Welcome to this curated educational transcript of the Joe Rogan Experience. In this session, we provide a deep-dive examination of the critical perspectives and historical dialogues presented in Episode #1309. Our mission is to offer a high-fidelity, searchable research resource for students of cultural history, emerging technology, and global discourse. This transcript has been specifically optimized for academic reference, linguistic study, and archival preservation regarding Wealth Creation, Mental Models, and Philosophical Algorithms for Happiness. Two, one, 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 quite a while now,
so it's great to actually meet you. Thanks for
having me. My pleasure, my pleasure. You are
one of the rare guys that is, you're a big investor,
you're deep in the tech world, but yet you seem
to have a very balanced perspective in terms
of how to live life, as opposed to not just be...
entirely focused on success and financial success
and tech investing, but rather how to live your
life in a happy way. That's an odd balance. Yeah,
I think the reason why people like hearing me
is because it's like if you go to a circus and
you see a bear. 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,
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 every thought. You're a UFC comedian, commentator,
podcaster, but you're also more than that. You're
also a father, lover, thinker, et cetera. 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 work.
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. So everyone should just be able
to do everything. And so I don't believe in this
model anymore of trying to focus your life down
on one thing. You've got one life, just do everything
you're going to do. I couldn't agree more. And
I think that sometimes people find certain success
in whatever the endeavor is, and then they think
that that is their niche, and they stick with
it, and they never change, and they're almost
out of fear. Well, it's hard because there's
an analogy around mountain climbing. Like if
you find a mountain, and you start climbing,
and 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 up. 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. And it's the
nature of later in life that you just don't have
the time. So it's very painful to go back down
and look for a new path, but that may be the
best thing to do. And that's why when you look
at the greatest artists and creators, they have
this ability to start over that nobody else does.
Like Elon will 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 U2 come out with a new album, their
existing fans use 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 have to be willing to be a fool and kind
of have that beginner's mind and go back to the
beginning to start over. And 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, 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 in something that you're
completely new to. I live for the aha moment,
that moment when you connect two things together
that you hadn't connected together before and
it fits nicely and solidly and it kind of helps
form a steel framework of understanding in your
mind that you can then hang other ideas off of.
That's what I live for. Yeah. It's that curiosity
fulfilled. And it's what little children do,
too. You know, my little son is always asking,
why, why, 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 talking to your kids and you
say, look, the reality is I don't know a lot
of things. Yeah, I've just memorized a lot of
things. And there's certain things that. You
just can't know. Yeah, you realize that you have
answers for a few things that you've thought
through. then you sort of have cover -ups 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.
And then you've got a whole bunch of memorized
stuff because a lot of intelligence these days
is just the external brain pack of civilization.
I know it's out there. I know the answers are
out there. I know how to look them up, and I've
memorized some of them. And I kind of understand
how money works and the Federal Reserve prints
it and what this government thing is, but not
really. Right. Not good enough to teach it in
university. Yeah. I think people do that with
almost everything in life these days in terms
of like have like a one page, a one sheet, like
a brief summary of what the explanation for what
this very complex subject might be. TLDR, right?
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 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 a single mom in New
York, and she used the local library as a daycare
center because it was a very tough neighborhood.
And so she would basically say, when you get
back from school, go straight to the library
and don't come out until I pick you up late at
night. So I used to basically live in the library
and I read everything. I read every magazine.
I read every pictograph. I read every book. I
read 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 and Instagram of look at my... pile of
books that I'm reading. It'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. Because your brain
has finite information in a finite space. You
get enough advice, it all cancels to zero. There's
a lot of nonsense in books out there too. So
I don't read any more to complete books. I read
to satisfy my genuine intellectual curiosity.
And it can be anything. It could be nonsense.
It could be history. It 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. So 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 get facebook you're just
used to being bombarded with information so you
can 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. If I find a thread that's
interesting, I can follow through five social
networks, through the web, through the libraries,
through the books, and I can really get to the
bottom of this thing very quickly. It's like
the Library of Alexandria that I can research
at my disposal. So I no longer track books read
or even care about books read. It's about understanding
concepts. Yeah, you brought up two awesome points.
First of all, the social media aspect of books
and basically anything. It's such a weird way
to display your life because you're displaying
the best aspects of your life in some sort of
a glass case. It's an unrealistic version of
your life that you cultivate and you curate.
as guilty of that as anybody. Everybody's guilty
of it. I'm guilty of it too. Yeah. 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 removed mental image. And it's kind of a
disease because social media is making celebrities
of all of us. And celebrities are the most miserable
people in the world, right? Because they have
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 10, one out of 100, 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 famous or you're well -known,
people want to attack you. So being a celebrity
is no good. It's actually a problem. Like one
of my tweets is, and these are all reminders
to myself, is you want to be rich and anonymous,
not poor and famous. There's benefits to it.
Of course, of course. But we wouldn't do it.
It has unusual problems. that you don't get trained
for and you really will not understand unless
you experience it. You know, I was having this
conversation with my wife. We were talking about
people that just come up to you and they don't
care what you're doing. They don't care if I'm
with my daughter, if I'm holding her, if I'm
feeding her. We're in the middle of an intense
conversation. She's crying. She could be crying.
And some bro will come over and just immediately
have to take a picture, doesn't care. His needs
supersede the daughter. And my wife was saying
that before she knew me, she used to think that
that's just part of the price of being famous,
that people like you, that's just part of the
price of being famous. And now when it interrupts
her life. And it interrupts the children and
it interrupts friends. And now she's like, this
is annoying. This is not healthy. This is not
a smart way to interact with people. And that
people have this weird challenge, this weird
thing that if you 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
Naval. Look at that smile. Anonymity is a privilege.
On the other hand, it's self -inflicted. I mean,
we brought it on ourselves. I don't think we
knew what it was, though. We did. But we carry
on. It tells us we are getting something out
of it. So, 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
for this. I got this. This is the payoff. Just
embrace it. Smile. Grit and bear it. But you
have a different sort of celebrity, too, right?
You're a hero amongst investors. I'm a hero among
young male geeks. 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? You want the cute females.
Yeah, you want chicks. Yeah. I look at my brief
little YouTube clips. I have a tiny little podcast
going now, and it's like 95 % male. Oh, I'm sure.
Yeah, this is very highly. 18 to 35. Yeah, what
is the number? Yeah, it's in the 90s. Yeah. You
do that one very small podcast where you just
have small three or four minute clips. Yeah,
so what it was, I did a tweet storm called How
to Get Rich Without Getting Lucky, and it got
pretty popular on Twitter. And it's really about
wealth creation. I just used 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 money and I don't care
about being happy and happiness is for stupid
people. But let's face it, 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. And
a 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. But I was born
poor and miserable. And I'm now pretty well off
and I'm very happy. 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 the tweet storm was 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 I've been carrying
them in my head for 30 years. And I've been sort
of living them. And over time, I just realized,
like, sadly or fortunately, the thing that I
got really good at was looking at businesses
and figuring out the point of maximum leverage
to actually create wealth and capture some of
that. and do it in a very long -term kind of
way, not the banker, crash the economy, get bailed
out kind of way, but build businesses and help
people and provide value kind of way, especially
when applied to modern technology and leverage
in this age of infinite leverage that we live
in. So the podcast is just explaining each tweet.
So these are little three, four, five -minute
snippets. I don't like to say the same thing
twice. I don't like to explain in detail. I feel
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'll 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 happiness and inner peace
and calm and all that. Because what you want
is you don't want to be the guy who succeeds
in life while being high strung, high stress
and unhappy and leading a trail of emotional
wreckage with you and your loved ones. Which
is more common than not. 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, quietly, without struggle. You want to
be the person who's the, when there's a crisis
going on, you want to be the calmest, coolest
cucumber in the room who still also figures out
the correct answer. If you can be. One of the
things that you were saying is that you feel
like happiness is something that you can learn
and then you can teach yourself to be happy even
just by adopting the mindset that you are 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 then, well, I have to
live up to that. Yeah, I've got hundreds of techniques.
