How to Rewrite Yourself and Escape Programming (Writing Your Own Character Sheet)
Episode Stats
Words per Minute
184.53471
Summary
In this episode, we discuss the concept of "breaking programming" and how we can break away from our programming, both biological and otherwise, to achieve optimal optimization. We also discuss the role of the family and community in breaking programming, and the role that family values play in creating balance in society.
Transcript
00:00:00.000
it's almost like you're drawing a character sheet of like what you built a character sheet for
00:00:04.780
yourself. And it worked. And then you basically make sure that as you get to rebuild your life
00:00:11.180
from the ground up with this new stage, you are building around that character and seeing yourself
00:00:15.860
as that person. And that's crucial because if you do not internalize yourself as that person,
00:00:20.740
when you're on autopilot mode, your sort of default model of yourself is that revised person.
00:00:26.320
So when you respond, you're responding and reacting in a way that that person would.
00:00:30.680
And we do this as a married couple all the time. We basically take our character sheets and we're
00:00:33.940
like, if you look at Simone, this sort of like peasant, medieval peasant woman, this was not
00:00:40.340
her historic archetype that she did in public. Would you like to know more? Well, I love you to
00:00:46.360
death, Simone. And today's topic is actually from a fan. Also, so I'm quoting a fan's email to us.
00:00:54.000
Also, if you ever find yourselves with a dearth of topics, unlikely as that may be, I'd love to hear
00:01:02.680
you expand on the perspective slash approach Malcolm mentioned in passing of escaping our
00:01:07.400
programming, biological or otherwise. I'm curious how you all might see escaping as it relates to
00:01:12.860
optimization. Do you see our programming as something to break away from or as something to
00:01:17.580
optimize by returning the system to a more ideal state of balance? I tend to think in terms of the
00:01:22.480
ladder that our operating systems are not broken, but out of balance and rebalancing is the best
00:01:28.340
method for increasing growth, strengths, and innovation in the individual family and community.
00:01:33.860
Oh, this isn't just a fan. This is someone we now have categorized in our CRM as a family friend of
00:01:40.020
high value. So thank you. You know who you are for the great topic. And this is going to be fun to
00:01:45.960
talk about. Yeah. Do you have thoughts to start? I mean, our general philosophy and tell me if I'm
00:01:53.860
getting this wrong, but the way that I believe we see it is our, our, the, the, the entire core of
00:02:02.580
what makes us human and what makes us civilized essentially is the distance between us and our
00:02:08.820
default instincts. Our, the more that we follow our default instincts, the more that we are akin
00:02:14.820
to animals and know better than them, the more that we are able to rise above and show inhibitory
00:02:19.680
control and focus on our values that we've logically arrived at rather than our feeling instinctually,
00:02:26.260
the more we are demonstrating the fact that we are the very differentiating factor that makes us
00:02:32.800
more than just animals that makes us human. So we do not believe about necessarily returning to some
00:02:38.600
form of symbiosis or some natural state or returning balance. No, no. The whole point
00:02:44.880
is to pull away, to overcome, to rise above. Well, actually, yeah, this reminds me of,
00:02:51.080
and in upcoming tracks that we have, or we are defining good and evil, you know, a lot of society
00:02:56.520
defines good and evil based off of just what is pro-social and anti-social, because these are the
00:03:01.520
traits that when held by the aggregate member of society, help those individuals who are trying to,
00:03:06.700
in average, help the individuals who are striving for personal hedonism or some sort of distributed
00:03:11.700
heathenism value system. And as such, they always end up as social value systems. They're not actually
00:03:16.440
good and evil. They're just what's in the best interest of the average individual. Whereas we
00:03:21.260
see there being as two alternate primary competing value systems. One we see as truly good and the other
00:03:28.200
we see as truly bad. And we categorize these into spiral and anti-spiral energy. Whereas the core
00:03:34.580
of a spiral-based philosophy is intergenerational human improvement, or rather the maximization
00:03:41.600
