The Joe Rogan Experience - Joe Rogan Experience #1309 - Naval Ravikant

00:00:00.000 Two, one, boom. 0.97

00:00:02.000 Alright, we're live.

00:00:03.000 Thank you very much for doing this, man.

00:00:04.000 I really appreciate it.

00:00:05.000 I've been absorbing your information and listening to you talk for quite a while now, so it's great to actually meet you.

00:00:12.000 Thanks for having me.

00:00:31.000 Entirely focused on success and financial success and tech investing, but rather how to live your life in a happy way.

00:00:42.000 That's an odd balance.

00:00:45.000 Yeah.

00:00:46.000 You know, I think the reason why people like hearing me is because it's like if you go to a circus and you see a bear, right?

00:00:54.000 That's kind of interesting, but not that much.

00:00:55.000 If you see a unicycle, that's interesting.

00:00:57.000 But you see a bear on a unicycle, that's really interesting, right?

00:01:00.000 So when you combine things you're not supposed to combine, people get interested.

00:01:04.000 It's like Bruce Lee, right?

00:01:05.000 Striking thoughts, philosophy, plus martial arts.

00:01:08.000 Yeah.

00:01:09.000 And I think it's because at some level, all humans are broad.

00:01:13.000 We're all multivariate, but we get summarized in pithy ways in our lives.

00:01:18.000 And at some deep level, we know that's not true, right?

00:01:20.000 Every human basically is capable of every experience and every thought.

00:01:25.000 You're a UFC comedian, commentator, podcaster, but you're also more than that.

00:01:29.000 You're also a father.

00:01:34.000 Welcome to my show!

00:01:52.000 Where you try your hand at everything.

00:01:55.000 And as one of my friends says, specialization is for insects.

00:02:00.000 So everyone should just be able to do everything.

00:02:02.000 And so I don't believe in this model anymore of trying to focus your life down on one thing.

00:02:07.000 You've got one life.

00:02:08.000 Just do everything you're going to do.

00:02:10.000 I couldn't agree more.

00:02:12.000 And I think that sometimes people find certain success in whatever the endeavor is, and then they think that that is their niche, and they stick with it, and they never change, and they're almost out of fear.

00:02:24.000 Well, it's hard because there's an analogy around mountain climbing.

00:02:29.000 Like, if you find a mountain...

00:02:30.000 And you start climbing and you spend your whole life climbing it and you get, say, two thirds of the way.

00:02:35.000 And then you see the peak is like way up there, but you're two thirds of the way up, you're still really high up.

00:02:39.000 But now to go the rest of the way, you're going to have to go back down to the bottom and look for another path.

00:02:44.000 Nobody wants to do that.

00:02:45.000 People don't want to start over.

00:02:47.000 And it's the nature of later in life that you just don't have the time.

00:02:50.000 So it's very painful to go back down and look for a new path, but that may be the best thing to do.

00:02:55.000 And that's why when you look at the greatest artists and creators, they have this ability to start over that nobody else does. 0.94

00:03:03.000 Like Elon will be called an idiot and start over doing something brand new that he supposedly is not qualified for.

00:03:10.000 Or 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. 0.98

00:03:19.000 And a lot of times they'll just miss completely. 0.96

00:03:21.000 So you have to be willing to be a fool and kind of have that beginner's mind and go back to the beginning to start over. 0.97

00:03:27.000 If you're not doing that, you're just getting older. 0.99

00:03:29.000 Yeah, I mean, I don't even know if it's willing to be a fool.

00:03:32.000 It's just, to me, the most exciting thing is to try to get better at something, to learn at things.

00:03:38.000 I mean, it's really exciting when you just have incremental progress in something that you're completely new to.

00:03:43.000 Yeah, I live for the aha moment, that moment when you connect two things together that you hadn't connected together before, and it fits nicely and solidly, and it kind of helps form a steel framework of understanding in your mind that you can then hang other ideas off of.

00:03:57.000 That's what I live for.

00:04:00.000 It's that curiosity fulfilled.

00:04:01.000 And it's what little children do, too.

00:04:03.000 My little son is always asking, why, why, why, why, why?

00:04:06.000 And I always try and answer him.

00:04:08.000 And half the times I realize, actually, I don't really understand why.

00:04:11.000 I just have a memorized answer for you, but that's not really understanding.

00:04:15.000 Yeah, those are weird conversations, right?

00:04:17.000 When you're talking to your kids and you say, look, the reality is I don't know a lot of things.

00:04:22.000 Yeah, I've just memorized a lot of things.

00:04:25.000 And there's certain things that you just can't know.

00:04:28.000 Yeah, you realize that you have answers for a few things that you've thought through.

00:04:33.000 Then you sort of have cover-ups, like trap doors, like don't go here.

00:04:37.000 This is just a cover-up.

00:04:38.000 I don't really know the answer to what the meaning of life is or how we got here.

00:04:42.000 Yes.

00:04:42.000 And then you've got a whole bunch of memorized stuff because a lot of intelligence these days is just the external brain pack of civilization.

00:04:49.000 I know it's out there.

00:04:50.000 I know the answers are out there.

00:04:51.000 I know how to look them up and I've memorized some of them.

00:04:53.000 And I kind of understand how money works and the Federal Reserve prints it and what this government thing is, but not really.

00:04:59.000 Right.

00:05:00.000 Not good enough to teach it in university.

00:05:02.000 Yeah.

00:05:04.000 I 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.

00:05:18.000 T.L.D.R., right?

00:05:19.000 Don't give me the lecture, give me the book.

00:05:22.000 Don't give me the book, give me the blog post.

00:05:23.000 Don't give me the blog post, give me the tweet.

00:05:25.000 Don't give me the tweet.

00:05:26.000 I already know.

00:05:27.000 Yeah.

00:05:28.000 I got really fascinated by the way you read, because I thought there was something wrong with me by doing that.

00:05:33.000 But you don't really just read a book to completion.

00:05:37.000 You read, and then you pick something else up, and you just kind of go based on your whims, whatever you're interested in.

00:05:44.000 Well, I was raised by a single mom in New York, and she used the local library as a daycare center, because it was a very tough neighborhood.

00:05:52.000 And so she would basically say, when you get back from school, go straight to the library and don't come out.

00:05:57.000 Until I pick you up late at night.

00:05:58.000 So I used to basically live in the library and I read everything.

00:06:01.000 I read every magazine.

00:06:02.000 I read every pictograph.

00:06:04.000 I read every book.

00:06:05.000 I read every map.

00:06:05.000 I just ran out of stuff to read.

00:06:07.000 I just read everything.

00:06:07.000 So I got over this idea of that reading a large number of books or reading a book to completion as a vanity metric.

00:06:14.000 Because really, when people are putting up photos on Twitter and Instagram of look at my Yeah, sure.

00:06:34.000 In a finite space, you get enough advice, it all cancels to zero.

00:06:38.000 There's a lot of nonsense in books out there too.

00:06:41.000 So I don't read any more to complete books.

00:06:44.000 I read to satisfy my genuine intellectual curiosity.

00:06:48.000 And it can be anything.

00:06:49.000 It could be nonsense.

00:06:50.000 It could be history.

00:06:51.000 It could be fiction.

00:06:52.000 It could be science.

00:06:52.000 It could be sci-fi.

00:06:53.000 These days it's mostly sci-fi, philosophy, science, because that's just what I'm interested in.

00:06:57.000 But I will read for understanding.

00:07:00.000 So a really good book, I will flip through.

00:07:03.000 I won't actually read it consecutively in order.

00:07:05.000 And I won't even finish it.