How did you develop that one? 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 working inside a larger organization, and
I told everybody that I was going to go start
a company. I was like, I hate this place. I'm
going to do my own thing. I'm going to be a successful
entrepreneur. Six months pass, nine months pass,
then people start going, 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 done drinking. I'm throwing
everything out of the house. You'll never see
me drink again. When you say that, you know you're
serious. So I think a lot of these are choices
that we make. And happiness is just one of those
choices. 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 you're saying if I'm not happy,
that's my fault. I'm not saying that, but I'm
saying that just like fitness can be a choice,
health can be a choice, nutrition can be a choice,
working hard and making money can be a choice,
happiness is also a choice. If you're so smart,
how come you aren't happy? How 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
miserable. There's something about the pursuit
of excellence and of success that supersedes
all other pursuits. In their eyes, it is the
peak, the pinnacle, the most important thing.
It's not a tradeoff. I would argue that – now,
when I say happy, happy is one of those words
that means a zillion different things. It's like
love, right? What does that mean? I love cheese.
Yeah. I'm going to define it a little bit more
tightly. Right. So let's go back to desire. Right.
This is old, old Buddhist wisdom. I'm not saying
anything original. But desire to me is a contract
that you make with yourself to be unhappy until
you get what you want. And I keep that in front
of mind. So when I'm unhappy about something,
I look for what is the underlying desire that
I have that's not being fulfilled. It's okay
to have desires. 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 pick them up randomly. Don't have thousands
of them. My coffee is too cold. It doesn't taste
quite right. I'm not sitting perfectly. Oh, I
wish it were warmer. 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 a 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 mind's working, working, working. 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 twitching and running
around and jumping and 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 nonstop information 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 thousandfold,
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 code. So a clear mind leads
to better judgment, leads to better outcome.
So a happy, calm, peaceful person will make better
decisions and have better outcomes. So if you
want to operate at peak performance, you have
to learn how to tame your mind, just like 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 drinks like, I think,
six Coca -Colas a day and he eats mostly McDonald's.
And he's still alive somehow. That shows you
that low stress is more important. Yeah, but
he looks like shit. Like, how old is he? I mean,
he's a fairly old man. Charlie Munger is, I think,
in his 90s, right? Yeah. He's made it really
far. I wonder what Warren's doing. I mean, he's
got to know that's bad for him. It's terrible.
But he doesn't care. He doesn't care. I think
he's just low stress. Stress is the big killer.
Right. So he just enjoys that Coca -Cola. Maybe
there is a trade -off, right? Maybe him enjoying
that junk food and that Coke, just, ah, that
pleasing of the mind is maybe better than him
just eating. wheatgrass shots and kale 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 let things
go. Pick your battles. We like to think that
we like to view the world as linear, which is
I'm going to put in eight hours of work. I'm
going to 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 it with, how you do it,
way more important than how hard you work, right?
Outputs are... nonlinear based on the quality
of the work that you put in. The right way to
work is like a lion. You 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. Don't tell vegans that. Yeah, sorry.
Look, I wish all that stuff worked. I don't want
to eat meat. Future generation will look back
at us as worse than slavers because of the Holocaust
we're committing with the animals. But they'll
have artificial meats that taste healthier, better
than the real thing. Allegedly. Allegedly. 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 more. 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. That's machines. Machines should be
working nine to five. Humans are not meant to
work nine to five. No, I agree wholeheartedly.
But for people that are working for someone,
there's not really that option. So that's unfortunately
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 out your time.
Even lawyers and doctors who are charging $300,
$400, $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. They just don't have that ability to
retire. So the first thing you have to do is
you have to own a piece of a business. You need
to have equity, either as an owner, an investor,
shareholder, or a brand that you're building
that accrues to you to gain your financial freedom.
Yeah, and I was really fascinated by another
thing that you were bringing up about working
for yourself, that you feel that 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 worked for
ourselves. We communicated and cooperated within
tribes, but each hunter, each gatherer stood
on their own and then combined their resources
with the family unit. But there was no boss hierarchy,
hierarchy, hierarchy, where 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
can tell you when to be at work, and what to
wear, and how to behave, you're not a free person.
You're not actually rich. So we're in this model
now where we think it's all about employment
and jobs. And intrinsic in that is that I have
to work for somebody else. But the information
age is breaking that down. So Ronald Coase is
an economist who has this Coase theorem, a very
famous theorem, but it basically just talks about...
why is a company the size that it is? Why is
a company one person instead of 10 people, instead
of 100, instead of 1 ,000? And it has to do with
the internal transaction costs versus the external
transaction costs. Let's say I want to 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 can send you small
amounts of money. I can hire you through an app.
I can rate you afterwards. So we're seeing an
atomization of the firm. We're seeing the optimal
size of the firm shrinking. 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
is. 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 quality work will be available
in a gig fashion where you'll wake up in the
morning, your phone will buzz, and you'll have
five different jobs 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 organize 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 have already started figuring out
that the Internet enables this. And they're starting
to work more and more remotely on their own schedule,
on their own time, 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 working
a 10 -person company or a 20 -person company
is way better than working in a 1 ,000 -person
company or a 10 ,000 -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 is 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 as it regards to the size of
companies? Not that I'm aware, but to me it's
obvious. It'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'll be treated like a human just
because you're able to do multiple things. Yeah.
This brings me to what is a subject that keeps
getting brought up. nowadays is universal basic
income with the oncoming apocalypse of automation
this is how it's being portrayed by andrew yang
who's running for president i sat down and talked
with him about it's very compelling 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 leave people stranded. I know you're
a guy who thinks about the future. I'm going
to take the unpopular point of view on this.
I think it's a non -solution to a non -problem.
And I mean that in the sense that automation
has been happening since the dawn of time. Man,
when electricity came along, that put a lot of
people out of work. Did it? Right? A lot of people
carrying buckets of water and lighting lamps
and all those kinds of things. And this was the
concern with factories as well, right? Yeah,
apps, everything. Literally every single thing
that comes along. Even the printing press, right?
Absolutely. And what it does is it frees people
up for new creative work. So the question is
not, is automation going to eliminate jobs? There
is no finite number of jobs. We're not like sitting
around. up the same jobs that were around since
the Stone Age. So obviously new jobs are being
created, and they're usually better jobs, more
creative jobs. So the question is, how quickly
is this transition going to happen, and what
kinds of jobs will be eliminated, and what kinds
of jobs will be created? It's impossible looking
forward to predict what kinds of jobs will be
created. If I told you 10 years ago that podcaster
was going to be a job, or that playing video
games is going to be a job, or commentating on
video games is going to be a 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. All I'm saying is 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 in
the UBI, there's a couple of problems in the
UBI. One is you're creating a slippery slide
transfer straight into socialism. The moment
people can start voting themselves money combined
with a democracy, it's just a matter of time
before the bottom 51 votes. themselves are everything
in the top 49. And by the way, slippery slope
fallacy is not a fallacy. I know people like
saying that, but they haven't thought it through.
But the moment you start having a direct transfer
mechanism like that in a democracy, you're basically
doing it with capitalism, which is the engine
of economic growth. You're also forcing the entrepreneurs
out or telling them not to come here. The estimate
I saw for 15K a year basic income for everybody
would be 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 with UBI
is that people who are 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. 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 meaning.
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 phone in your pocket. Those are the kinds
of things you want to give people. And finally,
in terms of the rate of automation, I think we
can educate people very quickly. One of the myths
that we have today is that adults can't be re
-educated. We view education 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.
There are ones that will even pay you to go there
now. You can educate people en masse 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 structured thinking.
An AI that can program. as well or better than
humans is an AI that just took over the world.
That's endgame. That's the end of the human species.
And I can give you arguments why 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.
It's another... It's a combination of Cassandra
complex. You know, it's fun to talk about the
end of the world combined with a God complex,
like people who have lost religion. So they're
looking for meaning in some kind of end of history.
The reason why I don't think AI is coming anytime
soon is because a lot 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 in all
of that noise? There is nothing approaching what
we call creative thinking. To actually model
general intelligence, you run into all kinds
of problems. First, we don't know how the brain
works at all. Number two, we've never even modeled
a paramecium or an amoeba, 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 that is doing calculations that is intelligent,
that isn't accounted for. And the best estimates
are it 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 simulate inside
the cells. So putting it at saying that I'm just
going to model neuron as 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 of 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're talking about mirroring the actual abilities
of cells, or are you talking about recreating
the actual mechanism? Like what is going on inside
cells and biological organisms? Yeah, we just
don't know how intelligence works. Right. We
don't know what consciousness is. 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 they model at the neuron level, which
is saying this neuron's on, that neuron's off.
