熊骑独轮车、算法权力与收件箱清零：Naval 的两小时心智减法

00:01one boom all right we're live thank you very much for doing this man i really appreciate it i've been absorbing your information and listening to you talk for uh quite a while now so it's uh it's great to actually meet you thanks for having me my pleasure my pleasure you are one of the rare guys that is uh you're a big investor you are um you're deep in the tech world but yet you seem to have a very balanced perspective in terms of how to live life as opposed to not just be entirely focused on success and financial success tech investing but rather how to live your life in a happy way that's a it's a it's not balance yeah you

00:46know i think the reason why people like uh hearing me is because like if it's like if you go to a circus and you see a bear right that's kind of interesting but not that much if you see a unicycle that's interesting but you see a bear on a unicycle that's really interesting right so when you combine things you're not supposed to combine right people get interested it's like bruce lee right striking thoughts philosophy plus martial arts and i think it's because at some level all humans are broad we're all multivariate but we get summarized in pithy ways in our lives and at some deep level we know that's not true right every human basically is capable of every experience and

01:23every thought uh you know you're ufc comedian commentator podcaster but you're also more than that you're also father uh lover you know thinker etc so i like the model of life that the ancients had the greeks the romans right where you would start out and when you're young you're just like going to school then you're going to war then you're running a business then you're supposed to serve in the senate or the government then you become a philosopher there's sort of this arc to life where you try your hand at everything and as one of my friends says specialization is for insects right so everyone should just be able to do everything and so i don't believe in this model anymore

02:04of trying to focus your life down on one thing you've got one life just do everything you're going to do i couldn't agree more and i i think that sometimes people find certain success in whatever the endeavor is and then they think that that is their niche and they stick with it and they never change and they almost out of fear well it's hard because there's a you know the analogy around mountain climbing like if you find a mountain and you start climbing you spend your whole life climbing it and you get say two thirds of the way and then you see the peak is like way up there but you're two thirds of the way up you're still really high

02:39up but now to go the rest of the way you're going to have to go back down to the bottom and look for another path nobody wants to do that people don't want to start over yeah and it's the nature of later in life that you just don't know the time so it's very painful to go back down and look for a new path but that may be the best thing to do and that's why when you look at the greatest artists uh and and creators they have this ability to start over that nobody else does like elon will you know be called an idiot and start over doing something brand new that he supposedly is not qualified for or when madonna or paul simon or you two come out with a new album their existing fans usually hate it because they've adopted a completely new style that they've learned somewhere else and a lot of times they'll just miss completely so you

03:22have to be willing to be a fool and kind of have that beginner's mind and go back to the beginning to start over if you're not doing that you're just getting older yeah i mean i don't even know if it's willing to be a fool it's just to me that the most exciting thing is to try to get better at something to learn things i mean it's really exciting when you just have incremental progress and something that you're completely new to yeah i live for the aha moment that moment when you connect two things together that you hadn't connected together before and it fits nicely and solidly and it kind of helps form a steel framework of understanding in your mind

03:55that you can then hang other ideas off of that's what i live for yeah it's like curiosity fulfilled and it's what little children do too you know my little son is always asking why why why and i always try and answer him and half the times i realize actually i don't really understand why i just have a memorized answer for you but that's not really understanding yeah those are weird conversations right when you're you're talking to your kids and you say look uh the reality is i don't know a lot of things yes i've just memorized a lot of things and there's certain things that you just can't know yeah you realize that you know you have answers for a few

04:32things that you've thought through then you sort of have cover-ups like like trap doors like don't go here this is just a cover-up i don't really know the answer to what the meaning of life is or how we got here yes and then you've got a whole bunch of memorized stuff because a lot of your uh a lot of intelligence these days just the external brain pack of civilization i know it's out there i know the answers are out there know how to look them up and i've memorized some of them and i i kind of understand how money works and the federal reserve prints it and what this government thing is but not really so not good enough to teach

05:01it in university yeah yeah i think people do that with almost everything in life these days in terms of like have a like a one page a one cheat like a brief summary of what and the explanation for what this very complex subject might be tldr right don't give me the don't give me the lecture give me the book don't give me the book give me the blog post don't give me the blog post give me the tweet don't give me the tweet i just i already know yeah i got really fascinated by the way you read because i thought there was something wrong with me by doing that but you you don't really just read a book to completion you read and then you pick something else up and you just kind of go based on your whims whatever you're interested in well i was raised by my i was raised by a single mom in new york and she used the

05:49local library as a daycare center because it was a very tough neighborhood and so she would basically say when you get back from school go straight to the library and don't come out until i pick you up late at night so i used to basically live in the library and i read everything i read every magazine i read every pictograph or every book or every map i just ran out of stuff to read i just read everything so i got over this idea of that reading a large number of books or reading a book to completion as a vanity metric because really when people are putting up photos on twitter instagram of look at my pile of books that i'm reading

06:20it's a show-off thing it's a signaling thing yeah sure and the reality is i would rather read the best hundred books over and over again until i absorb them rather than read all the books right yeah because your your brain has finite information in a finite space you get enough advice it all cancels to there's a lot of nonsense in books out there too so i don't read anymore to complete books i read to satisfy my genuine intellectual and it can be anything it could be nonsense it could be history could be fiction it could be science it could be sci-fi these days it's mostly sci-fi philosophy science because that's just what i'm interested in but i will read for understanding

07:00so a really good book i will flip through i won't actually read it consecutively in order and i won't even just even finish it i'm looking for ideas things that i don't understand and when i find something really interesting i'll reflect on it i'll research it and then when i'm bored of it i'll drop it or i'll flip to another book thanks to electronic books i've got 50 70 books open at any time in my kindle or ibooks and i'm just bouncing around between them it's also a little bit of a defense mechanism to how in modern society we get too much information too quickly and so our attention spans are very low so you get twitter you get instagram you

07:37get facebook you're just used to being bombarded with information so you can take that to you you can view that as a negative and be like i have no attention span or you could view that as a positive i multitask really well and i can dig really fast i can if i find a thread that's interesting i can follow it through five social networks through the web through the libraries through the books and i can really get to the bottom of this thing very quickly it's like the library of alexandria that i can research at my disposal so i i no longer track books read or even care about books read it's about understanding concepts yeah you brought up two awesome

08:11points first of all the social media aspect of of books and basically anything it's like it's such a weird way to display your life because it's you know you're displaying the best aspects of your life and some sort of a glass you know just it's an unrealistic version of your life that you cultivate and you curate and i'm i'm as guilty of that as anybody everybody's guilty of it i'm guilty of it too yeah you know i mean i pose with my dog every time i run yeah we're always signaling yeah it's like rather than really looking at yourself you're looking at how other people look at you so it's like this one remove mental image and it's kind of a

08:50disease because social media is making celebrities of all of us and celebrities the most miserable people in the world right because they're this strong self-image that gets built up it gets built up by compliments every time somebody pays you or me a compliment and we're like oh well thank you right then that builds up an image of who we are and then one idiot comes along one out of ten one out of a hundred and they can easily tear it down because it doesn't take many insults to cancel out a lot of compliments and now you're carrying around this big weighty self-image and it's just very easy to be attacked and because you're you're famous or you're well known people want

09:23to attack you so being a celebrity is no good it's actually a problem like one of my tweets is and these are all reminders to myself is you want to be rich and anonymous not poor and there's benefits to it of course of course but we wouldn't do it it has problems that you don't get trained for and you really will not understand unless you experience it you know i was having this conversation with my wife we were talking about um people that just come up to you and they don't care what you're doing they don't care if i'm with my daughter if i'm holding her if i'm feeding her for you know we're in the middle of an intense conversation

10:02she's crying she could be crying and some bro will come over and just immediately have to take a picture doesn't care his needs supersede the daughter and my wife was saying i that before she knew me she used to think that that's just part of the price of being famous that people people like you that's just part of the price being famous and now when it interrupts her life and you know it interrupts the children and it interrupts friends and you know she now she's like this is annoying like this is not this is not healthy this is not a smart way to to interact with people and that people have this weird challenge this weird thing that if you're if

10:42you become famous there's this weird challenge where people just want to come to you especially today because if they can get a photo of you then that boosts their social media profile like hey i'm sitting here with the vault look at that smile anonymity is a privilege on the other hand it's self-inflicted i mean we brought it on ourselves yeah we don't think we knew what it was though we did but we carry on so yeah it tells us we are getting something out of it so i you know there are times when someone will approach me in public and i'm a little resentful and there are other times i'm just like actually i'm really grateful that you know i worked

11:13for this i got this right this is the payoff just embrace it smile grit and bear it but you have a different sort of celebrity too right you're you're a hero amongst investors and amongst i mean you've just i'm a among young male geeks which is those are some of my favorite people right but that's not the kind of celebrity i think most people set out to get especially most guys right right you want the cute females yeah i look at my brief little youtube clips i have a tiny little podcast going now and it's like 95 mail oh sure yeah this is very highly 18 to 35. yeah we what do we what is the numbers yeah it's in the 90s yeah um you you did that one you do that one very small podcast where you just have small like three or four minute clips yeah so what

12:03it was i i did a tweet storm uh called how to get rich without getting lucky and it got pretty popular in twitter and it's really about wealth creation i just use the clickbaity title and it's trying to basically lay out timeless principles of wealth creation that if you absorb them you become the kind of person who can create wealth create business make money and my theory behind that is like there are three things everybody wants there's actually more than three but let's just start with three the three basics everybody wants to be wealthy everybody wants to be happy and everybody wants to be fit and i know there's a lot of virtue signal that goes on like we don't want

12:39to money and you know i don't care about being happy and happiness is for stupid people but let's face it like you want to be rich and happy and healthy that's the trifecta now of course you also want an internally calm state of mind you want a loving household so there are other things that come into it but those three i think they can actually be taught right and the fitness i'm not going to teach there are a lot of people who you've had on here including yourself who know a heck of a lot more about fitness and health than i do i was born poor and miserable and uh i'm now pretty well off and i'm very happy and i

13:11don't and i worked at those and so i've learned a few things there are some principles and so i try to lay them out but in a timeless manner where you can kind of figure it out yourself because at the end of the day i can't really teach anything i can only inspire you and maybe give you a few hooks so you can remember things when they happen or put a name to them so this podcast actually ended up explaining this tweet storm so there's a tweet storm with like 36 38 tweets got very famous got translated to dozens of languages and these were principles that i came up with for myself when i was really young around 13 14 and

13:46i've been carrying them in my head for 30 years and i've been sort of living them and over time i just realized like sadly or fortunately the thing that i got really good at was looking at businesses and figuring out the point of maximum leverage to actually create wealth and capture some of that and do it in a very long-term kind of way not let the you know banker crash the economy get filled out kind of way but you know build businesses and help people and provide value kind of especially when applied to modern technology and leverage in this age of infinite leverage that we live in so the podcast is just explaining each tweet so these are little three four

14:24five minute snippets i don't like to say the same thing twice i don't like to explain in detail i just i i feel like if you have something original and interesting to say you should say it otherwise it's probably been said better so that podcast tries to be information dense it tries to be very concise it tries to be high impact it tries to be timeless and it has all the information i think you need the principles that if you absorb these and you work hard over 10 years you get what you want so i've got the one on wealth creation i'm going to attempt to do one on happiness is a big word but you know happiness and inner peace

15:02and calm and all that because what you want is you don't want to be the guy who succeeds in life while being high strung high stress and unhappy and leading the trail of emotional wreckage with you and your loved ones which is more common than not yeah because you got to focus and it's very hard to be great at everything you want to be the guy or the gal who gets there calmly you know quietly without struggle uh you want to be the person who's the when there's a crisis going on you want to be the calmest coolest cucumber in the room who still also figures out the correct answer um if you can be you were one of the things

15:38that you were saying is that you feel like happiness is something that you can learn and then you can teach yourself to be happy even just by adopting the mindset that you are a happy person and proclaiming that to your friends and so you've sort of developed a social contract i'm a happy person and i have to live up to that yeah i've got hundreds of techniques but then how did you develop that one there's just a there's social consistency right humans have a need to be highly consistent with their past pronouncements so the way i started my first tech company was i was in working inside a larger organization and i told everybody that i was going to go start

16:16a company i was like i hate this place i'm going to do my own thing i'm going to be successful entrepreneur six months past nine months pass then people start you're still here i thought you were going to go start a company are you lying right that was the implication so we kind of know this right social contracts are very powerful like if you want to give up drinking right and you're not serious about it you'll say i'm going to cut back i'm going to have only one drink a night i'm going to only drink on weekends you tell yourself but if you're serious you'll announce it on facebook you'll tell all your friends you'll tell your wife you'll say i'm