of human potentiality. And the sort of optimization function of anti-spiral energy is
00:03:48.880
the elimination of human potentiality. And so we categorize these into like words that people might
00:03:57.160
know or be familiar with. And one of the words that we would see as sort of core to anti-spiral
00:04:02.460
thinking is harmony or balance, instead of words like, which would be called a spiral energy,
00:04:08.580
industry, and ambition. And actually this comes from Gurren Lagann. If anyone's familiar with that,
00:04:14.700
is where we borrowed the concept. But I think it's really beautifully explained and illustrated in
00:04:18.860
this anime. And so why not? And we'll get into why we did that in the future. But so in that regard,
00:04:25.620
I agree with you. But then there's this second aspect of breaking your programming, which is like a
00:04:30.060
whole different aspect of our literature, which some of you may not be familiar with. I mean,
00:04:34.500
those who may not know, we've written five books. We wrote five books before we started doing these
00:04:38.380
podcasts. And the very first book we wrote, The Pragmatist Guide to Life, individuals who it's
00:04:43.880
actually used by a lot of psychologists now. So like I have psychologists call me about it and stuff
00:04:48.280
like that. Like it's a book that is frequently used within psychology offices because, and they don't
00:04:53.840
know this often when they call, but it's immediately obvious to me why it was used by psychologists.
00:04:57.160
When I first wrote the book, it started as a manual for an alternative to cognitive behavioral
00:05:02.940
therapy. So cognitive behavioral therapy is a little old at this point. And I was like,
00:05:06.980
can I build an alternative that is based around individual value systems? And this theory I have
00:05:13.340
for how sort of humans contextualize themselves and how the human mind works, which is much more
00:05:19.020
narrative focused and focuses much more on the experiments around fixing those narratives.
00:05:23.220
And it used to actually have, and you can still see this in sort of the architecture of the book,
00:05:27.180
which makes it very different from our other books. It's almost like a series of prompts.
00:05:32.160
It has a core prompt for an individual. And then it would have had a, they answer X or Y,
00:05:38.640
and then you answer Z or D so that the psychologist would always have an answer to any of the person who
00:05:44.860
was talking with some answers or questions. Right. And now it just comes off as huge lists of like
00:05:51.360
potential ways you could think about something or respond to something, which I think for a lot of
00:05:55.140
people might be more helpful. But anyway, the, the, the relevant point here being that a big part of
00:06:02.320
this is this idea that a lot of the way we contextualize ourselves are these internal narratives
00:06:07.400
and these internal narratives we pick up from, from society. And that the, the moments in our day when
00:06:13.700
we are genuinely lucid in making decisions for ourselves are small, maybe maximum 5% of the day.
00:06:23.040
Most of our human life is on autopilot. And that autopilot is determined by the self narratives we have
00:06:29.860
about ourselves, by the type of people that we think we are. And also to a certain extent by our
00:06:35.540
surroundings, the accoutrement, like if you're sitting next to a bag of chips, you're way more likely to
00:06:40.700
eat it, that kind of thing. Which why, why do you leave these children's snacks all around me?
00:06:47.440
No, no. Peanut butter Cheez-Its. They're so good. Children's snacks are so much better than adult
00:06:52.400
snacks. That's the problem. That's how they get you. Fruit by the foot. Come on guys.
00:07:00.040
That's like a fancy version now that's like mashed up fruit. That's in a consolidated, like,
00:07:06.540
I don't know, dehydrated. And then you, you eat it. It's like a, like supposed to be healthy,
00:07:10.520
but I don't, I don't know. It's delicious. Well, you see though now, like, I mean, not to like go
00:07:14.860
off on a total tangent, but like along the, our recurring theme of the infantilization of adults,
00:07:19.860
you now see all these kid foods that are now sold to millennials, like the weird looking mac and
00:07:26.600
cheese grownup cereal. And it's like, it has like very millennial targeted branding and it costs like
00:07:34.120
10 times more, but they're like, but it's keto. $10 at Walmart for like a box of mac and cheese.
00:07:39.620
Yeah. But it's, but it's with lentil noodles and chickpea noodles and their time protein.