They're combining their signal. But I'm saying...
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 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. Exactly. And 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 doesn't have to
be a moving thing even, but a thing that you've
created that stores virtually all the information
that's available in the world, stores all the
patterns of all the thinking. of all the great
people that have ever lived, all the writers,
all the people that have ever published anything,
all the people that have ever spoken any words,
stores all of their points, all of their counterpoints,
all their contradictions, applies logic and reason
and some sort of sense of the future and starts
improving upon these patterns. and then starts
acting on its own based on the information that
it's been provided with. Well, first you would
have to actually simulate a structure of the
human brain that can hold all that information.
You're basically talking about tens of thousands
of brains worth of information. We can't even
build one brain in the next decade or two or
three. Well, in terms of an actual physical brain,
yes. But what about something that recreates
the abilities of a brain? Like I said, nature
is parsimonious. So we've got this three -pound
wetware object that can hold all this data. Nature
has been very efficient in evolving kind of how
we get there. 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 evolve 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 in 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 we
can take a computer that can beat someone at
chess, the real question was, well, can we make
some sort of an artificial intelligence that
can beat someone at Go, which is far more complex
than 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 not on the road to the unbounded game
of life. They are completely artificial. But
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 great poetry. Right. The creativity
for sure is something that's great. 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. That brings us back to the idea of meaning
and universal basic income. I think the idea
of giving someone $15 ,000 a year doesn't necessarily
cause what everyone would worry about is people
being on the dole. You would have a bunch of
listless people out there with no meaning in
life. But the idea is that $15 ,000 a year, and
I'm not necessarily sure I agree with this. I'm
not even endorsing this. But that $15 ,000 a
year 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 going
to stop at $15 ,000 because the moment people
are like, I mean, $15 ,000. Then people will
demand more. Bernie Sanders will be like, I want
$16 ,000, $17 ,000, $18 ,000 a year. These companies
are too big. Yeah, that could happen. It doesn't
stop. It just goes all the way to bankruptcy.
The concern is the slide to socialism. It's obvious.
I mean, heck, 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 as ethical
or compassionate capitalism? 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 eliminated the middle class. There are
absolutely problems with capitalism. I think
monopolies are a problem. I think that crony
capitalism is a problem with the government,
you know, kind of gets in bed with them and sort
of forces things. I think the bankers have really,
you know, raped society and the rest of us are
suffering 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 bailed out and bankrupt everybody
else. So capitalism has gotten a really bad name.
Let's talk about its free exchange, free markets.
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
of labor, we trade. That's built into the human
species. Basic math comes from accounting, keeping
track of debts and credits and so on. We need
to be able to engage in free trade. The correct
criticism of capitalism is when it does not provide
equal 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. And if you don't
let them suffer the consequences of bad choices
or reap the rewards from good choices, then you
are forcibly redistributing through violence.
It's interesting that there are no... socialist
working socialist examples that exist without
violence you basically need someone to show up
with a gun and say okay you're not allowed to
do that you hand this over to that person so
one of the reasons why I do 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
lower down. You're president, so I must be vice
president. You're a plus one, I'm a minus one.
It has to cancel the zero. We should be all for
playing positive -sum 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.
You burn the whole system down, we end up like
Venezuela or the former Soviet Union. You don't
want to be a failed socialist state with emaciated
teens hunting cats in the streets to eat. 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, we just need to do it
right. If we do it right, we can, have you ever
had a debate? 100 million dead. Yeah. Let's keep
trying. All over the world, yeah. And every single
time it's been implemented. Have you ever had
a conversation with someone who's a socialist?
Many times. Some of my better friends are socialists.
Really? We really get into it, yeah. And what
is their, I mean, does anyone have a compelling
perspective at all? I think really socialism
comes from the heart. Right. We all want to be
socialist. Capitalism comes from the head because
they're always cheaters in any system. Yes. And
there's incentives in any system. So when you're
young, if you're not a socialist, you have no
heart. When you're older, if you're not a capitalist,
you have no head. Right. You haven't thought
it through. So I understand where it comes from.
I always like Nassim Taleb's framing on this,
where he said, with my family, I'm a communist.
With my close friends, I'm a socialist. You know,
at my state level politics, I'm a Democrat. 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 in 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 my family, I'm a socialist. That's the right
way to live a loving, happy... integrated life
yes but when you're dealing with strangers i
mean you want to be a real socialist great open
all your doors and windows tomorrow please everybody
come take what you want see how that works out
yeah um 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 And the outcome inequality is there
because you made different choices. Now, again,
going back, if it was because you didn't have
the same opportunities, that's a problem. 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 yourself. That would be much
better for society on all levels than basically
just saying, now you're going to be the dole
for the rest of your life. Yeah, you'd have to
lead that horse to water and then make him drink.
It requires people to put in some effort. We
can't all just sit around. Well, that's my perspective
on income inequality. There's always effort inequality
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'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. It's like, well, you
know what the greatest privilege is? You're alive.
85 % of humanity is dead. So how privileged are
you? Then you're living in the first world. Then
you have four limbs, et cetera. So you can take
that argument all the way. It's kind of a nonsense
discussion. Well, it's a very weird progressive
argument. And as it pertains to race, it's always
a weird one, right? Because white privilege to
me, although... You could look at what they're
saying on paper like, yes, yeah, I'm sure there's
more black people that are harassed by the police.
I'm sure there is more black people who are treated
suspiciously by shop owners and the like. But
the problem isn't the people who aren't treated
poorly. The problem is the people who treat the
people poorly. The problem is racism. The problem
is not. people that didn't ask to be born white
or whatever they are, and they don't get harassed.
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
a geographical location. 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 is hilarious if you can't be racist against
white people. That's a variation of the hold
still while I hit you argument. Stop struggling
while I'm hitting you. But it's just so silly.
completely change what racism means. But what's
hilarious is that mostly the people who are yelling
racist are not the minorities. When I look on
my Twitter or my social media or on my news,
it's white on white violence. Virtue signaling.
Yeah, it's white on white violence. What's mostly
going on... is it's elitist whites, blue state
whites, college educated whites, beating up on
high school educated whites, blue collar. It's
a white collar versus blue collar war that's
going on. And the rest of us are just kind of
watching like, 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?
And what the, do you put that much time in your
kids 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, you just, these some,
I've read some people's Facebook posts. I'm like,
this is a preposterous amount of effort that
you put into saying virtually nothing. Let's
see. Humans are being creative. Yeah. Let's see
an 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 social value or raise their
position on the social totem pole. It's signaling
and it's easy signaling because it's 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, some
of it is so cliche that it seems like I know
one guy who poses as a woman on Twitter, but
he does it obviously. What is the name? Tatiana
McGrath. Yes. Hilarious. Used to be Godfrey Elwick.
Yes. Oh, is that the same guy? I think so, yeah.
That's hilarious. I did not. They killed his
account. I think it's the same one. I'm not 100
% sure. For pretending to be transracial. That's
right. They didn't. Yeah. He basically says all
the crazy stuff that people on the left say,
but he says the craziest version and kind of
just shows how it's okay. I saw a tweet from
him recently, he just said, or her, that it's
not okay to be white. Yes. And then some people
agree. But it's so close to what they say. It's
so close that it's like the most artful form
of subtle parody. Well, if you replace in half
of these things, if you replace the word white
with black or Asian, watch the lynch mob descend
upon you. It's a strange time in that respect.
There's a famous saying that if you want to see
who rules over you, see who you're not allowed
to criticize. Excellent. Yeah, that's so true,
right? Yeah, that's so true. I wonder where this
is going. I really do. I wonder because 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. I think
it's actually a great thing overall. Yeah, I
do as well. Because now it means that any human
can broadcast to any other human on the planet
at any time. So, for example, if, you know, a
totalitarian dictator 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.
But 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 media
and try and get somebody outraged. Of course.
And so you have to learn how, first of all, society
just has to get over this idea of outrage. Like
to me, like... Outrage people, people who get
easily outraged are the stupidest people on social
media. Those are the people I block instantly.
It's just kind of very low -level thinking, right?