00:07:06.000 I'm looking for ideas, things that I don't understand.

00:07:09.000 And when I find something really interesting, I'll reflect on it.

00:07:12.000 I'll research it.

00:07:14.000 And then when I'm bored of it, I'll drop it or I'll flip to another book.

00:07:18.000 Thanks to electronic books, I've got 50, 70 books open at any time in my Kindle or iBooks, and I'm just bouncing around between them.

00:07:26.000 It's also a little bit of a defense mechanism to how, in modern society, we get too much information too quickly.

00:07:32.000 And so our attention spans are very low.

00:07:35.000 So you get Twitter, you get Instagram, you get Facebook, you're just used to being bombarded with information.

00:07:40.000 So you can view that as a negative and be like, I have no attention span.

00:07:46.000 Or you could view that as a positive.

00:07:48.000 I multitask really well and I can dig really fast.

00:07:51.000 If I find a thread that's interesting, I can follow through five social networks, through the web, through the libraries, through the books, and I can really get to the bottom of this thing very quickly.

00:08:00.000 It's like the Library of Alexandria that I can research at my disposal.

00:08:03.000 So I no longer track books read or even care about books read.

00:08:07.000 It's about understanding concepts.

00:08:09.000 Yeah.

00:08:09.000 Yeah, you brought up two awesome points.

00:08:11.000 First of all, the social media aspect of books and basically anything.

00:08:16.000 It's such a weird way to display your life because you're displaying the best aspects of your life in some sort of a glass case.

00:08:27.000 It's an unrealistic version of your life that you cultivate and you curate.

00:08:33.000 And I'm as guilty of that as anybody.

00:08:35.000 Everybody's guilty of it.

00:08:36.000 I'm guilty of it too.

00:08:37.000 I mean, I pose with my dog every time I run.

00:08:40.000 Yeah.

00:08:41.000 We're always signaling.

00:08:42.000 It's like rather than really looking at yourself, you're looking at how other people look at you.

00:08:47.000 So it's like this one removed mental image.

00:08:50.000 And it's kind of a disease because social media is making celebrities of all of us and celebrities are the most miserable people in the world.

00:08:57.000 Because they have this strong self-image that gets built up.

00:09:00.000 It gets built up by compliments.

00:09:01.000 Every time somebody pays you or me a compliment, and we're like, oh, well, thank you, right?

00:09:05.000 Then that builds up an image of who we are. 0.99

00:09:07.000 And then one idiot comes along, one out of 10, one out of 100, and they can easily tear it down. 0.99

00:09:13.000 Because it doesn't take many insults to cancel out a lot of compliments. 1.00

00:09:16.000 And now you're carrying around this big, weighty self-image, and it's just very easy to be attacked.

00:09:20.000 And because you're famous or you're well-known, people want to attack you.

00:09:24.000 So Being a celebrity is no good.

00:09:27.000 It's actually a problem.

00:09:29.000 One of my tweets, and these are all reminders to myself, is you want to be rich and anonymous, not poor and famous.

00:09:36.000 There's benefits to it.

00:09:37.000 Of course.

00:09:38.000 We wouldn't do it.

00:09:39.000 It has unusual problems that you don't get trained for.

00:09:45.000 And you really will not understand unless you experience it.

00:09:48.000 You know, I was having this conversation with my wife.

00:09:50.000 We were talking about people that just come up to you and they don't care what you're doing.

00:09:55.000 They 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.

00:10:03.000 She's crying.

00:10:03.000 She could be crying.

00:10:04.000 And some bro will come over and just immediately have to take a picture.

00:10:09.000 Doesn't care.

00:10:10.000 His needs supersede the daughter. 0.68

00:10:12.000 And my wife was saying that before she knew me, she used to think that that's just part of the price of being famous.

00:10:20.000 That people like you, that's just part of the price of being famous.

00:10:23.000 And now, when it interrupts her life.

00:10:26.000 And, you know, it interrupts the children and it interrupts friends.

00:10:30.000 And, you know, now she's like, this is annoying.

00:10:33.000 Like, this is not healthy.

00:10:34.000 This is not a smart way to interact with people.

00:10:37.000 And that people have this weird challenge, this weird thing that if you become famous, there's this weird challenge where people just want to come to you, especially today.

00:10:46.000 Because if they can get a photo of you, then that boosts their social media profile.

00:10:50.000 Like, hey, I'm sitting here with Naval.

00:10:52.000 Look at that smile.

00:10:53.000 Hey, man!

00:10:55.000 Anonymity is a privilege.

00:10:56.000 On the other hand, it's self-inflicted.

00:10:58.000 I mean, we brought it on ourselves.

00:10:59.000 I don't think we knew what it was, though.

00:11:01.000 We did.

00:11:01.000 But we carry on.

00:11:04.000 It tells us we are getting something out of it.

00:11:06.000 So, you know, there are times when someone will approach me in public and I'm a little resentful.

00:11:10.000 And there are other times where I'm just like, actually, I'm really grateful that, you know, I worked for this.

00:11:14.000 I got this.

00:11:15.000 Right.

00:11:15.000 This is the payoff.

00:11:16.000 Just embrace it, smile, grin and bear it.

00:11:18.000 But you have a different sort of celebrity too, right?

00:11:21.000 You're a hero amongst investors.

00:11:25.000 I'm a hero among young male geeks.

00:11:29.000 Those are some of my favorite people.

00:11:31.000 Right, but that's not the kind of celebrity I think most people set out to get, especially most guys, right?

00:11:36.000 You want the cute females. 1.00

00:11:37.000 Yeah, you want chicks. 1.00

00:11:38.000 Yeah.

00:11:39.000 I look at my brief little YouTube clips.

00:11:42.000 I have a tiny little podcast going now, and it's like 95% male.

00:11:47.000 Oh, I'm sure.

00:11:48.000 Yeah, this is very highly...

00:11:49.000 18 to 35. Yeah, what is the numbers?

00:11:53.000 Same thing.

00:11:53.000 Yeah, it's in the 90s.

00:11:55.000 You do that one very small podcast where you just have small three or four minute clips.

00:12:03.000 Yeah, so what it was, I did a tweetstorm called How to Get Rich Without Getting Lucky, and it got pretty popular on Twitter.

00:12:10.000 It's really about wealth creation.

00:12:12.000 I just use the click-baity title.

00:12:14.000 It's trying to basically lay out timeless principles of wealth creation that if you absorb them, you become the kind of person who can create wealth, create business, make money.

00:12:23.000 My theory behind that is there are three things everybody wants.

00:12:27.000 There's actually more than three, but let's just start with the three basics.

00:12:31.000 Everybody wants to be wealthy.

00:12:42.000 Yeah.

00:12:54.000 They can actually be taught, right?

00:12:57.000 And fitness, I'm not going to teach.

00:12:58.000 There are a lot of people who you've had on here, including yourself, who know a heck of a lot more about fitness and health than I do.

00:13:04.000 But I was born poor and miserable.

00:13:07.000 And I'm now pretty well off and I'm very happy.

00:13:11.000 And I worked at those.

00:13:13.000 And so I've learned a few things.

00:13:14.000 There are some principles.

00:13:15.000 And so I try to lay them out, but in a timeless manner where you can kind of figure it out yourself.

00:13:21.000 Because at the end of the day, I can't really teach anything.

00:13:22.000 I can only inspire you and maybe give you a few hooks so you can remember things when they happen or put a name to them.

00:13:29.000 So this podcast actually ended up explaining this tweet storm.

00:13:33.000 So there's a tweet storm with like 36, 38 tweets, got very famous, got translated into dozens of languages.

