In this episode of the podcast, I sit down with UFC commentator and podcaster Conor Mcgregor to talk about what it takes to be a good Dad and a good Entrepreneur. We talk about how to balance being a Dad and being an Entrepreneur, the importance of having a beginner's mind, and why you should just try to do everything. I hope you enjoy this episode, and that it inspires you to live your life in a way that's fun, productive, and meaningful to you and your family. Tweet me and let me know what you thought of it in the comments section below! Timestamps: 3:00 - How to balance your life and become a better Dad and Entrepreneur 9:30 - Why it's important to have a beginner s mind 14:00 - Why you should try and do everything 17:15 - The importance of a fool's mind 18:20 - How you need to be willing to try everything 19:40 - What's the worst thing you can do? 21:00- How to start over? 22:10 - What do you do when you're not good enough? 23:30- How do you know you don't have it all figured out yet? 24:40- What are you going to do next? 25:30 26:40 27: How do I know you're going to make it? 26 - How can you make it in this world? 27 - What is the most important thing in your life? 28: How can I be a better than you already have it already? 29:10 35:30 What do I'm going to be better than that you're trying to do it better than I can I have it better? & so I can t have it yet 30:00 Can you have it more than that yet I have a better chance of making it better in the next 5 years? ) 35:00 Is there more than you can I get it better so I'm not going to stop trying to improve my life more than I'm trying to be more? 36:00 Do you have a plan? ? 37: Is there a better answer to that? 39: What s your answer to something better than this? 41:00 Aha! Is it possible to have more than one thing you're just trying to get better at something?
00:02:12.000And 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.
00:02:24.000Well, it's hard because there's an analogy around mountain climbing.
00:02:47.000And it's the nature of later in life that you just don't have the time.
00:02:50.000So it's very painful to go back down and look for a new path, but that may be the best thing to do.
00:02:55.000And that's why when you look at the greatest artists and creators, they have this ability to start over that nobody else does.
00:03:03.000Like Elon will be called an idiot and start over doing something brand new that he supposedly is not qualified for.
00:03:10.000Or when Madonna or Paul Simon or U2 come out with a new album, their existing fans usually hate it because they've adopted a completely new style that they've learned somewhere else.
00:03:19.000And a lot of times they'll just miss completely.
00:03:21.000So 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.
00:03:27.000If you're not doing that, you're just getting older.
00:03:29.000Yeah, I mean, I don't even know if it's willing to be a fool.
00:03:32.000It's just, to me, the most exciting thing is to try to get better at something, to learn at things.
00:03:38.000I mean, it's really exciting when you just have incremental progress in something that you're completely new to.
00:03:43.000Yeah, 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.
00:04:42.000And 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.
00:05:04.000I think people do that with almost everything in life these days in terms of like have a one page, a one sheet, like a brief summary of the explanation for what this very complex subject might be.
00:05:28.000I got really fascinated by the way you read, because I thought there was something wrong with me by doing that.
00:05:33.000But you don't really just read a book to completion.
00:05:37.000You read, and then you pick something else up, and you just kind of go based on your whims, whatever you're interested in.
00:05:44.000Well, 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.
00:05:52.000And so she would basically say, when you get back from school, go straight to the library and don't come out.
00:07:48.000I multitask really well and I can dig really fast.
00:07:51.000If 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.
00:08:00.000It's like the Library of Alexandria that I can research at my disposal.
00:08:03.000So I no longer track books read or even care about books read.
00:08:42.000It's like rather than really looking at yourself, you're looking at how other people look at you.
00:08:47.000So it's like this one removed mental image.
00:08:50.000And 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.
00:08:57.000Because they have this strong self-image that gets built up.
00:09:39.000It has unusual problems that you don't get trained for.
00:09:45.000And you really will not understand unless you experience it.
00:09:48.000You know, I was having this conversation with my wife.
00:09:50.000We were talking about people that just come up to you and they don't care what you're doing.
00:09:55.000They don't care if I'm with my daughter, if I'm holding her, if I'm feeding her, if we're, you know, we're in the middle of an intense conversation.
00:10:34.000This is not a smart way to interact with people.
00:10:37.000And 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.
00:10:46.000Because if they can get a photo of you, then that boosts their social media profile.
00:10:50.000Like, hey, I'm sitting here with Naval.
00:12:14.000It'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.
00:12:23.000My theory behind that is there are three things everybody wants.
00:12:27.000There's actually more than three, but let's just start with the three basics.
00:13:15.000And so I try to lay them out, but in a timeless manner where you can kind of figure it out yourself.
00:13:21.000Because at the end of the day, I can't really teach anything.
00:13:22.000I 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.
00:13:29.000So this podcast actually ended up explaining this tweet storm.
00:13:33.000So there's a tweet storm with like 36, 38 tweets, got very famous, got translated into dozens of languages.
00:13:40.000And 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.
00:13:51.000And 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.
00:14:03.000And 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.
00:14:20.000So the podcast is just explaining each tweet.
00:14:23.000So these are little three, four, five minute snippets.
00:14:26.000I don't like to say the same thing twice.
00:14:47.000I think you need the principles that if you absorb these and you work hard over 10 years, you get what you want.