00:07:44.280
And the cereal is totally keto. So you can't buy it for like $15. And, but like, it's just kid,
00:07:49.940
it's just kid food for adults, which is, so they do do it. But the marketing's on point. I will agree
00:07:54.620
that marketing appeals to me. Oh no. That's how it caught our eye. This is how we know about it.
00:07:58.420
I'm like, this is some nice looking mac and cheese. I'm a buy it. And then we look at the price and
00:08:02.420
we're like, we're going to eat our kids' food instead. Yeah. We'll get the children's mac and
00:08:07.640
cheese and eat that. But, but the point I'm making here is that you have these internal narratives
00:08:12.100
of who you are. And in a lot of ways, these internal narratives determine the emotional state
00:08:17.640
you will experience based on the environment you're in during most of the time when you're like not in
00:08:22.100
these rare lucid states that humans experience. And that what this means is, is I was using Adam's
00:08:28.500
family. It's this great example of this, right? You know, so the Adam's family sees a rose that's
00:08:34.560
dying or with its head cut off and they experience happiness. And Adam's family member sees, you know,
00:08:40.800
things that in other people would cause, you know, gloom or moroseness. And they have chosen for
00:08:46.560
themselves as an internal narrative that they experience happiness from these things. And we've
00:08:52.340
talked about this in other episodes, but it's worth going over because it's actually a really
00:08:55.400
interesting point about the Adam's family. And I think that modern writers has sort of forgotten
00:08:59.820
or missed this point about the Adam's family. The, the joke about the monsters. Okay. The, the,
00:09:07.140
the core joke of the monsters that makes the monsters interesting and funny is that they are
00:09:12.180
monstrous people. Like they, they are monsters, but they are attempting to live the life of the average
00:09:18.740
American family. Okay. The joke about the Adam's family is that they are normal people, but they
00:09:26.900
are made monstrous in their deviation from mainstream cultural expectations to the extent that they are
00:09:35.740
more culturally similar and more have a more personal affinity and get more acceptance within a society of
00:09:43.740
monsters than they do within a society of people. The joke, the point of the Adam's family is that
00:09:50.680
they are normal humans that differentiate from common social norms so much that they are seen as
00:09:57.080
monsters. And then the, the, the, the, the meta joke on top of this is always layered with the Adam's
00:10:02.120
family. But despite that, they are more emotionally happy. They are more emotionally fulfilled with their
00:10:08.760
relationship. They have a better relationship with their kids and everything is good. They have a
00:10:14.180
better sexual relationship. Everything about them differentiates from society and yet it is working
00:10:20.920
for them and it's not working for the rest of the world. That's the joke of the Adam's family. It's a joke
00:10:27.340
about society that society monster rises them, others them for being so different. And yet, but anyway,
00:10:34.280
I'm getting a bit off topic here, but it's an interesting point to me because I think that this is, this is
00:10:39.840
what people miss. The Adam's family aren't cool because they're monsters. They're cool because they're not
00:10:43.200
monsters, but they are so true to themselves that they are seen as monsters by society.
00:10:49.780
Yeah, they're cool because they're based, basically.
00:10:52.040
Yeah, based, basically. What being true to themselves means within this context is that they have chosen
00:11:00.360
self-narratives for themselves. Like, why do you get happiness when you see roses versus like, like live
00:11:07.460
sprayed roses versus dead roses? It's really no reason. It's a level of cultural priming and self-narrative.
