to build something that I think is beautiful, that I want to see exist. Um, I really want to see exist.

It's so early. It's... Yeah, maybe I'll show it to you in a few months. Uh, hopefully 6 months. Um, and, uh, I'm excited about it. And that's a good use of money.

What is the old line? "If it flies, floats, or fornicates..."

...Fox, but yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think that was, uh... Maybe it was, uh, Felix Dennis.

Who... who had that quote. Yeah. He said, "If it flies, floats, or fornicates, rent it." I... I think the last one was a little too... it's wrong. That... he didn't have a family, didn't have kids. So, you know, he missed the big one. Um, but yeah, there... there are lots of bad ways to spend money. Uh, I... I believe in investment. You know, I don't believe in consumption. Uh, yes, you can... you're born with a short housing position. You close that out, you get yourself a nice house. Um, get yourself some help to free up your time so you're not doing, uh, things that other people can do better. Um, treat people well. You know, always overpay and expect the best. Uh, pay them like they're the best and expect the best. Um, but overall, I think a good use of money is to take risks and build things and do things that other people can't do. Align it with your own unique talents so you can keep delivering to the world. I'm not going to sit idle. Uh, I'm not going to retire. That's a... that's a waste of whatever time I have left on this earth. Um, and if I'm doing something I enjoy, then I'm already in perpetual retirement. Um, because work is just a set of things you want to do... that... that you have to do that you don't want to do. So, if you want to do it, it's not work. Um, and so there are things that I want to do, don't feel like work. I can put money behind them, and I can use that to make... instantiate them into reality. And I don't want to say "make the world a better place" 'cuz that's too trite, but it's more just create a product that I'm proud of, that wouldn't exist otherwise, that other people will get tremendous value [from].

Exactly. Yeah. Wealth gives you freedom. It gives you freedom to explore more options. And in my case, it gives me freedom to start businesses without having to ask other people for permission or to warp my vision based on, uh, their desires to make a return or how they think money should be made.

No, there's like 10,000 things I could talk about that topic forever, to be honest. Like that... that thread was so short, and it was so limited, and it was so, like, you know, crafted in a sense, although I wrote it very spontaneously. Um, it left so much on the cutting room floor that I could just talk about that topic for days. But it's all contextual. Right? Business is very, very, very contextual. Like, you have to look at the particular business and understand what's being done and why it's being done and how it's being done. And then you can tear it apart or you can re... and then reassemble it properly. Um, and I like to think that... That is actually where I have specific knowledge and expertise. My specific knowledge expertise is not in happiness, not in philosophy, not... Yes, my life is very hacked to be very unique, but I don't think that's where my specific knowledge is. My specific knowledge is in being able to analyze a business, especially a technology business, and take it apart at the seams and predict in advance what is likely to work and what is not likely to work—Clubhouse notwithstanding. Um, because you're still going to be wrong most of the time. It's like playing the lottery, but you know one or two of the tickets' numbers in advance. You only have to be right a few times, or even just once, to... to get the big score. Um, you know, Peter Thiel started PayPal, but he made all his money on Facebook, right? And now he's done more since then, obviously. But that was the big winner. And that's true in any power-law distribution. Number one is going to return more than two through n put together. Two will return more than three through n put together. You're operating in a highly leveraged intellectual domain. So, the outcomes are going to be nonlinear. Um, so I... I know a lot about that topic, but it's highly contextual. It makes a lot more sense if there's a specific business in front of me, a specific entrepreneur, and I can take that apart and I can say... you know, so there are certain companies where I'll say, "Oh, this is not going to work because you, the entrepreneur, are doing this for the wrong reasons. You're doing A so you can get to B. Just go to B." Or, "You're doing this to make money," when really the person who's doing this because they love the product is going to beat you. Or, "You're raising money from the wrong people who are in it for the wrong reasons." Or, "Your co-founder is not in it for the right reasons." Or, "You don't have the right kind of co-founder." Or, "Your vesting schedule is wrong." Or, "You're starting the business in the wrong place." Or, "You're approaching it from this angle instead of that angle." And... and of course, I'll be wrong too, but I've just seen a lot of data. I have my theories around it. Uh, and that's where I feel very comfortable operating. The problem is, when I have to talk about how to create wealth—and "How to Get Rich" is a clickbait title, deliberately—but when I talk about how to create wealth, talking about it in the abstract is very difficult because then you just want to speak truth. You have to just say the timeless stuff. You have to be right in almost every context. And so, it really limits what you can say.

Yeah. Correct. It's back to philosophy. But when I... if I can get specific about it, you know, that's when... that's when the real knowledge could be...

Yeah. Part of the reason why I started doing podcasts—and you know, this is ego at play, so I'll admit it freely—when I was tweeting, you know, I kind of pioneered philosophy Twitter, if you will, or a certain kind of practical philosophy Twitter, where in 140 characters, I would try to say something true in an interesting way that was insightful to me at the time. But then that got copied. There's thousands of us now, right? Thousands of people spitting it out. ChatGPT trying to create these things all day long. Um, although I like to say... I like to think that my stuff is incompressible. I'm saying it in the tightest way possible. Um, which is kind of a little failed poetry background. Um, but what I realized was if you truly have a deep understanding of something, then you can talk about it all day long. Then you can re-derive everything you need from that understanding. No memorization required. You can get to it from first principles. And every piece of what you know is... is like a... it's like a Lego block that just fits in and forms a steel frame. It's solid. It's locked in there. And so, on a podcast, I can unload much more deeply about some of these topics. Um, so for example, we can talk about any business you like, but it has to be in context. It has to be real. It has to be an actual problem. Then we can solve it.

You don't understand it. That's right. If you... if you have to memorize something, it's because you don't understand it. And if you understand something, you don't have to memorize it.

It's cliche for reasons. Uh, but you know, sometimes you learn new things. Sometimes you do figure out new things, too. Uh, even... even in philosophy, for example... science has advanced. As science has advanced, it's actually expanded our boundaries of philosophy. Um, when we used to think that, uh, you know, the earth was the center of the universe, you would actually have a different philosophical outlook than when you think the universe is vast and we're infinitesimally small. It will give you a different philosophical outlook. Uh, the same way, if you think that, uh, nature is driven by angels and demons and gods, versus if there are laws of physics that are computable and understandable, that will lead you to a different philosophical outlook. Uh, if you think that knowledge is something that is passed down from above and through generations, versus something that is created on the fly and then tested against reality, that will lead you to a different philosophical outlook. If you think humans are created by God as opposed to humans evolved from some, you know, unicellular organism... Yeah, it still doesn't solve the original problem, "Who created that?" But at least it takes you further down the... down the road. Even Sim theory is an attempt at reformulating philosophy based on what we know about computers. Even though it kind of leads to a lot of the same conclusions as, you know, "creator." But it... it is at least philosophy that is informed by technology and by science. So, philosophy can also... evolve. Moral philosophy evolves. Right? Uh, there was a time when every culture practically that was a conquering culture practiced slavery. Now, almost all cultures abhor slavery. That's moral philosophy having evolved.