00:14:53.000So I've got the one on wealth creation.
00:14:55.000I'm going to attempt to do one on wealth creation.
00:14:58.000Happiness is a big word, but, you know, happiness and inner peace and calm and all that.
00:15:03.000Because 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 leaving a trail of emotional wreckage with you and your loved ones.
00:15:15.000Because you got to focus and it's very hard to be great at everything.
00:15:18.000You want to be the guy or the gal who gets there calmly, you know, quietly, without struggle.
00:15:26.000You 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.
00:15:37.000One 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.
00:15:50.000And so you've sort of developed a social contract.
00:16:01.000Well, there's social consistency, right?
00:16:05.000Humans have a need to be highly consistent with their past pronouncements.
00:16:10.000So 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.
00:16:52.000When you say that, you know you're serious.
00:16:55.000So I think a lot of these are choices that we make.
00:16:58.000And happiness is just one of those choices.
00:17:00.000And this is unpopular to say because there are people who are actually depressed, you know, chemically or what have you.
00:17:05.000And there are people who don't believe that it's possible because then it creates a responsibility on them.
00:17:10.000It says, oh, now you're saying if I'm not happy, that's my fault.
00:17:14.000I'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.
00:17:25.000If you're so smart, how come you aren't happy?
00:17:28.000How come you haven't figured that out?
00:17:30.000That's my challenge to all the people who think they're so smart and so capable.
00:17:33.000If you're so smart and capable, why can't you change this?
00:17:37.000There are a bunch of people, though, that actually take pleasure in being miserable.
00:17:42.000There's something about the pursuit of excellence and of success that supersedes all other pursuits.
00:17:51.000In their eyes, it is the peak, the pinnacle, the most important thing.
00:19:19.000Well, if you want to be a high-performance athlete, how good of an athlete are you going to be if you're always having epileptic seizures, if you're always like twitching and running around and like jumping and your limbs are flailing out of control?
00:19:31.000The same way, if you want to be effective in business, you need a clear, calm, cool, collected mind.
00:19:37.000Warren Buffett plays bridge all day long and goes for walks in the sun.
00:19:40.000He doesn't sit around like constantly loading his brain with nonstop information and getting worked up about every little thing.
00:20:02.000The 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.
00:20:11.000So a clear mind leads to better judgment, leads to better outcome.
00:20:16.000So a happy, calm, peaceful person will make better decisions and have better outcomes.
00:20:23.000So 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.
00:21:04.000Maybe him enjoying that junk food and that Coke, just, ah!
00:21:08.000That pleasing of the mind is maybe better than him just eating wheatgrass shots and kale salads and just being super worked up about everything.
00:21:19.000It'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.
00:21:41.000And 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?
00:22:38.000As 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,
00:22:54.000then you sprint again, then you rest, then you reassess.
00:22:57.000This idea that you're going to have linear output just by cranking every day at the same amount of time, that's machines, you know?
00:23:05.000Machines should be working 9 to 5. Humans are not meant to work 9 to 5. No, I agree wholeheartedly, but for people that are working for someone, there's not really that option.
00:23:18.000So that's unfortunately the rub, right?
00:23:20.000That'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.
00:23:29.000Even 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.
00:23:39.000They just don't have that ability to retire.
00:23:41.000So the first thing you have to do is you have to own a piece of a business.
00:23:45.000You 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.
00:23:53.000Yeah, 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.
00:24:06.000And I believe the way you put it is that the information age is going to reverse the industrial age.
00:24:13.000If you go back to hunter-gatherer times, how we evolved, we basically worked for ourselves.
00:24:17.000We communicated and cooperated within tribes, but each hunter, each gatherer stood on their own and then combined their resources with the family unit.
00:24:25.000But there was no boss hierarchy, hierarchy, hierarchy, where you're like the third middle manager down.
00:24:30.000In the farming age, we became a little bit more hierarchical as we had to run farms, but even those were still mostly family farms.
00:24:38.000It'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.
00:24:48.000The 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.
00:26:20.000Tons and tons of startups constantly coming up and shaving off little pieces of businesses from large companies and turning them into huge markets.
00:26:27.000So what looked like the small little vacation rental market on Craigslist is now suddenly blown up into Airbnb.
00:26:37.000But 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.
00:26:45.000We're not talking about driving an Uber.
00:26:46.000We'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.
00:26:57.000It's kind of like how Hollywood already works a little bit with how they organize for a project.
00:27:01.000You decide whether to take the project or not.
00:27:03.000The contract is right there on the spot.
00:27:09.000And 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.
00:27:14.000And I think the smart people have already started figuring out that the internet enables this.
00:27:18.000And 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.
00:27:25.000And that's actually how we are the most productive.
00:27:28.000So the information revolution, by making it easier to communicate, connect, and cooperate, is allowing us to go back to working for ourselves.
00:27:38.000Even 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.
00:27:47.000Maybe not everybody will get there, but it would be fine if we were...
00:27:50.000Even working in 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.
00:27:57.000So 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.
00:28:12.000And when those missions are done, we collect our money, we get raided, and then we rest And reassess until we're ready for the next sprint.
00:28:19.000Has there ever been a study done on happiness as it regards to the size of companies?