These are the foot soldiers in a 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
will also be anti -mob tactics. Like, for example,
if I go to someone's Twitter feed, and all it
is is full of political ranting, raving, conspiracy
theories. Do I want to work with this person?
Do I want to associate with this person? Do I
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 you're sound of mind and body,
it will eventually drive you insane. This goes
back to Clockwork Orange where he has his eyes
opened up and 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. And if you fall for
it, if you get addicted, your brain will get
destroyed. And I think this is the modern struggle.
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 you 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, they've... They've massaged all
the mechanisms to addict you like a skinner pigeon
or a rat who's just going to click, click, click,
click, click, can't put the phone down. Food,
they've taken sugar and they'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 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 alone. 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. It's 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 up with
it. 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 it
wasn't even him that made the video. At least
that's not what he said. But it was a video where
he sort of doctored Nancy Pelosi talking and
made it look like she was drunk. And then a bunch
of people retweeted it. Like, oh, my God, look,
she's drunk. And so one of the online publications,
some website, tracked him down and doxed him.
And it turned out he's just a day laborer. who
is an African -American Trump fan and thought
it would be funny to do that. And it turns out
that he didn't even, at least according to him,
he actually just put it up on his Facebook page.
What's even more disturbing is Facebook gave
up his information to this website. Right. 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 think
Facebook and Twitter and a bunch of these other
social media platforms are committing slow motion
suicide. through these kinds of activities. That
was a stunning one, though, that they would give
up this guy who's a 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 because I don't think this is
something that the New York Times would have
done or anything responsible. But 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
broadcasts. 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
1000 times. You know, you go on Google News,
you're like, okay, what's the piece of news,
which source and 3000 other articles. Too many,
right? So news has become commoditized. So the
entire news media has shifted into peddling opinions
and entertainment. And so now they've become
a variation between cheerleaders, shock troops,
enforcers, talking heads. So these are now propaganda
machines signaling for their tribes. There's
a right -wing one. There's a 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.
Basically, when you see one of these news organizations
doxing an individual, that's like a tank running
over a soldier. That's what's going on. It's
just war. And so there's no such thing anymore
as a neutral media commentator. 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. 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 social
media site for friends and family, one for business,
et cetera. So the internet is this giant aggregator
where it creates one big hegemon for everything.
And it creates an atomized long tail of millions
and millions of individuals. What it gets rid
of is the medium -sized ones in the middle. So,
for example, you might have had like seven Hollywood
studios. Well, it's all going to be Netflix.
You had, you know, like... 10 large e -commerce
players, commerce players from Walmart to Costco
to, you know, Kmart and whatever. No, 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
long tail of millions of independent people.
So this idea, of who's a journalist and who's
not. You know, is Assange a journalist or not?
Everyone's a journalist. That's the world that
we're headed towards. I do think that extreme
power, the most powerful people in the world
today. And this is not well known, but the most
powerful people in the world today 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 one of their execs
got up in front of Congress and the congressman
asked him, do you manipulate 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
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. If I call you
up and I say something horrible to you on the
phone, the phone company doesn't get in trouble.
But the moment they started taking stuff down
that wasn't illegal because somebody 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, where the left wants
them to take down the right, the right wants
them 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 Congress, and this day is coming,
if not already here, it might even been here
today, actually, because I saw something related
in the news. The day is coming. When the politicians
realize that these social media platforms are
picking the next president, the next congressman,
they're literally picking. And they have the
power to pick, so they will be controlled by
the government. In what way? How do you think
they're going to be controlled? Do you think
they're going to have to adhere to strict principles
of freedom of speech? No, no. Unfortunately,
it's headed in the opposite direction. 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 be hauled in for hearings. They're going
to be pressured massively, do this, don't do
that. My concern about that is the hearings that
I saw with Zuckerberg, those people were completely
incompetent. They didn't seem to understand.
They don't. They don't. But they're just applying
pressure. They're just trying to scare him so
he'll do what they want. What do they want him
to do? They want him to basically suppress the
other side. So if you're a right wing, you want
to suppress the left wing. If you're a left wing,
you want to suppress the right wing. And if you
just see where these companies are headquartered
in Silicon Valley, all the sensors, and that's
really what they are. There are sensors working
inside these companies. They're called by different
names, obviously, right? It's doublespeak. You
call it the Department of Defense when it's the
Department of War. So in this case, the Department
of Safety and Trust when really it's the Department
of Censorship. The sensors are inside Silicon
Valley, so it's going to reflect Silicon Valley's
politics. Which is extremely progressive left
wing. Yeah. if you're not that, you really have
no place. That's right. Try being a conservative,
an open conservative at Google. Good luck. Now
you get lynched. It's crazy. I mean, I don't
think that there was ever a thing like that that
was so influential and so politically, ideologically
one -sided. Yeah, there's a little saying on
the internet, 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. It's a fascinating battle that's
going on right now. I mean, it really is. And
conservatives, as far as social media is concerned,
they're just getting chopped off at the hams,
left and right. What will eventually happen is
that whenever you suppress speech, the organism
metastasizes. Then it has to start turning towards
other means. If you're unlucky, it 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 suppressed or shut down
that will then start spreading these various...
And that will take the place of Twitter or Facebook
or whatever. 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 have Jack Dorsey
and to talk to him about where it's going, where
he thinks it's going, and his own principles,
which he believes that it's a fundamental right.
And he believes that freedom of speech is something
that we all should have and that these. platforms
should essentially be like like utilities like
the electric company jack is correct and he has
the right vision it's just he's in an organization
where the other individuals in the organization
feel differently very differently so the organization
itself can get hijacked and his timeline for
changing things is like it's decades. I mean,
I, I don't, I shouldn't say decades, but I mean,
I was like, when do you think that something,
but there, there was a part, there was one idea
of having an uncensored Twitter, like one Twitter.
That's the wild West. Like you can have regular
Twitter or you could try wild West Twitter. Like,
well, that, that already exists as a network
called gab. Yes, but Gab isn't even Wild West
Twitter. When people dox people, they remove
things like that. Yeah, I mean, I think there's
certainly lines around violence and illegality
that you don't want to cross, but Gab is closer
to a free speech platform, but it's still not
decentralized. It can still get shut down. It
can still get taken out. Well, it's also suppressed
heavily. Yes, and the people on there are right
now extremely right -wing, so it's not a pleasant
place for someone like me to hang out. Well,
it's all the people that have been kicked off
of something else. So 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. It
doesn't work for me. Is that a problem in Silicon
Valley when you don't identify as anything? Do
you get pressure? 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 it definitely has that oppressive
feeling to it. Right, and you also have to be
politically outspoken. It can't be something
that you just stay neutral. Right. It's like
when Tim Ferriss, I think at some point, put
out a tweet about how you can't just say anything
anymore and people are being suppressed. And
a whole bunch of people, a lot of them from Silicon
Valley, piled in and said, what is it that you
can't say? What are you afraid to say? You can
say whatever you want, Tim. Go ahead. What are
you afraid of? They were like baiting him. What
was he trying to say? Wow, we have to put him
in that box. He was someone who was thinking
about saying something he shouldn't have said.
Exactly. Now we know. One great tweet I saw was,
you know, the left won the culture wars. Now
they're just driving around shooting the survivors.
Wow, that's hilarious. Yeah, I wonder. I wonder
who has won the culture war. There's certainly
a battle that's been won in terms of 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
slouches left, right? Leviathan is the government.
Why does it slouch left? And I think a lot of
that has been because of technology. Technology
has made it so that it makes more like industrial
revolution technology. We all band together.
We're wards of the state, right? Contraception
is a technology that kind of helps lean leftward.
It takes away from the family unit. Abortion
is a technology, 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 necessarily opposed
to that. 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 left.
Yeah, it's also... usually highly educated people
that are involved in technology in the first
place. And I think when you look at universities
in particular, they tend to lean left in this
country as well. Well, universities, what happened
with universities is very interesting. So universities
first 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 physics
and math and computer science and chemistry because
these deliver real things, the Manhattan Project,
the microprocessor, the space vehicles and so
on, the electric car. So they gained this mantle
of authority and legitimacy from the hard sciences.