00:11:13.480
It's true for so many things in our lives where we don't really think about why these things cause us
00:11:19.460
happiness other than this is just how we allowed the world around us to program ourselves. But that programming
00:11:27.320
isn't who we are. It's like the random debris we collected as like a sticky ball rolling down a dirt
00:11:33.840
road, right? But you can spray that off and design yourself to be whoever you want. That was the point
00:11:41.320
of the Pragmatist Guide to Life. And the key way that an individual does this is with something we call
00:11:47.000
flux periods in the book. So a flux period is created when an individual goes through a significant
00:11:54.580
narrative shift within their life. So the truth is, is that you don't have one narrative, okay? Like I,
00:12:00.760
earlier I was saying like individuals have narratives that determines their emotional responses to
00:12:04.380
environmental stimuli. True, but you actually have multiple layered narratives that appear within
00:12:12.580
different social cues and social contexts. What does that mean? That means that the narrative that you
00:12:19.380
developed within your office is different from the narrative you developed at home. And it's different
00:12:24.740
than the narrative you developed among your family growing up. This is why often when individuals are
00:12:30.660
around social cues and contexts that remind them of their childhood, i.e. their parents, their siblings,
00:12:37.620
and their childhood home, they are going to show dramatically more childish emotional responses to
00:12:44.020
stimuli around them. Yeah, I think a lot of people can like empathize with referring to
00:12:49.460
annoying childlike versions of oneself. Yeah, they're like, why did I let that get to me? I haven't been
00:12:54.260
like that in years. Exactly. Because they're back home and parents and like it all falls apart. All the
00:13:00.500
composure. Yeah. And who a person is at their office, you will emotionally respond differently to things
00:13:07.700
at your office than you might when you're on like your local sports team or something like that.
00:13:12.980
Mm hmm. Because I think a key way to think about it is to a great extent that the various contexts
00:13:18.420
you have in your life act like a set on a play. And we are actors responding to our costumes, to our cues,
00:13:27.380
and to our co-stars and supporting actors and all that, right? So when you are in a set where you are dressed
00:13:34.020
like a business person and surrounded by professionals and treated like a professional, yeah, you're more likely
00:13:39.700
to act like a professional and a mature person. And when you are on a set surrounded by characters who are
00:13:45.780
literally your parents who are also like treating you more like a kid and, you know, not really normalizing to
00:13:51.540
the fact that, oh my gosh, you've grown up, you're going to start acting more like a kid.
00:13:55.700
You're going to also act like that as well. Not just because parents are treating them that way, but because of
00:13:59.860
environmental cues. Yeah. But so when it comes to flux periods, why they're really important. And this is something that is...
00:14:05.700
Hold on. Before we go deeper in flux periods, I want to talk about a different context of this,
00:14:09.620
which is actually really interesting. So if you talk about humans as being like on a set,
00:14:14.500
the really interesting example is when people are intentionally structuring parts of their lives
00:14:22.340
to bring out internal narratives that are incredibly specialized to masturbating some aspect of their
00:14:31.540
their sense of self, which isn't something that they can embody in everyday life.
00:14:37.220
And one example of this is the reason why BDSM dungeons, for example, are so different than your
00:14:43.380
daily life. Like they have so many contextual cues within them that you're in a very different
00:14:48.980
environment. You wear different costumes in the same way you're wearing one costume for your family
00:14:52.580
and what costume for work. It's to trigger different narrative states really easily,
00:14:58.340
because they're trying to change everything that's associated with these narrative triggers.
00:15:02.180
But now we're also seeing hobbies based around changing narrative states.
00:15:07.460
That is what furries fundamentally are. The people who dress in fur, like dress like anthropomorphic
00:15:13.220
animals and go to conventions and interactions with other people, is they have realized I can write
00:15:18.580
my fursona's personality, design a fursona around that personality and then embody that personality.
00:15:27.620
They are choosing to experience being somebody radically different from who they are and they
00:15:34.500
are finding a level of catharsis in this. So back to flux periods, it is really difficult to find a
00:15:40.980
time in someone's life where their set gets to change, right? Like it's not like every day you're suddenly
00:15:46.660
changing your social surroundings, your clothing, your schedule, your lifestyle, your food. Like
00:15:54.420
this is very difficult and governments have struggled with this as well. So there are many,
00:15:59.380
first, I think this was really popularized by the nudge unit within the UK. There's a book called
00:16:04.100
inside the nudge unit. They didn't actually call it the nudge unit. Well, I think they did informally,
00:16:08.500
but they had another different name for this department that tried to do behavioral interventions that
00:16:13.140
would, you know, basically help people live better lives, but cost taxpayers very little.