00:28:25.000Not that I'm aware, but to me it's obvious.
00:28:28.000The 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 be treated like a human just because you're able to do multiple things.
00:28:40.000This brings me to what is a subject that keeps getting brought up nowadays is universal basic income with the oncoming apocalypse of automation.
00:28:52.000This is how it's being portrayed by Andrew Yang, who's running for president.
00:28:55.000I sat down and talked with him about it.
00:28:58.000And he's a very smart guy and he's an entrepreneur himself.
00:29:01.000And 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.
00:29:11.000I'm going to take the unpopular point of view on this.
00:29:14.000I think it's a non-solution to a non-problem.
00:29:18.000And I mean that in the sense that automation has been happening since the dawn of time.
00:29:22.000Man, when electricity came along, that put a lot of people out of work.
00:30:01.000It's impossible looking forward to predict what kinds of jobs will be created.
00:30:05.000If 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.
00:30:15.000Those are nonsense jobs, but yet here we are.
00:30:18.000So society will always create new jobs.
00:30:20.000Civilization creates new jobs, but it's impossible to predict what those jobs are.
00:30:24.000So the question is, how quickly is that transition happening?
00:30:28.000Well, the reality is, even though everybody keeps talking about this automation apocalypse, we're at a record low unemployment.
00:30:48.000The problem with UBI, there's a couple of problems with UBI. One is, you're creating a straight...
00:30:54.000You're creating a slippery slide transfer straight into socialism, right?
00:30:59.000The moment people can start voting themselves money combined with a democracy, it's just a matter of time before the bottom 51 votes themselves or everything in the top 49. And by the way, slippery slope fallacy is not a fallacy.
00:31:11.000I know people like saying that, but they haven't thought it through.
00:31:14.000But 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.
00:31:22.000You're also forcing the entrepreneurs out or telling them not to come here.
00:31:39.000Another issue with UBI is that people who are down on their luck, they're not looking for handouts.
00:32:12.000There's no reason to give it to you and me.
00:32:14.000So you end up back towards the welfare system where you do have to figure out who needs it and who doesn't.
00:32:20.000So 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.
00:32:30.000So get basic housing, get basic food, get basic transportation, get high-speed internet access, get a phone in your pocket.
00:32:37.000Those are the kinds of things you want to give people.
00:32:41.000And finally, in terms of the rate of automation, I think we can educate people very quickly.
00:32:46.000One of the myths that we have today is that adults can't be re-educated.
00:32:50.000We view education as this thing where you go to school, you come out when you're out of college and you're done.
00:33:43.000It's a combination of Cassandra complex.
00:33:47.000It's fun to talk about the end of the world combined with a God complex, like people who have lost religion, so they're looking for meaning and some kind of end of history.
00:34:16.000To actually model general intelligence, you run into all kinds of problems.
00:34:20.000First, we don't know how the brain works at all.
00:34:23.000Number two, we've never even modeled a paramecium or an amoeba, let alone a human brain.
00:34:27.000Number 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.
00:34:38.000There's a lot of machinery inside the cell that is doing calculations that is intelligent, that isn't accounted for.
00:34:44.000And 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.
00:34:54.000So 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.
00:35:01.000Furthermore, I would posit there's no such thing as general intelligence.
00:35:04.000Every intelligence is contextual within the context of the environment that it's in.
00:35:08.000So you have to evolve an environment around it.
00:35:10.000So I think a lot of people who are peddling general AI, the burden of proof is on them.
00:35:14.000I 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.
00:35:59.000Inside the cell, there's all this machinery going on that's operating the neuron that is also part of the intelligence apparatus.
00:36:05.000You can't just ignore that and abstract that out.
00:36:08.000You have to model it down to the inside the cell level.
00:36:11.000It's also a part of the biological organism itself, and it has all these needs that, you know, the biological organism has to have food and rest, and there's a balance going on.
00:36:22.000But 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,
00:36:41.000stores 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.
00:37:37.000So we've got this three-pound wetware object that can hold all this data.
00:37:41.000Nature has been very efficient in evolving kind of how we get there.
00:37:46.000I just don't think computers are anywhere close to that.
00:37:49.000Like 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.
00:37:57.000And then, I don't think you can evolve a creature to be intelligent outside of the boundaries of feedback in a real medium.
00:38:05.000Like, 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.
00:38:24.000I mean, if you have just all the information that people have accumulated, and the lessons that people have learned, and you program that into the computer.
00:38:33.000Like, 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?
00:39:31.000That 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.
00:39:43.000That brings us back to the idea of meaning and universal basic income.
00:39:47.000I think the idea of giving someone $15,000 a year It doesn't necessarily cause – what everyone would worry about is people being on the dole.
00:40:00.000You would have a bunch of listless people out there with no meaning in life.
00:40:04.000But the idea is that $15,000 a year – and I'm not necessarily sure I agree with this.
00:40:35.000I 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.
00:40:43.000What do you say to the people that don't believe that there is such a thing as ethical or compassionate capitalism?
00:40:49.000There's many people today that are espousing Marxism and they're espousing some sort of a socialist society where...
00:40:57.000They believe that capitalism has screwed people over and eliminated the middle class.