16:49done drinking i'm throwing everything out of the house you'll never see me drink again when you say that you know you're serious so i think a lot of these are choices that we make and happiness is just one of those choices and this is unpopular to say because there are people who are actually depressed you know chemically or what have you and there are people who don't believe that it's possible because then it creates a responsibility on them it says oh now if i'm you're saying if i'm not happy that's my fault i'm not saying that but i'm saying that just like fitness can be a choice health can be a choice nutrition can be a choice working hard and making

17:22money can be a choice happiness is also a choice if you're so smart how come you aren't happy how come you haven't figured that out that's my challenge to all the people who think they're so smart and so capable if you're so smart and capable why can't you change this there are a bunch of people though that actually take pleasure in being there's something about the pursuit of excellence and of success that supersedes all other that in in their eyes it is that the peak the pinnacle the most important thing it's not a trade-off i would argue that if now when i say happy happy is one of those words that means a zillion different things right it's like love right

18:07what does that mean right i love cheese yeah i'm going to define it a little bit more tightly let's go back to desire right this is old old buddhist wisdom i'm not saying anything original but desire to me is a contract that you make with yourself to be unhappy until you get what you want okay and i keep that in front of mine so when i'm unhappy about something i look for what is the underlying desire that i have that's not being fulfilled it's okay to have desires you're a biological creature you're put on this earth you have to do something you have to have desires you have a mission but don't have too many don't pick them up unconsciously don't

18:44pick them up randomly don't have thousands of them my coffee is too cold doesn't taste quite right i'm not sitting perfectly oh i wish it was warmer uh you know my dog you know pooped in the lawn i didn't like that whatever it is pick your one overwhelming desire it's okay to suffer over that one but on all the others you want to let them go so you can be calm and peaceful and relaxed and then you'll perform a better job most people when you're unhappy like a depressed person it's not that they have very clear calm mind they're too busy in their mind their sense of self is too strong they're sitting indoors all the time their minds working working

19:18working they're thinking too much well if you want to be a high performance athlete how good of an athlete are you going to be if you're always having epileptic seizures if you're always like twitching and running around and like jumping and your your limbs are flailing out of control the same way if you want to be effective in business you need a clear calm cool collected mind warren buffett plays bridge all day long and goes for walks in the sun he doesn't sit around like constantly loading his brain with non-stop information and and getting worked up about every little thing we live in an age of infinite leverage what i mean by that is that your actions can be multiplied a

19:54thousand fold either by broadcasting at a podcast or by investing capital or by having people work for you or by writing code so because of that the impacts of good decision making are much higher than they used to be because now you can influence thousands or millions of people through your decisions or your a clear mind leads to better judgment leads to a better outcome so a happy calm peaceful person will make better decisions and have better outcomes so if you want to operate at peak performance you have to learn how to tame your mind just like you have to learn how to tame your body i love what you're saying warren buffett might not be the best example because he

20:34drinks like i think six coca-colas a day and he eats mostly mcdonald's and he's still alive somehow so that shows you that low stress is more nobody looks like [ __ ] like how old is he i mean he's he's a fairly old man charlie mungers i think in his 90s right yeah he's made it really far i wonder what warren's doing you know i mean just he's got to know that's bad for him but it's terrible he doesn't care he doesn't care i think he's just a little stressed yeah stresses right so he just enjoys that coca-cola and that's probably maybe there is a trade-off right like maybe him enjoying that junk food and that coke just ah that that pleasing of

21:09the mind is maybe better than him just eating wheatgrass shots and yeah and salads and just being yeah just super worked up about everything it's like if you need your glass of red wine to de-stress and calm down that's probably better than you flying off the rails right right and i think that that's applicable not just in business but in probably any pursuit and i like what you're saying about allow that one thing to be your obsession but everything else just you know learn how to learn how to let things go pick your battles we like to think that we we like to view the world as linear which is i'm going to put in eight hours of work i'm going

21:49to get back eight hours of output right it doesn't work that way guy running the corner grocery store is working just as hard or harder than you and me how much output is he getting what you do who you do with how you do it way more important than how hard you work right outputs are non-linear based on the quality of the work that you put in the right way to work is like a lion you don't you and i are not like cows we're not meant to graze all day right we're meant to hunt like lions we're closer to carnivores in our omnivorous development than we are to herbivores um we don't tell vegans that yeah sorry look i wish

22:23all that stuff worked i don't want to eat meat this future generation will look back at us as worse than slavers you know because the holocaust we're committing with the animals but they'll have artificial meats that taste and are healthier is uh better than the real thing so allegedly but so as a modern knowledge worker athlete as an intellectual athlete you want to function like an athlete which means you train hard then you sprint then you rest then you reassess you get your feedback loop then you train some then you sprint again then you rest then you reassess this idea that you're going to have linear output just by cranking every day at the same amount of time same that's machines

23:04you know machines should be working nine to five humans are not meant work nine of are not meant to work nine to five no i agree wholeheartedly but that's it for people that are working for someone there's not really that option so that's unfortunately the the rub right that's kind of where my tweet storm starts which is first of all the first thing if you're going to make money is that you're not going to get rich renting at your time even lawyers and doctors who are charging three four 500 an hour they're not getting rich because their lifestyle is slowly ramping up along with their income and they're not saving enough uh they just don't have that ability to so the

23:42first thing you have to do is you have to own a piece of a business you need to have equity either as an owner an investor shareholder or a brand that you're building that accrues to you to gain your financial yeah and i was really fascinated by another thing that you were bringing up about working for yourself that you feel in the future whether it's 50 or 100 years from now virtually everyone is going to be working for themselves and i believe the way you put it is that the information age is going to reverse the industrial age yeah if you go back to hunter-gatherer times how we evolved we basically work for ourselves we communicated and cooperated within tribes but

24:20each hunter each gatherer stood on their own and then combined their resources with the family unit but there was no boss hierarchy hierarchy or you're like the third middle manager down in the farming age we became a little bit more hierarchical as we had to run farms but even those were still mostly family farms it's industrial work with factories that sort of created this model of thousands of people working together on one thing and having bosses and schedules and times to show up the reality is if you have to go i don't care how rich you are i don't care whether you're like a top wall street banker if you have to go if somebody has to tell you if somebody

24:57can tell you when to be at work and what to wear and how to behave you're not a free person you're not actually rich so we're in this model now where we think it's all about employment and jobs and intrinsic in that is that i have to work for somebody else but the information age is breaking that down so ronald kos is an economist who has this coase theorem a very famous theorem but it basically just talks why is a company the size that it is why is a company one person instead of 10 people instead of 100 instead of a thousand and it has to do with the internal transaction costs versus the external transaction costs let's say i want

25:34to do something let's say i'm building a house and i need someone to come in and provide the lumber i'm a developer right do i want that to be part of my company or do i want that to be an external provider a lot of it just depends on how hard it is to do that transaction with someone externally versus internally if it's too hard to keep doing the contract every time externally i'll bring that in-house if it's easy to do externally and it's a one-off kind of thing i'd rather keep it out of the house well information technology is making it easier and easier to do these transactions externally it's becoming much easier to communicate with people gig economy i

26:08can send you small amounts of money i can hire you through an app i can rate you afterwards so we're seeing an atomization of the firm we're seeing the optimal size of the firm shrinking it's most obvious in silicon valley tons and tons of startups constantly coming up and shaving off little pieces of businesses from large companies and turning them into huge markets so what looked like the small little vacation rental market on craigslist is now suddenly blown up into airbnb one example that's a great example but what i think we're going to see whether it's 10 20 50 100 years from now high quality work will be available we're not talking about driving an uber we're talking about super high

26:48quality work will be available in a gig fashion where you'll wake up in the morning your phone will buzz and you'll have five different jobs from people who have worked with you in the past or have been referred to it's kind of like how hollywood already works a little bit with how they're organized for a project you decide whether to take the project or not the contract is right there on the spot you get paid a certain amount you get rated every day or every week you get the money delivered and then when you're done working you turn it off and you go to tahiti or wherever you want to spend the next three months and i think the smart people

27:15have already started figuring out that the internet enables this and they're starting to work more and more remotely on their own schedule on their own time on their own place with their own friends in their own way and that's actually how we are the most productive so the information revolution by making it easier to communicate connect and cooperate is allowing us to go back to working for ourselves and that is my ultimate dream even when i run a company and i have employees i always tell those people hey i'm going to help you start your company when you're ready because i think that's the highest calling maybe not everybody will get there but it would be fine if we were even

27:51working a ten person company or twenty person company is way better than working in a thousand person company a ten thousand person company so this idea that we're all factory like cogs in a machine who are specialized and have to do things by rote memorization or instruction it's going to go away and we're going to go back to being small groups of creative bands of individuals setting out to do missions and when those missions are done we collect our money we get rated and then we rest and reassess until we're ready for the next sprint has there ever been a study done on happiness and as it regards the size of companies not that i'm aware but to me it's obvious

28:27it's just obvious the smaller the company the happier you're going to be the more human your relations are the less you have rules to operate under the more flexible the more creative the more you betray like a human just because you're able to do multiple things yeah um this brings me to is a subject that keeps getting brought up nowadays is universal basic income with the oncoming apocalypse of automation this is how it's being portrayed by andrew yang who's running for president i sat down and talked to him about is very and he's a very smart guy and he's an entrepreneur himself and when he starts talking about automation and how it's going to just eliminate massive amounts of jobs and

29:07leave people stranded what do you when i know you're a guy who thinks about the future and i'm going to take this popular point of view on this i don't i think it's a non-solution to a and i mean that in the sense that automation has been happening since the dawn of time electricity came along that put a lot of people out of work did it right a lot of people carrying buckets of water and you know lighting lamps and all those kinds of things and this was the concern with factories as well apps everything literally every single thing that comes even the printing pros absolutely and what it does is it frees people up for new creative work so the

29:39question is not is automation going to eliminate jobs there is no finite number of jobs we're not like sitting around dividing up the same jobs that we're around since the stone age so obviously new jobs are being created and they're usually better jobs more creative jobs so the question is how quickly is this transition going to happen and what kinds of jobs will be eliminated and what kinds of jobs will be created it's impossible looking forward to predict what kinds of jobs will be created if i told you 10 years ago that podcaster was going to be a job or that you know playing video games is going to be a job or commentating on video games is going to be

30:13a job you would have laughed me out of the room those are nonsense jobs but yet here we are so society will always create new jobs civilization creates new jobs but it's impossible to predict what those jobs are so the question is how quickly is that transition happening well the reality is even though everybody keeps talking about this automation apocalypse we're at a record low unemployment explain that where's the transition donald trump that's hard all i'm saying is it's it's i don't see it in the numbers i don't see it actually happening the question is how quickly can you retrain people so it's an education problem the problem with ubi there's a couple of problems with ubi one is you're creating

30:53a slippery slide straight into socialism right the moment people can start voting themselves money combined with a democracy right it's just a matter of time before the bottom 51 votes themselves everything in the top 49. yeah and it just it and by the way slippery slope fallacy is not a fallacy and i know people like saying that but they haven't thought it through um but the moment you start having a direct transfer mechanism like that in a democracy you're basically doing it with capitalism which is the engine of economic growth you're also forcing the entrepreneurs out or telling them not to come here the estimate i saw for 15k a year basic income for everybody would

31:31be three quarters of current gdp and of course gdp would shrink in response as all the entrepreneurs fled so you would essentially bankrupt the country another issue at ubi is that people who down in their luck they're not looking for handouts it's not just about money it's also about status it's about meaning and the moment i start giving money to you and put you on the dole i've lowered your status i've made you a second class citizen so i have to give you meaning and meaning comes through education and capability i have you have to teach a man to fish not to basically throw your rotting leftover carcasses at him and say here eat the scraps so it doesn't solve the

32:06meaning problem and lastly it's nonsense to hand 15k out to everybody you want to means test people there's no reason to give it to you and me so you end up back towards the welfare system where you do have to figure out who needs it and who doesn't so i think the better route is that we actually establish a set of basic substance services that you have to have and we provide those in abundance to technology-based automation so get basic housing get basic food get basic transportation get high-speed internet access get a phone in your pocket those are the kinds of things you want to give and finally in terms of the rate of automation i think we can educate people