Um, you know, there was even... like, this sounds too ludicrous to be true, and I don't know if it fully is true, but there were a... a fairly large group of doctors based on studies who believed until the 1980s that babies couldn't feel pain. And so, even to this day, I think circumcision is done without anesthesia and because... under the theory that, you know, very young children, babies don't feel pain. And that's ludicrous. And there was a study that came out in the 80s that said, "No, no, no, they do feel pain". It's like, "Oh, yeah, of course." Right? So, people can be stuck in bad philosophical traps for a long period of time. So, even philosophy can make progress. And, uh, as an example, one of the realizations that I had—and this is thanks to, uh, David Deutsch and my friend James Pierce and also thinking it through a little bit—is that there are these timeless, old questions that we run into where the answers seem like paradoxes. So, we stop thinking about them. So, an example is free will. Do you have free will? Or does anything matter? Is there a meaning to life? And there... and... and we get stuck in them because, for example, "Is there a meaning to life?" Like, yes, life has a meaning because you're... you're right here. You create your own meaning. This... this moment has all the meaning you could imagine. It's all the meaning there is. On the other hand, you're going to die. It all goes to zero. Heat death of the universe. It has no meaning. Right? So, which one is it? Well, the reason why it seems paradoxical is because you're asking the question of a human here and now, at a certain scale and a certain time, and then you're answering it from the viewpoint of the universe over infinite time. So, you pull the trick. You switch the level at which you're answering the question. And questions should be answered at the level at which they're asked. So, if you ask the question, "Is there meaning?"—you, Chris, are asking that question—Yes. Yes, to Chris, there is meaning. There's meaning right here. This is the meaning. You can interpret any meaning you want onto it. Um, don't ask the question as Chris and then answer it as God or as the universe. That's the trick that you're playing. That's why it seems paradoxical. The same way you can say, "Do I have free will?" People debate free will all day long. This... the question is answered at the wrong frame. So, they ask the question... is... "Do I, as an individual, have free will?" Hell yeah, I have free will. My mind-body system can't predict what I'm going to do next. The universe is infinitely complex. I'm making a choice in my mind and I'm doing something. There's my free will. So, answer at the level at which you were asked. Of course I have free will, because I feel like I have free will, and I treat you like you have free will, and you treat me like I have free will. We have free will. The problem then is you start trying to answer the question as if you're the universe. You're like, "Well, on the universal scale, big bang, particle collisions... No one makes any choices. You know, how could you be any different than the... what the universe wants you to be? And it's all one block universe . So, you don't have free will". Don't answer the question at the level at which it wasn't asked. So, if God asked the question, "Is there free will?" No, there is no free will. The universe asks a question, there is no free will. But if an individual asks a question right now, then yes, there is free will. So, a lot of these paradoxes resolve themselves—philosophical paradoxes that people have been struggling with since the beginning of time—when you just realize there... you're... you're answering them at a scale and time different than they were asked.

I mean, all the time. Uh, but are you talking about like philosophical, existential things? Or like technological things?

Yeah, I'm less laissez-faire than I used to be on a societal level. I think that culture and religion are good cooperating systems for humans. And so, if you want to operate in a high-trust society, you need to have sets of rules that people need to follow and obey so they get along, even if they're, you know, one-size-fits-all doesn't work for everybody .

Yeah, I think pure libertarians get out-competed and die. Right? They get overrun because they're every man for himself. They can't coordinate.

Exactly. Right. Um, so the coordination problems, right? Culture exists to solve fundamental coordination problems. Religion solves coordination problems. Ethnicity solves coordination problems historically. Um, and when you, uh, break down those coordination systems too fast and don't replace them with anything else, you get societal breakdown. So, you can have very malfunctioning societies. You know, go to Japan versus go to any Western city and you can see the difference... a culture that's working and a culture that's not. Um, so I... I think that that's like a... a broader set of things that I've changed my mind on, uh, a fair bit. I used to be much more laissez-faire on that stuff. Let's put it that way. Mh. Um, what else? I mean, on child-rearing, I've gotten a lot looser. You know, I'm still not like completely laissez-faire, but I'm much more... realized like, "Kids are going to be kids," and you kind of let them do their thing.

No, he... he was quoting somebody else, some brothers, I forget which ones. But he was making the point eloquently, as he often does , uh, that, uh, at... you know, at... at the family... local level, he's a communist. At the family level, you're communist. Uh, at maybe the... the extended family level, you're a socialist. At the local level, you know, you're kind of a, uh, a democrat, and so on, until at the federal level, you're a libertarian. Right? So, you've done it the other way. You're being a libertarian with the kids, and you're being a religious conservative... societal...

I... I don't know if the scale is that... that simple. Um, what else have I changed my mind on? I mean, I think modern AI is really cool. I think it's... but I think these are natural language computers. Um, they're starting to show evidence of kind of, uh, reasoning at some levels, but I don't think they do creativity. I think modern AI... one of... so, just on that, one of my favorite takes is from Dwarkesh Patel, and he says, um, uh, "If you gave any human on the planet 0.00001% of the consumption that an LLM has, any LLM, they would have come up with thousands of new ideas" . Right? "Give me one new idea, one fundamental new idea that's been generated". Yeah. Like, I'm big into poetry. Every poem ever written by an LLM is garbage. I think even their fiction writing is terrible. Even the new GPT-4.5, with all due respect to Sam and crew, uh, I... I think they're terrible, terrible writers. I find them really bad at summarizing. They're really good at extrapolating, you know, paperwork. Um, they're very bad at actually distilling the essence of something and what's important . They don't have opinions or a point of view. But they're still unbelievably powerful breakthroughs. They solve search. They solve natural language computing. They make English a programming language. They solve driving. They solve, uh, simple coding and backup coding. They solve translation. They solve transcription. Um, they are a fundamental breakthrough in computing. It is a different way to program a computer. Rather than you explicitly speak its language and write the code and then run the data through it, you just run enough data through it until it figures out how to write the program . That's huge. Um, but are they... are they AGI? Not yet. And I don't see a direct path from here to there. Um, maybe we'll have to solve a few more problems before that happens. And I think ASI is a fantasy. I don't think there's any such thing as, uh, artificial super intelligence where it has some kind of intelligence that humans can't fathom.