00:41:03.000There are absolutely problems with capitalism.
00:41:07.000I think that crony capitalism is a problem with the government, you know, kind of gets in bed with them and sort of forces things.
00:41:13.000I think the bankers have really, you know, raped society and the rest of us are suffering for it.
00:41:18.000Yeah, they've essentially taken huge risks where they privatized the gains and they socialized the losses.
00:41:24.000So when it fails, they basically get bailed out and bankrupt everybody else.
00:41:30.000So capitalism has gotten a really bad name.
00:41:32.000Let's talk about it as free exchange, free markets.
00:41:35.000Free markets and free exchange are intrinsic to humans.
00:41:37.000From 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?
00:44:38.000So 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.
00:44:50.000The 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.
00:44:57.000With my aunts, with my brother, with my cousins, with my uncles, with my mom, with my family.
00:45:29.000And the outcome inequality is there because you made different choices.
00:45:33.000Now, again, going back, if it was because you didn't have the same opportunities, that's a problem.
00:45:37.000So society should always try to give people equal opportunities.
00:45:41.000So, 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 ten, you can take one year out and we'll pay for you to go retrain completely.
00:45:59.000And 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.
00:46:08.000That 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.
00:46:56.000Well, it's a very weird progressive argument, and as it pertains to race is always a weird one, right?
00:47:01.000Because 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.
00:47:12.000I'm sure there's more black people who are treated suspiciously by shop owners and the like.
00:47:18.000But the problem isn't the people who aren't treated poorly.
00:47:22.000The problem is the people who treat the people poorly.
00:47:28.000The problem is not people that didn't ask to be born white or whatever they are and they don't get harassed.
00:47:35.000So this idea of white privilege or male privilege or whatever it is, that's not the problem.
00:47:42.000You're just looking at someone who's not a victim of this particular problem that you're highlighting.
00:47:48.000But you're not looking at the perpetrators of the problem.
00:47:51.000You're making people perpetrators by simply existing and having less melanin in their skin or having their ancestors come from a geographical location.
00:48:30.000What's mostly going on is it's elitist whites, blue state whites, college educated whites, beating up on high school educated whites, blue collar.
00:48:38.000It's a white collar versus blue collar war that's going on.
00:48:41.000And the rest of us are just kind of watching like, oh, that's kind of interesting.
00:48:44.000Well, it's also a side effect of the ability to broadcast, right?
00:48:48.000Like everyone with a Twitter handle has the ability to broadcast.
00:48:51.000Everyone with a Facebook page has the ability to pontificate and have these long rambling messages.
00:48:59.000These huge statements that people put out, when you read them, it's like, how much time did you put in this?
00:49:04.000Do you put that much time in your kids?
00:49:07.000Or your job, or your life, or your future, or planning for your, you know, how much do you work out a day?
00:49:12.000I mean, are you just, these, I read some people's Facebook posts, I'm like, this is a preposterous amount of effort that you put into saying virtually nothing.
00:49:26.000It's creative in a very odd way, right?
00:49:29.000Because it's creative in 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.
00:49:39.000It'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.
00:49:45.000And it's very hard to make the nuanced arguments against than it is to just kind of go along.
00:51:13.000I wonder, because it seems like this newfound ability to broadcast that we have, whether you have a YouTube page or whether you have Twitter or whatever you're doing, this newfound ability to...
00:51:32.000I think it's actually a great thing, overall.
00:51:36.000Because now it means that any human can broadcast to any other human on the planet at any time.
00:51:40.000So, 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.
00:51:50.000There would be an instant outrage hue and cry rallying.
00:51:52.000So, in that sense, it 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.
00:52:05.000So it becomes very easy to set up a mob and have it attack somebody, take all the context out.
00:52:11.000Like even this conversation, I'm sure people will take out snippets, put them on social media and try and get somebody outraged.
00:53:06.000I think that the human brain is not designed to absorb all the world's breaking news 24-7 emergencies injected straight into your skull with clickbait headline news.
00:53:16.000If 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.
00:53:24.000This goes back to Clockwork Orange, where he has his eyes opened up and he's forced to watch the news.
00:53:29.000But I think that's what's happening right now because these are addictive, right?
00:53:33.000Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, these are weaponized.
00:53:36.000You have social statisticians and scientists and researchers and people in lab coats, literally, Best minds of our generation are figuring out how to addict you to the news.
00:53:45.000And if you fall for it, if you get addicted, your brain will get destroyed.
00:53:50.000And I think this is the modern struggle.
00:54:34.000Social media, 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.
00:54:45.000Food, they've taken sugar and they've weaponized it.
00:54:48.000They've put it into all these different forms and varieties that you can't resist eating.
00:55:02.000If you're a young male and you wander around 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.
00:55:12.000Video games, another way to addict people.
00:55:17.000Large factories of people that are working to addict you to these things and you stand alone.
00:55:23.000So 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.
00:55:50.000I hope too because you're seeing some ridiculous behavior from people today that's so common.
00:55:56.000I mean, I don't know if you've been paying attention to this, but there was a guy who – He made a video.
00:56:02.000It 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.
00:56:12.000And then a bunch of people retweeted it, like, oh my god, look, she's drunk.