00:13:40.000 And these were principles that I came up with for myself when I was really young, around 13, 14. And I've been carrying them in my head for 30 years.

00:13:49.000 And I've been sort of living them.

00:13:51.000 And over time, I just realized, like, sadly, or fortunately, the thing that I got really good at was looking at businesses and figuring out the point of maximum leverage to actually create wealth and capture some of that.

00:14:03.000 And do it in a very long-term kind of way, not the banker, crash the economy, get bailed out kind of way, but build businesses and help people and provide value kind of way, especially when applied to modern technology and leverage in this age of infinite leverage that we live in.

00:14:20.000 So the podcast is just explaining each tweet.

00:14:23.000 So these are little three, four, five minute snippets.

00:14:26.000 I don't like to say the same thing twice.

00:14:28.000 I don't like to explain in detail.

00:14:31.000 I feel like if you have something original and interesting to say, you should say it.

00:14:36.000 Otherwise, it's probably been said better.

00:14:37.000 So that podcast tries to be information dense.

00:14:41.000 It tries to be very concise.

00:14:42.000 It tries to be high impact.

00:14:44.000 It tries to be timeless.

00:14:45.000 And it has all the information.

00:14:47.000 I think you need the principles that if you absorb these and you work hard over 10 years, you get what you want.

00:14:53.000 So I've got the one on wealth creation.

00:14:55.000 I'm going to attempt to do one on wealth creation.

00:14:58.000 Happiness is a big word, but, you know, happiness and inner peace and calm and all that.

00:15:03.000 Because what you want is, you don't want to be the guy who succeeds in life while being high-strung, high-stress and unhappy and leaving a trail of emotional wreckage with you and your loved ones.

00:15:13.000 Which is more common than not.

00:15:15.000 Because you got to focus and it's very hard to be great at everything.

00:15:18.000 You want to be the guy or the gal who gets there calmly, you know, quietly, without struggle.

00:15:26.000 You want to be the person who's the, when there's a crisis going on, you want to be the calmest, coolest cucumber in the room who still also figures out the correct answer.

00:15:35.000 If you can be.

00:15:37.000 One of the things that you were saying is that you feel like happiness is something that you can learn, and then you can teach yourself to be happy, even just by adopting the mindset that you are a happy person, and proclaiming that to your friends.

00:15:50.000 And so you've sort of developed a social contract.

00:15:53.000 I'm a happy person.

00:15:54.000 And then, well, I have to live up to that.

00:15:57.000 Yeah, I've got hundreds of techniques.

00:15:59.000 How did you develop that one?

00:16:01.000 Well, there's social consistency, right?

00:16:05.000 Humans have a need to be highly consistent with their past pronouncements.

00:16:10.000 So the way I started my first tech company was I was working inside a larger organization, and I told everybody that I was going to go start a company.

00:16:17.000 I was like, I hate this place.

00:16:18.000 I'm going to do my own thing.

00:16:20.000 I'm going to be a successful entrepreneur.

00:16:22.000 Six months pass, nine months pass, then people start going, you're still here?

00:16:26.000 I thought you were going to go start a company.

00:16:28.000 Were you lying?

00:16:30.000 That was the implication.

00:16:31.000 So we kind of know this.

00:16:33.000 Social contracts are very powerful.

00:16:35.000 If you want to give up drinking and you're not serious about it, you'll say, I'm going to cut back.

00:16:39.000 I'm going to have only one drink a night.

00:16:41.000 I'm going to only drink on weekends.

00:16:43.000 You tell yourself.

00:16:44.000 But if you're serious, you'll announce it on Facebook.

00:16:47.000 You'll tell all your friends.

00:16:48.000 You'll tell your wife.

00:16:49.000 You'll say, I'm done drinking.

00:16:50.000 I'm throwing everything out of the house.

00:16:51.000 You'll never see me drink again.

00:16:52.000 When you say that, you know you're serious.

00:16:55.000 So I think a lot of these are choices that we make.

00:16:58.000 And happiness is just one of those choices.

00:17:00.000 And this is unpopular to say because there are people who are actually depressed, you know, chemically or what have you.

00:17:05.000 And there are people who don't believe that it's possible because then it creates a responsibility on them.

00:17:10.000 It says, oh, now you're saying if I'm not happy, that's my fault.

00:17:14.000 I'm not saying that, but I'm saying that just like fitness can be a choice, health can be a choice, nutrition can be a choice, working hard and making money can be a choice, happiness is also a choice.

00:17:25.000 If you're so smart, how come you aren't happy?

00:17:28.000 How come you haven't figured that out?

00:17:30.000 That's my challenge to all the people who think they're so smart and so capable.

00:17:33.000 If you're so smart and capable, why can't you change this?

00:17:37.000 There are a bunch of people, though, that actually take pleasure in being miserable.

00:17:42.000 There's something about the pursuit of excellence and of success that supersedes all other pursuits.

00:17:51.000 In their eyes, it is the peak, the pinnacle, the most important thing.

00:17:59.000 It's not a trade-off.

00:18:01.000 I would argue that, now when I say happy, happy is one of those words that means a zillion different things.

00:18:06.000 It's like love, right?

00:18:07.000 What does that mean?

00:18:08.000 Right, I love cheese.

00:18:09.000 Yeah, I'm going to define it a little bit more tightly, right?

00:18:12.000 So, let's go back to desire, right?

00:18:16.000 This is old, old Buddhist wisdom.

00:18:18.000 I'm not saying anything original.

00:18:19.000 But desire to me is a contract that you make with yourself to be unhappy until you get what you want.

00:18:26.000 And I keep that in front of mind.

00:18:28.000 So when I'm unhappy about something, I look for what is the underlying desire that I have that's not being fulfilled.

00:18:34.000 It's okay to have desires.

00:18:35.000 You're a biological creature.

00:18:37.000 You're put on this earth.

00:18:37.000 You have to do something.

00:18:39.000 You have to have desires.

00:18:40.000 You have a mission.

00:18:41.000 But don't have too many.

00:18:42.000 Don't pick them up unconsciously.

00:18:44.000 Don't pick them up randomly.

00:18:45.000 Don't have thousands of them.

00:18:46.000 My coffee is too cold.

00:18:47.000 It doesn't taste quite right.

00:18:48.000 I'm not sitting perfectly.

00:18:50.000 Oh, I wish it were warmer.

00:18:52.000 Oh, my dog pooped in the lawn.

00:18:54.000 I didn't like that.

00:18:55.000 Whatever it is.

00:18:55.000 Pick your one overwhelming desire, and it's okay to suffer over that one.

00:19:00.000 But on all the others, you want to let them go so you can be calm and peaceful and relaxed.

00:19:04.000 And then you'll perform a better job.

00:19:07.000 Most people, when you're unhappy, like a depressed person, it's not that they have a very clear, calm mind.

00:19:12.000 They're too busy in their mind.

00:19:14.000 Their sense of self is too strong.

00:19:15.000 They're sitting indoors all the time.

00:19:17.000 Their mind's working, working, working.

00:19:18.000 They're thinking too much.

00:19:19.000 Well, if you want to be a high-performance athlete, how good of an athlete are you going to be if you're always having epileptic seizures, if you're always like twitching and running around and like jumping and your limbs are flailing out of control?

00:19:31.000 The same way, if you want to be effective in business, you need a clear, calm, cool, collected mind.

00:19:37.000 Warren Buffett plays bridge all day long and goes for walks in the sun.

00:19:40.000 He doesn't sit around like constantly loading his brain with nonstop information and getting worked up about every little thing.

00:19:48.000 I think?