00:16:17.060
And they found, for example, when trying to intervene in parenting in a way that led to positive
00:16:23.460
outcomes, they really were only able to successfully change behavior at one point in people's lives. And
00:16:30.260
that was only the first time they became a parent. Now this makes sense because this is a very good example
00:16:36.340
of a flux period where someone's life dramatically changes, their identity dramatically changes,
00:16:42.020
their surroundings, the people that they can befriend and hang out with, everything shifts,
00:16:46.420
their schedule, et cetera. And so at that point, people are forced to reinvent themselves. They're
00:16:53.140
put into a new set, they're a new character, and they're actually able to change their behavior.
00:16:57.540
And so then they decided to really double down and focus in on policy interventions with
00:17:01.220
first time parents, because that made sense. Other really common examples of flux periods are
00:17:05.380
moving to a new city to get a job or fundamentally changing your career. And then a good, like from
00:17:10.580
high school to college, from college to your first job. And then if you change to a violently different
00:17:15.220
job in a different city, maybe that as well. This is one reason why when people are trying to
00:17:21.140
quit an addictive, like a very dangerously addictive thing, they may move to another country
00:17:26.260
just to completely do that. Of course, the problem is if you move back to your old set,
00:17:30.260
you're going to fall back to old ways. Well, this is shown really effective in Vietnam.
00:17:34.340
They found that when people were returning to the US, I think it was heroin addictions,
00:17:38.500
something like 78% of people lost their heroin addiction. So even when you're talking about very
00:17:44.180
deep-seated neurological- Yeah, chemical, like real, real, real.
00:17:49.060
Like this is real. This is much more than just like who you are. So there's two ways to take
00:17:54.100
advantage of flux periods in your life. One is to identify upcoming flux periods and then build
00:17:59.620
narratives for when you enter them. This could be entering college. This could be a new job. This
00:18:04.260
could be a new relationship. This could be a new, you know, anything like that, that you have
00:18:08.980
upcoming, you can identify it as a flux period and then try to change. The other is to intentionally
00:18:12.980
create flux periods, as Simone was talking about. This can be done by moving and changing jobs and
00:18:20.020
changing friend circles and changing self-conceptions. But these are difficult to do, but they are an option
00:18:26.580
that is in a way available to most of the human population. It just requires sacrifice as, you know,
00:18:33.860
anything of value does. And a lot of intentionality.
00:18:37.940
Yeah. And I'm realizing, yeah, this isn't just a like wealthy person thing. I've been completely
00:18:46.180
addicted to this one show on, or like YouTube channel on budgeting. And there are a lot of very
00:18:52.260
low income, like not even low income, but like deeply in debt people who like clearly don't have
00:18:56.740
money, but like they are also capable and they frequently do move across the country, change studies,
00:19:02.020
et cetera. Like you can, regardless of your level of income, change your location and your context, and
00:19:07.220
it can be very helpful. Yeah. And a lot of people are like, but then I don't have my support network and
00:19:14.180
stuff like that. And we'll be like, well, one thing that might be in your advantage is to change
00:19:17.700
yourself into the type of person who builds your own support. Well, and support networks can also be
00:19:21.780
enablement networks. They, they can facilitate bad behaviors that are holding you down.
00:19:27.540
And they can see you as your previous self. So something that is commonly true among support
00:19:34.420
networks that are your home support network or that's network you grew up in is that they
00:19:38.820
contextualize you as who you were as a child. And this is constantly true of people's parents,
00:19:45.060
you know, like, or even, but even just before you got better or improved, like I remember I changed a
00:19:51.380
ton when I met you because, you know, you asked me, well, what are your core values? What do you
00:19:55.620
want to achieve with your life? And I told you, and you're like, okay, but you understand you're
00:19:59.700
not going to be able to do that if you continue to dress and act the way that you're dressing and
00:20:03.300
acting. And so we totally changed my outfit. We totally changed the way that I like my tone of
00:20:08.500
voice and my styling. And then when people like, so there was a colleague of mine who was previously
00:20:16.500
at the startup where I worked, where I went from after you helped me with my makeover social media
00:20:21.540
manager, which is like very low. Frontline employee managing a Facebook page to director of marketing.