00:56:15.000And so one of the online publications, some website, tracked him down and doxxed him.
00:56:25.000And it turned out he's just a day laborer who is an African American Trump fan.
00:56:31.000And 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.
00:56:38.000What's even more disturbing is Facebook gave up his information to this website.
00:56:52.000I think Facebook and Twitter and a bunch of these other social media platforms are committing slow-motion suicide through these kinds of activities.
00:57:00.000That 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.
00:57:08.000Well, you now have basically the media views it as their job to go after individuals they don't like.
00:57:13.000Yeah, 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.
00:57:19.000But the media is getting more and more desperate, right?
00:57:21.000Because 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.
00:57:30.000And then CNN came along and started commoditizing the news 24-7 broadcasts.
01:00:08.000That's the world that we're headed towards.
01:00:10.000I 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.
01:00:23.000Because they're controlling the spread of information.
01:00:31.000Like Google, I believe that, you know, one of their execs got up in front of Congress and The Congressman asked him, you know, do you manipulate search results?
01:00:40.000And he said, no, we do not manipulate search results.
01:00:46.000Google has one job, which is to manipulate search results, to pull them out of the noise and rank them properly.
01:00:51.000And 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.
01:01:01.000Now, if Google, Facebook, and Twitter had been smart about this, they would not have picked sides.
01:01:06.000They would have said, we're publishers, whatever goes through our pipes goes through our pipes.
01:01:11.000If it's illegal, we'll take it down, give us a court order, otherwise we don't touch it.
01:01:16.000If I call you up and I say something horrible to you on the phone, the phone company doesn't get in trouble.
01:01:20.000But 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.
01:01:29.000And now all of a sudden, they've taken on liability.
01:01:32.000So 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.
01:01:42.000Traditionally, the libertarian-leaning Republicans and Democrats would have stood up in principle for the common carriers, but now they won't.
01:01:47.000So my guess is, as soon as Congress, and this day is coming, if not already here, it might have even been here today, actually, because I saw something related in the news.
01:01:57.000The day is coming when the politicians realize that these social media platforms are picking the next president, the next congressman.
01:02:07.000They're literally picking, and they have the power to pick, so they will be controlled by the government.
01:03:27.000I mean, I don't think that there was ever a thing like that that was so influential and so politically, ideologically one-sided.
01:03:39.000Yeah, 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.
01:03:48.000And I don't know why that's true, but it does seem to me to be true.
01:03:51.000It's a fascinating battle that's going on right now.
01:03:55.000And conservatives, as far as social media is concerned, they're just getting chopped off at the hams, left and right.
01:04:02.000What will eventually happen is that whenever you suppress speech, The organism metastasizes.
01:04:10.000Then it has to start turning towards other means.
01:04:12.000If you're unlucky, it goes towards violence.
01:04:15.000If you're lucky, they find other outlets.
01:04:17.000I think what will happen is we will start creating decentralized media that's not owned by any single entity that can't be suppressed or shut down that will then start spreading these various things.
01:04:27.000And that will take the place of Twitter or Facebook or whatever.
01:04:32.000Well, you know, Twitter took 10 years to get to the point where it's at this mess right now.
01:04:36.000But 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...
01:04:53.000Platforms should essentially be like utilities, like the electric company.
01:04:59.000Jack is correct, and he has the right vision.
01:05:01.000It's just he's in an organization where the other individuals in the organization feel differently.
01:05:40.000I 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.
01:06:43.000It'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.
01:06:49.000And a whole bunch of people, a lot of them from Silicon Valley, piled in and said, what is it that you can't say?
01:08:02.000It wasn't possible thousands of years ago.
01:08:05.000So technology actually empowers the individual.
01:08:08.000The individual means that you have the breakdown of family structure and religion and all that, and I'm not necessarily opposed to that, but it does mean that there's a leftward shift to it.
01:08:17.000Now we're getting a small set of technologies that actually can take you more rightward.
01:08:22.000Encryption is an example, because encryption makes it easier to have privacy.
01:08:25.000It makes it easier to have money that is outside of the state.
01:08:29.000Guns, 3D printing of guns is an example of a technology that is more of a rightward shift.
01:08:35.000But generally, technology leads the world left.
01:08:38.000Yeah, it's also usually highly educated people that are involved in technology in the first place.
01:08:45.000And I think when you look at universities in particular, they tend to lean left in this country as well.
01:10:03.000And the social sciences, and you can tell they're fake sciences because they have the word science tacked on at the end, have come in and hijacked the universities and become the new think tanks.
01:10:12.000And so essentially what you see going on today in the universities is a war between the social sciences and the physical sciences.
01:10:40.000Or is it just something that has to play out?
01:10:42.000Do we have to realize the consequences of the foolishness?
01:10:45.000Well, the good news is the physical sciences have a reality on their side.
01:10:49.000Yeah, but it's not even, I mean, in many ways it's not respected.
01:10:55.000Yeah, but at the end of the day, your aircraft still has to fly.
01:10:59.000You know, your microprocessor still has to compute.
01:11:01.000So there's only so far they can take it.
01:11:04.000But 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.
01:11:17.000So 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.