00:20:02.000 The impacts of good decision-making are much higher than they used to be because now you can influence thousands or millions of people through your decisions or your code.

00:20:11.000 So a clear mind leads to better judgment, leads to better outcome.

00:20:16.000 So a happy, calm, peaceful person will make better decisions and have better outcomes.

00:20:23.000 So if you want to operate at peak performance, you have to learn how to tame your mind just like you have to learn how to tame your body.

00:20:30.000 I love what you're saying.

00:20:32.000 Warren Buffett might not be the best example because he drinks like, I think, six Coca-Colas a day and he eats mostly McDonald's.

00:20:38.000 And he's still alive somehow.

00:20:39.000 That shows you that low stress is more important. 1.00

00:20:42.000 Yeah, but he looks like shit. 1.00

00:20:43.000 Like, how old is he? 1.00

00:20:44.000 I mean, he's a fairly old man, right?

00:20:46.000 Charlie Munger is, I think, in his 90s, right?

00:20:48.000 Yeah.

00:20:49.000 He's made it really far.

00:20:50.000 I wonder what Warren's doing.

00:20:51.000 I mean, he's got to know that's bad for him, but he doesn't care.

00:20:56.000 He doesn't care.

00:20:56.000 I think he's just low stress.

00:20:58.000 Stress is a big deal.

00:20:59.000 So he just enjoys that Coca-Cola.

00:21:02.000 Maybe there is a trade-off, right?

00:21:04.000 Maybe him enjoying that junk food and that Coke, just, ah!

00:21:08.000 That pleasing of the mind is maybe better than him just eating wheatgrass shots and kale salads and just being super worked up about everything.

00:21:19.000 It's like if you need your glass of red wine to de-stress and calm down, that's probably better than you flying off the rails.

00:21:24.000 Right, right.

00:21:25.000 And I think that that's applicable not just in business, but in probably any pursuit.

00:21:30.000 And I like what you're saying about allow that one thing to be your obsession.

00:21:35.000 But everything else, just learn how to let things go.

00:21:39.000 Pick your battles.

00:21:41.000 And 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?

00:21:51.000 Doesn't work that way.

00:21:53.000 Guy running the corner grocery store is working just as hard or harder than you and me.

00:21:56.000 How much output is he getting?

00:21:58.000 What you do, who you do it with, how you do it, way more important than how hard you work, right?

00:22:03.000 Outputs are non-linear based on the quality of the work that you put in.

00:22:08.000 The right way to work is like a lion.

00:22:10.000 You and I are not like cows.

00:22:11.000 We're not meant to graze all day, right?

00:22:13.000 We're meant to hunt like lions.

00:22:15.000 We're closer to carnivores in our omnivorous development than we are to herbivores.

00:22:20.000 Don't tell vegans that.

00:22:21.000 Yeah, sorry.

00:22:22.000 Look, I wish all that stuff worked.

00:22:24.000 I don't want to eat meat.

00:22:25.000 Future generation will look back at us as worse than slavers, you know, because the Holocaust we're committing with the animals. 0.97

00:22:31.000 But they'll have artificial meats that taste and are healthier, better than the real thing.

00:22:36.000 Allegedly.

00:22:37.000 Allegedly.

00:22:38.000 As a modern knowledge worker athlete, as an intellectual athlete, you want to function like an athlete, which means you train hard, then you sprint, then you rest, then you reassess, you get your feedback loop, then you train some more,

00:22:54.000 then you sprint again, then you rest, then you reassess.

00:22:57.000 This 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?

00:23:05.000 Machines 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.

00:23:18.000 So that's unfortunately the rub, right?

00:23:20.000 That's kind of where my tweet storm starts, which is, first of all, the first thing if you're going to make money is that you're not going to get rich renting out your time.

00:23:29.000 Even lawyers and doctors who are charging $300, $400, $500 an hour, they're not getting rich because their lifestyle is slowly ramping up along with their income.

00:23:36.000 And they're not saving enough.

00:23:39.000 They just don't have that ability to retire.

00:23:41.000 So the first thing you have to do is you have to own a piece of a business.

00:23:45.000 You need to have equity, either as an owner, an investor, shareholder, or a brand that you're building that accrues to you to gain your financial freedom.

00:23:53.000 Yeah, and I was really fascinated by another thing that you were bringing up about working for yourself, that you feel that in the future, whether it's 50 or 100 years from now, virtually everyone is going to be working for themselves.

00:24:06.000 And I believe the way you put it is that the information age is going to reverse the industrial age.

00:24:13.000 Yeah.

00:24:13.000 If you go back to hunter-gatherer times, how we evolved, we basically worked for ourselves.

00:24:17.000 We communicated and cooperated within tribes, but each hunter, each gatherer stood on their own and then combined their resources with the family unit.

00:24:25.000 But there was no boss hierarchy, hierarchy, hierarchy, where you're like the third middle manager down.

00:24:30.000 In the farming age, we became a little bit more hierarchical as we had to run farms, but even those were still mostly family farms.

00:24:38.000 It's industrial work with factories that sort of created this model of thousands of people working together on one thing and having bosses and schedules and times to show up.

00:24:48.000 The reality is if you have to go, I don't care how rich you are, I don't care whether you're like a top Wall Street banker, If you have to go, if somebody can tell you when to be at work and what to wear and how to behave, you're not a free person.

00:25:02.000 You're not actually rich.

00:25:04.000 So we're in this model now where we think it's all about employment and jobs.

00:25:08.000 And intrinsic in that is that I have to work for somebody else.

00:25:12.000 I think?

00:25:27.000 And it has to do with the internal transaction costs versus the external transaction costs.

00:25:33.000 Let's say I want to do something.

00:25:35.000 Let's say I'm building a house and I need someone to come in and provide the lumber.

00:25:39.000 I'm a developer, right?

00:25:40.000 Do I want that to be part of my company or do I want that to be an external provider?

00:25:45.000 A lot of it just depends on how hard it is to do that transaction with someone externally versus internally.

00:25:50.000 If it's too hard to keep doing the contract every time externally, I'll bring that in-house.

00:25:54.000 If it's easy to do externally and it's a one-off kind of thing, I'd rather keep it out of the house.

00:25:59.000 Well, information technology is making it easier and easier to do these transactions externally.

00:26:04.000 It's becoming much easier to communicate with people.

00:26:07.000 Gig economy. 0.94

00:26:07.000 I can send you small amounts of money. 0.94

00:26:09.000 I can hire you through an app.

00:26:10.000 I can rate you afterwards.

00:26:12.000 So we're seeing an atomization of the firm.

00:26:15.000 We're seeing the optimal size of the firm shrinking.

00:26:17.000 It's most obvious in Silicon Valley.

00:26:20.000 Tons and tons of startups constantly coming up and shaving off little pieces of businesses from large companies and turning them into huge markets.

00:26:27.000 So what looked like the small little vacation rental market on Craigslist is now suddenly blown up into Airbnb.

00:26:34.000 This is one example.

00:26:36.000 That's a great example.

00:26:37.000 But what I think we're going to see is whether it's 10, 20, 50, 100 years from now, high-quality work will be available.

00:26:45.000 We're not talking about driving an Uber.

00:26:46.000 We're talking about super high-quality work will be available in a gig fashion where you'll wake up in the morning, your phone will buzz, and you'll have five different jobs from people who have worked with you in the past or have been referred to.

00:26:57.000 It's kind of like how Hollywood already works a little bit with how they organize for a project.

00:27:01.000 You decide whether to take the project or not.

00:27:03.000 The contract is right there on the spot.