00:20:28.740
And I told this, this former team member of this startup that that happened. She was like,
00:20:34.340
no, you didn't. And she wasn't joking. She was not the kind of person who knew how to joke. I think
00:20:39.860
she just didn't believe me because the person that she knew before was not that. And being surrounded
00:20:44.820
by people like that, people surround it. You're like being surrounded by people who are like,
00:20:48.660
no, you're not going to go sober. Like, of course you're going to try for a while and then you're
00:20:52.260
going to fail. Like, then of course you're going to fail because they're not helping you. You need to
00:20:56.100
be around people. Also, like you can see, this is kind of correlated to the research that finds that
00:21:00.900
things like fatness and depression are kind of contagious. Yeah. That if you have a lot of fat
00:21:06.580
friends, you're much more likely to be fat. If you have a lot of depressed friends and family,
00:21:10.260
you're more likely to be depressed. Like these things catch. So yeah.
00:21:14.900
And I hate to say that if you want to hear something offensive, the data does show,
00:21:21.540
oh, I probably shouldn't say this, but I will. If you have gender dysphoria and you change your friend
00:21:28.660
group to a friend group that isn't populated with a lot of trans individuals or people with gender
00:21:34.180
dysphoria, it goes away. I'm not going to say this is a social phenomenon, but I am going to say that
00:21:42.340
there is evidence that gender dysphoria is in part within some individuals, a result of societal
00:21:51.300
narratives. And it is very painful. I understand from individuals who experienced it. And so we are just
00:21:57.620
offering this as an alternative to some of the potentially more expensive alternatives out there
00:22:03.700
and, and, and, and may help because it does, it does, you know, I don't like to hear people
00:22:08.580
struggling or suffering. And when there is a real alternative that, that works, you know, it's,
00:22:14.500
it's worth highlighting. Yeah. And again, I would say that this is something I'm inferring from the
00:22:19.780
research. And the reason I'm inferring this from the research is it appears to emerge in individuals
00:22:25.540
when they are in social circles that are overwhelmingly gender dysphoric or trans and
00:22:29.780
it doesn't emerge before then. And these individuals have a very common narrative when
00:22:35.300
I'm reading these narratives, which is when they reflect back on their lives, they'll say,
00:22:40.980
I saw this as a major issue throughout my life, but at any individual period in their life, if you
00:22:45.860
ask them or other people, they wouldn't have seen this as an issue. And then sort of all of a sudden,
00:22:50.820
they begin to fixate on it as an issue. And then all of a sudden it becomes the most important issue
00:22:55.380
of their lives and it begins to really eat at them and it becomes something they're thinking
00:22:59.460
about constantly. But it's this sort of spiral that increases in importance in their daily lives
00:23:05.380
over and over and over as days continue that is fed by a community that is reinforcing that spiral.
00:23:14.260
And that whether it's an online community or a narrative building community was in a,
00:23:18.100
you know, but it's, it's, it's not something that happens totally organically. I, I, I actually
00:23:23.220
don't think I've ever seen an instance of it happening totally organically. It's, it's always
00:23:28.980
some sort of online community or something like that, which identifies the problem and then feeds
00:23:34.500
behavior and narratives around the problem. When I'm saying the problem, I'm talking about
00:23:38.900
gender dysphoria, not being trans. It's not a problem. I'm not saying that. I'm just saying
00:23:43.380
that some of this stuff can be narrative based issues instead of biological issues.