01:11:25.000Synthetic 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.
01:11:38.000You won't be able to get the adulation of your peers.
01:11:41.000I 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.
01:13:24.000Whereas on the right, sometimes you've got racist hiding in there, so it doesn't help their cause.
01:13:28.000They're talking about two different things.
01:13:30.000If they were talking about the same thing, which is how many immigrants should we let into the country and what are the criteria for that, that would be a very different conversation than no immigrants or everybody comes in.
01:13:41.000And then also on the left, you have this benefit 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.
01:13:51.000To me, the test of any good system is you build a system, hand it over to your enemies to run for the next decade.
01:13:58.000So for example, if you want a censorship on Twitter or Facebook, you should build that system and then hand it over to the other side to run.
01:14:05.000So if you're a left-winger who's promoting censorship, let somebody else run it.
01:14:10.000If you want an immigration system, build the system, then hand it over to the other side to run it.
01:14:15.000That's how you know it's a good system.
01:14:16.000There'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.
01:14:30.000Gun control is a great example of that, right?
01:14:32.000There's no room for what about mental health?
01:14:35.000What about the fact that so many of these people are on psych medications?
01:15:12.000I'm sure there's going to be some people that… Here's the thing about politics.
01:15:15.000Because we have a first-past-the-post system, what that means is that whoever wins 51% of the vote in this country gets a lot of the power, right?
01:15:24.000It's not like proportional representation where the Greens have 10% and the Libertarians have 3% or whatever.
01:15:29.000It's just like you're all Democrat in power, now we're all Republican.
01:15:32.000Because of that, to win, you have to pick one of these two sides.
01:17:40.000Oh, I do it, and I do it whenever I get, like, spare time.
01:17:43.000I 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.
01:17:51.000You 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.
01:18:49.000Well, I think it's critical, and I do think that these times where you just think about things, just be alone and think about things, are so rare these days.
01:19:00.000And I think during those rare times is when you really get to understand what you actually believe or don't believe.
01:19:27.000Everyone 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?
01:19:41.000Or, you know, there are people now wearing headbands saying with tweety birds that chirp and then when they're in deep meditation, I don't know.
01:19:46.000I don't know how they make it work, but they'll be like, I got a lot of chirps today.
01:19:53.000But really, all it is is the art of doing nothing.
01:19:57.000And it's important because I think when we grow up, it's all this stuff happening to you in your life.
01:20:05.000And 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.
01:21:48.000I just try to only concentrate on breathing.
01:21:51.000I 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.
01:21:59.000And concentration is a technique to still your mind enough that you can then drop the object of concentration.
01:22:05.000So you could also just try going straight to the endgame.
01:22:08.000The 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.
01:22:14.000It'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.
01:22:21.000So it'll be hell for a while, but when you come out the other side, it's great.
01:22:26.000Or 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.
01:23:06.000So it's hard to describe, but I would say that every psychedelic state that people encounter using so-called plant medicines can be arrived at just through pure meditation.
01:23:19.000And I've definitely hit some of those states.
01:23:21.000You've hit some transcendent psychedelic states where you're hallucinating the whole deal?
01:23:37.000And 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.
01:23:45.000Where 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.
01:25:09.000All 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.
01:25:16.000I went out in New Zealand, and there's this guy that I met with.
01:25:20.000You know, everyone's on social media shouting about environmentalism and conserve and sustain.
01:25:24.000And 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.
01:25:34.000So every package that he opened, he would keep.
01:25:42.000If he opened a tea bag, he has to figure out how to compost the tea inside, how to make the tea itself useful, how to make the tea bag like a little storage item.
01:25:56.000Meeting people like him made me far more environmentally conscious than, you know, any amount of people yelling at me on social media ever will.
01:26:22.000I mean, look, it is entirely possible to somehow or another engineer all of our cups and all of our things to be biodegradable.
01:26:33.000You know, the struggle with the modern environmental movement is that they identify the correct problem, which is finite earth, spaceship earth, this is all we've got, don't ruin it.
01:27:44.000So 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.
01:27:53.000People are not going to give up economic growth.
01:27:55.000They're going to have to get rich first.
01:29:01.000Or replacing a lot of plastics with glass and paper and so on.
01:29:05.000Yeah, 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.
01:29:19.000So then in that way, plastic waste will become valuable.
01:29:52.000If 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.
01:30:06.000So that people, so that maybe give the pharmaceutical companies an incentive to preserve the biodiversity of the Amazon.
01:30:12.000Say, 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 can then license, you get the patent for 20 years or 30 years or whatever.
01:30:22.000So 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.
01:30:31.000That'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.
01:30:39.000Or the government does it, and then the government gets the patents, and the government will auction off the patents later.
01:31:06.000Obviously, I skew more towards a private property capitalist type solution because even though they're not perfect, they have been proven to actually work.
01:31:14.000Once something is your property, you take care of it.
01:31:16.000You're not going to crap all over your own house.
01:31:19.000But it should probably be temporary property, not permanent property.
01:31:23.000You see a lot of countries around the world now doing this no foreign ownership of land thing, for example.
01:31:28.000Or Mexico has no private ownership of beaches, right?
01:31:31.000So you can draw the line at certain points.