32:45very quickly one of the myths that we have today is that adults can't be re-educated we view education as this thing where you go to school you come out when you're out of college and you're done no more education well that's wrong you have all these great online boot camps and coding schools coming up they're ones that will even pay you to go there now you can educate people and mass and you can educate them into creative professions people who are talking about ai automating programming have never really written serious code coding is thinking it's automatic structure thinking an ai that can as well or better than humans is an ai that just took over the world that's end game that's

33:24the end of the human species and i can give you arguments why i don't think that's coming either people who are thinking and i know i take the opposite side from some very famous people in this debate but we're nowhere near close to general ai not in our lifetimes you don't have to worry about it even in our lifetimes really it's so overblown uh it's it's a combination of cassandra complex you know it's fun to talk about the end of the world combined with a god complex like people who have lost religion so they're looking for meaning in some kind of end of history right right um the reason why i don't think ai is coming anytime soon is because a

34:00lot of the advances in so-called ai today are what we call narrow ai they're really pattern recognition machine learning to figure out like what is that object on the screen or how do you find this signal and all that noise there's nothing approaching what we call creative to actually model general intelligence you run into all kinds of problems first we don't know how the brain works at all number two we've never even modeled a paramecium or an amiibo let alone a human brain number three there's this assumption that all of the computation is going at the cellular level at the neuron level whereas nature is very parsimonious it uses everything at its disposal there's a lot of machinery inside the cell

34:40that is doing calculations that is intelligent that isn't accounted for and the best estimates are would take 50 years of moore's law before we can simulate what's going on inside a cell near perfectly and probably 100 years before we can build a brain that can stimulate inside the cells so putting it at saying that i'm just going to model neuron is on or off and then use that to build a human brain is overly simplistic furthermore i would posit there's no such thing as general intelligence every intelligence is contextual within the context of the environment that it's in so you have to evolve an environment around it so i think a lot of people who are peddling general ai the burden

35:13of proof is on them i haven't seen anything that would lead me to indicate we're approaching general ai instead we're solving deterministic closed set finite problems using large amounts of data but it's not sexy to talk about that if you you're talking about mirroring the actual abilities of cells or are you talking about recreating the actual mechanism like what what what is going on inside cells and and biological organisms yeah we just don't know how intelligence works right we don't know we literally have no idea so most of the ai approaches basically say we're going to try and model how the brain works but the model at the neuron level which is saying this neurons on that neurons often combining their

35:56signal but i'm saying in the neuron is a cell inside the cell there's all this machinery going on that's operating the neuron that is also part of the intelligence apparatus you can't just ignore that and abstract that out you have to model it down to the in inside the cell level it's also a part of the biological organism itself exactly and it has all these needs that you know the biological organism has to have food and rest and exactly there's a balance going on but when you eliminate all that when there is none of that and it's just calculations and we get to a point where it's just this thing that we've created whether you call it a computer whether it

36:33doesn't have to be a moving thing even but a thing that you've created that stores virtually all the information that's available in the world stores all the patterns of all the thinking of all the great people that have ever lived all the the writers all the people that have ever published anything all the people that have ever spoken any words stores all of their points all their counterpoints all their contradictions applies logic and reason some sort of sense of the future and starts improving upon these patterns and then starts acting on its own based on the information that it's been provided with well first you would have to actually simulate a structure the human brain that can hold all that information

37:22you're basically talking about tens of thousands of brains worth of information right we can't even build one brain the next decade or two or three well in terms of an actual physical brain yes but what about something that recreates the abilities of a brain like i said nature is parsimonious so we've got this three pound wet wear object that can hold all this data nature has been very efficient in evolving kind of how we get there i i just don't think computers are anywhere close to that like they can hold that amount of data with that complexity with like the holographic structure of the brain where it can recall in many many different ways and then i don't think you can

37:59evolve a creature to be intelligent outside of the boundaries of feedback in a real medium like if you evolved if you raised a human being a concrete cell with no input from the outside they wouldn't have any feedback from the real world they wouldn't evolve properly so i think just dumping information into into a thing isn't enough it has to have an environment to operate in to get feedback from it needs to have context but isn't that biological i mean what if you if you have just the all the information that people have accumulated and the lessons that people have learned and you program that into the computer like if if we can take a computer that can beat someone at

38:36chess the the real question was well can we make some sort of an artificial intelligence could beat someone at go which is far more complex of chess they figured out how to do that too and that was a giant shock right these are still man-made very closed bounded games they're they're not they're not on the road to the unbounded game of life they are completely artificial but this didn't go didn't that give you like a little bit of a pause a little bit go is not go or league of legends or fortnite they're not completely deterministic right but they're still very artificial very bounded games being good at go doesn't mean that you can then suddenly figure out how to write

39:16great poetry right the creativity for sure is something that's creativity is the last frontier so i do believe that automation over a long enough period of time will replace every non-creative job or every non-creative work but that's great news that means that all of our basic needs are taken care of and what remains for us is to be creative which is really what every human wants yeah what are you doing right now this is a creative job sure um that that brings us back to the idea of meaning and universal basic income uh i think the idea of giving someone 15 000 a year doesn't necessarily cause whatever what everyone would worry about is people being on the dole you would

40:00have a bunch of listless people out there with no meaning in life but the idea is that fifteen thousand dollars a year and i'm not necessarily sure i agree with this i'm not even endorsing this but that fifteen thousand dollars a year would just provide you with the necessities to get by in life it would give you food it would give you shelter well it's not gonna stop at 15 because the moment people are like i mean like 15 like then people would demand more bernie sanders would be on this 16 7 45 thousand dollars yeah these companies are too big yeah that could it doesn't it doesn't stop it's just it just goes all the way to bankruptcy the concern

40:32is the slide to socialism it's obvious yeah i mean heck if i was on if i was not working and i was getting my 15 a year i would happily vote for the guy who would give me 20 or 25 it's just common sense what do you say to the people that don't believe that there is such a thing of ethical as ethical or compassionate capitalism and there's many people today that are espousing marxism and they're espousing some sort of a socialist society where they believe that capitalism has screwed people over and the middle class and there are absolute problems with capitalism i think monopolies are a problem i think that uh crony capitalism is a problem with the government you

41:10know kind of gets in bed with them and sort of forces things uh i think the bankers have really you know raped society and the rest of us are suffering for it yeah they've essentially taken huge risks where they privatize the gains and they socialize the losses so when it fails they basically get billed out and bankrupt everybody else so capitalism has gotten a really bad name let's talk about its free exchange free markets and free exchange are intrinsic to humans from when the first person started a fire and somebody came along with a deer and said hey if i cook my deer on your fire i'll share some of it with you right so specialization labor we trade that's built

41:47into the human species basic math comes from accounting keeping track of debts and credits and so on we need to be able to engage in free trade the correct criticism of capitalism is when it does not provide equal opportunity and so we should always strive to provide equal opportunity but people confuse that with equal outcome when you have equal outcome that can only be enforced through violence because different people free people make different choices and when they make different choices they have different outcomes if you don't let them suffer the consequences of bad choices or reap the rewards from good choices then you are forcibly redistributing through violence it's interesting that there isn't there are no socialist working socialist examples that

42:29exist without violence you basically need someone to show up with a gun and say okay you're not allowed to do that you hand this over to that person so one of the reasons why this podcast is because i believe everybody can be wealthy everybody it's not a zero-sum game it is a positive sum game you create something brand new you exchange it with me for something brand new i've created this higher utility for both of us the sum of the value created is positive it's not like status where it's like you're higher up i'm lowered down your president so must be vice president you're a plus one i'm a minus one and has to cancel a zero we should all be

43:02all for playing some ethical games the problem is because of these looters who have ruined capitalism's name that then you get socialists coming in and saying burn the whole system down right you burn the whole system down we end up like venezuela or the former soviet union you know you don't want to be a failed socialist states with emaciated teens hunting cats in the streets to eat right that's literally what happens in some of these places so i think it's very important not to destroy the engine of progress that brought us here yeah the idea that socialism just hasn't worked yet that it needs to the we just need to do it right if we do it right we can if

43:38you ever 100 million dead and yeah yeah well let's keep trying all over the world yeah and and every single time it's been have you ever had a conversation with someone who's a socialist who where many times some of my better friends are socialists really we really get into it yeah and what is there i mean does anyone have a compelling perspective at all i i think really socialism comes from the heart right you all we all want to be capitalism comes from the head because they're always cheaters in any system yes and there's incentives in any system when you're young if you're if you're not a socialist you have no heart when you're older if you're not a capitalist you

44:18have no head right you haven't thought it through so i understand where it comes from i always liked nassim taleb's framing on this where he said with my family i'm a communist with my close friends i'm a socialist uh you know at my state level politics i'm a democrat at you know higher levels i'm a republican and at the federal level i'm a libertarian right so basically the larger the group of people you have massed together who have different interests the less trust there is the more cheating there is the better the incentives have to be aligned the better the system has to work the more you go towards capitalism the smaller the group you're in you're in a kibbutz you're

44:53in your commune you're in your house you're in your tribe by all means be a socialist with my aunts with my brother with my cousins with my uncles with my mom with your family i'm a socialist that's the right way to live a loving integrated life yes but when you're dealing with strangers i mean you want to be a real socialist great open all your doors and windows tomorrow please everybody come take what you want see how that works out yeah this idea of income inequality that always strikes me as a very it's a deceptive term income inequality well let's flip it around it comes from outcome inequality yeah and the outcome inequality is there because you made different choices now

45:33again going back if it was because you didn't have the same opportunities that's a problem yes so society should always try to give people equal opportunities so for example instead of basic income what if we had a retraining program built into our basic social fabric which said that every four years or every six years or whatever it is maybe it's every 10 you can take one year out and we'll pay for you to go retrain completely and you can go into any profession you like that has some earning power and output hopefully a creative long-term profession and you can re-educate that would be much better for society on all levels than basically just saying now you're going to be the dole

46:12for the rest of your life yeah you just you'd have to lead that horse to water and then make them drink it requires people to put in some effort yeah you know we can't all just sit around it's just not well that's my my perspective on income inequality there's always effort in and and thought inequality there's just some people that are obsessed and if those people become successful it doesn't mean they stole from you it just means that they put in the amount of energy and effort that it's required to reach where they're at and there's a lot of virtue signaling that goes on now where people say well it's because you're privileged well you know you know what the greatest

46:45privilege is you're alive 85 of humanity is dead yeah so how privileged are you then you're living in the first world and you're you know you have four limbs etc so you can take that argument all the way it's kind of a nonsense discussion what's a very weird progressive argument and it as it pertains to uh race is always a weird one right because white privilege to me it although it you could look at what they're saying on paper like yes yeah i'm sure there's more black people that are harassed by the police i'm sure there's more black people who are treated suspiciously by shop owners and the like but the problem isn't the people who aren't treated poorly the problem

47:23is the people who treat the people poorly the problem is racism the problem is not people that didn't ask to be born white or whatever they are and they don't get so this idea of white privilege or male privilege or whatever it is that's not the problem you're just looking at someone who's not a victim of this particular problem that you're highlighting but you're not looking at the perpetrators of the problem you're making people perpetrators by simply existing and having less melanin in their skin or having their ancestors come from actually it's a sneaky way of being racist yeah and then they say you can't be racist it's not racist because you're white that's right that is this hilarious if you

48:08can't be racist against white people that one that's what there's a variation of the whole still while i hit you argument you know stop struggling while i'm hitting you but it's just so silly you've just completely changed what racism means but what's hilarious is mostly the people who are yelling racists are not the minorities when i look on my twitter my social media or on my news it's white on white violence virtue signaling yeah it's white on white violence yeah what's mostly going on is its elitist whites blue state whites college educated whites beating up on high school educated whites blue collar it's a white collar versus blue-collar war that's going on and the rest of us are just kind of

48:42watching like oh that's kind of interesting well it's also a side effect of the ability to broadcast right like everyone with a twitter handle has the ability to broadcast everyone with a facebook page has the ability to pontificate and have these long rambling these huge statements that people put out when you you read them it's like how much time did you put in this what the f do you put that much time in your kids or your job or your job or your life or your future or planning for your you know how much do you work out a day i mean are you just these some i read some people's facebook posts i'm like this is a preposterous amount of

49:18effort that you put into saying virtually nothing let's see humans are being creative yeah and ai do that well that's true it is creative it's it's creative in a very odd way right because it's creative and that they're trying to elicit a response from people and they're trying to raise their their social value or raise their position on the social totem pole it's signaling and it's easy signaling because the kind of thing that everybody has to agree with you on because nobody wants to be seen as a horrible person yeah and it's very hard to make the nuanced arguments against than it is to just kind of go along right well it's also it's some of it is so cliche that