00:23:50.980
So if you know that you have a chance to change your context, that you're, you're approaching a
00:23:56.660
flux period where your entire set dressing, whatnot can be changed. First, you need to make sure that
00:24:01.940
you fully own personally your fundamental values and your objective function of life. The thing you want
00:24:08.420
to maximize most or the things you want to maximize most, because if you don't have that straight,
00:24:12.260
you're not going to get anything straight. Second, then you have to decide, okay, who is the ideal
00:24:17.540
persona? Like, what is the ideal model of a person that at least has dealt the cards that I've been
00:24:23.380
dealt? You know, new, new wardrobe, potentially new accent, new, you know, like, what, what,
00:24:31.060
yeah, what are they like? It's almost like you're drawing a character sheet of like,
00:24:33.780
you built a character sheet for yourself. And it worked. And then you basically make sure that
00:24:40.900
as you get to rebuild your life from the ground up with this new stage, you are building around
00:24:46.100
that character and seeing yourself as that person. And that's crucial because if you do not internalize
00:24:51.620
yourself as that person, when you're on autopilot mode, your subconscious is not going to like,
00:24:57.860
I'm using the word subconscious, not like I'm a Freudian or Jungian. Let's be clear about that.
00:25:02.740
But your, you know, your sort of default model of yourself is that revised person.
00:25:08.020
So when you respond, you're responding and reacting in a way that that person would.
00:25:16.180
Well, I am deeply happy of the people. And we do this as a married couple all the time. We
00:25:21.060
basically take our character sheets and we're like, if you look at Simone, this sort of like
00:25:25.780
peasant, medieval peasant woman, this was not her historic archetype that she did in public.
00:25:32.020
My historic archetype, I've actually started wearing the outfit more because we get a good
00:25:35.460
response from it, from, from fans. And I might go back more towards it, is the suit. But I used
00:25:44.660
With jeans. Always with jeans. People can't tell that in the show, but even still, I'm always wearing
00:25:48.420
it with jeans. But I stopped wearing it because it seemed a little juvenile. By that, what I mean is
00:25:53.940
some archetypes work better for specific age ranges. And that worked really well when I was a young,
00:25:58.660
up and coming sort of like boy genius CEO and, and venture capitalist. It works a lot less well
00:26:05.460
when I am a middle-aged dad, venture capitalist and just look young. And it's the same as you,
00:26:12.020
you know, with your hair, you're growing it out now. Brian Kaplan's suggestion, by the way,
00:26:15.700
he goes, you know, it's your audience. I think you should have longer hair. And we're like, you know
00:26:18.740
what? We agree. And also I think that short hair on women looks uniquely hot when a woman is
00:26:23.860
incredibly useful. This is just my perspective, right? But I do not think it serves middle-aged
00:26:30.020
women well. It makes them look like Karens, basically, right? Instead of like hot Vulcans.
00:26:37.060
And so, you know, she's going for this more mid, mid, mid hair. And this is something you have to
00:26:41.700
keep in mind as you age. Is it the narratives you have built for yourself at a younger age in terms
00:26:46.180
of how you interact and how you present yourself? May not work.
00:26:49.540
Well, and I think this is also like kind of, it dovetails with the ongoing argument you have
00:26:55.540
about people not realizing that also the things that make them happy are going to change over time.
00:27:00.180
And that, you know, a lot of people are stuck with their perpetual teenage model of, of self,
00:27:07.220
both like internally and externally. And in terms of their goals, when you do actually have to adjust
00:27:12.340
the model and your character to adapt, not only to what makes you happy as an older person,
00:27:18.660
but also to adapt to the cards that you've been dealt. Because what I was alluding to earlier is
00:27:22.740
like, you can't just be like, oh, well, I'm just going to act like I'm Tony Stark because that, that,
00:27:28.740
that kind of person is more likely to, I don't have those cards. Yeah. Like, I'm sorry. Are you a
00:27:34.900
really wealthy, extremely well-connected genius? Because if not, I think you're going to have to like,
00:27:40.980
you know, adapt for your health profile, your fitness profile, your age, your, your, you know,
00:27:47.620
economic starting point, uh, your, your background, your culture and your looks. And, you know,
00:27:54.260
you can't just, I have to say, I uniquely loved your pre-mom profile. So I remember when we were
00:27:59.700
workshopping this, it was when I was in Korea and the one that we had basically, if you see all pictures
00:28:04.020
of her, you'll see this. This was, this was post. So when we first started dating, your profile was like
00:28:08.900
these big hat thing. What are they called? Fascinators. Fascinators. These big, fancy
00:28:14.340
hat things and sort of quirky, but otherwise a little conservative-ish and professional outfits,
00:28:20.340
but, but nothing else. When I first met her, she had extremely long hair, like below her butt. Like,
00:28:25.380
it was like a hippie. I did not enjoy that. And so I did, she cut her hair and she did that for a while
00:28:31.140
after, after, after cutting her, the, the, the, the fascinators when she still had long hair.