01:31:35.000Do 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?
01:31:45.000I'm not trying to illuminate so much as, you know, talking to you I learn as much as I do.
01:31:53.000And I learned it for myself because I'm being forced to articulate it.
01:31:56.000I can sit around and think my thoughts all day long, but a lot of it's going to be nonsense.
01:32:01.000Because there are gaps in thinking where you make leaps because you're kind to yourself that you don't realize you're making.
01:32:08.000But 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.
01:32:17.000And the mistake that I made when I was young was, you know, I always wanted to seem like the smartest kid in the room.
01:32:23.000You know, like just like you probably want to seem like the funniest kid in the room or the toughest kid in the room, right?
01:32:49.000So now what I realize is that the biggest mistake was memorization, right?
01:32:54.000Because 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.
01:33:03.000And so it's much more important to know the basics really well than is to know the advanced.
01:33:11.000But knowing arithmetic really well will help you really.
01:33:14.000Whether 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.
01:33:23.000So, understanding basic mathematics cold is way more important than memorizing calculus concepts.
01:33:30.000And 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.
01:33:43.000This is why there are a lot of people I'm sure that you listen to who are really smart.
01:33:46.000They use a lot of jargon and you can't quite follow their reasoning.
01:33:50.000You don't know how they're putting things together and you have this deep down suspicion they don't even really understand.
01:33:55.000So 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.
01:34:05.000Richard 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.
01:34:18.000And it's a complete unbroken logical chain that takes you through geometry, trigonometry, pre-calculus, analytic geometry, graphs, everything, all the way to calculus.
01:34:52.000But 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.
01:35:01.000Just the basic hook that'll point towards the deeper understanding, and I'm forced to explain it to people.
01:35:06.000And that's how I know I understand something.
01:35:08.000So this is what I meant originally when we talked about reading.
01:35:10.000A 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.
01:35:21.000You know, so for example, there was a, I was dealing with, this is a few months back, I was dealing with a question of, stupid topic, but the meaning of life.
01:38:23.000The 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.
01:38:37.000And you start going, Jesus Christ, am I just a little piece of this thing?
01:38:41.000Well, the answers to all the great questions are paradoxes.
01:38:44.000So, for example, you're asking, do I matter?
01:38:47.000That's really the question you asked, right?
01:38:49.000How do I matter in this infinite universe?
01:39:34.000So the answer to that question of do I matter is I am nothing and I am everything.
01:39:40.000And you'll find this with all the great questions.
01:39:42.000The 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.
01:39:49.000But 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.
01:39:59.000I feel like there's, with many people, this stress of this question is also accentuated by unhappy lives.
01:40:07.000It's accentuated by unhappy choices, by being trapped.
01:40:11.000There's a big difference between not knowing what the meaning of life is and, God, I gotta get the fuck out of this job.
01:40:18.000I have to, I can't live my life this way.
01:40:20.000What's the meaning of life if this is my life?
01:40:22.000Which is why I always start with, let's get you rich first.
01:40:27.000That's why I'm very practical about it.
01:40:50.000And you would go out in the woods by yourself.
01:40:51.000You had to give everything up to be free inside.
01:40:54.000Well, today we have this wonderful invention called money, where you can just store stuff up in a bank account.
01:40:59.000And you can basically 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.
01:42:34.000Now, if they're educated all as hardware, software, engineers, scientists, biologists, technicians, hard sciences, not the social sciences, We would all be done within five years.
01:42:43.000Robots would be doing everything from cleaning toilets to cooking food to flying airplanes to driving Ubers.
01:44:27.000Imagine 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.
01:44:41.000So we need a way to iterate on nuclear fission and eventually fusion and get them working safely, cleanly, passive failure, etc., if we're going to find our way out of the energy trap.
01:44:52.000And the best place to do that is someplace like on the Moon or Mars.
01:44:55.000Do you think that it's actually a possibility that they could...
01:44:59.000Get nuclear power to the point where it's not a detriment because what everyone's worried about is a meltdown, right?
01:45:16.000They do now have Gen 4 nuclear reactors that are passive fail-safe.
01:45:20.000So, 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.
01:45:49.000So 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.
01:46:00.000But then eventually the technology gets so good you can bring it home.
01:46:04.000Now, I want to go back to this idea of getting people rich, that somehow or another that's going to make people happy.
01:46:09.000How do you stop the natural progression that people have of, you know, oh, you know, I've got a nice Chevrolet, but I really want a BMW. I've got a nice BMW, but now I want a Mercedes.
01:47:47.000It comes from if you're smart, it's usually because you thought things through and you have a very busy mind.
01:47:52.000And so busy mind can often rob you of peace of mind.
01:47:55.000Because the peace that we seek is not peace of mind, it's peace from mind.
01:48:00.000So if you look at all the crazy activities you do to be happy, whether it's like 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.
01:48:13.000You're trying to get your monkey mind to stop chattering at you for a moment.
01:48:17.000You're trying to get peace from the mind.
01:48:20.000And there are other better ways to do that.
01:48:23.000Most of the ways we try to get peace from mind are indirect.
01:48:27.000Whereas if you understand things, if you see things properly, you will naturally slowly develop peace from mind.