No, I'm not an AI doomer. I think that's such a flawed line of reasoning.

I think Stephen Wolfram puts it better: it's a different form of intelligence. It's like if you see [a] Jaguar in the jungle, it has a different form of intelligence than you. Like, a plant has a form of intelligence, how it can like photosynthesize and grow . It's a different form of intelligence. It's not... and "intelligence," again, like "love" or like "happiness," is this overloaded word that means many things to many people. But by my definition, where, you know, "the true test is you get what you want out of life," it doesn't even have a life. It doesn't even want anything. It's a different thing. Um, I do think it's unbelievably useful. I'm glad that it exists. You don't see it much yet in large-scale production systems replacing humans because [of] this tendency to hallucinate. So, you can't put it into anything mission-critical.

Correct. And it doesn't even know when it's wrong. Uh, and maybe they'll get that one out of 10 down to one out of 100, but you'll kind of always want human oversight for critical, critical things. I... I always feel so bitter. It's... I'm petty sometimes. My... my less economist version of me is petty, and I always want to like teach it a lesson if it gets something wrong. Like, "How the [...]... like, no, you were so confident." I'm treating it... but I'm anthropomor... anthropologizing...

It doesn't have a point of view. And they are going to get a lot better. And they might get to the point where the error rates are so low that you can put them into certain bounded problems, like self-driving. I think [that] will be solved completely, uh, because it's a bounded problem. Cars don't, you know, go like off-road and drive through houses and stuff like that. Right? So, because... and same way, like certain kinds of coding... The creative side of coding, I think, doesn't go away. I think if anything, programmers get even more leverage and more powerful. And rather than computing replacing programmers, programmers use AI to replace everybody else.

Yeah. So, the... I think Tesla's in the stronger longer-term position, but it's hard to argue with what's working right now. And Waymo is working right now. So, I would not underestimate them, because there's a learning curve that you go through when you actually deploy something. And Waymo is way ahead in that regard . But Tesla's camera-only approach, if it works, uh, is... is superior. It's much more scalable. And Tesla knows how to print cars, right? They can just mass-manufacture cars. But I think... I think they'll both be around. They'll both be fine. It's everybody else who doesn't have a self-driving vehicle that's screwed.

I forgot that one. You're going to have to...

Well, I mean, think back... like, what was it? 30 years ago, 20 years ago, everybody was saying overpopulation of the earth is going to be a problem. Malthusian ending, we're going to have too many people. And now all of a sudden, we're going to have too few people. So, part of it is just the doomerism meme is always alive and well, right? Or it just gets repackaged. Yeah. "We're running out of oil." "We have too much oil." Right? You know, it's like, "The world is cooling." "The world is warming." Like, there's always something to scream about . "The world is ending." Uh, "There's no progress in technology." "AI is going to blow up the world." Right? So, people tend to overdo in both directions. Now, what is the actual fertility problem? Right? Well, people are having less kids. Are they having less kids because there's a disease? Was there a virus? Did they lose their fertility? The microplastics in the testicles? Right? No, it's... people are having less kids because they're choosing to have less kids. Right? Women have gotten emancipation, independence in the workforce, and they're making more money . Um, people don't need kids as insurance policies. They have less kids. Maybe they're living hedonistic lives. God bless them. Right? They want to have more fun. They want to have less kids. I don't see the act of choosing to have less kids as a problem. Okay, so let's move one level up. Uh, it's because of retirees. It's because a large percentage of the population is essentially retiring at the guaranteed age of 65 or 70, thanks [to] social security. And so, they need other people to pay for it . They need more workers in the workforce. And if the workforce is shrinking, then you have a small number of people, exactly, who are supporting a large number of retirees. And in democracies, you can't take pensions away. The voters vote you out. So, they slowly strangle the economy. So, what do you do then? You have a bunch of immigration, and then the whole culture changes. You end up in a low-trust society, and people start fighting over limited resources. And how do you control which immigrants come in? And how do you make sure that they're good taxpayers after they're in? And so on. So, you end up in... in kind of this trap where the low fertility rate is upstream of the downstream problems that are cultural and societal . But I'm not sure that you're going to solve that by making people have more kids. How are you going to meme them into having more kids? And I'm not even sure it's necessarily a problem, because keep in mind, you have more resources now. You have less of a burden. Now, there's... there's a flip side where every kid is a lottery ticket and an invention . So, there's some benefit to having more kids. But you can't... you can't force it. I think it'll work itself out. Right? The... Scott Adams has this great law which [he] calls the Adams Law of Slow-Moving Disasters. When disasters are very slow-moving, like peak oil or global warming or population collapse, and everyone can kind of see them coming, economics and society as a force solve them. Because enough individual people [have] incentives to go solve them. So, I don't know exactly how it gets solved, but I think it could get solved in various ways. Uh, one example could be, um, you know, maybe people retire later. Maybe AI and automation and robots take care of the older people. Maybe we figure out how to have immigrants while still keeping a high-trust society. We kind of put more rules around immigration that protects some of the high-trust benefits. Maybe we outsource more things. Maybe we just, you know, have more land and housing to go around. Believe me, if we were having too many kids, everybody [would] be complaining about how there's no housing and there's no land. Right? So, they'll always find something to care about. So, I just don't view this as like a thing that any individual or government action is going to solve. I think economics and incentives over time will solve it. And I'm not even convinced it's like that big of a problem.

Is there anything that you do think is a... It may be self-correcting, too. Which is that if there are too few kids in society and the returns to having kids literally might just go up. It might just be easier to have the incentive to now have a child because there's so few around, they're going to get the best job. They're going to have opportunity, resources.

That's a good incentive. I also think that people have been memed into thinking that, uh, kids make your life worse. And that's a... that's a pretty, pretty bad...

Kids make your life better in every possible way. If you want to... if you want an automatic, built-in meaning to life, have kids. Uh, and I think there are these bad psych studies—like most psych studies, unfortunately—that say that people are unhappy when they have kids. Yeah, it's because you're catching [them] in the middle of changing a diaper and you're saying like, "Are you glad you had kids or not?" Or... or they don't even say that. They say, "Are you happy or not?" And they say, "No, I'm not happy right now." But what they don't realize is that person has found something more important than being happy in the moment. They found meaning. And the meaning comes from kids. And if you ask parents, "Do you regret having kids?" I think it would be 99 to 1 against. You know, it would be, "No, I don't regret having kids. I love having kids. I'm so glad I had kids." It's... it's incredibly rare to meet a parent that regretted having children.