So then come the social sciences kind of sneak
in. Then you get 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, blah, blah, blah. And so what
happened is that because we took scientists to
be the high priests. of our new world. Science
itself has gotten corrupted. And the social sciences,
and you can tell they're fake sciences because
they're 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. Where you can see 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. But
you can see the struggle going on in 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? Do we have to
realize the consequences of the foolishness?
The good news is the physical sciences have a
reality on their side. Yeah, but it's not even,
I mean, in many ways it's not respected. Yeah,
but at the end of the day, your aircraft still
has to fly. Your microprocessor still has to
compute. So there's only so far they can take
it. But I do see, for example, in biology, a
lot of biologists are facing this difficult thing
where they have to say things that they know
are not true to keep their job. Like what? Well,
you had Brett Weinstein on here, right? So that's
a clear example. So there's just the crossover
line of what is acceptable and what's not is
entering into biology. And biology will probably
suffer the most. Synthetic biology, for example,
a lot of this will end up in China because you
won't be able to map facts and reality 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 know enough here, so now I'm in shaky
territory. But it's just my sense that that crossover
battleground right now is in evolutionary biology.
Economics lost. Well, certainly in terms of gender.
That seems to be one of the major battlegrounds.
Yeah. It's also going to happen, for example,
blank slate theory. Are we nature or are we nurture?
It's kind of socially unacceptable to say that
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 a – unbelievably important thing
to understand. Like what makes a person a sociopath?
What makes a person a super successful person,
a winner? What makes a person a drug addict?
What are these factors? You can't have a reasonable
conversation about climate science anymore. It's
not a science. It's all politicized. You can't
even bring it up. Everyone's got their minds
made up already. Well, what's uncomfortable to
me is people have their minds made up and they
don't even have the data. On most of these topics,
people are talking past each other anyway. They're
talking about different things. Like 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 side is talking about
school shootings and protecting people in their
homes from crime. So they're just talking about
two different things. And it's just not politically
acceptable to even talk about the same thing.
Or when it gets to immigration, the right is
talking about, you know. or the left is like
bundling together illegal immigration and legal
immigration into one thing, right? Whereas on
the right, sometimes you've got racists hiding
in there, so it doesn't help their cause, right?
They're talking about two different things. If
they were talking about the same thing, which
is how many immigrants should we let into the
country? And, you know, what are the criteria
for that? That would be a very different conversation
than no immigrants or everybody comes in. And
then also on the left, you know, you have this.
that everybody who's currently coming in illegally
is going to vote for the left because of where
they're coming from and 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 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 censorship... Let somebody else
run it. Same with immigration. If you want an
immigration system, build a 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 you're dealing with right
versus left and one 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 medication? Why is that not being discussed?
We're running one of the greatest mental health
experiments in history when we're doping everybody
up in SSRIs. And maybe if you give 30 million
people SSRIs, maybe like 29 .9 million are a
lot happier. And then you have a fraction that
commit suicide or detonate. Yes. You're basically
trading the mean for the variance. Right. You
have blow -up risk. Yeah, there's no room for
nuance, which is why I stay out of politics,
largely. Do they drag you in, though, sometimes?
They always try. Well, this conversation is going
to force you to get dragged in. Sure. I'm sure
there's going to be some people that— Here's
the thing about politics. Because we have a first
-past -the -post system. What that means is whoever
wins 51 % of the vote in this country gets a
lot of the power. It's not like proportional
representation where the Greens have 10 % and
the Libertarians have 3 % or whatever. It's just
like you're all Democrat in power, now you're
all Republican. Because of that, to win, you
have to pick one of these two sides. You have
to choose. You can't just basically say, I'm
going to be... you know, nuanced about it. You
can't vote for a third party that's throwing
away your vote, right? I have a friend who's
trying to fix that. He's starting this thing
called a good party where like you kickstart
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? So you don't throw away your vote. But
outside of those hacks, we're never going to
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 into that tribe, if you signal
outside of that tribe, or out of that bundle,
you get attacked. 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 think. What dread. Most
of modern life, all our diseases are diseases
of abundance, not diseases of scarcity, right?
Old times, I may have starved. 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'd 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 diseases of abundance.
We are overexposed to everything. So the way
to survive in modern society is to be an ascetic.
It is to retreat from society. There's too much
society everywhere you go. Society in your phone,
society in your pocket, society in your ears.
You're being socialized right now by listening
to this podcast. We're socializing you. We're
programming you. Everyone's trying to program
everybody. The only solution is to turn it off.
The only solution is to turn it off and concentrate
on your breathing. Meditation, yeah. Yes. I mean,
that's huge. It's been a lifesaver for me. Oh,
I do it. And I do it whenever I get like spare
time. I was at the doctor's office this morning
and I knew it was going to be 20 minutes. So
I just sat there with my eyes closed for 20 minutes
and I meditated. You know, when I was growing
up, there was this statement. I think it was
Pascal. He said, you know, all of man's problems
arise because he cannot sit by himself in a room
for 30 minutes alone. And it's very true. I always
needed to be stimulated. And when the iPhone
came along, boredom was dead. I would never be
bored again. 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 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 while. And that is
a superpower that I think everybody can attain.
The superpower of learning to be alone and enjoying
it. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I think it's critical.
And I do think that this... These times where
you just think about things, just be alone and
think about things are so rare these days. And
I think during those rare times is when you really
get to understand what you actually believe or
don't believe. Yeah, it's funny. When I first
started meditating, it was really hard, right?
Because everybody, I think a lot of people who
listen to this broadcast, they've heard of meditation
that has a good rep. So everybody tries it. They
struggle. They kind of give it up. It's one of
those things that everybody says they do, but
nobody actually does, right? It's like not eating
sugar, right? Everyone talks about how, yeah,
I don't eat sugar. But like, yeah, then the dessert
tray rolls around and everyone's going for the
cookies, right? So it's become one of those things.
And in fact, it's now 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 Bird, a chirp, and then when they're
in deep meditation, I don't know how they make
it work, but they'll be like, I got a lot of
chirps today. How many chirps did you get? Oh,
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 the
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 after email that's not answered going
back 10, 20, 30, 40 years. And then when you
sit down to meditate, those emails start coming
back at you. Hey, what about this issue? What
about that issue? Have you solved this? Did you
think about that? You have regrets there. You
have issues there. 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
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 down, you realize the only things
you're thinking about are things that happened
yesterday. 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 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't.
It is literally the art of doing nothing. Yes.
All you need to do for meditation is just sit
down, close your eyes, comfortable position.
Whatever happens, happens. If you think, you
think. If you don't think, you don't think. Don't
put effort into it. Don't put effort against
it. It's all you need. Do you concentrate on
your breath or do you have a specific technique?
Nothing. Nothing. You just sit. You just sit.
I think about my breath. That's all I do. You
can do that. I 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. And concentration is a technique
to still your mind enough that you can then drop
the object of concentration. So you could also
just try going straight to the end game. The
problem with what I'm talking about, which is
not focusing on your breath, is you will have
to listen to your mind for a long time. It's
not going to work 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 hell for a while. But when you come
out the other side, it's great. You get rid of
the chatter. Or when the chatter comes, it's
in the background. It's dimmer. It's smaller.
You've heard it before. You see the patterns.
It's more recent. It's something you need to
resolve anyway. And you will get moments of actual
silence. What's your ultimate state when you
meditate? Is there a state where you've achieved
rarely, if ever, where you just... you're in
bliss or you're in harmony or you're in enlightenment.
It's kind of indescribable because when you're
really meditating, you're not there. When there's
no thoughts, there's no experience or there's
nothing. There's just nothing. So it's hard to
describe, but I would say that it's like a...
Every psychedelic state that people encounter
using so -called plant medicines can be arrived
at just through pure meditation. And I've definitely
hit some of those states. You've hit some transcendent
psychedelic states where you're hallucinating
the whole deal? I've had trippy visuals. I've
had 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 rarely. And in fact,
I would say that's also like an experience that
you can start craving, which will then actually
take you out of meditation. 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 just personal experience, is the
place where I end up the most that is really
the one that I want to be at is peace. It's just
peace. Peace, happy. Yeah, peace. To me, peace
is happiness at rest, and happiness is kind of
peace in 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 want.
Yeah. If you're a peaceful person, anything you
do will be a happy activity. And by the way,
being on social media and engaging in politics
will not bring you peace. There's nothing less
peaceful. Right. In 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 peace is 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 at politics? Because then you'll
be at peace because your people will have won.