49:54it seems like i i know one guy who poses as a woman on twitter but he does it just obviously yeah uh what is this the name tatiana yes yeah yeah used to be godfrey elwick yes oh is that the same guy i think so yeah that's i did not they killed his account they killed his account for 100 sure for pretending to be transracial that's right they did yeah he basically says all the crazy stuff that people in the left say but he says the craziest version yes and kind of just shows how it's okay like i saw a tweet from recently just said or her that it's not okay to be white yes and then some people agree but it's it's so close to what they say it's so close that it's like the most artful form of subtle parody because it's well if you replace in half of these things if you replace the word white with black or asian

50:53yeah yeah it's a strange time in that respect that there's a favor saying that if you want to see who rules over you see who you're not allowed to criticize excellent yeah that is a that's so true right yeah that's so true i wonder where this is going i really do i wonder because this is it seems like this newfound ability to broadcast that we have with whether you have a youtube page or whether you have twitter or whatever you're doing this newfound ability to spread whatever you're trying to say to so many people with very little understanding on the most part from i think it's actually a great thing overall yeah now it means that any human can broadcast any

51:38other human on the planet at any time so for example if you know a totalitarian dictator were to come to power and someone was beating up you know had fascists beating up on old women like that would get broadcast out instantly there would be an instant outrage hue and cry rallying so in that sense it helps bring attention to the plight of anybody right now we're going through the phase where we have this newfound power to assemble mobs and people don't know how to deal with that so it becomes very easy to set up a mob and have it attack somebody take all the context out like even this conversation i'm sure people will take out snippets put them on social

52:14media and try and get somebody outraged of course and so you have to learn how first of all society just has to get over this idea of outrage like to me outraged people are just people who get easily outraged are the stupidest people on social media those are the people i block instantly uh it's just kind of very low level thinking right these are the foots of the these are the foot soldiers and the mob eventually society just has to get over it they have to understand that these are all snippets being taken out of context these are doctored video clips these are just someone who's trying to get outraged over something eventually there'll also be anti-mob tactics like for example

52:49if if i go to someone's twitter feed and all it is is full of polit political ranting raving conspiracy theories do i want to work with this person do i want to associate with this person do you want to be friends with this person their mind is just cluttered with junk now i don't necessarily blame them i think that the human brain is not designed to absorb all of the world's breaking news 24 7 emergencies injected straight into your skull with clickbait headline news if you pay attention to that stuff even if you're well-meaning even if your sound of mind and body it will eventually drive you insane this goes back to clockwork orange where he's you know has his eyes

53:27opened up he's forced to watch the news but i think that's what's happening right now because these are addictive right twitter facebook instagram these are weaponized you have social statisticians and scientists and researchers and people in lab coats literally best minds of our generation figuring out how to addict you to the news yes and if you fall for it if you get addicted your brain will get destroyed and i think this is the modern struggle right the modern struggle so the ancient struggle used to be the tribal struggle you had your tribe of friends and family you had your religion you had your country you had your loyalty you had your nationality at least you had meaning and support but now

54:04you would struggle against other tribes modern life we're so free everything's become atomized we stand alone you live in your apartment alone you live in your house alone your parents don't live nearby your friends don't live nearby you don't have any tribal meaning you don't believe in religion anymore you don't believe in country anymore it's fine you got a lot of freedom it's fantastic but now when they come to attack you you're alone and you can't resist so how do they attack you it's all well-meaning i don't fault capitalism i love capitalism but look at how it happens social media massaged all the mechanisms to addict you like a skinner's pigeon or a rat who's just gonna click click click click

54:43can't put the phone down the food they've taken sugar and they've weaponized it they've put it into all these different forms and varieties that you can't resist eating drugs right they've taken pharmaceuticals and plants and they've synthesized them they've grown them in such a way that you can't you get addicted you can't put them down porn right if you're a young male you wander on the internet it'll like sap away your libido and you're not going out in real life society anymore because you've got this incredibly stimulating stuff coming at you video games another way to addict people so you have this you have entire large factories of people that are working to addict you to these things and you stand

55:22alone so the modern struggle as an individual is learning how to resist these things in the first place drawing your own boundaries and there's no one there to help you that's terrifying i mean it is a new road that needs to be navigated by young people that are there's no map there's no guidebook on how to handle this our generation is the transition generation i think our kids will know how to handle it better because they'll grow but i hope i hope i hope too because you're seeing some ridiculous behavior from people today that's so common i mean i don't know if you've been paying attention to this but there was a guy who he made a video it turns out

56:02it wasn't even him that made the video at least that's not what he said but it was a video where he sort of doctored nancy pelosi talking and made it look like she was drunk and then a bunch of people retweeted it like oh my god look she's drunk and and so one of the online publications uh some website tracked him down and doxed him and turned out he's just a day laborer who is an african-american trump fan and thought it would be funny to do that and it turns out that he didn't even at least according to him he actually just put it up on his facebook page what's even more disturbing is facebook gave up his information to this

56:43website for what because he made something funny that made people seem drunk there's a million of those about me i mean you could find them i mean i think facebook and twitter and a bunch of these other social media platforms are committing slow-motion suicide through these kinds of that was a stunning one though that they would give up this guy who's a laborer because he made a parody video or he made someone look foolish with editing well you now have basically the media views it as their job to go after individuals they don't like yeah i use media with air quotes in that regard so i don't think this is something that the new york times would have done anything responsible

57:19but the media is getting more and more desperate right because what happened was before the internet you could have two local newspapers in every town and you could have two local news stations you know tv stations in every town and then cnn came along and started commoditizing the news 24 7 broadcast and then the internet came along that was the final nail in the coffin because what the internet did was it said actually if there's a fact that's news you can distribute that immediately it can go on twitter it can go on facebook it gets reprinted on google news a thousand times you know you're going google news you're like okay what's the piece of news which source and three thousand

57:52other articles too many right yeah so news has become commoditized so the entire news media has shifted into peddling opinions and entertainment yes and so now they've a variation between like cheerleaders shock troops enforcers you know talking heads so these are now tribal these are not propaganda machines signaling for their tribes it's a right-wing one this left-wing one right there's the alt-right there's a control left and the two of them are just fighting it out using their various media organs and memes so basically when you see one of these news organizations doxing an individual that's like a tank running over a right that's what's going on it's just war and so there's no there's no such thing anymore as a neutral

58:34media the the illusion of objectivity that journalism had is lost there's no longer one guy like a walter cronkite that everyone's going to listen to it's now all just shock troops fighting wars with each other how does this play out have you thought about it yeah a little bit uh so what the internet does a lot of this is internet driven what the internet does is the internet creates one giant aggregator or two for everything one taxi dispatcher one e-commerce store one search engine one uh you know one social media site for friends and family one for business etc so the internet is this giant aggregator where it creates one big hegemon for and it creates an atomized long tail of

59:21millions and millions of individuals what it gets rid of is the medium medium-sized ones in the middle so for example you might have had like seven hollywood studios what's all going to be netflix you had uh you know like 10 large e-commerce players so commerce players from walmart to costco to you know kmart and whatever now it's just going to be amazon and a ton of small individual brands so that's the world that we're headed towards one hegemon and millions of individuals so where it ends up long term is media will be a few gigantic outlets you know it could be the new york times it could be facebook a few like that and there's going to be just a really

1:00:00long tale of millions of independent people so this idea of who's a journalist and who's not you know is assange journalist or not everyone's a journalist that's the world that we're headed towards i do think the extreme power the most powerful people in the world today and this is not well known but the most powerful people in the world today are the people who are writing the algorithms for twitter and facebook and instagram because they're controlling the spread of information they're literally rewriting people's brains they're programming the culture and they're doing it very subtly like google i believe that you know one of their execs got up in front of congress and the congressman asked him uh you know do you

1:00:38manipulate search results and he said no we do not manipulate search results really that's your job that is literally all google does google has one job which is to manipulate search results to pull them out of the noise and rank them properly and the out the precise algorithms of how they do that is very hidden very complex but influences the hearts and minds of everybody including all the voters now if google facebook and twitter had been smart about this they would not have picked sides they would have said we're publishers whatever goes through our pipes goes through our pipes if it's illegal we'll take it down give us a court order otherwise we don't touch it it's like the phone company

1:01:16if i call you up and i say something horrible to you on the phone the phone company doesn't get in trouble but the moment this started taking stuff down that wasn't illegal because somebody screamed they basically lost their right to be viewed as a carrier and now all of a sudden they've taken on liability so they're sliding down the slippery slope into ruin sloping to ruin where the left wants them to take down the right the right wants him to take down the left and now they have no more friends they have no allies traditionally the libertarian-leaning republicans and democrats would have stood up in principle for the common carriers but now they won't so my guess is as soon as

1:01:49congress this is this day is coming if not already here it might even been here today actually because this saw something related in the news the day is coming when the politicians realize that these social media platforms are picking the next president the next congressman they're literally picking and they have the power to pick so they will be controlled by the in in what way how do you think they're going to be controlled you think they're going to have to adhere to strict principles of freedom of speech no first particularly unfortunately it's headed the opposite direction right absolutely i wish it was freedom of speech much more likely they're going to be in the short to medium term they're going to

1:02:28be hauled in for hearings uh they're going to be pressured massively do this don't do that my concern about that is the the hearings that i saw with zuckerberg those people were completely incompetent they don't seem to understand they don't but they're just applying pressure they're just trying to scare him so he'll do what they want and what do they want him to do they want him to basically suppress the other side so if you're right wing you want to suppress the left wing if you're left-wing you want to suppress the right wing and if you just see where these companies are headquartered in silicon valley all the sensors and that's really what they are there are sensors working inside these

1:02:59companies they're just called they're called by different names obviously right it's double speak you call it the department defense when it's the department of war so in this case the department of safety and trust when it releases the department of censorship the sensors are inside silicon valley so it's going to reflect silicon valley's politics which is extremely progressive left ring yeah and if you're not that you really have no place there's i mean right try being a conservative an open conservative at google good luck now you get lynched yes that's crazy i mean i don't think that there was ever a thing like that was so influential and so politically ideologically one-sided yeah there's a there's a little saying on the

1:03:40internet i think it's called conquest law that any organization that's not explicitly right-wing eventually becomes left-wing and i don't know why that's true but it does seem to me to be true well it's a fascinating battle that's going on right now i mean it really is and conservatives in as far as social media is concerned they're just getting chopped off at the hams left and right yeah what'll eventually happen is that whenever you suppress speech the organism metastasizes then it has to start turning towards other means if you're unlucky goes towards violence if you're lucky they find other outlets i think what will happen is we will start creating decentralized media that's not owned by any single entity that can't be

1:04:23suppressed or shut down that will then start spreading these various things and that will take the place of twitter or facebook that's right but it's going to take 10 years 20 years it's not overnight well you know twitter took 10 years to get to the point where it's at this mess right now but it was so interesting to to have jack dorsey and to to talk to him about where it's going where he thinks it's going in his own principles which he believes that it's a fundamental right and he believes that freedom of speech is something that we all should have and that these platforms should essentially be like utilities like the electric company jack is correct and he has the

1:05:00right vision it's just he's in an organization where the other individuals in the organization feel differently very differently so the organization itself can get hijacked and his timeline for changing things it's like it's decades i mean i i don't know i shouldn't say decades but i mean i was like when do you think that something well there's a part there was one idea of having an uncensored twitter like one twitter that's the wild west like you could have regular twitter or you could try wild west twitter like well that already exists there's a network called gab yes but gab isn't even wild west twitter they when when people dox people they remove things like that yeah i mean i think there's

1:05:41certainly lines around violence and illegality that you don't want to cross but yes gab is closer to free speech platform but it's still not decentralized it can still get shut down it can still get taken out it's also suppressed heavily yes so that so there and the people on there are right now are extremely right-wing so it's not a pleasant place for someone like me to hang out with all the people that have been kicked off of something that's right so that's right try going over there and being moderate try going over there there's no room for you yeah unfortunately because i don't identify as any party or any creed you know it doesn't work for me is that a problem

1:06:14in silicon valley when you don't identify as anything do you get pressure it totally it used to be okay it's not okay anymore when was it okay like 10 years ago i would say it was okay and then you started seeing a shift yeah and now you have to pick sides otherwise you're automatically the enemy really yeah struggle sessions and all that god struggle sessions i'm exaggerating for effect but but it definitely has that oppressive feeling to it right and you also have to be politically outspoken right yeah it can't be something that you just stay neutral about right it's like when uh tim ferriss i think at some point put out a tweet about how you can't just say anything