It's... it's extremely good odds. And I think... so I think... I think a lot of people get late into life and, uh, you know, then they can't admit that they didn't want kids... that... that they should have had kids. It's kind of late in the game. Um, but you know, a lot of times you see everybody who has a pet, right? Uh, and they're pushing them around in a stroller, right? What is that? That's a sublimated desire for children.

It... It's definitely in that direction. And you know, I like pets. I like animals. I don't... but I don't like the idea of like neutering or spaying something and then keeping it as a prisoner in the house and having to train it. You know, it's just... I don't want to be responsible for that.

They should just be happy and do what they want. I don't... I don't... I don't have particular goals in mind for them. I think that's a... that's another route to unhappiness. Having...

Yeah, that's it. Right? So, "I can be loved" or "I am loved unconditionally." Is that one of the things...

...and I want them to have high self-esteem as a consequence of that. But I don't get to choose any... All I get to choose is my output. I can output love. I can't choose what they feel. I can't choose how they behave. I can't choose what they want. I can't choose what they turn out to be. And downstream from that, there should be freedom. There should be a degree of freedom that comes from the self-esteem that comes from the unconditionality . They should make their own mistakes and learn their own lessons and, uh, have their own desires and fulfill them, as is appropriate. Uh, I, like any parent, I wouldn't want them to be hurt. I wouldn't want them to be unhappy. But I cannot control these things.

Nassim Taleb. He talk[s] about "intellectual yet idiot". These are people who are overeducated and they deny like basic common sense. Okay. Uh, so there's a lot of that that goes on in child-rearing, uh, thanks to really bad studies, uh, and... and bad public medical directives. So, for example, you know, uh, a few, uh, a few parents, you... maybe they're drunk or they're high or they're just... other issues, and you know, they roll over their kid when they're sleeping, the kid suffocates. Or they neglect their kid. And then...

Yeah. Exactly. Or... or there... you know, the... the modern proclamation... And so, because of that, they say, "Well, don't co-sleep with your kids." Well, the kids in every society through all of human history co-slept with their parents. Where else do you think they were sleeping? They weren't... houses [didn't have] multiple rooms. Yeah, exactly. "Put [them] in the other tent." It's just nonsense. Co-sleeping has been around since the dawn of time. So has, uh, feeding kids cow milk when... or goat milk when breast milk... runs out or is not available. Yet we're told formula, you know, made with soy and... and corn syrup, which was invented recently, is somehow better than, uh, cow milk. And cow milk can be dangerous for your kids, and co-sleeping is dangerous for your kids, and "cry it out" is the right answer . All of that is nonsense. I mean, it's very clear that, um, we raise children throughout human history without, uh, these interventions. And... and to me, the idea that like, "You're going to let your kid cry it out"... I get why that's done for practical reasons so that, you know, you can get some sleep and you can go to work in the morning. But the reality is, when you let the kid cry it out, you're letting the kid bawl until it finally gives up. I mean, the kid left by itself to cry it out in the wild, it's going to get... it's going to get eaten. Right? It's going to get eaten by a tiger. Um, so this kid is starting off on the wrong foundation. The... the one I mentioned earlier about the idea that babies don't feel pain... Like, that's ludicrous. Right?

Yeah, I'm not saying that's 100% true. I read it on the...

I read it on Twitter, and I did one-level confirmation on it, but it's so ludicrous that I should probably do two- or three-level confirmations on it before I talk about it. Um, but there are definitely some people who believe that. There [were] enough that it was a thing, um, in certain circles for a while. But I think we just go through these, you know, the... these IYI beliefs, these intellectual beliefs come from people who, uh, take a little bit of knowledge and extrapolate it too far. They think we know more than we know due to recent scientific studies. And these are junk science . These are low-power studies on, uh, you know, on very certain contexts that then get over-applied. Behavioral psych is very guilty of this, but it's true across a lot of science. Um, so even with science, you have to be skeptical. You have to look very carefully at, you know, "Does it apply in the right context or not? Is it... come from good sources? Did they run enough high-powered studies? [Is it] widely accepted?" And there are a whole bunch of things you're just not supposed to talk about. You're not supposed to say... like, you don't say... like, you... you can... you can't say anything negative about vaccines because, "God forbid, what if they don't get the polio vaccine?" Right? And that's part of the reason why the recent vaccine debate... because we've taken our worship for vaccines too far because we don't want people to not take non-essential vaccines. So, it gets overdone. So, the same way, there's this whole SIDS thing, Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. Right? It's like, no, there's... kids don't suddenly mysteriously die. Like, more likely there was neglect or there was a problem, and then whoever was the caretaker doesn't want to admit to the problem or didn't recognize the problem. But kids don't just spontaneously die in the crib . Right? Um, so they talk about swaddling babies. You swaddle babies, you know, basically tie them up, mummify them. Uh, so you constrict them... so they die of SIDS where they roll over and they can't get back. I mean, it's just all this craziness around...

It's a real minefield. It's a minefield. And... and... and you know, you have these scared parents [who] are having a kid for the first time, and they open a book and they start reading how to raise children, when I would argue that your natural instincts on what to do with your child, uh, are actually pretty good .

It... It's funny, when, uh, my wife and I had our first baby, I remember, you know, at the hospital... sorry, the first one was natural birth, um, at the birthing center. We... we went home. I was like, "There you go. That's it". And we're like, "What do we do? Where's the instruction manual?" You take them home, and then you relax and you realize, "Actually, instincts are pretty good." You know, if the kid cries, check to see if they... clean, feed them, all that. It's like, your... your basic instincts are actually very, very good. And kids' instincts are actually very, very good. They know what they want, and they want things for a reason, and they can encourage you to give it to them. Yes, it's usually... children are not deficient adults who can't reason. Uh, and to some extent that's true, but mostly it's not true. Mostly they have very good reasons for what they want. And you as a parent mostly have communication problems with them. They can't yet communicate to you. You can't communicate to them... They can't communicate to you. So, early on with my kids, I tried to focus on teaching them, you know, basic explanatory theories as opposed to having them memorize things . That's just the most... Yeah, the most Naval solution...

Involving them. But another one is that a lot of the rules that you teach kids have to do with hygiene. Right? "You must brush your teeth." "You know, cover your mouth when you cough." Um, "You know, clean up after yourself." "Don't touch that." "Wash your hands after you do this." Um, "Don't eat food off the floor." Right? But all of these are subsumed under the germ theory of disease . Right? So, if you instead go on YouTube and show them videos of germs, or if you have them look under a microscope at anything, they're like, "Ah..."