It's a daunting task to get your shit together.
It's easier to change yourself than to change
the world. That's true. And the best way to change
the world is to change yourself. Exactly. 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
to New Zealand and there's this guy that I met
with and, you know, everyone's on social media
shouting about environmentalism and conserve
and sustain. And I go to this guy's house and
he was doing a very quietly, very gently. He
was doing a two week long zero waste experiment
where he was throwing out nothing. So every package
that he opened, he would keep and he would like
clean it up. So he would keep his Amazon boxes.
He would keep the little containers, even a teabag.
If you open the teabag, he has to figure out
how to compost the tea inside, how to make the
tea itself useful, how to make the teabag 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 do that for? I think it was two weeks.
It was hard. what the fuck are you going to do
with teabags? He had quite the collection. He
was filling them with little things. He sounds
like a crazy hoarder, like a hoarder person with
stacks of teabags in his house. Very impressive
guy. Yeah, that's a strange way to go about things.
I appreciate it. Look, it is entirely possible
to somehow or another engineer all of our cups
and all of our things to be biodegradable. The
struggle with the modern... environmental movement
is that they identify the correct problem which
is finite earth spaceship earth this is all we
got don't ruin it but they don't have the solution
So what they say is no growth, no growth, no
growth. Well, the problem is you got 3 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 for being one
of the few people who's out there trying to do
that. So you build things that are biodegradable
and good for you and healthier. And everybody
wants to be healthy. 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 So I think the modern environmental
movement identifies the correct problem but then
doesn't come up with the right set of solutions
that are appealing to people. People are not
going to give up economic growth. They're going
to have to get rich first. Yeah, that's a very
good point. But how do you do both? You lower
the price of clean technologies massively. So
you basically make clean technologies cost competitive
with unclean technologies. Innovation, ideally,
you can subsidize in the short to medium term
until the innovation curve is crossed. I mean,
like Tesla doesn't have any patents, right? Right.
Or they freely give away their patents. That's
the example of how you can do it. So, you know,
someone, if you want to get rid of plastic straws.
Yeah, you can do it here and there. You can get
San Francisco to ban plastic straws, but China's
not going to ban plastic straws. Not until you
build a paper straw that is, you know, same cost,
good durability. And then you educate the Chinese
like, hey, this is petroleum. You know, this
plastic that you're drinking 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 probably the best 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 waste into fuel.
And that there's companies that are actively
trying to do that now. In that way, plastic waste
will become valuable. It'll become a commodity.
It'll become something that people resource.
Now, there's certain problems this doesn't solve.
This doesn't solve carbon. This doesn't solve
deforestation. So there you kind of have to step
in with other means. So, for example, you look
at the Amazon, right? Everyone's complaining
about the Amazon being deforested. Well, you're
not the poor Brazilian farmer. So you're sitting
here in your comfortable chair like social media
hammering away at 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
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 it, and you conserve it, whatever plant
medicines that come out of there that you...
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 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 companies should have
the rights to this natural plant. Or the government
does it, and then the government gets the patents,
and the government will auction off the patents
later. That's even worse. Or they'll license
them or whatever it is, right? Well, often, like
just this, often the problem is there is no really
good solution. There's a bunch of solutions that
also have drawbacks. That's life. That's a trade
-off. That's being a human. It's 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.
Once something is your property, you take care
of it. You're not going to crap all over your
own house. But it should probably be temporary
property, not permanent property. You see a lot
of countries around the world now doing this
no foreign ownership of land thing, for example,
or Mexico has no private ownership of beaches,
right? So you can draw the line at certain points.
Yeah. Do you enjoy doing this kind of thing where
you break things down and give your perspective
on things and try to illuminate certain complex
subjects? I'm not trying to illuminate so much
as, you know, talking to you, I learn as much
as I... And I learn it for myself because I'm
being forced to articulate it. I can sit around
and think my thoughts all day long, but a lot
of it's going to be nonsense. 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 forced 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. You know, 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 wanted
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,
this 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
improved me that way. A lot of people. Exactly.
So now what I realize is that the biggest mistake
was memorization, right? Because when you're
actually trying to live your life in congruence
with reality, you want to have a deep understanding
of what you do and why you do it. And so it's
much more important to know the basics really
well. That is to know the advanced. Knowing calculus
wouldn't help you today. It doesn't help you
in business. It 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 some action that you want to take. So
understanding basic mathematics cold is way more
important than memorizing calculus concepts.
And the problem is, and this is true of, I think,
all reasoning. It's much better to know the basics
from the ground up. solid foundation of understanding,
a steel frame of understanding than it is to
just have a scaffolding where you'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 have this deep down suspicion they don't
even really understand. So if you look at the
most powerful thinkers, especially the ones where
money or life is on the line. They have to understand
the basics really, really well. Richard Feynman,
the famous physicist, was able to... He had this
piece in one of his lectures where he takes you
from counting numbers on your hand all the way
to calculus in four pages of text, orally, but
written down as four pages of text. And it's
a complete unbroken logical chain that takes
you through geometry, trigonometry, pre -calculus,
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 re -derive
anything on the spot. And if you can't, you don't
know it. So do you apply that to things other
than mathematics? Everything. You apply that
to everything. Everything, yeah. You don't even
make attempt to memorize things. Just make attempt
to understand them. You can't help but memorize
things. Right. 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 will point towards the deeper understanding.
And I'm forced to explain it to people. And that's
how I know I understand something. So this is
what I meant originally when we talked about
reading. A good book, I'll read one page in a
night, and then I spend the rest of the night
thinking about it, or I'm chasing down references
on Wikipedia or weird blog posts trying to understand
it. So, for example, 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? It's trite. It's trite. 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. Go get a job, hippie. Yeah, exactly.
Go get a job, you freaking hippie. 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 answer be? Not what is the answer,
but what could the answer be? And so at a core
level, I was forced to kind of hunt down all
these weird little things and really understand.
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 don't have to keep asking that question.
What is the meaning of life? I mean, I think
the question is more interesting than the answer.
Everyone should explore this on their own. But
let me just explore a few parts with you, right?
So first is, if I gave you an answer, if I said
the meaning of life is to please God, well, which
God? Okay, Judeo -Christian God. Well, okay,
why that one? Why this thing? The problem is
it's a why question. You can keep asking why
forever, right? Any answer I give you, you'll
just ask why again, why again, why again. Like
a little kid. That's right. And you end up in
a place called Agrippa's Trilemma. This is a
philosophical exercise, but I kind of thought
it through and Googled around, and there's a
thing called Agrippa's Trilemma. And Agrippa's
Trilemma says that any questioning like this,
the why, will always end in one of three places.
First is infinite regress. Why? Because of this.
Why that? And just keep going forever. The second
is circular reasoning. Well, A. Why A? Because
of B. Well, why B? Because of A. 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
of the Big Bang, because of simulation. These
are all axioms. These are all just stopping points.
Saying we're in a simulation or saying it's the
Big Bang is just another way of saying God. 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. So there is no
answer. The real answer is because. 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 Borg -like robots, each
one competing with each other to fulfill that
single meaning more than the others. Back to
signaling, like I'm better at 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... That's the basis of all existential
angst, that you don't... You don't know why you're
here. And you have this feeling that it could
be meaningless. I mean, when you start pondering
the multiverse, the universe, the galaxies, the
solar system, the planet... The organism, the
cells inside the organism, the bacteria, the
parasites, the symbiotic relationship we have
to our environment. And you start going, Jesus
Christ, am I just a little piece of this thing?
Well, the answers to all the great questions
are paradoxes. 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 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
words Joe Rogan without invoking the entire universe.
Joe Rogan, Alien comes along and says, what's
that? Joe Rogan. What's Joe Rogan? It'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? 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. 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 useful
because then it gives you certain intrinsic understanding
in your life that brings a level of peace. I
feel like there's, with many people, this stress
of this question is also accentuated by unhappy
lives. It's accentuated by unhappy choices, by
being trapped. There's a big difference between
not knowing what the meaning of life is and,
God, I got to get the fuck out of this job. I
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. That's
why I'm very practical about it. Because look,
Buddha was a prince. He started out really rich
and then he got to go off in the woods. And in
the old days, what happened was if you 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'd
renounce women, men. You'd renounce children.