1:06:47anymore and you know people are being suppressed and a whole bunch of people who love them from silicon valley piled and said what is it that you can't say what are you afraid to say you can say whatever you want tim go ahead what are you afraid of right they don't like baiting yeah what was he trying to say wow we have to put him in that box what is someone who's thinking about saying something he shouldn't have said exactly now we know one great tweet i saw was you know the left one the culture wars now they're just driving around shooting the survivors wow that's hilarious yeah i wonder i wonder who as has won the culture war there's certainly

1:07:18a battle that's been won in terms of like control of social media control of social media is absolutely left well this is unfortunate for conservatives but technology is a force that also pushes left so if you look all throughout human history like the left essentially grows and grows and grows right why is that why is it inexorably that as some commentators have said leviathan slouch is left right leviathan is the government why does it slouch left and i think a lot of that has been because of technology uh technology has made it so that it makes more like industrial revolution technology we all band together we're wards of the state right contraception is a technology that kind of helps lean leftward

1:07:59it takes away from the family unit abortion is a right it wasn't possible thousands of years ago so technology actually empowers the individual the individual means that you have the breakdown of family structure and religion and all that and i'm not mostly opposed to that but it does mean that there's a leftward shift to it now we're getting a small set of technologies that actually can take you more rightward encryption is an example because encryption makes it easier to have privacy it makes it easier to have money that is outside of the state guns 3d printing of guns is an example of a technology that is more of a rightward shift but generally technology leads the world yeah it's it's also

1:08:41usually highly educated people that are involved in technology in the first place and i think when you look at universities in particular they tend to lean left in this country as well universities what happened with the university is very interesting universities first when you know became the arbiters of data and intellectualism and what's right and wrong so there's a time period when it was like should we be doing that or not well let's look at the university what do they have to say what are the smartest people the professors the think tanks have to say and the universities got this credibility from the hard sciences so they got this from uh you know physics and math and computer science and chemistry

1:09:24because these deliver real things the manhattan project the microprocessor the space vehicles and so on the electric car so they gain this mantle of authority and legitimacy from the hard sciences so then come the social sciences kind of sneak in then you get economy economics and microeconomics is a real discipline real science real math behind it logic reason and then you get macroeconomics which can be politicized a little bit more voodoo and then you get social studies and then you get gender studies and then you get blah blah blah blah blah and so what happened is that because we took scientists to be the high priests of our new world science itself has gotten corrupted and the social sciences and you

1:10:05can tell they're fake sciences because the word science tacked on at the end have come in and hijacked the universities and become the new think tanks and so essentially what you see going on today in the universities is a war between the social sciences and the physical sciences and the crossover point is biology right where you can see like the whole gender is a social construct movement is attacking biology and evolutionary biology just like in the social sphere they're coming after the comedians right but you can see the struggle going on the universities and i would say the physical sciences are essentially losing that war what can be done or is it just something that has to play out is it

1:10:42do we have to realize the consequences of the foolishness well the good news is the physical sciences have a reality on their side yeah but it's not even i mean in many ways it's not respected yeah but you at the end of the day your aircraft still has to fly uh you know your microprocessor still has to compute so there's only so far they can they can take it uh but i do see for example in biology a lot of biologists are facing this difficult thing where they have to say things that they know are not true to keep their job like what well you had brett weinstein on here right so that's a that's a clear example so there's just

1:11:18the crossover line of what is acceptable and what's not is entering into biology and biology will probably suffer the synthetic biology for example will you know a lot of this will end up in china because it won't be you you won't be able to map facts and actions together you won't be able to get grants you won't be able to get the adulation of your peers i don't i don't know enough here so now i'm in shaky territory but it's just my sense that that crossover battleground right now is an evolutionary biology economics lost well it's certainly in terms of gender and that that that sort of that seems to be one of the major battlegrounds yeah i mean it's also

1:11:58going to happen for example blank slate theory you know are we nature are we um it's kind of uh socially unacceptable to say that you know a lot of it is nature and not nurture or vice versa depending on which side you're on right those kinds of discussions get corrupted they do get corrupted and it's really unfortunate because that's an unbelievably important thing to understand like what makes a person a sociopath what makes a person a super successful person a winner what what makes a person a drug addict what are these factors you can't have a reasonable conversation about climate science anymore right it's not a science it's all politicized you can't even bring it up everyone's got their minds made

1:12:38up already well it's what's uncomfortable to me is people have their minds made up and they don't even have the data well on most of these topics people are talking past each other anyway they're talking about different things like when you get into uh you know when you when you get into gun control for example right one side is talking about the right to bear arms in case a tyrannical ruler or king tries to take over the country the other time the other side is talking about school shootings and you know protecting people in their homes right from crime so they're just talking about two different things right and it's just not politically acceptable to even talk about the same thing

1:13:13or when it gets to immigration the right is talking about uh you know the left is like bundling together illegal immigration and legal immigration into one thing yes right whereas in the on the right sometimes you've got racist hiding in there so it doesn't help their cause right they're talking about two different things yeah if they were talking about the same thing which is how many immigrants should we let into the country and you know what are the criteria for that that would be a very different conversation than no immigrants or everybody comes in and then also on the left you know you have this benefit that everybody who's currently coming in illegally is going to vote for the left because

1:13:47of where they're coming from in their socioeconomic circumstances to me the test of any good system is you build a system hand it over to your enemies to run for the next decade so for example if you want a censorship on twitter or facebook you should build that system and then hand it over to the other side to run so if you're a left-winger who's promoting uh censorship let somebody else running same with immigration if you want immigration system build the system then hand it over to the other side to run it that's how you know it's a good system there's no room for nuance when you're dealing with these political battlegrounds when when you're dealing with right versus left and

1:14:23one side has a clearly established stance that you're supposed to take like gun control is a great example of that right there's no room for what about mental health what about the fact that so many of these people are on psych medications right why is that not being discussed we're running one of the greatest uh mental health experiments in history when we're doping everybody up and ssris yeah and you know maybe if you give 30 million people sris maybe like 29.9 million are a lot happier and then you have a fraction that commits suicide or detonate yeah you're basically trading the mean for the variance right you have blow up risk yeah there's no room for nuance which is why i

1:15:05stay out of politics largely do they drag you in though sometimes they always try i mean these conversations in this conversation you get to get dragged in sure but i'm sure there's going to be some people here here's the thing about politics because they're we we have a first-past-the-post system what that means is that whoever wins 51 of the vote in this country gets a lot of the power right it's not like proportional representation where the greens have ten percent and you know libertarians are three percent or whatever it's just like you're all democrat in power now we're all republican because of that to win you have to pick one of these two sides right you have you have to choose

1:15:37you can't just you can't just basically say i'm gonna uh you know nuanced about it you you can't vote for a third party that's throwing over your vote right i have a friend who's trying to fix that he's starting this thing called a good party where like you kick-start your vote so you combine all your votes you hold them in reserve and then when you have enough to win then you vote that person in power right you don't you don't throw away your vote but outside of those hacks we're never gonna get a third party elected so because of that all of your beliefs have to neatly fit into the democrat bundle or the republican bundle and so when you get

1:16:08into that tribe uh if you signal outside of that out of that bundle you get attacked yeah so it's literally it's making you into an unclear thinker it's making you into a muddled thinker if all of your beliefs line up into one political party you're not a clear thinker if all your beliefs are the same as your neighbors and your friends you're not a clear thinker you're literally just your beliefs are socialized they're taken from other people so if you want to be a clear thinker you cannot pay attention to politics it will destroy your ability to what dread most of modern life all our diseases are diseases of abundance not diseases of scarcity right old times i may have you

1:16:51know old times if i got sugar that was a wonderful thing i should have eaten all the sugar to get my hands on if i gotten a piece of news or gossip that was interesting data that would have helped my life and moved me forward if i'd gotten some brief amount of entertainment whether through video games or magazines or whatever that would have been good now it's all disease of abundance we are overexposed to everything so the way to survive in modern society is to be an ascetic it is to retreat from society there's too much society everywhere you go society in your phone society in your pocket society in your ears you're being socialized right now by listening to this

1:17:24podcast right we're socializing you we're programming you everyone's trying to program everybody the only solution is turn it off the only solution is to turn it off and concentrate on your breathing meditation yeah yes i mean it works it's been a lifesaver for me oh i do it and i i do it whenever i get like spare time i was in the doctor's office this morning and uh i knew it was going to be 20 minutes so i just sat there with my eyes closed for 20 minutes and i meditated you know when i was growing up there was this statement i think it was pascal he said you know all of man's problems arise because he cannot sit by himself

1:17:58in a room for 30 minutes alone and it's very true i always needed to be stimulated and when the iphone came along boredom was dead i would never be bored again even if i'm standing in line i'm on my iphone and i thought it was great and when i was a kid i used to try and overclock my brain be like how many thoughts can i think at once the answer is only one but i would try to like think multiple thoughts at once and i was proud of that i was proud that my brain was always running this engine was always moving and it's a disease it's actually the road to misery and now that i'm older i realize like you actually want to again rest your mind you want to learn how to settle into your mind now i look forward to solitary confinement you leave me alone for a day it'll be like the happiest day i've had in a

1:18:40while and and that is a superpower that i think everybody can attain the superpower of learning to be alone and enjoying it yeah well i think it's critical and i and i do think that this these times where you just think about things just be alone and think about things are so rare these and i think during those rare times is when you really get to understand what you actually believe or don't believe yeah it's it's funny when i first started meditating it was really hard right because everybody i think a lot of people who listen to this broadcast they've heard of meditation that has a good rep so everybody tries it they kind of give it up it's one of

1:19:22those things that everybody says they do but nobody actually does right it's like not eating sugar right everyone talks about how yeah i don't eat sugar but like yeah then right then the dessert tray rolls around and everyone's going for the cookies yeah right so it's become one of those things and in fact it's not even become a signaling thing where it's like oh how much did you meditate i meditated this much or you know there are people now wearing headbands saying with tweety birds a chirp and then when they're in deep meditation i don't i don't know how they make it work but they'll be like i got a lot of trips today how many trips did you get oh

1:19:50my god oh your meditation technique is wrong mine is right but really all it is is the art of doing nothing okay and it's important because i think when we grow up right it's all this stuff happening to you in your life and some of it you're processing some of it you're absorbing and some of it you should probably think a little bit more about and work through but you don't you don't have time so it gets buried in you and it's all these preferences and judgments and unresolved situations and issues and it's like your email inbox it's just piling up email after email that's not answered going back 10 20 30 40 years and then when you sit down to

1:20:27meditate those emails start coming back at you hey what about this issue what about that issue have you solved this did you think about that your regrets there you have issues there and that gets scary people don't want to do that it's like it's not working i can't clear my mind i better get up and not do this but really what's happening is it's it's self therapy it's just that instead of paying a therapist to sit there and listen to you you're listening to yourself and you just have to sit there as those emails go through one by one you work through each of them until you get to the magical inbox zero and there comes a day when you sit

1:20:57down you realize the only things you're thinking about are things that happened yesterday because you've processed everything else not necessarily even resolved it but at least listen to yourself and that's when meditation starts and i think it's a it's a very powerful thing that everybody should experience and that's when you arrive upon the art of doing nothing well i think it's even a problem that most people are getting their meditation from an app i will not use an app it's sneaky i mean sam harris is a very good meditation app i should say that but you should be able to just do it and many people can it is literally the art of doing nothing yeah all you need to do

1:21:30for meditation is just sit down close your eyes comfortable position whatever happens if you think you think if you don't think you don't think don't put effort into it don't put effort against it it's all you need do you concentrate on your breath or do you have a specific technique nothing nothing no you just sit you just sit i think about my breath that's all i do i just need to try to only concentrate on breathing i used to do that but at some level all the concentration every meditation technique is leading you to the same thing which is just witnessing yes and concentration is a technique to still your mind enough that you can then drop the object of so

1:22:06you could also just try going straight to the end game the problem with what i'm talking about which is not focusing on your breath is you will have to listen to your mind for a long time it's not going to work unless you do at least an hour a day and preferably at least 60 days before you kind of work through a lot of issues so it'll be held for a while but when you come out the other side it's great you get rid of the or when the chatter comes it's in the background it's dimmer it's smaller you've heard it before you see the it's more recent it's something you need to resolve anyway and you will get moments of actual silence what is your what's your ultimate state when you meditate like is there a state where you've achieved rarely if ever where you just you you're in bliss or you're in harmony or you're in enlightenment like what it's kind