Yeah, "There's creepy crawlies everywhere, and I got to watch out for them". Uh, and then, you know, you can talk about how if you look at humans, like our real enemy are pathogens. I think a lot of aging and disease are actually downstream of our competition with pathogens over time, uh, to a point that people still don't fully appreciate. Um, there's a Red Queen hypothesis, which is that we undergo sexual selection to mix up our genes. And so, every 20 years, every generation, [we] mix up our genes. But if you look at how bacteria and viruses mutate through just random mutations, their mix-up rate on their genes and evolution rate is roughly the same as ours . Even though they go through thousands of generations [in] those 20 years, because they're not doing sexual selection, they're doing asexual replication [and] mutation, their... their evolutionary rate is roughly equivalent to ours. So, we're in a Red Queen race where we're both running at roughly the same speed using very different strategies. But a lot of how we're evolved is around pathogens. Like, our immune system is one of the most expensive things to run in the body. [It] is so much... is about immune system optimization. That's about pathogens. Junk DNA... in bacteria and CRISPR was discovered because in bacteria, their DNA is evolved to fight viruses . And the way it does that is by taking viral DNA and snipping it up every time there's a viral attack and storing it in their own DNA so they have a copy, so they can recognize it next time it attacks, and you know, and so on. Um, a lot of the population structure of species, uh, determines how long their lifespans are. So, very... so, if... if in a given species there's a very high rate of infection, then you'll have these older members of the population [who] are carrying diseases that will then infect the young. So, it's important for that species to get rid of the old faster . So, the higher the disease rate in a given population, the less long-lived the entire population, so the older ones don't infect the younger ones. That's a hypothesis, and I think it's true. It's an interesting hypothesis. Um, uh, homeostasis within the human body, how we're always returning to a given level of things like... that's a... that's a fundamental part of our makeup: our temperature, pH, blood pressure, and so on, under homeostasis. But if you... if you engage in any kind of signaling, like you take a peptide, for example, that's a signaling molecule, you take a hormone externally, the body will counteract it. You take testosterone, the body will counteract... will down-regulate its own production very fast. Uh, and the body releases its own hormones in pulses rather than steady state. Why is that? Well, that's because, uh, bacteria and viruses can infect your body and trick your body. They can take it over. Like toxoplasmosis does this, rabies does this. They take over macroscopic structur... structural bodies. And small bacteria and viruses would hack our bodies and literally take them over if we didn't have defense mechanisms . And one of those defense mechanisms is homeostasis. Anytime you see something getting out of whack, you immediately push back really hard on it because like, "Did I just get infected? Is something trying to take me over?" It's also why hormones get released in pulses at night rather than in steady-state low levels. Because, uh, enemy bacteria can release toxins or the same signaling molecules in small quantities, but they can't pulse. They can't coordinate to pulse. So, your body can coordinate to pulse as a macroscopic object, but microscopic objects can't coordinate to create the same pulses.

So you know that it's coming from you. Is that why? Correct. It's endogenous rather than exogenous. So...

And that's why we resist a lot of exogenous treatments. A lot of our medical treatments don't work. Um, anyway, so this... these are... there's... there's a bunch more I could go on, but I think that a lot of, uh, you know, you see this in cancers where, uh, a lot of, uh, bacteria show up, like the Epstein-Barr virus shows up in a lot of cancers . And, um, you know, now it seems like the gut microbiome influences so many things. Basically, uh, bacteria and viruses are at the top of the food chain compared to us. Like, we are top of the well-known food chain, but bacteria and viruses eat us. Fungus eats us. So, these microscopic predators are our natural predators. And so, a lot of aging, societal structure, hygiene, religious strictures against pork, you know, circumcision, all of these things... these are all designed to resist bacteria and viruses . So, if you can teach children this philosophy at an early age, you shortcut all the debates.

That one, I think I've been pretty effective. I've drilled that one at home. The one I haven't quite gotten around to yet is evolution. Like, I'm starting to do little bits of that. You know, like, "We came from monkeys. What does that mean?" Um, already got them thinking about some of the deeper questions. I did ask my, you know, young son, like, uh, you know, "Can nothing exist?" I thought that was a fun question.

No, no, he's... he's eight. Oh, right. An 8-year-old and a six-year-old. So, I asked them both, like, "Can nothing exist?" And they had pretty good answers . Right? Um, another one we played with the other day was like, "What is the Matrix?" Okay. Uh, you know, "What is... what is this? What is all this?" Um, I just find it... and it's entertaining. It's just fun to talk about, right? To talk about these questions with your kids. I'm not saying that one is a good way of child-rearing. It's not leading to any deeper learning other than maybe just have them start, uh, or continue to question the basic structure of reality and not move past it so quickly.

Possibly. Also, "Dad tries not too hard to teach people things." I don't want to be... I don't want to be didactic.

Yeah. Correct. Correct. "Dad... Dad is here to help you solve problems when you have problems, and you constantly have problems. So, if you come to Dad, Dad can help explain to you how he would solve the problem." But most of the time, they don't want that. Most of the time, they just want... most of the time, they just want me to solve the problem. Right? So, sometimes I have to play it dumb. It's like, "Why is my Wi-Fi not working on my computer?" I'm like, "I don't know. Did you click on that thing?" Look, you've got like a rebellious, sovereign child...

Sovereign as they may be, but sometimes they still need the Dad to step in. So, in addition to feeling loved and having high self-esteem, I think the most important trait that would be nice to not rob them of is agency. I want them to preserve their agency. They're born naturally agentic and willful, but a lot of child-rearing can beat that out of them by essentially domesticating them. That's right. And I would rather have wild animals and wolves than have well-trained dogs, because I'm not going to be around to take care of them.

Exactly. Yeah. A friend of mine, uh, Parsa on, uh, on AirChat, uh, he had a great saying. He said, uh, he wants his, uh, children to be "quick to learn and hard to kill" . Thought that was pretty good.

It's not over yet. Um, they definitely won earlier rounds. They took over institutions. I think now it's much more of a fair fight, um, where you have people like Elon, you know, kind of supporting... So... so there... there's these different forces through history, right? Historians will argue about this. Uh, but there's a theory of the "great man of history" thing, where it's like, "Oh, you have the Einsteins, you have the Teslas, you have the, um, the Genghis Khans and the Caesars." Right? They determine the flow of history. And then there's the other, uh, point of view that, "No, there are these massive forces at play, you know, demographics and geography and so on. And then the particular great man doesn't matter. They just come and go. Napoleon doesn't matter. They would have been somebody else." Uh, the specific names are not important. And because of kind of the leftist turn that our institutions took in the last few, uh, decades, they now only subscribe to the "great forces" theory of history, not the "great man" theory of history. But I think now we're seeing the two play out, where you're seeing, you know, Trump and Elon and other individuals rising up and saying, "No, we resist."