You'd renounce money. You'd renounce politics,
science, technology, everything. And you would
go out in the woods by yourself. You had to 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.
And you can basically save up. You can work really
hard. You can do great things for society, and
society will give you money for giving it things
that it wants and it doesn't know how to get.
And then you can save that up, and you can live
well below with your means, and you can find
a certain freedom in that, and that will give
you the time and the energy to pursue your own
internal peace and happiness. So I believe the
solution to making everybody happy is to give
them what they want. Let's get them all rich.
Let's get them all fit and healthy. And then
let's get them all happy. Are those things even
possible? Absolutely. Everyone can be rich? Everyone
can be rich. Everyone. Here's my thought exercise
for you. Now it seems like we're in an infomercial.
Everyone can be rich. Look at my home. This is
my Rolls Royce. Yeah. So that's a good point.
So everything that I've ever created on this
topic of how to make money, I will never charge
a dollar for. 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 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 a 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 a 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
this hardware, software, engineers, scientists,
biologists, technicians, hard sciences, not the
social sciences. We would all be done within
five years. Robots would be doing everything
from cleaning toilets to cooking food to flying
airplanes to driving Ubers. And what would we
be doing? We would be doing all creative jobs
to entertain each other and researching science
and technology. We would have wonderful lives.
So it is really just a question of education,
nothing else. Is this a scale issue, though?
I mean, you're talking about it as if this would
work with 300 million people. It'll work with
10 billion people. It'll work with a spacefaring
race with 100 trillion people. We have the resources.
We have... The ability. The universe is infinite
resources. Have you heard of a Dyson sphere?
You pull the Dyson sphere on a star and you gather
all its energy. 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 need for a long, long time. We can extract
it out of nuclear fusion. We're not that far
from those kinds of technologies working. It's
just a question of guts and interest. We should
be building. nuclear fusion test plants on the
moon. The moon should be littered with them.
There's no downside. Right. Yeah. How would that
work? Send a bunch of people up there to work?
Robots. The problem with nuclear fission is that
nature... 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 information transmission, but they're actually
not great for energy transmission. For energy
creation, you want nuclear to work. And the problem
is because nuclear energy, you know, we built
it with a bomb, we have dirty... nukes, all those
kinds of problems with Fukushima, Three Mile
Island, Chernobyl. We don't innovate anymore
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, right? So we
need a way to iterate on nuclear fission and
eventually fusion and get them working safely,
cleanly, passive failure, et cetera, if we're
going to find our way out of the energy trap.
And the best place to do that is someplace like
on the moon or Mars. Do you think 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? And we do have these old plants that are
running on this. This is 50 -year -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 a, when you pull the plug on them,
they fail into a state where there's no leakage,
there's no problem. They're default. is a positive
outcome, as opposed to the current ones, the
old ones, where if you unplug them, they melt
down. And even these Gen 4 are just Gen 4. They're
not Gen 5, Gen 6. They're not Gen 80, Gen 100,
where we have microprocessors, right? And that
should be something that people are working towards.
I hope so. I mean, in an ideal world, 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 to... 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 that's the initial use case.
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 that? The natural progression
that people have of, oh, I have got a nice Chevrolet,
but I really want a BMW. I've got a nice BMW,
but now I want a Mercedes. I have a Mercedes.
I want a Ferrari. How do you stop that material
possession trap? You can't at some level, but
I think most smart people over time realize that
possessions don't make them happy. You have to
go through that. You 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. Like
you have some expensive cars out there, some
fancy cars. Tell me how much that attracts women
versus men. Well, I'm married. Those are for
me. I just enjoy machines. For me, they're toys.
That's a particular thing where you enjoy machines.
But I think as you get older, you just realize
that there's no happiness. and 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 what 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? Whereas I posit
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 from. It comes from,
if you're smart, it's usually because you thought
things through and you have a very busy mind.
And so a busy mind can often rob you of peace
of mind. Because the peace that we seek is not
peace of mind, it's peace from mind. So if you
look at all the crazy activities you do to be
happy, whether it's trying to get laid and have
an orgasm or extreme sports or looking at something
beautiful or taking a psychedelic, you're trying
to get out of your own mind. 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 better ways to do that. Most
of the ways we try to get peace from mind are
indirect. Whereas if you understand things, if
you see things properly, you will naturally slowly
develop 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 is what's thrilling to people and
the possibility that one day they'll be able
to rest and that they'll reach this goal. That's
the fundamental delusion, that there is something
out there that will make me happy and fulfilled
forever. The 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, let's bring it 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, ah, I want that. That's what I want. 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 essentially
what you want to get everybody to is retirement.
But not retirement in the I'm 65 years old, sitting
in a nursing home, collecting a check retirement.
Different definition. Retirement is when you
stop sacrificing today for some imaginary tomorrow.
When today is complete in and of itself, you're
retired. 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. 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. Like we get into this model
of I must work for other people, work my way
up the ladder. I must like do what that person
is doing to make money. But really today in society,
you get rewarded for creative work, for creating
something brand new. that society didn't even
know yet that it wanted, that doesn't know how
to get other than through you. So the most powerful
moneymakers 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 UFC fighter? and a commentator
and a podcaster and a comedian and interested
in all these things and knows all these people.
Can't replace you. So we have to pay you what
you're worth. I never fought in the UFC though.
Oh, you didn't? Okay, sorry. Or whatever, you're
involved in that whole scene. You just have a
unique set of skill sets. So because of this
unique, what I call specific knowledge, because
of the accountability that you have with your
name, because of the leverage that you have through
your media, you're a money -making machine. I'm
sure at this point I could make you start over
tomorrow, wipe out your bank account, you'd be
rich again in no time because you have all the
skill sets. So once people have those skill sets
and the beauty is the way you've done it is you
don't have any competition. There's no substitution.
If Joe Rogan were to disappear off the air tomorrow,
it's not like random podcaster number 12 would
step in and fill that thing. No, it's just gone.
So the way to get out of that competition trap
is actually to be authentic. The 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 do it. Be authentic. And then figure
out how to map that to what society actually
wants. Apply some leverage. Put your name on
it so you take the risks but you gain the rewards.
Have ownership and equity in what you do and
then just crank it out. I think people have to
be very careful to not get trapped along the
way with things that you can afford with your
current lifestyle, like the way you're living
and the way you're earning. They're also imprisoning
you in 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're
saddled down to this job. You're not saving.
You're not putting things in a good place. And
you're working for these things. Working for
things as rewards is a real trap that a lot of
people fall into. It's the biggest one. Nassim
Taleb also says that there are two great addictions,
heroin and a monthly salary. And that's why you
can't get rich renting out your time. Because
even when you start charging more and more for
your time, it's a slow upgrade loop. And then
you upgrade your house at the same time. You
upgrade your car at the same time. You move in
the neighborhood. You really also have to get
used to ignoring your peers or upgrading or changing
the definition of your peers. There are 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 ignoring the peers is an issue
because the keeping up with the Joneses is a
real phenomenon. Yeah, envy makes the world go
round. Yeah. And then 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 as a first -generation immigrant in
Jamaica, Queens, with zero money, single mom,
two kids, working day and night, going to school.
You know, I washed dishes. I was working catering
jobs. I was mowing lawns. I was working since
the age of 11, on and off, here and there. Didn't
have two cents to rub together. I had to borrow
$400 to go to college. I was short $400. I had
to find $400. I didn't have it. Got rejected
from a job at Dunkin' Donuts. 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.
Look at the kids who are born rich, no meaning
to their lives. It's a terrible place. Your real
resume is just a cataloging of all your suffering.
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 have your four limbs,
you have your brain, you have your head, you
have your skin. That's all for granted. You have
to do hard things anyway to create your own meaning
in life. Making money is a fine one. Yeah, struggle.
It is hard. I'm not going to say it's easy. It's
really hard, but the tools are all available.
It's all there. There's also these traps that
people sort of establish in their own mind. of
giving themselves excuses or giving themselves
insurmountable obstacles, insurmountable paths
and terrain. Victim mentality. Yeah. 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
else's fault. 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 do think,
even despite what I said earlier, life is really
a single player game. It's all going on in your
head. You know, whatever you think, you believe.
will very much shape your reality, both from
what risks you take and what actions you perform,
but also just 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 not attractive. That guy's fat.