1:22:56of it's kind of indescribable uh because when you're really meditating you're not there when there's no thoughts there's no experience there's nothing there's just nothing uh so it's it's hard to describe but i would say that uh it's like a you can definitely every psychedelic state that people encounter using so-called plant medicines can be arrived just through pure meditation and i've definitely hit some of those states you've hit some transcendent psychedelic states where you're vaccinating the whole deal i've had trippy visuals i've had the kind of the lights and colors i've had the so-called downloads i've had the realizations i've had the bliss i've had the light i've had the colors but not every time no it's really and in fact

1:23:38i would say that that's a that's also like an experience that you can start craving which will then actually take you out of um where you really and i'm not enlightened or anything close to it so not even the ballpark but my own experience and this is this personal experience is the place where i end up the most that is really the one that i i want to be at is peace it's just peace peace happy yeah peace to me peace is happiness at rest and happiness is kind of peace and motion you can convert peace to happiness anytime you want but peace is what you want most of the time that's interesting you can convert peace to happiness anytime you

1:24:18want yeah if you're a peaceful person anything you do will be a happy activity and by the way being on social media engaging politics will not bring you peace there is nothing less peaceful right and today's day and age the way we think you get peace is by resolving all your external problems but there's unlimited external problems so the only way to actually get pieces on the inside by giving up this idea of problems who thinks you can get peace by resolving external problems other than politicians everybody that's what everybody's struggling to do right why are you trying to make money to solve all your money problems why are you trying to win a politics because then you'll be at peace

1:24:53because your people will have one it's a daunting task to get your [ __ ] together it's easier to change yourself than to change the world that's true yeah and the best way to change the world is to change yourself exactly it's all yeah it's all these people who are shouting on social media the best way is just to actually live the life that you want other people to live like i went down to new zealand and there's this guy that i met with and you know everyone's on social media shouting about environmentalism and conservative and sustain and i go to this guy's house and he was doing a very quietly very gently he was doing a two week long zero waste experiment

1:25:32where he was throwing out nothing so every package that he opened he would keep and he would like clean it up so he would keep his amazon boxes it would keep the little containers even a tea bag if you open the tea bag he has to figure out how to compost the tea inside how to make the tea itself useful how to make the tea bag like a little storage item so there was no trash he was literally living with zero trash waste and he was doing it and it was really inspirational meeting people like him made me far more environmentally conscious than you know any amount of people yelling at me on social media ever will how long did he

1:26:04do that for i think it was two weeks it was hard what the [ __ ] are you gonna do with tea he had quite the collection he was filling them with little things he sounds like a crazy this hoarder like a hoarder person with stacks of tea bags in his house a very impressive guy yeah that's a strange way to go about things i i appreciate that i mean look it is entirely possible to somehow or another engineer all of our cups and all of our things and all our about to be biodegradable you know the struggle with the modern environmental movement is that they identify the correct problem which is finite earth spaceship earth this is all they got don't ruin

1:26:43it but they don't have the solution so what they say is no growth no growth no growth well the problem is you got three billion indian and chinese who aren't going to stay in poverty they're going to grow whether you like it or not so you can yell at them you can scream at them you can yell at us and scream at us but that's not going to happen so the only way out unfortunately is again through technology which is you have to build green technology and i give musk a lot of credit you know for being one of the few people who's out there trying to do that so you build things that are biodegradable and good for you and

1:27:13healthier and everybody wants to be healthier chinese want to be healthier indians want to be healthier they want to be cleaner if you say i can clean up your rivers i can clean up your forests i can have your children not get sick with cholera and diphtheria and typhoid i can cure your diseases i can help make your immune system stronger i can give you clean drinking water like that is what causes people to become environmentalists not shouting and screaming at them that they shouldn't grow and they should stop pumping things into the sky and you know they have no concept of that they're just trying to get out of poverty so i think the modern environmental movement identifies the correct

1:27:48problem but then doesn't come up with the right set of solutions that are appealing to people are not going to give up economic growth they're going to have to get rich first hmm that's yeah that's a very good point but how do you do how do you do you lower the price of clean technologies massively so you basically make clean technologies cost competitive through subsidy technologies ideally you can subsidize in the short to medium term until the innovation curve is is crossed i mean like tesla doesn't have any patents right right or they they freely give away their patents that's the example of how you can do it um so you know someone in if you want to get rid of

1:28:28plastic such straws yeah you can do it here and there you can get san francisco to ban plastic straws but china's not going to blend ban plastic straws not until you build a paper straw that is you know same cost good durability and then you in and then you educate the chinese like hey this is petroleum you know this plastic that you're doing is petroleum this is bad for you here's the chemical composition here's the things that are going in your bloodstream and they want healthy happy kids also so they're going to have their kids use paper straws maybe straws aren't the best example but you can you know this is true with fossil fuels for example that's that's probably the

1:29:00best one or replacing a lot of plastics with glass and paper and so on yeah there's a new technology that was just rhonda patrick had it on her twitter today about they're able to convert plastic uh waste into fuel and that there's companies that are actively trying to do that now so then in that way plastic waste will become valuable right and it'll become a commodity it'll become something that people are resource now there's certain problems this doesn't solve this doesn't solve carbon this doesn't solve deforestation uh you know so there you kind of have to step in with other means so for example you look at the amazon right everyone's complaining about the amazon being deforested well you're not the

1:29:40poor brazilian farmer right so you're you're sitting here in your comfortable chair like social media hammering away at you know the evil brazilians for deforesting the amazon but the amazon has incredible resources if we really care about it we should turn it into an incredible tourist park and put your money where your mouth is start doing ecotourism in the amazon start paying for it and then maybe take the future rights for all the pharmaceuticals that are going to come out of all the incredible plants there and start selling those off so that people so that maybe give the pharmaceutical companies an incentive to preserve the biodiversity of the amazon say hey if you buy this patch of the amazon you conserve

1:30:15it and you can serve it whatever plant medicines that come out of there that you can then license you get the patent for 20 years or 30 years or whatever so i think there are solutions where we as the first worlders who have money can put our money where where our mouth is and go and rescue these kinds of properties that's a very interesting solution but i could see immediate pushback from people that don't think the pharmaceutical company should have the rights to this natural plan okay or the or the government does it and then the government gets the patents and the government will auction off the patents later or they'll worse or they'll license them or whatever it is right

1:30:48well that's often like just this the often the problem is there is no really good solution there's a bunch of solutions that also have drawbacks that's life yeah right that's the trade-off so it's being human very messy yeah it's a constrained environment obviously i skew more towards a private property capitalist type solutions because even though they're not perfect they have been proven to actually work right once something is your property you take care of it right you're not gonna you're not gonna crap all over your own house um but it should probably be temporary property not permanent property you see a lot of countries around the world not doing this no foreign ownership of land thing for example or mexico has

1:31:29no private ownership of beaches right so you can draw the line at certain points yeah do you enjoy doing this kind of thing where you break things down and give your perspective on things and try to illuminate certain complex subjects i'm not trying to illuminate so much as you know talking to you i learn as much as i say and i learn it for myself because i'm being forced to articulate it right i can sit around and think my thoughts all day long but it's a lot of it's going to be nonsense it's not i'm going to because there are gaps in thinking where you make leaps because you're kind to yourself that you don't realize you're making but when you're

1:32:09forced to write it down and this is why i tweet or when you have to talk to somebody you have to complete those gaps and make it a proper logical chain and the mistake that i made when i was young was you know i always wanted to seem like the smartest kid in the room uh you know like just like you probably want to seem like the funniest kid in the room or the toughest kid in the room right we're all losers starting out we want to be winners so we pick the thing we're good at and we double down on it so i always want to be the smartest kid in the room so what did i do i read a lot of books i memorized a lot of things and then whatever i hadn't memorized is pre-google i made it up so it sounded good okay pre-google after google fact checking started and i had to get better right so google

1:32:47improved me that way a lot of people exactly so now what i realize is that the biggest mistake with memorization right because when you're actually trying to live your life in congress with reality you want to have a deep understanding of what you do and why you do it and so it's much more important to know the basics really well then is to know the advanced knowing calculus wouldn't help you today it doesn't help you in business doesn't help you in most things but knowing arithmetic really will help you really whether it's at the corner grocery store counting change to figuring out the value of your podcast business to figuring out how to do the probability math on you know some

1:33:22action that you want to take so understanding basic mathematics cold is way more important than memorizing calculus concepts and the problem is and this is true of i think all reasoning it's much better to know the basics from the ground up solid foundation of understanding a steel frame of understanding than it is to just have a scaffolding we're just memorizing advanced concepts this is why there are a lot of people i'm sure that you listen to who are really smart they use a lot of jargon and you can't quite follow their reasoning you don't know how they're putting things together and you this deep down suspicion they don't even really understand right so if you look at the the most powerful

1:33:58thinkers especially the ones where money or life is on the line they have to understand the basics really really well richard feynman the physicist was able to he had this piece in one of his lectures where he takes you from counting numbers on your hand all the way to calculus in four pages of text orally but written down is four pages of text and it's a complete unbroken logical chain that takes you through geometry trigonometry precalculus analytic geometry graphs everything all the way to calculus he understood numbers at a core level he didn't have to memorize anything when you're memorizing it's an indication that you don't understand you should be able to rederive anything on the spot and if you can't

1:34:40you don't know it so do you apply that to things other than mathematics everything you don't even make attempt to memorize things just make an attempt to understand them you can't help but memorize things but if you can't and this is where twitter is great for me is i try to understand something and then i try to write it down in such a way that i can remember it just the basic hook that'll point towards the deeper understanding and i'm forced to explain it to people and that's how i know i understand something so this is what i meant originally we talked about reading a good book i'll read one page in a night and then i spend the rest of

1:35:14night thinking about it or i'm chasing down references on wikipedia or weird blog posts trying to understand it you know so for example there was a i was dealing with this is a few months back i was dealing with a question of stupid topic but the meaning of life right what's the meaning how could that be stupid though well it's just trite it's right you're not supposed to think about it it's something you ask your parents when you're young they tell you don't worry about it or they'll get a job yeah exactly good job you freaking hippy or here's god god is the meaning of life right and so i was just trying to resolve for myself like what could the

1:35:49answer be right not what is the answer but what could the answer and so at a core level i was forced to kind of hunt down all these weird little things and really understand for myself and it's got to be personal right but i have to establish for myself what it could and could not be and that gave me some level of peace so now i have to keep asking that question what is the meaning of life i mean you you sh i think the question is more interesting than the answer everyone should explore this on their own but let me just explore a few parts with you right so first is if i gave you an answer if i said the meaning of life has to please god well which god okay judeo-christian god well okay why that one why this thing the problem is it's a why question you can keep asking why forever right any answer i give you you'll

1:36:36just ask why again why again that's right and you end up in a place called agrippa's trilemma okay this is a philosophical exercise but i i kind of thought it through then googled around and there's a thing called agrippa's and agrippa's trauma says that any questioning like this y will always end in one of three places okay first is infinite regress right why because of this why that what and just keep going forever the second is circular reasoning well a why a because of b or why b because of a right you get trapped in that or the third is an axiom and the most popular axiom is god but it could be anything because of math because of science because

1:37:16the big bang because the simulation right these are all axioms these are all just stopping points saying simulation we're in a simulation or saying it's the big bang is just another way of saying god it's just god's a dirty word so we don't use it as much anymore but same thing so you end up in one of these three dead ends essentially right so there is no answer uh the real answer is because right what is the meaning of life yeah you get to make up your own answers the beauty if there was a single answer we would not be free we would be trapped because then we would all have to live to that answer then we'd be bored like

1:37:51robots each one competing with each other to fulfill that single meaning more than the others back to signaling like i'm better at it than you are but luckily there is no answer so you just do whatever you want the meaning of life it's funny that what that's the basis of all existential angst that you don't know why you're here and you have this feeling that it could be it is i mean if you when you start pondering the multiverse the universe the galaxies the solar system the planet the organism the cells inside the organism the bacteria the parasites right the symbiotic relationship we have to our environment and you start going jesus christ what am i just a little piece of

1:38:40this thing it's like well the answers to all the great questions or paradoxes yeah so for example you're asking like do i matter that's like really the question you asked right well how do i matter in this infinite universe well you know on the one hand you're separate no two points are the same every point is every two points are infinitely different you're completely separated no one will have your thoughts your emotions your feelings your experience so your life is a single player game you're trapped inside your head and you're just aware of a bunch of things going on and that's it on the other hand i cannot say the word joe rogan without invoking the entire universe joe alien comes