And, um, I think that unfortunately... and so the battle between kind of these... these collectivists and great forces versus individuals, it's as old as humanity itself. And... and it is fundamental to the species. We are not a completely individualistic species. You know, "No man is an island." A single person can't do anything by themselves. But we're also not a Borg. We're not a beehive. We're not an ant colony. We're not all just drones marching along. So, which is it? We... we're somewhere in the middle. And the human race is always kind of bouncing between the two . We like strong leaders. We like to be led. Um, we like to coordinate our forces and... and mass and... and do things. Uh, but at the same time, we're also all individuals and willing to break away and willing to do our own thing. And everyone's always fighting to be a leader, and there's always status games going on. So, uh, we're... there's a pendulum that's always swinging back and forth. And in modern economics, the way that manifests is between sort of Marxism and capitalism. Right? Marxism is like, "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs. We're all equal. There's a millennial project. We're all going to be equal in the end." And... and you know, "Don't try and stand out, but do what's good for everybody." Um, and there's a religious aspect to it. And then the... the capitalist individualist is like, "Libertarian. Every man for himself. You just... each do what you want, and it'll work out for the greater good." That's Adam Smith. You know, the invisible hand of the market will feed you. "The baker should bake, and the butcher should butcher, and the candlestick maker should make candlesticks, and it'll all work out." Each person does their best, and they trade. And so, which is it? Which... which theory is correct? And I think there's always going to be a battle between the two. And I think the interesting thing is what's going on... there's a modern flavor to it which changes it. The modern flavor is that the individual is getting more powerful because they're becoming more leveraged. So, someone like an Elon Musk can have the leverage of tens of thousands of brilliant engineers and producers working for him. He can have factories of robots manufacturing things. He can have hundreds of billions of dollars of capital behind him. And he can project himself through media to hundreds of millions of people . That is more power than any individual could have had historically. So, the great men of history are becoming greater. That said, that same leverage is increasing the gap between the haves and have-nots. So, in the wealth game, more people are winning overall and the average is going up. But in the status game, there are essentially more losers. There are more invisible men and women who are getting nothing out of life and have no leverage . Relatively speaking. Objectively speaking, they might be better off. They still have phones, and they still have TVs, and they're not...

Correct. And so, to the extent that we're relatives... creatures, there are more losers than winners. And in a democracy, those people will outnumber the winners, and they will vote the winners down.

Um, and so that's the battle that kind of goes on. And the democracy has gotten very broad. And so, one of my other quips is that, um, "It's not the right to vote that gives you power, it's power that gives you the right to vote." So, we've confused the two. So, what happened was, you know, voting started as a way for people who had power to divide up the power, not fight amongst themselves. The winners of the revolution, the winners of the war, the people in the House of Lords and the House of Commons, they divide up power amongst themselves to say, "Hey, we have all the money. We have the power. We are the knights. We have the swords. We have the warriors. We could kill everybody, but we don't want to just fight each other all day long. We don't have to be Game of Thrones forever. So, we're going to divide up power by voting among ourselves." But then as society goes on and becomes more and more peaceful, that franchise for voting gets spread. It gets spread to people who don't have land, who don't have power, who may not be able to inflict physical violence. And then eventually you get to the point where everybody's voting. Everybody's voting, and everybody [is] voting for candy and fairies and, you know, all the free things in life. Uh, and then eventually people start voting to oppress each other. The 51% in every... in any domain vote to oppress the 49[ers]... the tyranny of the majority. But not all of them are willing to back that up with physical power. And so, you can end up in a situation where people who don't have physical power are using the institutions of the state to control the people who do have physical power. As a simple example, taking the United States: the people who don't have guns voting to disarm the people that do have guns. Right? Well, if the people who do have guns get coordinated and care enough, you can't do that. Right? So, I think eventually these societal structures are unstable. They break down. And they break down because eventually the people who have the power... and say, "No, wait a minute. You don't get to vote. You... you only got to vote because you had power. And now you don't have power, and you're somehow trying to vote..." All of nature, all of society, all of capitalism, all of human endeavors are underpinned by physical violence. And that is [a] very hard truth to swallow and hard to get away from. Nature is red in tooth and claw. If you don't fight, you don't survive. You don't live, you die. And that's true of everything alive today . And humans are no different. So, giving up physical power and then thinking you can exercise political power fails. Which is why every communist revolution, which is all about equality and kumbaya and brothers and sisters, end up being run by a bunch of thugs. Because if you don't have a way to divide up the wealth based on merit, then it's always going to be based on power and influence. The thugs with the guns always win in the end. So, the question is just, can you keep the thugs... and the... with the guns paid and happy and... successful society where you're allocating based on merit? Because if you can't, then you do it based on power. So, I do think that this battle is not over, but that's because it... it never stopped. It's always been there from day one. It will continue.

Yeah, I mean, as you're saying, the human brain has not evolved to handle all the world's emergencies breaking in real time. And you can't care about everything, and you'll go insane if you try. Um, doesn't mean you shouldn't care at all. There's no "should". I mean, if you want to care, go ahead and care. I would just say that you're probably better off only caring about things that are local or things that you can affect. So, if you really care about something that's in the news, then by all means care about it, but make a difference. Go do something about it. Uh, and make sure that it's your overwhelming desire and you don't have five other desires at the same time. Um, also just realize the consequences of it. You're going to be unhappy until that thing gets fixed. And that thing will often be out of your control. "Desire is a contract to be unhappy until you get what you want".