00:28:34.740
And then you went into, we had developed was like this incredibly competent in store and sort of like
00:28:40.660
fascist chic, I guess I'd call it, you know, all black tight fitting, like high, large boots,
00:28:48.020
stuff like that in your outfits and stuff. You looked like.
00:28:53.460
Right. And, and, and yeah, well, that's what people call us, right. You know, techno feudalist,
00:28:58.340
right. You're not calling us techno fascist anymore, you know,
00:29:02.180
But it was, it was a hot outfit. It was, it was very Hugo Boss.
00:29:08.100
I'm joking, not using, not using, not using, we never would buy designer brands.
00:29:12.100
But they had a, a phase when I was younger where they went into this sort of like
00:29:15.940
gossy, authoritarian look that, that you really embodied in that previous stage. And I really
00:29:20.660
liked that. I love you to Desimone and you are the best wife any man could ever hope for,
00:29:28.100
because you have chosen to build out of the narrative for yourself. And you have chosen
00:29:33.540
that things I, or at least my intuition is things you've chosen the things that will make me happy,
00:29:39.780
make you happy. And that's the way I've built myself as well. I see myself, it's very important
00:29:45.860
to me to be a good husband to you because that is my narrative these days.
00:29:51.380
Yeah. And you know what, that is a really common thread among various successful couples is that a core
00:29:57.140
part of their identity is that they want to do well by their spouse and partner and surprise and
00:30:02.100
delight them. So another thing to keep in mind for those who are looking to reinvent themselves.
00:30:16.980
instructions to the team about American Airlines, which has once again done something antagonistic toward
00:30:26.580
travel agencies, they basically you will not accrue American Airlines miles anymore if you book with an
00:30:34.660
agency, unless it is a preferred agency, but the preferred agency has to book a certain percentage of
00:30:40.580
its flights using NDC. And if you don't use the new distribution capability, this certain percentage
00:30:47.460
of amounts, you're not a preferred agency. But the problem that our agents come back with is, well, yeah,
00:30:52.420
that except NDC prices are worse than the prices on a.com. So I just booked directly on American
00:30:58.180
airlines.com. And then why should we be penalized for that? Because that's what they want anyway.
00:31:03.300
And our rep basically just wrote back to us like,
00:31:08.260
that's not true. We don't have price differences.
00:31:11.220
So people who don't know, we, our day job is running a travel agency, a chain of travel agencies,
00:31:18.260
a global chain of travel agencies. One of the biggest in the South, actually, the more,
00:31:23.220
I don't know what it used to be, but travel agencies, they're a thing of the past these days.
00:31:26.820
So airlines have decided they don't like us. They're not wrong because cutting out bureaucrats
00:31:31.460
and middlemen and, you know, unnecessary layers, including the software that airlines used to use to
00:31:38.580
get bookings made for them and including travel agencies in many instances is the smart thing to
00:31:43.460
do. I pay for middlemen when it's efficient and easy to have things go directly with you. I don't
00:31:48.500
fault them. We still provide a lot of value for complex and group and entertainment and production
00:31:52.420
travel, but I'm just so frustrated. I just, ah, sometimes. Anyway, I do love you. And this is our
00:31:58.980
post work. Like we both wake up, you wake up at 2 a.m. I wake up at 4 a.m. So we can finish early
00:32:03.700
and save time to do podcast recordings is our personal date time. And I'm going to focus on
00:32:08.500
that now and not the fact that my job really stresses me out.