01:48:38.000It'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.
01:48:50.000That's the fundamental delusion, that there is something out there that will make me happy and fulfilled forever.
01:49:02.000But 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,
01:49:25.000So people, once someone can solve their money problems, either by lowering their lifestyle or by making enough money, and, you know, essentially what you want to get everybody to is retirement.
01:49:37.000But not retirement in the, I'm 65 years old, sitting in a nursing home, collecting a check, retirement.
01:49:57.000Well, 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.
01:50:15.000So there are multiple ways to that path.
01:50:17.000But the most common is people just say, I need to make more money.
01:50:20.000And the kind of wealth creation that I talk about is about creating timeless principles and adapting yourself so that making money won't be an issue.
01:50:27.000And you can do it by doing what you love.
01:50:30.000We get into this model of, I must work for other people, work my way up the ladder.
01:50:35.000I must do what that person is doing to make money.
01:50:39.000But 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 it doesn't know how to get other than through you.
01:50:48.000So the most powerful moneymakers are actually individual brands, people like yourself, or Elon, or Kanye, or Oprah, or Trump, right?
01:50:56.000These are individual brands, eponymous name brands, who themselves are leveraged, like you're leveraged.
01:51:02.000You have podcast media going out to everybody that's leveraged.
01:51:05.000The podcasts work for you when you sleep.
01:51:06.000They have knowledge that nobody else has, which is your knowledge is the knowledge of being Joe Rogan.
01:51:11.000I mean, who else is a UFC fighter and a commentator and a podcaster and a comedian and, you know, interested in all these things and knows all these people?
01:51:27.000Whatever, you're involved in that whole scene.
01:51:30.000You just have a unique set of skill sets.
01:51:32.000So 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.
01:51:42.000I'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.
01:52:23.000Put your name on it so you take the risks but you gain the rewards.
01:52:27.000Have ownership and equity in what you do and then just crank it out.
01:52:30.000I think people have to be very careful to not get trapped along the way with things that you can afford with your current lifestyle, like the way you're living and the way you're earning, but they're also imprisoning you 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 afford,
01:52:49.000but now you're saddled down to this job.
01:53:05.000Nassim Taleb also says that there are two great addictions, heroin and a monthly salary.
01:53:12.000And that's why you can't get rich renting out your time.
01:53:15.000Because 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.
01:54:09.000I grew up as a first-generation immigrant in Jamaica, Queens, with zero money, single mom, two kids, working day and night, going to school.
01:54:58.000Yeah, your real resume is just a cataloging of all your suffering.
01:55:03.000If 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?
01:55:11.000And it's all going to be around the sacrifices that you made and the hard things that you did.
01:56:22.000Will very much shape your reality, both from what risks you take and what actions you perform, but also just your everyday experience of reality.
01:56:29.000If you're walking down the street and you're judging everyone, you're like, I don't like that person because their skin color.
01:59:21.000And is this something that you've pursued through certain books?
01:59:25.000Or 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?
01:59:50.000It 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 a sustained basis.
01:59:59.000At the time, I used to be a pessimist, yeah.
02:00:01.000I started doing things like I would start looking at the, you know, in every moment and everything that happens, you can look on the bright side of something, right?
02:00:09.000And so I used to do that forcibly, and then I trained it until it became second nature.
02:00:13.000So for example, like a friend of my wife's was over when we were dating, and she took all these photos.
02:03:38.000Well, all of us start out, you know, everything you're the winner now in your life, it's because you were a loser at some point.
02:03:50.000If you had gotten all the girls, if you had all the money, if you had everything you wanted, you were good looking and In junior high or high school, you wouldn't have done anything with your life.
02:04:23.000Or 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 joys of sucking at something.
02:04:35.000In our profession, especially when you're high visibility, the problem with peaking is that you then get drowned in death of a thousand cuts.
02:05:17.000I 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?
02:06:23.000And 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.
02:06:48.000But 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.
02:07:00.000And so once it came out of that, then I just realized the cost of meetings.
02:07:04.000The cost of meetings is so high, especially given all the people who are in there, right?
02:07:08.000One person's talking, seven people listening, you're literally just dying an hour at a time.
02:07:12.000So 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.
02:07:18.000The extreme example is business travel.
02:07:21.000Getting on a plane to fly half around the world for one meeting, which never amounts to anything, and then wasting your whole little life there and then flying back.
02:07:30.000So about five years ago, I resolved, I am never going to travel for business.
02:07:59.000One of the secrets to happiness is to really embrace what you're doing in that moment.
02:08:04.000That's trite, but where that comes from is saying, I only want to do actions that are complete in and of themselves.
02:08:11.000If I'm looking for some ulterior motive down the line, It's not going to materialize.
02:08:17.000And if you think it is, maybe even if it does, it'll be very short-lived.
02:08:21.000Anything 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.
02:08:28.000Your brain had hedonically adapted to it and you were looking for the next thing.
02:08:33.000That's a great statement, hedonically adapted.
02:09:38.000I create businesses early stage because it's fun, because I'm into the product.
02:09:42.000Even 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.
02:09:49.000So these days I will pass on all kinds of great investments because I'm like, the product's not interesting.