You're asking me that question right now? What do I think is ignored by the media but will be studied by historians? Well, I mean, the media is only focused on very timely things, right? So, it depends if you want to talk about timely or timeless. Right? But as a... as a simple example, if I just look at things that maybe [in] the next five or 10 years that are going to make a massive difference that people are not focused enough on. Um, and I think within two years this will be obvious. So, like they... make a prediction, and predictions are tough. But... and I have to eat it in a few years. Yeah, I'm going have to eat... eat this in a few years. So I'm probably wrong. But, uh, two things that I pay attention to, um, that I don't think, uh, a lot of people do pay attention to... Well, there's a couple. One is I think just how bad modern medicine is. I think people just put a lot more faith in modern medicine than is warranted. Like our best ideas for a lot of things are surgery, just cutting things out . Right? Uh, treating things that are extraneous, like, "Oh, you don't really need a gallbladder. You don't really need an appendix, or you don't really need tonsils". Oh, that's false. Every... the surplus... requirement... human body is very, very efficient. All those things are needed. Um, you know, so I think... I think the state of modern medicine is still pretty bad. We don't have many good explanatory theories in biology. Um, we have germ theory [of] disease, we have, um, evolution, we have, uh, cell theory, we have DNA genetics, um, morphogenesis, embryogenesis, and not much else . You know, there's not much else. Everything else is rules of thumb, memorization. "A affects B 'cuz [B] affects C [which] affects D," but we don't understand the underlying explanation. It's all just words pointing to words pointing to words. So, biology is still in a very sorry state. And because we are not allowed to take risk[s] that might kill people, um, we just don't experiment enough in biology. So, a lot of treatments are just outright banned by large regulatory bodies. So, we just don't have the innovation. So, I think we're still in the Stone Age when it comes to biology, and we got a long ways to go . Uh, and I think people will look back aghast at this. And I think this is Bryan Johnson's point. He's like, you know, "Let's be more... more extreme. Let's try to live forever. It must be more experimental. And I'll start as N of one and start experimenting on myself". And, um, but even there, I disagree with Bryan on many things. Like, you know, taking huge amounts of supplements. I think we just don't know... supplements outside of their natural context. Like, "Just eat liver, man". Right? Um, but that's fine. And... and I wouldn't be vegan either. But, you know, it's... it's... I... I really appreciate that he's experimenting. He's good-natured about [it]. He shares everything. So, we need more people like that. Um, so I think the state of biology, people will look back and say, "Wow, that was in the Dark Ages".

...Um, I think, uh, another, uh, another thing that we'll look back on is I think we... we still continue to underestimate how important drones are going to be in warfare. The future of all warfare is drones. There will be nothing else on the battlefield . Um, because I think of the end state of drones as autonomous bullets. Not even guided—autonomous, like they're self-directed. Uh, and so if that's the future we're headed towards... and that's a... it is... Why would you have an armed force? That's... there's going to be no... there's... there's going to be no aircraft carriers, there's going to be no tanks, there's going to be no infantrymen. There's just going to be autonomous bullets. Buy autonomous bullets against your autonomous bullets. Whichever ones win, the other side just surrenders 'cuz it's over. Um, I think that's the second piece of it. I think a... a third piece that is going to be, uh, kind of unexpected is the GLP-1s, which I know you and I have privately discussed before. I think these are the most breakthrough drugs since antibiotics. Um, they're probably more important than statins. They're sort of miracle drugs. They seem to... the... there... there are downsides, but the downsides and side effects are so minor compared to the upsides beyond just weight loss. Um, they also seem to be addiction breakers. They seem to lower many kinds of cancer. They almost metabolically reverse aging up to a certain point . Um, and I think they're going to bend the curve on healthcare costs. And, uh, the big question people are going to be asking over the next 5 years is, "Why are Americans paying thousands of dollars a month for this when people overseas are getting them for free, or I can order them from China for free or whatever?" Um, and maybe it... like, if I were Bernie Sanders, the platform I would be running on is I would say, "Okay, we're going to pay, you know, hundreds of billions of dollars to Novo and Eli Lilly, and we're just going to make these free." Or there's hundreds of analogs of these things that work. These are not going to be, you know, limited to just the few that are... that are being used today. Just take one of them or two of them, make them free, and I think it'll make a big difference. And, uh, as you and I were discussing earlier, uh, this does bend a lot of people out of shape who got there the old-fashioned way. And they want to see obesity as a moral failing on people's parts, and it lowers their status if they are suddenly... [their] signal is less of a signal .

Yeah. So... so they're incented to say, "Oh, well, you don't know the downsides. You know, it's irresponsible to suggest it. It's going to cause cancer. Have fun losing bone and muscle mass." But none of that stuff is really true. The cancer stuff is actually beneficial. I know people who are now taking these things for anti-aging reasons. Um, they're already fit, but they just want to age better and have a stronger insulin metabolism. Um, and there's evidence now these things are, you know, they put off dementia, Alzheimer's, colon cancer. It's insane. Cardiovascular disease. Like the... the list of benefits is insane . There's no free lunch. But this is a class of drugs that prevents you from taking other drugs into your body. It prevents you from taking, uh, you know, too much sugar, too many calories in an era of abundance. [It] prevents you from smoking, prevents you from even... uh, there's an organization called Jasper that is now doing a study on heroin addictions, and they're showing that this can lower opioid overdoses and heroin addiction . So, there's a lot of overwhelming medical evidence coming out. And I think... I don't... I don't know the exact number, but I think something like 10% of the population might... have tried these things?

Exactly. So, uh, I think the body positivity movement is dead, and we always kind of knew it was a scam. I mean, it's dying very, very quickly. Yeah. Equipped, like "You can never be too rich, too thin, or too clean." Right? And immediately, like a whole bunch of people went nonlinear [in] my mention[s], like, "What do you mean, 'too thin'?" and "What about the hygiene hypothesis?" and, you know, obviously there's always exceptions. But people want to be thin and fit, and people want to be clean, back to the pathogen discussion that we had . Um, so I think overall that there's going to be huge demand for these things, and our modern medical system is not built to supply these. Well, I'm not... I'm not... I don't hold it against the... Pharms...? I think the pharmas did their job by creating the thing. But I think next we need to step up and figure out how to make it broadly and cheaply available, as opposed to just milk it for only for, you know, people on obesity who can get Medicare to sign off for it or people paying out of pocket at very, very high prices. Yeah. Um, the... the benefits of societal distribution of the safer GLP-1s is so large that whichever politician, uh, tackles that is going to be richly rewarded.

So many problems are downstream of that. Like, you know, look at how much of the federal budget goes into dialysis because of kidney failure. And why is that? It's because of diabetes. Right? So, so many of the problems that we have in modern society are downstream of obesity. And, you know, this... like, fitness is so important. Uh, and yes, there's... in some people, these things ca... cause muscle and bone loss, but not in the people who are eating high protein and working out hard . So, it... they can be taken [in] a way that's safer. And some versions of these, like Liraglutide, the original one, they've been around for decades. And the others have been around for about a decade. So, and we already have, as you said, 10% of the population taking them. So, they're already quite widely distributed.

Yeah, it's a great sample size. What more do you need? Like, if... if you have a bacterial infection that's eating you, I don't say, "Oh, I have this antibiotic, but it's going to raise your blood pressure." It's like, "No, take the antibiotic." If you're going to kill yourself, I say, "Take this antipsychotic and stay alive a little longer and solve it." I don't say, "Oh, it's going to, you know, cause your heart rate to go up by three beats a minute." I don't worry about that. So, similarly, if you're poisoning yourself with toxins and overuse of substances that you shouldn't be using—either heroin, alcohol, cigarettes, sugar, or just sheer calories—um, take this GLP-1. Uh, they also improve digestion. You just have less cal... just less food matter going through your stomach. They lower cancer risks across the board. There's quite a few cancers they lower. Um, cardiovasc... I mean, I don't know what else to tell you.