00:27:04.000 You get paid a certain amount.

00:27:06.000 You get rated every day or every week.

00:27:08.000 You get the money delivered.

00:27:09.000 And then when you're done working, you turn it off and you go to Tahiti or wherever you want to spend the next three months.

00:27:14.000 And I think the smart people have already started figuring out that the internet enables this.

00:27:18.000 And they're starting to work more and more remotely on their own schedule, on their own time, on their own place, with their own friends, in their own way.

00:27:25.000 And that's actually how we are the most productive.

00:27:28.000 So the information revolution, by making it easier to communicate, connect, and cooperate, is allowing us to go back to working for ourselves.

00:27:36.000 And that is my ultimate dream.

00:27:38.000 Even when I run a company and I have employees, I always tell those people, hey, I'm going to help you start your company when you're ready, because I think that's the highest calling.

00:27:47.000 Maybe not everybody will get there, but it would be fine if we were...

00:27:50.000 Even 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.

00:27:57.000 So this idea that we're all factory-like cogs in a machine who are specialized and have to do things by rote memorization or instruction is going to go away, and we're going to go back to being small groups of creative bands of individuals setting out to do missions.

00:28:12.000 And 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.

00:28:19.000 Has there ever been a study done on happiness as it regards to the size of companies?

00:28:25.000 Not that I'm aware, but to me it's obvious.

00:28:27.000 It's just obvious.

00:28:28.000 The smaller the company, the happier you're going to be, the more human your relations are, the less you have rules to operate under, the more flexible, the more creative, the more you be treated like a human just because you're able to do multiple things.

00:28:39.000 Yeah.

00:28:40.000 This brings me to what is a subject that keeps getting brought up nowadays is universal basic income with the oncoming apocalypse of automation.

00:28:52.000 This is how it's being portrayed by Andrew Yang, who's running for president.

00:28:55.000 I sat down and talked with him about it.

00:28:57.000 It's very compelling.

00:28:58.000 And he's a very smart guy and he's an entrepreneur himself.

00:29:01.000 And when he starts talking about automation and how it's going to just eliminate massive amounts of jobs and leave people stranded, I know you're a guy who thinks about the future.

00:29:11.000 I'm going to take the unpopular point of view on this.

00:29:14.000 I think it's a non-solution to a non-problem.

00:29:18.000 And I mean that in the sense that automation has been happening since the dawn of time.

00:29:22.000 Man, when electricity came along, that put a lot of people out of work.

00:29:25.000 Did it?

00:29:25.000 Right?

00:29:25.000 A lot of people carrying buckets of water and lighting lamps and all those kinds of things.

00:29:30.000 And this was the concern with factories as well, right?

00:29:32.000 Yeah, everything.

00:29:33.000 Literally every single thing that comes along.

00:29:35.000 Even the printing press.

00:29:36.000 Absolutely.

00:29:36.000 And what it does is it frees people up for new creative work.

00:29:39.000 So the question is not, is automation going to eliminate jobs?

00:29:42.000 There is no finite number of jobs.

00:29:44.000 We're not like sitting around dividing up the same jobs that were around since the Stone Age.

00:29:48.000 So obviously new jobs are being created and they're usually better jobs, more creative jobs.

00:29:53.000 So the question is, how quickly is this transition going to happen?

00:29:56.000 And what kinds of jobs will be eliminated and what kinds of jobs will be created? 0.99

00:30:00.000 Okay.

00:30:01.000 It's impossible looking forward to predict what kinds of jobs will be created.

00:30:05.000 If I told you 10 years ago that podcaster was going to be a job, or that playing video games is going to be a job, or commentating on video games is going to be a job, you would have laughed me out of the room.

00:30:15.000 Those are nonsense jobs, but yet here we are.

00:30:18.000 So society will always create new jobs. 0.57

00:30:20.000 Civilization creates new jobs, but it's impossible to predict what those jobs are.

00:30:24.000 So the question is, how quickly is that transition happening?

00:30:28.000 Well, the reality is, even though everybody keeps talking about this automation apocalypse, we're at a record low unemployment.

00:30:35.000 Explain that.

00:30:36.000 Where's the transition?

00:30:37.000 Donald Trump!

00:30:38.000 That's how...

00:30:38.000 All I'm saying is, I don't see it in the numbers.

00:30:42.000 I don't see it actually happening.

00:30:44.000 The question is, how quickly can you retrain people?

00:30:46.000 So it's an education problem.

00:30:48.000 The problem with UBI, there's a couple of problems with UBI. One is, you're creating a straight...

00:30:54.000 You're creating a slippery slide transfer straight into socialism, right?

00:30:59.000 The moment people can start voting themselves money combined with a democracy, it's just a matter of time before the bottom 51 votes themselves or everything in the top 49. And by the way, slippery slope fallacy is not a fallacy.

00:31:11.000 I know people like saying that, but they haven't thought it through.

00:31:14.000 But the moment you start having a direct transfer mechanism like that in a democracy, you're basically doing it with capitalism, which is the engine of economic growth.

00:31:22.000 You're also forcing the entrepreneurs out or telling them not to come here.

00:31:39.000 Another issue with UBI is that people who are down on their luck, they're not looking for handouts.

00:31:45.000 It's not just about money.

00:31:47.000 It's also about status.

00:31:48.000 It's about meaning.

00:31:49.000 And the moment I start giving money to you and put you on the dole, I've lowered your status.

00:31:53.000 I've made you a second-class citizen.

00:31:55.000 So I have to give you meaning.

00:31:57.000 And meaning comes through education and capability.

00:31:59.000 You have to teach a man to fish, not to basically throw your rotting leftover carcasses at him and say, here, eat the scraps.

00:32:06.000 So it doesn't solve the meaning problem.

00:32:07.000 And lastly, it's nonsense to hand 15K out to everybody.

00:32:11.000 You want to means test people.

00:32:12.000 There's no reason to give it to you and me.

00:32:14.000 So you end up back towards the welfare system where you do have to figure out who needs it and who doesn't.

00:32:20.000 So I think the better route is that we actually establish a set of basic substance services that you have to have, and we provide those in abundance to technology-based automation.

00:32:30.000 So get basic housing, get basic food, get basic transportation, get high-speed internet access, get a phone in your pocket.

00:32:37.000 Those are the kinds of things you want to give people.

00:32:41.000 And finally, in terms of the rate of automation, I think we can educate people very quickly.

00:32:46.000 One of the myths that we have today is that adults can't be re-educated.

00:32:50.000 We view education as this thing where you go to school, you come out when you're out of college and you're done.

00:32:55.000 No more education.

00:32:56.000 Well, that's wrong.

00:32:57.000 You have all these great online boot camps and coding schools coming up.

00:33:01.000 They're ones that will even pay you to go there now.

00:33:03.000 You can educate people en masse, and you can educate them into creative professions.

00:33:08.000 People who are talking about AI automating programming have never really written serious code.

00:33:13.000 Coding is thinking.

00:33:15.000 It's automatic structure thinking.

00:33:17.000 An AI that can program...

00:33:37.000 Even in our lifetimes?

00:33:41.000 Really?

00:33:41.000 It's so overblown.

00:33:43.000 It's a combination of Cassandra complex.

00:33:47.000 It's fun to talk about the end of the world combined with a God complex, like people who have lost religion, so they're looking for meaning and some kind of end of history.

00:33:56.000 Right, right.

00:34:16.000 To actually model general intelligence, you run into all kinds of problems.

00:34:20.000 First, we don't know how the brain works at all.

00:34:23.000 Number two, we've never even modeled a paramecium or an amoeba, let alone a human brain.