This person's a loser. Oh, who put this in my
way? You know, the more you judge, the more you're
going to separate yourself and you'll feel good
for an instant because you'll feel good about
yourself. I'm better than that. But then you're
going to feel lonely and then you're just going
to see negativity everywhere. The world just
reflects your own feelings back at you. Reality
is neutral. Reality has no judgments. To a tree,
there's no concept of right or wrong or good
or bad, right? You're born. You have a whole
set of sensory experiences and stimulations and
lights and colors and sounds, and then you die.
And how you choose to interpret that is up to
you. You do have that choice. So this is what
I meant, that happiness is a choice. If you believe
it's a choice, then you can start working on
it. And I can't tell you how to find it because...
It's your own conditionings that are making you
unhappy. So you have to uncondition yourself.
It's just like, I can't fix your eating habits
for you. I can give you some general guidelines,
but you got to 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. And 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. I just realized life is short.
I'm going to die. Again, trite, right? Trite.
In many ways. Yeah. Well, Confucius had a great
saying that, you know, every man has two lives.
And the second starts when he realizes he has
just one. Wow. And I read that. It was one of
those book dropping lines. You know, it's like
mic drop. Confucius had a lot of mic drops. Confucius
was a bad motherfucker. He was. That's a crazy
one. That was a great one. Or another one is
next time you get sick. 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. So it's your unlimited desires that
are clouding your peace, your happiness. Have
desires. You're a biological creature that stands
up and says, I can do something. I move. I resist.
I live. Just be very careful of your 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 got to let go. Did you make a gradual shift
to happiness or was it a radical change? It's
ongoing. It's gradual. Every day gets better.
So you're happier today than you were a month
ago. Yeah. Allegedly. Yeah. Yeah. I'm very happy
these days. Deliriously so. It's actually hard
for me to hang out with normal people. Really?
Yeah. So you've made a significant shift 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'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. It's basically
you have to decide it's a priority. And then
I tried every hack I possibly could. I tried
meditation. I tried witnessing. I even tried
an SSRI just to see what it would feel like.
How did it feel? It turned me from a pessimist
to an optimist, but I didn't like the physical
side effects, nor did I want to be on a drug
-for -sustain basis. So I dropped it. But it
did turn you into an optimist. Yes. At the time,
I used to be a pessimist, yeah. I started doing
things like I would start looking at the, you
know, in every moment, in everything that happens,
you can look on the bright side of something,
right? And so 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 was my immediate reaction. And then I could
say, actually. how nice of 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
work through every negative judgment that I had
until I saw the positive. And 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 of your head automatically. Very easy to
let go of them. Negative thoughts linger. So
if you interpret the positive in everything very
quickly, you let it go, right? You let it go
much faster. Simple hacks get more sunlight.
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. 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 that
conditioning from when I was 10 years old? Like,
for example, getting ready for this podcast.
You got ready? I didn't. Oh, good. I did. But
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 it's doing.
It's just rehearsing all the time to talk to
you. And then I was even rehearsing, telling
you about the rehearsal, right? So it was all
playing all these meta games. And I was just
like, shut 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.
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 trained habit.
That is a really interesting point that you want
to sound smart, that many people do that, and
especially young people. When you see someone
who is smart or someone who appears smart, they
say smart things, you go, God, I want to sound
smart. I want people to think about me the same
way I think about that person. That is my disease.
That is my feeling. It is what clutters my mind.
The thing I have to ask myself now is, 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. It's
very common. Well, all of us start out... Everything
you're a winner now in your life, it's because
you were a loser at some point. If you had gotten
all the girls, if you had all the money, if you
had everything you want, you were good looking
in junior high or high school, you wouldn't have
done anything with your life. And you would have
peaked early. It's like the Bruce Springsteen
Glory Days song, right? You would have married
your high school sweetheart. You'd be living
in your hometown. 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.
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 learn the the the joys of sucking at something.
Yeah. And actually, in our profession, 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 you give me advice on this? Can you 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. It's the only way you're going
to be able to start over with anything. Yeah,
and we talked about this, that I love your approach
to meetings. I hate meetings. If they're not
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 at a big organization. And I'm like, can
we just talk on the phone? And then we talked
on the phone. There was nothing to say. It was
just they wanted to get me in the office. Yeah,
and meetings should really be phone calls. Phone
calls should be emails and emails should just
be texts, right? Many of them, right? With meetings,
I mean, I despise meetings. I used to own the
domain idontdocoffee .com. I eventually let it
go, but I used to respond from the wallet idontdocoffee,
you know? Oh, that's hilarious. But it was a
little bit of a jerk move. But really where it
comes from is when I was young, one of my principles
was I knew I had to make money. It was my overwhelming
desire. And one of the things I did was I said,
okay, I'm never going to be worth more than what
I think I'm worth. Okay, no one's going to pay
me more than what I think I'm worth. So what
am I worth? So I picked an hourly rate for myself
that I was worth. And I said, I'm never going
to squander my time for less than this. So if
originally it was 500 bucks an hour, then I upgrade
to 5 ,000 bucks an hour. And, you know, it's
ludicrous. But pick an aspirational hourly rate.
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.
Or give it away. If I have to do some task 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 the people who are in there, right? One person's
talking, seven people listening. You're literally
just dying an hour at a time. So you have to
just drop non -urgent meetings or figure out
how to be more efficient with them if you're
going to do anything great. The extreme example
is business travel. Getting on a plane to fly
half 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 traveled for business since. I only
travel if the... travel experience will be so
entertaining and joyous because I have friends
or it's a place I want to see or whatever that
it will be complete in and of itself because
I know that whatever the business meeting I came
from is never worth it. Wow. And actually that
principle applies larger than just travel. It
applies to life in general. One of the secrets
to happiness is to really... embrace what you're
doing in that moment. That's trite. But 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 if you think it is, maybe even if it does,
it'll be very short -lived. Anything you wanted
in your life, whether it was a car or whether
it was a girl or whether it 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 adapted. 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. It's nice, but I'm used to it.
We all go through this learning. It's riding
the Ferris wheel of life. It's like you get at
the bottom. You're like, oh, I want to get to
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 that
wears off. Then you need another high. Then you
ride it back up and you ride it back down. In
fact, the more highs you get, the harder it gets
to go around the wheel. The more bored you get
of it, the harder it goes to go back up. So what
lights your fire now? 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, creating something,
playing, art. To me, creating business is play.
I create businesses early stage because it's
fun, because I'm into the 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, the product's not interesting.
It's boring. I'm not going to learn anything.
That's a beautiful luxury. It is a luxury. Art
and learning, yeah. It is a luxury. These are
not 100 % or zero things. You can, in your life,
start moving more and more towards that. But
it's a goal. It's a goal. When I was younger,
I used to be so desperate to make money that
I would have done anything. If you'd shown up
and said, hey, I got a sewage trucking business,
and you're going to go into that, I would have
said, great, let's do it. I'm going to make money.
Thank God no one gave me that opportunity. I'm
glad that it went down the road of technology
and science, which I genuinely enjoy. And so
I got to combine my vocation and my avocation.
I mean, what are you doing? You're playing. You're
having fun. You're doing art. You're not working.
No. That's what I always say when people say
I work hard. I'm like, sort of, not really. I'm
always working, but it looks like work to them,
but it feels like play to me. And that's how
I know no one can compete with me on it. because
I'm just playing 16 hours a day. And if they
want to compete with me and they're going to
work, they're going to lose because they're not
going to do it 16 hours a day, seven days a week.
Well, listen, man, there are some gems of wisdom
in this conversation. And I hope people pull
things out of this and apply them to their own
life. And I'm certainly going to listen to you
again and try to apply some of this to my own
life, stuff that I'm not already applying. But
I really appreciate your time, and I really appreciate
you coming in here. Thanks for having me. And
please tell people, your small little podcast
is just the Naval podcast, right? Yeah, best
way to find me is on Twitter, actually. I'm just
at Naval. website at nav .al. I have a YouTube
channel, Naval, and I have a podcast, Naval.
That's it. Well, thank you very much. Thank you.
Really appreciate it. Thank you. Bye, everybody.
Bye -bye.