1:39:16along says what's that joe rogan what's joe rogan's a human what's a human bipedal ape what's an ape on the earth what's the earth planet what's a planet solar system where was the carbon made inside stars right instead i have to create the entire universe to just say the words joe rogan so in that sense you're connected to everything it's inseparable so the answer to that question of do i matter is i am nothing and i am everything and you'll find this with all the great questions the answers are all paradoxes which is why at some level it's sort of pointless to pursue them to find a trite answer like i'm giving but the act of pursuing them is actually really

1:39:52useful because then it gives you certain intrinsic understanding in your life that brings a level of peace i feel like there's with many people stress of this question is also accentuated by unhappy lives it's actually accentuated by unhappy choices by being trapped there's a big difference between not knowing what the meaning of life is and god i gotta get the [ __ ] out of this job i have to i can't live my life this way what's the meaning of life if this is my life which is why i always start with let's get you rich first right that's why i'm very practical about it because look the you know buddha was a prince okay he started out really rich and then he

1:40:33got to go off in the woods and in the old days what happened was if you wanted to be peaceful inside you would become a monk you would renounce everything you would become an ascetic you would give everything up you renounce women men you'd renounce children you'd announce money you'd renounce politics science technology everything and you would go out in the woods by yourself you could give everything up to be free inside well today we have this wonderful invention called money where you can just store stuff up in a bank account okay and you can basically save up you can you can work really hard you can do great things for society and society will give you money for giving it

1:41:07things that it wants and it doesn't know how to get and then you can save that up and you can live well below with your means and you can find a certain freedom in that and that will give you the time and the energy to pursue your own internal peace and happiness so i believe the solution to making everybody happy is to give them what they want let's get them all rich let's get them all fit and healthy and then let's get them all happy is are those things even possible everyone can be rich everyone can be rich everyone here's my thought exercise for you now it seems like we're in an everyone can be writing not selling my home this

1:41:41is my rolls royce yeah no so that's a good point so everything that i've ever created on this topic of how to make money i will never charge a dollar for because that would ruin it that would show that i'm just another huckster who's trying to get rich off of you there are no get-rich-quick schemes that's just somebody else trying to get rich off of you right so it's so to me it's more of a philosophical contribution where for it to have meaning and to be legit i can't charge you anything for it but yes everybody can be rich and let me give you a thought exercise okay imagine if tomorrow we could wave a wand and everybody was trained as

1:42:17a scientist or an engineer everybody even if you weren't very good you had enough understanding of computers you could write some code you could build some hardware and don't tell me people can't do it because they can that's just the tyranny of soft expectations that's just you looking down on somebody else they can't do it they just have to be educated now if they're educated all as hardware software engineers scientists biologists technicians hard sciences not the social sciences we would all be done within five years robots would be doing everything from cleaning toilets to cooking food to flying airplanes to driving ubers and what would we be doing we would be doing all creative jobs to entertain each other and researching

1:42:52science and technology we would have wonderful lives so it is really just a question of education nothing else is this a scale issue though i mean you're talking about it as if this would work with 300 million people it'll work with 10 billion people it'll work with a spacefaring race with 100 trillion people just we have the resources we the ability the universe is infinite resources you build it you know have you heard of a dyson sphere you know you pull the dyson sphere on a star and you gather all its energy like that there's so much energy out there one asteroid's got all the minerals that we need one sun one solar system has got all the power we will

1:43:28need for a long time uh you know we can extract it out of nuclear fusion you know we're not that far from those kinds of technologies working uh it's just a question of guts and uh you know and interest like we should be building nuclear fusion test plants on the moon the moon should be littered with them it's no downside right if you could how would that work well it doesn't send a bunch of people up there to work oh the problem robots the problem with fission nuclear fission is that you know creates energy through nuclear energy right like the sun creates energy nuclear energy now for transmission we use photons because photons don't interact and so photons are great for

1:44:09information transmission but they're actually not great for energy transmission for energy creation you want nuclear to work and the problem is because nuclear energy you know we built it with a bomb we have dirty nukes all those kinds of problems with fukushima three-mile island chernobyl we don't innovate anymore on nukes imagine if when the first steam engine blew up we said oh no more steam engines for a while or very carefully regulated billion dollars of regulation you can't innovate that way when the first airplane crashed we said no more innovation in airplanes so we need a way to iterate on nuclear fission and eventually fusion and get them working safely cleanly passive say failure etc if we're going to find our

1:44:51way out of the energy trap and the best place to do that is someplace like on the moon or mars do you think that it's actually a possibility that they could get nuclear power to the point where it's not a detriment because what everyone's worried about is a meltdown right yeah and we do have these old plants that are running that are running on this this is 50 years old technology it's crazy because there's no ability to shut them off right very old technology they do now have gen 4 nuclear reactors that are passive fail safe so in other words when they fail they fail into us when you pull the plug on them they fail into a state where there's

1:45:25no leakage there's no problem right their default is a positive outcome as opposed to the current ones the old ones where if you unplug them like and these even these gen four are just gen four they're not gen five they're not gen eighty gen hundred where we're in microprocessors right and that should be something that people are working towards i hope so i mean in an ideal world we would now the problem is if you have nuclear energy on the moon how do you get it home right so what you actually got to do is you got rev it on the moon and you're using it there maybe to launch more satellites more rockets further out into the solar system and

1:45:58that's the initial use case um but then eventually the technology gets so good you can bring it home now i want to go back to this idea of getting people rich that somehow or another that's going to make people happy how do you stop the the natural progression that people have of you know oh you know i have got a nice chevrolet yeah but i really want a bmw i've got a nice bmw but now i want a mercedes i have mercedes i want a how do you stop that material trap because you can't at some level but i think most smart people over time realize that possessions don't make them happy right it's just you have to go through that

1:46:38you have to buy your stupid car to realize that it doesn't attract attractive girls it actually just attracts other dudes who are like hey i like that car man right like like you have some expensive cars out there some fancy cars tell me how you know how much that attracts women versus men well i'm married those are for me i just enjoy machines yeah so for me they're toys that's a particular thing where you enjoy machines but i think very as you get older you just realize that there's no happiness in material possessions now lack of material possessions can make you very unhappy so being poor can make you unhappy but being rich is not going to make you happy and

1:47:14what happens unfortunately a lot of people struggle through their whole lives to make money they make some they're exhausted and then they're like well now why am i not happy i guess i'm just not a happy person and smart people aren't happy that's like a great little way to people feel better about it they say well if you're smart you're not happy right where's i positive the other way if you're smart you should be able to figure out how to be happy otherwise you're not that smart yeah that is an offensive statement that if you're smart you're not happy i've heard that before and i just do not understand the logic of that other than self-justifying i understand where it comes

1:47:47from it comes from if you're smart it's usually because you thought things through and you have a very busy mind yeah and so busy mind can often rob you of peace of because what the peace that we seek is not peace of mind it's peace from mind right so if you look at all the crazy activities you do to be happy right whether it's like trying to get laid and have an orgasm or you know extreme sports or looking at something beautiful or taking a psychedelic you're trying to get out of your own mind you're trying to get your monkey mind to stop chattering at you for a moment you're trying to get peace from the mind and there are other

1:48:21better ways to do that most of the ways we try to get peace from mind are indirect whereas if you understand things if you see things properly you will naturally slowly develop peace from mind sorry if i went on a tangent there no it's a good tangent it's a good tangent because i think that oftentimes the pursuit what's thrilling to people and the possibility that one day they'll be able to rest and that they'll reach this goal that's the fundamental delusion that there is something out there that will make me happy and fulfill forever yeah golden years there is it's called death oh i'll take care of everything that's the great leveler but when people look at particularly social media bring

1:49:04it back to that when you see someone who you know you see them posed in front of their mansion with their beautiful car and they're leaning against it with their designer clothes on their expensive watch you go i want that right that's what i what you really want is freedom you want freedom from your money problems right and i think that's okay so people once someone can solve their money problems either by lowering their lifestyle or by making enough money and you know essentially what you want to get everybody to the retirement but not retirement in the i'm 65 years old sitting in a nursing home collecting a check retirement different definition retirement is when you stop sacrificing today for some

1:49:48imaginary okay yes when today is complete in and of itself you're retired yeah and so how do you get there well one is you can have so much money saved up that just your passive income off of that without you having to lift a finger covers your burn rate keep your burn rate low right a second is you just drive your burn rate down to zero you become a monk a third is you're doing something you love you enjoy it so much it's not about the money right so there are multiple ways to that path but the most common is people just say i need to make more money and the kind of wealth creation that i talk about is about creating timeless principles and adapting yourselves that making money won't be an issue and you can do it by doing what you love right like we get into this model of i must work for other people work my way up the

1:50:34ladder i must like do what that person is doing to make money but really today in society you get rewarded for creative work for creating something brand new that society didn't even know yet that it wanted it doesn't know how to get other than through you so the most powerful money makers are actually individual brands people like yourself or elon or kanye or oprah or trump right these are individual brands eponymous name brands who themselves are leveraged like you're leveraged you have podcast media going out to everybody that's leveraged the podcasts work for you when you sleep they have knowledge that nobody else has which is your knowledge is the knowledge of being joe rogan i mean who else is a

1:51:12ufc fighter and a commentator and a podcaster and a comedian and you know interested in all these things and those all these people can't replace you um so we have to pay you what you're worth and who's i never fought in the ufc though oh you didn't okay sorry um or you know you're whatever you're involved in that whole scene you just have a unique set of skill sets um so because of this unique what i call specific knowledge because of the accountability that you have with your name because the leverage that you have through your media you're a money-making machine you're i'm sure at this point i could make you start over tomorrow wipe out your bank account you'd be

1:51:46rich again in no time because you have all the skill sets so once people have those skill sets and the beauty is the way you've done it is you don't have any competition there's no substitution if joe rogan were to disappear off the air tomorrow it's not like random podcaster number 12 would step in and fill that thing no it's it's just gone so the way to get out of that competition trap is actually to be authentic the way to retire is actually to find the thing that you know how to do better than anybody and you know how to do that better than anybody because you love to do it no one can compete with you if you love to

1:52:17do it be and then figure out how to map that to what society actually wants apply some leverage put your name on it so you take the risks but you gain the rewards have ownership and equity in what you do and then just crank it out i think people have to be very careful to not get trapped along the way with things that you can afford with your current lifestyle like the way you're living and the way you're earning but they're also imprisoning you and the fact that you are now going to have to work this 40-hour a week job in order to get this thing that you can't afford but now you you're saddled down to this job you've no

1:52:53you're not saving you're not putting things in a good place and you're working for these working for things as rewards is a real trap that a lot of people fall into it's the biggest one you know naseem tell that also says that uh you know under two great addictions heroin and a monthly salary and and that's why you can't get rich writing out your time because even when you start charging more and more for your time it's a slow upgrade loop and then you upgrade your house at the same time you break your car at the same time you move in the neighborhood you really also have to get used to ignoring your or upgrading or changing the definition of your

1:53:29peers a lot of people here who are poor here but they would be rich if they were living in thailand and bali and if they have the luxury of a remotely doable job they may want to be living there and saving up money but the ignoring the peers is an issue because the keeping up with the joneses is a real phenomenon yeah envy makes the world go around right yeah and then there's a there's another thing that people have to avoid even allowing their mind to think when they're hearing what you're saying and all this logical fantastic advice there's these six dirty words that's easy for you to say yeah that is a terrible trap i mean look i grew up

1:54:09as a first generation immigrant uh in jamaica queens uh with zero money single mom two kids working day and night going to uh you know i washed dishes uh i was k i was working catering jobs i was mowing lawns i was working since the age of 11 on and off here and there um didn't have two cents to rub together you know i had to borrow 400 to go to college like literally i was short 400 dollars 400. i had to find 400 i didn't have it um you know got rejected from a job at dunkin donuts so like okay it's not to say that it's easy it's not easy it's actually really freaking hard it is the hardest thing you will do but it's also the rewarding thing you know look at the kids who are born rich no meaning to their lives you're a terrible place yeah your real your real resume is just a cataloguing of all your

1:55:01suffering right if i were to ask you to describe your real life to yourself when you look back on your deathbed you're going to go back and say what are the interesting things i've done and it's all going to be around the sacrifices that you made and the hard things that you did anything you're given doesn't matter you know you you have your four limbs you have your brain you have your head you have your skin that's that's all for granted so you have to do hard things anyway to create your own meaning in making money is a fine one yeah struggle it is hard i'm not gonna say it's easy it's a really hard but the tools are all available