00:34:27.000 Number three, there's this assumption that all of the computation is going at the cellular level, at the neuron level, whereas nature is very parsimonious.

00:34:36.000 It uses everything at its disposal.

00:34:38.000 There's a lot of machinery inside the cell that is doing calculations that is intelligent, that isn't accounted for.

00:34:44.000 And the best estimates are it would take 50 years of Moore's Law before we can simulate what's going on inside a cell near perfectly and probably 100 years before we can build a brain that can simulate inside the cells.

00:34:54.000 So putting it at saying that I'm just going to model neuron as on or off and then use that to build a human brain is overly simplistic.

00:35:01.000 Furthermore, I would posit there's no such thing as general intelligence.

00:35:04.000 Every intelligence is contextual within the context of the environment that it's in.

00:35:08.000 So you have to evolve an environment around it.

00:35:10.000 So I think a lot of people who are peddling general AI, the burden of proof is on them.

00:35:14.000 I haven't seen anything that would lead me to indicate we're approaching general AI. Instead, we're solving deterministic, closed-set, finite problems using large amounts of data.

00:35:23.000 But it's not sexy to talk about that.

00:35:25.000 You're talking about mirroring the actual abilities of cells, or are you talking about recreating the actual mechanism?

00:35:35.000 Like, what is going on inside cells and biological organisms?

00:35:40.000 Yeah, we just don't know how intelligence works.

00:35:43.000 We literally have no idea.

00:35:45.000 So most of the AI approaches basically say we're going to try and model how the brain works.

00:35:51.000 But they model at the neuron level, which is saying this neuron's on, that neuron's off.

00:35:55.000 They're combining their signal.

00:35:56.000 But I'm saying the neuron is a cell.

00:35:59.000 Inside the cell, there's all this machinery going on that's operating the neuron that is also part of the intelligence apparatus.

00:36:05.000 You can't just ignore that and abstract that out.

00:36:08.000 You have to model it down to the inside the cell level.

00:36:11.000 It'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.

00:36:22.000 But when you eliminate all that, when there is none of that, and it's just calculations, And we get to a point where it's just this thing that we've created, whether you call it a computer, whether it doesn't have to be a moving thing even, but a thing that you've created that stores virtually all the information that's available in the world,

00:36:41.000 stores all the patterns of all the thinking of all the great people that have ever lived, all the writers, all the people that have ever published anything, all the people that have ever spoken any words.

00:36:54.000 I think?

00:37:10.000 And then starts acting on its own, based on the information that it's been provided with.

00:37:16.000 Well, first you would have to actually simulate a structure of the human brain that can hold all that information.

00:37:22.000 You're basically talking about tens of thousands of brains worth of information.

00:37:25.000 We can't even build one brain in the next decade or two or three.

00:37:28.000 Well, in terms of an actual physical brain, yes.

00:37:31.000 But what about something that recreates the abilities of a brain?

00:37:35.000 Like I said, nature is parsimonious.

00:37:37.000 So we've got this three-pound wetware object that can hold all this data.

00:37:41.000 Nature has been very efficient in evolving kind of how we get there.

00:37:46.000 I just don't think computers are anywhere close to that.

00:37:49.000 Like they can hold that amount of data with that complexity, with like the holographic structure of the brain where it can recall in many, many different ways.

00:37:57.000 And then, I don't think you can evolve a creature to be intelligent outside of the boundaries of feedback in a real medium.

00:38:05.000 Like, 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.

00:38:12.000 They wouldn't evolve properly.

00:38:14.000 So I think just dumping information into a thing isn't enough.

00:38:18.000 It has to have an environment to operate in to get feedback from.

00:38:22.000 It needs to have context.

00:38:23.000 But isn't that biological?

00:38:24.000 I 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.

00:38:33.000 Like, if we can take a computer that can beat someone at chess, the real question was, well, can we make some sort of an artificial intelligence that can beat someone at Go, which is far more complex than chess?

00:38:43.000 They figured out how to do that, too.

00:38:45.000 And that was a giant shock.

00:38:47.000 These are still man-made, very closed, bounded games.

00:38:52.000 They're not on the road to the unbounded game of life.

00:38:57.000 They are completely artificial.

00:38:59.000 But didn't Go, didn't that give you like a little bit of a pause?

00:39:04.000 A little bit.

00:39:05.000 Go is not, Go or League of Legends or Fortnite, they're not completely deterministic.

00:39:09.000 Right.

00:39:09.000 But they're still very artificial, very bounded games.

00:39:13.000 Being good at Go doesn't mean that you can then suddenly figure out how to write great poetry.

00:39:17.000 Right.

00:39:18.000 The creativity for sure is something that's great.

00:39:20.000 Creativity is the last frontier.

00:39:22.000 So I do believe that automation over a long enough period of time will replace every non-creative job.

00:39:27.000 Or every non-creative work.

00:39:29.000 But that's great news.

00:39:31.000 That means that all of our basic needs are taken care of, and what remains for us is to be creative, which is really what every human wants.

00:39:39.000 What are you doing right now?

00:39:40.000 This is a creative job.

00:39:41.000 Sure.

00:39:43.000 That brings us back to the idea of meaning and universal basic income.

00:39:47.000 I 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.

00:40:00.000 You would have a bunch of listless people out there with no meaning in life.

00:40:04.000 But the idea is that $15,000 a year – and I'm not necessarily sure I agree with this.

00:40:08.000 I'm not even endorsing this.

00:40:09.000 But that $15,000 a year would just provide you with the necessities to get by in life.

00:40:13.000 It would give you food.

00:40:14.000 It would give you shelter.

00:40:16.000 Well, it's not going to stop at $15,000 because the moment people are like, I mean, at $15,000...

00:40:20.000 Then people would demand more.

00:40:21.000 Bernie Sanders would be on the...

00:40:22.000 $16,000, $17,000, $18,000, $18,000, $19,000.

00:40:25.000 These companies are too big.

00:40:27.000 Yeah, that could happen.

00:40:28.000 It doesn't stop.

00:40:29.000 It just goes all the way to bankruptcy.

00:40:31.000 The concern is the slide to socialism.

00:40:34.000 It's obvious.

00:40:35.000 I mean, heck, if I was not working and I was getting my 15 a year, I would happily vote for the guy who would give me 20 or 25. It's just common sense.

00:40:43.000 What do you say to the people that don't believe that there is such a thing as ethical or compassionate capitalism?

00:40:49.000 There's many people today that are espousing Marxism and they're espousing some sort of a socialist society where...

00:40:57.000 They believe that capitalism has screwed people over and eliminated the middle class.

00:41:03.000 There are absolutely problems with capitalism.

00:41:05.000 I think monopolies are a problem.

00:41:07.000 I think that crony capitalism is a problem with the government, you know, kind of gets in bed with them and sort of forces things.

00:41:13.000 I think the bankers have really, you know, raped society and the rest of us are suffering for it.

00:41:18.000 Yeah, they've essentially taken huge risks where they privatized the gains and they socialized the losses.

00:41:24.000 So when it fails, they basically get bailed out and bankrupt everybody else.

00:41:30.000 So capitalism has gotten a really bad name.

00:41:32.000 Let's talk about it as free exchange, free markets.

00:41:35.000 Free markets and free exchange are intrinsic to humans.

00:41:37.000 From when the first person started a fire and somebody came along with a deer and said, hey, if I cook my deer on your fire, I'll share some of it with you, right?

00:41:44.000 So specialization of labor, we trade.

00:41:47.000 That's built into the human species.

00:41:48.000 Basic math comes from accounting, keeping track of debts and credits and so on.