Think about how many sacred cows are being gored, right? All the people who are basically saying, uh, "You should work harder. You should be fit, like I did." Right? It's lowering their status. Think about all the nutritionists and doctors and trainers who are now being, you know... "It's too easy." They're being put out of business in a way. Right? Uh, it's kind of like, "Why does the American military keep buying aircraft carriers?" right, in the age of drones. Um, there's an incentive bias. There's a very strong motivated reasoning. Uh, but it doesn't matter. 10% [of] people are on it. Uh, everybody wants to be fit. It's going to spread like wildfire.

Yeah, I... I did have a, uh, tough childhood, but I don't think about it. You know, I... I think there are a couple of things going on there. One is I did process it quite a bit. I thought about it, but I thought about it to get rid of it. I didn't think about it to dwell on it or to like... indulge. Yeah. I wanted to be successful. I wanted more than anything else to rise past that. And so, I couldn't have that as a burden on me. So, I had to get rid of it. So, to the extent that I dealt with it, it was to... it was for the express purpose of getting rid of it, not to create an identity or story or to reflect upon it or to say, "Look at me. Look at what I've accomplished, and look how great I am and what I've done." So, I got rid of it. And I think at some point, you... you wrestle with that thing, and then you just realize like, you're never going to untangle the whole thing. It's a Gordian knot problem. Uh, like Alexander, you know, found that tangled knot in India, and, uh, they said, "Oh, the famous conqueror will come and will untie this knot. Nobody else can untie the knot." And he took one look at it, pulled out a sword, and just cut it . So, at some point, you just have to cut your past. If your past is bothering you, you will eventually get tired of trying to untangle that knot, and you will just drop it. Because you will realize life is short. And the more you have... more you want to accomplish in this life, actually, the less time you have to unravel that thing. So, I just wanted to actually get things done, so I had no time to deal with it. So, I just cut it. It's like a really bad relationship, but in this case, it's a bad relationship with your own history. So, you just drop it.

That's right. I used to think, you know, the currency of life, right? People think it's money. And yes, money is important, and it does let you trade certain things for time, but it doesn't really buy you time. Ask Warren Buffett how much time money can buy you, or Michael Bloomberg. They're, you know, rich as Scrooge... and... but they can't buy more time. Right? Bryan Johnson notwithstanding. Um, so you can't trade money for time. Money is not the real currency of life. And time itself doesn't even mean that much because, as we talked about before, a lot of time can be wasted because you're not really present for it. You're not paying attention. So, the real currency of life is attention. It's what you choose to pay attention to and... and what you do about it. And so, back to the point about the news media: you can put your attention on the news, but that's how you're spending the real currency of life. So, just be aware of that. If you want to, that's fine. There's no... there's no right or wrong here. Like, maybe it is your destiny to pick something in the news, learn about that problem, adopt that problem, and solve it. But just be careful, because your attention is the only thing that you have.

It... Yes. You can fritter it away on anything you like.

Uh, absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. 'Cuz if you're... because if you're a loser, then you'll want to be a winner, and then you'll develop all the characteristics that will help you be a, you know, quote-unquote winner in life. That said, I wouldn't sentence my kids to it. Like, I don't think you can artificially do that. You know, it's... it's sort of like, imagine that you were, you know, 300 years ago, you're born a serf, and then somehow you managed to escape off the farm and you become a landowner, and then eventually you become minor nobility and aristocrat. Are you going to put your kids back on the farm and say, "You're going to be a serf again"? I know they all like those stories. The... the kids themselves like those stories because it says, "I came from the School of Hard Knocks. My dad made me go shovel hay for a summer." It's not real. I mean, you're not going to trick them. Um, I think what you can... all you can do is kind of, uh, cultivate an appreciation and gratitude for what you have. And the only way to do that is just evidence it yourself, right? Just show yourself how you spend money, how you respect it, what you do with it, how you take care of people who you're responsible for. And... and the more resources you have, the greater the tribe you can take care of. The more of the tribe you can take care of. So, when you have no resources, you're struggling to take care of yourself. And at that point, it's good to be selfish 'cuz you can't save somebody else if you can't even save yourself. Yes. So, you take care of yourself, and you become the best version of yourself. But there are too many men who are able, fit, and have some money who are doing nothing with their lives. They're just sitting at home, doing nothing, just indulging in themselves. Maybe they go on dates and they get DoorDash. Like, I have no respect for that . I think there's nothing worse in society than a lazy man, because he's sort of... he's sort of leaving it all on the table. He's leaving his potential on the table. It's bad for him. So, the next thing you do is you go and you have a family, and you take care of your family. Take care of that tribe. Then you take care of your extended family. You take care of your cousins, brothers, uncles, grandmothers, aunts, you know, sisters, everybody that you can. And then if you have more resources beyond that, then you go take care of your local tribe. You take care of your people. Um, you start trying to do some good for the world. And if you have more resource[s] than that, you go take care of an even bigger tribe . And that's how you earn both respect and self-confidence, and you live up to your potential. So, the... the more you have, the more is rightfully expected of you. And I think it's a good compact with society when highly capable people express and flex that capability by giving more and more and by doing more and more. And society rewards them with the one thing they can't get otherwise, which is status. Right? So, society should give you status in exchange for it. Um, they should say, "Okay, you did a good job. You took care of more people than... than just yourself and just the people immediately around you." Uh, and that's what an alpha male to me is. An alpha male is not the one who gets to eat first. The alpha male eats last. The alpha male feeds everybody else first and then gets to eat last. And they do that out of their own self-respect and pride. And society rewards them by calling them an alpha and giving them status .

Uh, it is. Like, who was it? Zuck, who, you know, donated money at Zuckerberg General's hospital and they wanted to pull his name off of it? I mean, that's... I didn't see that, but that's... that kind of stuff backfires, right? You... you should reward people for doing... What were you saying before? You don't just need to... in fact, actually actively avoid castigating people if you want their behavior to change when they get something wrong. Look at reinforcing it when they get something right.

Correct. I mean, like the... the guys who make a lot of money and go out and buy sports teams—I wouldn't do that, right? But the one who goes out and builds a hospital or builds a rocket to take people to the moon, uh, you know, rescue some astronauts, you should be rewarding him for that. Mhm.

Expect nothing.

Thanks for having me.

Thanks for getting in my mind. And hopefully now you're out. We'll see. Maybe even worse now. You've got the real memories to stick. I don't know. The reason to win the game is to be free of it. The reason... the reason to do the podcast is to be... is to be done with it. All right.