1:55:33it's all there there's also these these traps that people sort of establish in their own mind giving themselves excuses or giving themselves in insurmountable obstacles insurmountable paths victorian victim mentality yes it's somebody else's fault it's my skin color's fault it's the system's fault yeah those people are sinking i feel bad for them i want to shake them out of it and say actually you can get out of it you just have to stop thinking it's everybody you have to alter the perspective yeah but it's so difficult for people to do it's one of the most difficult things for people to do is to change the way they approach approach reality itself at the end of the day i i do think

1:56:14even despite what i said earlier life is really a single player game it's all going on in your head you know whatever you think you believe will very much shape your reality both from what risks you take and what actions you perform but also just your everyday experience of reality if you're walking down the street and you're judging everyone you're like i don't like that person because their skin color i don't like that oh she's she's not attractive that guy's fat this person's a loser oh who put this in my way uh you know the more you judge the more you're gonna separate yourself and you'll feel good for an instant because you'll feel good about yourself i'm better than that

1:56:48but then you're gonna feel lonely and then you're just gonna see negativity everywhere the world just reflects your own feelings back at you reality is neutral reality has no judgments to a tree there's no concept of right or wrong or good or bad right you're born you have a whole set of sensory experiences and stimulations and lights and colors and sounds and then you die yeah and how you choose to interpret that is up to you do have that choice so this is what i meant that happiness is a choice if you believe it's the choice then you can start working on it and i can't tell you how to find it because it's your own conditionings that are making you

1:57:21unhappy so you have to uncondition yourself it's just like i can't fix your eating habits for you can give you some general guidelines but you gotta go through the hard habit forming of how to eat right but you have to believe it's possible and it is absolutely possible i was miserable i'm happy as a clam it's not just the money i got there before the money you got happy before the money mostly yeah how did you get happy before the money i started getting older you know i just realized like life is short i'm going to again trite right try it in 20 ways yeah well confucius had a great saying that uh you know every man has two lives and

1:57:54the second starts when he realizes he has just one and i read that it was one of those book dropping lines you know it's like mic drop confucius had a lot of mic drops fuchsias was a bad [ __ ] he was that's a crazy one that was a great one um or another one is next time you get sick you know because everybody gets sick every now and then it's like a happy person wants 10 000 things a sick person just wants one thing right so it's your it's your unlimited desires that are clouding your peace your happiness have desires your biological creature stands up and says i can do something i move i resist i live just be very careful of

1:58:34your desires this is the oldest most trite wisdom desire is suffering that's what it means right every desire you have is an access where you will suffer so just don't focus on more than one desire at a time the universe is rigged in such a way that if you just want one thing and you focus on that you'll get it but everything else you gotta let go did you make a gradual shift to happiness or was it a radical change it's ongoing it's gradual every day so you're happier today than you were a month ago yeah allegedly yeah i'm i'm very happy these days deliriously so it's actually hard for me to hang out with normal people really yeah so you

1:59:12you've made a significant over the period of like how many years about eight years eight years yeah wow and is this something that you've pursued through certain books or is it just like you you've made an understanding or gained an understanding in your own mind and then started pursuing it based on that understanding yeah it's very very personal uh it's basically you have to decide it's a priority and then i tried every hack i possibly could i used to you know i tried all the i tried meditation i tried witnessing uh you know i even tried an ssri just to see what it would feel like how did it feel uh it was it turned me from a pessimist to an

1:59:51optimist but i didn't like the physical side effects nor did i want to be on a drug for a sustained basis so i dropped it and i did turn you into an optimist yes at the time i used to be a pessimist yeah um i started doing things like i would start looking at the you know in every moment and everything that happens you can look on the bright side of something right and so i used to do that forcibly and then i trained it until it became second nature so for example like a friend of my wife's was over and she when we were dating and she took all these photos she took like hundreds of photos and then she sends them all to us and my immediate reaction was like why are you dumping hundreds of photos of my phone i don't need hundreds of photos have some judgment that's my immediate reaction and then i could say actually how nice

2:00:33of her she sent me hundreds of photos i can pick the one that i like right there are two ways of seeing almost everything there are a few things that are like high suffering so you can't do that other than just saying well this is a teacher right but i slowly worked through every negative judgment that i had until i saw the positive end now it's second nature to me i also realized that like what you want is you want to clear minds you want to let go of thoughts happy thoughts disappear out ahead automatically very easy to let go of them negative thoughts linger so if you interpret then the positive and everything very quickly you let it go right

2:01:05you let it go much faster simple hacks get more sunlight right learn to smile more learn to hug more these things actually release serotonin in reverse they aren't just outward signals of being happy they're actually feedback loops to being happy spend more time in nature you know these are obvious watch your mind watch your mind all day long watch what it does not judge it not try to control it but you can meditate 24 7. meditation is not a sit down close your eyes activity meditation is just basically watching your own thoughts like you would watch anything else in the outside world and say why am i having that thought does that serve me anymore is

2:01:40that conditioning from when i was 10 years old like for example getting ready for this podcast you got ready i didn't but good i did but i did i couldn't help it and what happened was the few days leading up to this my mind was just running and normally my mind is pretty calm and it was just running and running and running and every thought i would have i would imagine me saying it to you my brain couldn't help but rehearse what what it's doing it's just rehearsing all the time to talk to you and then i was even rehearsing rehearse telling you about the rehearsal right so it was all playing all these meta games and i was just like

2:02:17shut up stop it what is going on and it took me a while to figure out oh yeah you know what it is when i was a kid in queens and i had no money and i had nothing and i needed to save myself the way i got out was by sounding smart not being smart sounding smart that was the skill i perfected so i am hardwired to always rehearse things so i will sound smart it's a disease it keeps me from being happy so but when you see that when you realize that when you understand something then it naturally calms you down so after that i stopped rehearsing as much wow but it's still a train habit that is a really interesting point that want to sound smart that that many people do that and especially young people when you you see someone who is smart or someone who appears smart they say smart things oh god i want to sound smart

2:03:09i want people to think about me the same way i think about that person that that is my disease that is my feeling it is what clutters my mind i the the thing i have to ask myself now is if i can would i still be interested in learning this thing if i couldn't ever tell anybody about it that's how i know it's real that's how i know it's something i actually want to know that's a common thing though i know i suffered from that when i was young the desire to sound smart that's it's very common well all of us start you know every everything you're a winner now in your life you were to lose because you were a loser at some point right if if you had gotten all the girls if you had all the money if you had everything you want you were good looking and in junior high or high school uh you wouldn't have done anything

2:03:58with your life and you would have peaked early it's like the bruce springsteen glory days song right you would have married your high school sweetheart you'd be living in your hometown you know you'd be a manager at the local mcdonald's whatever the first dream job you had thank god we didn't all get what we wanted when we were young right or we would be trapped in that so you have to be able to break out of where you came from i don't know where i was going that is interesting too about people who peak too early yeah or maybe those people that peak too early can do the elon musk thing and just abandon it and start something new and then

2:04:29learn the the the joys of sucking at something yeah and actually in our professions especially when you're high visibility the problem with peaking is that you then get drowned in death of a thousand cuts people have expectations of you hey joe can you come to my event hey joe can you look at my business plan hey joe can give me advice on this can you you know talk to my friend can you come in this podcast you're just being assaulted all the time with inbound opportunities so you have no time to start over with anything so you have to ruthlessly ruthlessly disappoint everybody eliminate and clear your schedule drop all the meetings not even respond to the emails the only way

2:05:07you're gonna be able to start over with yeah and i we talked about this that i'd love your approach to meetings if they're not meeting life or death i'm the same way i avoided a good one recently and this was someone that was just tracking me down as a high-profile person in a big organization and i'm like can we just talk on the phone and then we talk on the phone there was nothing to say it was just they wanted to get me in the office and yeah and the meetings should really be phone calls should be emails and emails should just be text many of them right with meetings i i mean i i despise meetings i used to own the domain i don't do coffee.com i eventually let go but i used to respond from the wallet i don't do coffee you know oh that's hilarious but it was a little bit of a jerk move but really where it comes

2:05:52from is when i was young one of my principles was i knew i had to make money it was my overwhelming desire one of the things i did was i said okay i'm never going to be worth more than what i think i'm worth okay no one's going to pay me more than what i think i'm worth so what am i worth so i i picked an hourly rate for myself that i was worth and i said i'm never going to squander my time for less than this so originally there's 500 bucks an hour then i upgrade to 5000 bucks an hour and it's ludicrous but pick an aspirational hourly rate aspirational it has to be a little ludicrous and then what i would do is if i have to return something i'm standing in line to return something and it's below my hourly rate i'll throw it away if i have to if i or give it away if i have to

2:06:34do some tasks and i can hire somebody to do it for less than my hourly rate i would hire them and so i just became extremely jealous of my time which doesn't mean you can't have fun rest leisure spending time with your friends and family that's all great don't count that but if you're doing anything you don't want to do which is the definition of work it's a set of things that you have to do that you don't want to do if you're working it better be for your hourly rate otherwise don't do the work and so once it came out of that then i just realized the cost of meetings the cost of meetings is so high especially given all

2:07:06the people who are in there right one person is talking seven people listening you're literally just dying an hour at a time so you have to just drop non-urgent meetings or figure out how to be more efficient with them if you're gonna do anything great the extreme example is business travel getting on a plane to fly halfway around the world for one meeting which never amounts to anything and then like wasting your whole little life there and then flying back so about five years ago i resolved i am never going to travel for business wow and i haven't tried for business since i only travel if the travel experience will be so entertaining and joyous because i have friends or it's

2:07:43a place i want to see or whatever that it will be complete in and of itself because i know that whatever the business meeting i came from is never worth it and actually that principle applies larger than just travel it applies to life in general the this one of the secrets to happiness is to really embrace what you're doing in that moment that's trite but where that where that comes from is saying i only want to do actions that are complete in and of themselves right if i'm looking for some ulterior motive down the line it's not going to materialize and and if you think it is maybe even if it does it'll be very short-lived anything you wanted in your

2:08:22life whether it was a car or whether it was a girl or there was money when you got it a year later you were back to zero your brain had hedonically adapted to it and you were looking for the next thing that's a great statement hedonically that's that is what happens to people you get accustomed to whatever it is i realized that when i first got a new apartment it was a nice apartment after a while i got used to it i was like oh okay this is just an apartment it's just where i live i'm used to it's nice but i'm used to it yeah we all go through this learning it's it's you know it's riding the ferris wheel of life it's like you get at the bottom like i want to get the top this is so exciting you ride it up you get a little dopamine rush and get a little serotonin then you ride it back down as

2:09:05that wears off then you need another high then you ride it back up and write it back down in fact the more highs you get the harder it gets to go around the wheel and the more board you get it the harder it goes to go back up so what lights your fire now like what gets you motivated to do things and to act art art this is art oh okay art is just creativity it's just anything that's done for its own sake so what are the things that are done for their own sake there's nothing beyond loving somebody uh creating something art to me creating business is play i create businesses early stage because it's fun because i i'm into

2:09:42the product even when i invest it's because i like the people i like hanging out with them i learn from them and i think the product is really cool so these days i will pass on all kinds of great investments because i'm like i just the product's not interesting it's boring i'm not gonna learn anything that's a beautiful luxury it is a luxury art and learning yeah it is a luxury these are not 100 or zero things right you can in your life start moving more and more towards that right but that's a goal it's a goal when i was younger i used to be so desperate to make money that i would have done anything right if you'd shown up

2:10:16and said hey i got a sewage trucking business and you're going to go into that i said great let's do it i'm going to make money thank god no one gave me that i'm glad that it went down the road of technology and science which i genuinely and so i got to like combine my vocation and my advocation i mean what are you doing you're playing you're having fun you're doing art you're not you're not working no that's what i always say when people say i work hard i'm like sorta not really i'm always working but it looks like work to them but it feels like play to me and that's how i know no one can compete with me on it because i'm just playing 16 hours a day and if they want to compete with me and they're going to work they're going to lose because they're not going to do it 16 hours a day seven days a week well

2:10:59listen man there are some gems of wisdom in this conversation and i hope people pull things out of this and apply them to their own life and i'm certainly going to listen to you again and and and try to apply some of this to my own life stuff that i'm not already applying but i really appreciate your time and i really appreciate you coming in here thanks for having me and um please tell people you those small little podcast it's just the naval podcast right yeah best way to find me is on twitter actually okay just at naval then i have a website at nav.al i have a youtube channel neval and i have a podcast in the world that's it

2:11:33well thank you very much thank you really appreciate it thank you bye everybody