00:41:53.000 We need to be able to engage in free trade.

00:42:07.000 I think?

00:42:24.000 It's interesting that there are no working socialist examples that exist without violence.

00:42:31.000 You basically need someone to show up with a gun and say, okay, you're not allowed to do that.

00:42:34.000 You hand this over to that person.

00:42:36.000 So one of the reasons why I do this podcast is because I believe everybody can be wealthy.

00:42:41.000 Everybody.

00:42:41.000 It's not a zero-sum game.

00:42:42.000 It is a positive-sum game.

00:42:44.000 You create something brand new.

00:42:45.000 You exchange it with me for something brand new.

00:42:47.000 I've created this higher utility for both of us.

00:42:49.000 Yeah.

00:43:13.000 You burn the whole system down, we end up like Venezuela or the former Soviet Union. 0.90

00:43:18.000 You don't want to be a failed socialist state with emaciated teens hunting cats in the streets to eat.

00:43:23.000 That's literally what happens in some of these places.

00:43:26.000 So I think it's very important not to destroy the engine of progress that brought us here.

00:43:31.000 Yeah, the idea that socialism just hasn't worked yet.

00:43:34.000 That it needs to...

00:43:35.000 We just need to do it right.

00:43:37.000 If we do it right, we can...

00:43:38.000 Have you ever had a debate?

00:43:39.000 A hundred million dead.

00:43:40.000 Yeah.

00:43:41.000 Let's keep trying.

00:43:42.000 All over the world, yeah.

00:43:44.000 And every single time it's been implemented.

00:43:46.000 Have you ever had a conversation with someone who's a socialist?

00:43:50.000 Many times.

00:43:50.000 Some of my better friends are socialists.

00:43:52.000 Really?

00:43:52.000 We really get into it, yeah.

00:43:54.000 And what is their...

00:43:54.000 I mean, does anyone have a compelling perspective at all?

00:43:59.000 I think really socialism comes from the heart, right?

00:44:03.000 We all want to be socialist.

00:44:06.000 Capitalism comes from the head because there are always cheaters in any system.

00:44:10.000 And there's incentives in any system.

00:44:12.000 So when you're young, if you're not a socialist, you have no heart.

00:44:16.000 When you're older, if you're not a capitalist, you have no head, right?

00:44:18.000 You haven't thought it through.

00:44:20.000 I understand where it comes from.

00:44:37.000 Right?

00:44:38.000 So basically, the larger the group of people you have massed together, who have different interests, the less trust there is, the more cheating there is, the better the incentives have to be aligned, the better the system has to work, the more you go towards capitalism.

00:44:50.000 The smaller the group you're in, you're in a kibbutz, you're in your commune, you're in your house, you're in your tribe, by all means be a socialist. 0.65

00:44:57.000 With my aunts, with my brother, with my cousins, with my uncles, with my mom, with my family.

00:45:02.000 I'm a socialist.

00:45:03.000 That's the right way to live a loving, happy, integrated life.

00:45:07.000 But when you're dealing with strangers, I mean, you want to be a real socialist?

00:45:10.000 Great.

00:45:11.000 Open all your doors and windows tomorrow.

00:45:13.000 Please, everybody, come take what you want.

00:45:14.000 See how that works out.

00:45:16.000 Yeah.

00:45:17.000 This idea of income inequality, that always strikes me as a very, it's a deceptive term, income inequality.

00:45:25.000 Well, let's flip it around.

00:45:27.000 It comes from outcome inequality.

00:45:29.000 And the outcome inequality is there because you made different choices.

00:45:33.000 Now, again, going back, if it was because you didn't have the same opportunities, that's a problem.

00:45:37.000 So society should always try to give people equal opportunities.

00:45:41.000 So, for example, instead of basic income, what if we had a retraining program built into our basic social fabric, which said that Every four years or every six years or whatever it is, maybe it's every ten, you can take one year out and we'll pay for you to go retrain completely.

00:45:59.000 And you can go into any profession you like that has some earning power and output, hopefully a creative long-term profession, and you can re-educate yourself.

00:46:08.000 That would be much better for society on all levels than basically just saying, now you're going to be the dole for the rest of your life.

00:46:13.000 Yeah.

00:46:14.000 Yeah, you'd have to lead that horse to water and then make him drink.

00:46:19.000 It requires people to put in some effort.

00:46:21.000 But we can't all just sit around.

00:46:23.000 Well, that's my perspective on income inequality.

00:46:26.000 There's always effort inequality and thought inequality.

00:46:30.000 I mean, there's just some people that are obsessed, and if those people become successful, it doesn't mean they stole from you.

00:46:35.000 It just means that they put in the amount of energy and effort that's required to reach where they're at.

00:46:40.000 And there's a lot of virtue signaling that goes on now where people say, well, it's because you're privileged.

00:46:44.000 You know what the greatest privilege is?

00:46:46.000 You're alive.

00:46:46.000 85% of humanity is dead.

00:46:48.000 So how privileged are you?

00:46:50.000 Then you're living in the first world. 0.88

00:46:51.000 Then you have four limbs, etc.

00:46:53.000 So you can take that argument all the way.

00:46:54.000 It's kind of a nonsense discussion.

00:46:56.000 Well, it's a very weird progressive argument, and as it pertains to race is always a weird one, right? 0.92

00:47:01.000 Because white privilege, to me, although you could look at what they're saying on paper, like, yes, yeah, I'm sure there's more black people that are harassed by the police.

00:47:12.000 I'm sure there's more black people who are treated suspiciously by shop owners and the like.

00:47:18.000 But the problem isn't the people who aren't treated poorly.

00:47:22.000 The problem is the people who treat the people poorly.

00:47:26.000 The problem is racism.

00:47:28.000 The problem is not people that didn't ask to be born white or whatever they are and they don't get harassed.

00:47:35.000 So this idea of white privilege or male privilege or whatever it is, that's not the problem.

00:47:42.000 You're just looking at someone who's not a victim of this particular problem that you're highlighting.

00:47:48.000 But you're not looking at the perpetrators of the problem.

00:47:51.000 You're making people perpetrators by simply existing and having less melanin in their skin or having their ancestors come from a geographical location.

00:48:00.000 It's a sneaky way of being racist.

00:48:03.000 Yeah, and then they say you can't be racist.

00:48:04.000 It's not racist because you're white. 0.68

00:48:07.000 That is hilarious if you can't be racist against white people. 0.87

00:48:10.000 That one. 0.87

00:48:11.000 That's a variation of the whole still while I hate you argument.

00:48:14.000 You know, stop struggling while I'm hitting you. 0.99

00:48:16.000 Well, it's just so silly. 0.98

00:48:17.000 You've just completely changed what racism means. 0.87

00:48:20.000 But what's hilarious is that mostly the people who are yelling racist are not the minorities.

00:48:23.000 When I look on my Twitter or my social media or on my news, it's white on white violence. 0.92

00:48:28.000 Yeah, it's white on white violence. 0.90

00:48:30.000 What's mostly going on is it's elitist whites, blue state whites, college educated whites, beating up on high school educated whites, blue collar.

00:48:38.000 It's a white collar versus blue collar war that's going on. 0.57

00:48:41.000 And the rest of us are just kind of watching like, oh, that's kind of interesting.

00:48:44.000 Well, it's also a side effect of the ability to broadcast, right?

00:48:48.000 Like everyone with a Twitter handle has the ability to broadcast.

00:48:51.000 Everyone with a Facebook page has the ability to pontificate and have these long rambling messages.

00:48:59.000 These huge statements that people put out, when you read them, it's like, how much time did you put in this?

00:49:04.000 Do you put that much time in your kids?

00:49:07.000 Or your job, or your life, or your future, or planning for your, you know, how much do you work out a day?

00:49:12.000 I 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.

00:49:21.000 Let's see, humans are being creative.

00:49:23.000 Let's see an AI do that. 0.55

00:49:24.000 Well, that's true.

00:49:25.000 It is creative.

00:49:26.000 It's creative in a very odd way, right?

00:49:29.000 Because 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.

00:49:39.000 It's signaling and it's easy signaling because it's the kind of thing that everybody has to agree with you on because nobody wants to be seen as a horrible person.

00:49:45.000 And it's very hard to make the nuanced arguments against than it is to just kind of go along.

00:49:51.000 Right.

00:49:51.000 Well, it's also, some of it is so cliche that it seems like, I know one guy who poses as a woman on Twitter, but he does it, obviously.

00:50:03.000 What is the name, Tatiana McGrath?

00:50:07.000 Yes.

00:50:08.000 Hilarious.

00:50:08.000 Used to be Godfrey Elwick.

00:50:10.000 Oh, is that the same guy?

00:50:11.000 I think so, yeah.

00:50:12.000 That's hilarious!

00:50:14.000 I did not.

00:50:14.000 They killed his account.

00:50:16.000 I think it's the same one.

00:50:17.000 I'm not 100% sure.

00:50:18.000 For pretending to be transracial. 0.95

00:50:21.000 That's right.

00:50:21.000 They didn't.

00:50:21.000 Yeah.

00:50:22.000 He basically says all the crazy stuff that people on the left say, but he says the craziest version.

00:50:27.000 Yes.

00:50:28.000 And kind of just shows how it's okay.

00:50:30.000 I saw a tweet from him recently just said, or her, that it's not okay to be white.

00:50:34.000 Yes.

00:50:34.000 That was the whole tweet.

00:50:37.000 And then some people agree.

00:50:38.000 But it's so close to what they say.

00:50:42.000 It's so close that it's like the most artful form of subtle parody. 0.74

00:50:47.000 Well, if you replace in half of these things, if you replace the word white with black or Asian, watch the lynch mob descend on you.

00:50:54.000 It's a strange time in that respect.

00:50:57.000 There's a famous saying that if you want to see who rules over you, see who you're not allowed to criticize.

00:51:04.000 Hmm.

00:51:06.000 Excellent.

00:51:06.000 Yeah, that's so true, right?

00:51:09.000 Yeah, that's so true.

00:51:10.000 I wonder where this is going.

00:51:12.000 I really do.

00:51:13.000 I 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...

00:51:32.000 I think it's actually a great thing, overall.

00:51:35.000 Yeah, I do as well.

00:51:36.000 Because now it means that any human can broadcast to any other human on the planet at any time.

00:51:40.000 So, for example, if, you know, a totalitarian dictator were to come to power and someone was beating up, you know, had fascists beating up on old women, like, that would get broadcast out instantly.

00:51:50.000 There would be an instant outrage hue and cry rallying.

00:51:52.000 So, 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.

00:52:05.000 So it becomes very easy to set up a mob and have it attack somebody, take all the context out.

00:52:11.000 Like even this conversation, I'm sure people will take out snippets, put them on social media and try and get somebody outraged.

00:52:16.000 Of course.

00:52:17.000 And so you have to learn how, first of all, society just has to get over this idea of outrage. 1.00

00:52:21.000 Like to me, like, outrage people, people who get easily outraged are the stupidest people on social media. 0.99

00:52:27.000 Those are the people I block instantly. 0.99

00:52:29.000 It's just kind of very low-level thinking, right?

00:52:31.000 These are the foot soldiers in a mob.

00:52:34.000 Eventually society just has to get over it.

00:52:57.000 Do I want to work with this person?

00:52:59.000 Do I want to associate with this person?

00:53:00.000 Do I want to be friends with this person? 1.00

00:53:02.000 Their mind is just cluttered with junk. 0.99

00:53:04.000 Now, I don't necessarily blame them. 1.00

00:53:06.000 I 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.

00:53:16.000 If you pay attention to that stuff, even if you're well-meaning, even if you're sound of mind and body, it will eventually drive you insane.

00:53:24.000 This goes back to Clockwork Orange, where he has his eyes opened up and he's forced to watch the news.

00:53:29.000 But I think that's what's happening right now because these are addictive, right?

00:53:33.000 Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, these are weaponized.

00:53:36.000 You 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.

00:53:45.000 And if you fall for it, if you get addicted, your brain will get destroyed.

00:53:50.000 And I think this is the modern struggle.

00:53:53.000 The modern struggle.

00:53:54.000 So the ancient struggle used to be the tribal struggle.

00:53:56.000 You had your tribe of friends and family.

00:53:58.000 You had your religion.

00:53:59.000 You had your country.

00:54:00.000 You had your loyalty.

00:54:01.000 You had your nationality.

00:54:03.000 We're good to go.

00:54:24.000 When they come to attack you, you're alone and you can't resist.

00:54:28.000 So how do they attack you?

00:54:29.000 It's all well-meaning.

00:54:30.000 I don't fault capitalism.

00:54:31.000 I love capitalism.

00:54:32.000 But look at how it happens.

00:54:34.000 Social 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.

00:54:45.000 Food, they've taken sugar and they've weaponized it.

00:54:48.000 They've put it into all these different forms and varieties that you can't resist eating.

00:54:52.000 Drugs, right?

00:54:53.000 They've taken pharmaceuticals and plants and they've synthesized them.

00:54:58.000 They've grown them in such a way that you get addicted.

00:55:00.000 You can't put them down.

00:55:01.000 Porn, right?

00:55:02.000 If 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.

00:55:12.000 Video games, another way to addict people.

00:55:13.000 So you have this...

00:55:15.000 You have entire...

00:55:17.000 Large factories of people that are working to addict you to these things and you stand alone.

00:55:23.000 So the modern struggle as an individual is learning how to resist these things in the first place, drawing your own boundaries, and there's no one there to help you.

00:55:30.000 Oof, that's terrifying.

00:55:33.000 I mean, it is.

00:55:33.000 It's a new road that needs to be navigated by young people that are – there's no map.

00:55:40.000 There's no guidebook on how to handle this.

00:55:42.000 Our generation is the transition generation.

00:55:45.000 I think our kids will know how to handle it better because they'll grow.

00:55:49.000 I hope.

00:55:50.000 I hope too because you're seeing some ridiculous behavior from people today that's so common.

00:55:56.000 I mean, I don't know if you've been paying attention to this, but there was a guy who – He made a video.

00:56:02.000 It turns out it wasn't even him that made the video, at least that's not what he said, but it was a video where he sort of doctored Nancy Pelosi talking and made it look like she was drunk.

00:56:12.000 And then a bunch of people retweeted it, like, oh my god, look, she's drunk. 0.96

00:56:15.000 And so one of the online publications, some website, tracked him down and doxxed him.

00:56:25.000 And it turned out he's just a day laborer who is an African American Trump fan.

00:56:30.000 Mm-hmm.

00:56:31.000 And thought it would be funny to do that, and it turns out that he didn't even, at least according to him, he actually just put it up on his Facebook page.

00:56:38.000 What's even more disturbing is Facebook gave up his information to this website.

00:56:44.000 For what?

00:56:46.000 Because he made something funny that made people seem drunk?

00:56:48.000 There's a million of those about me.

00:56:50.000 I mean, you could find them.

00:56:52.000 I think Facebook and Twitter and a bunch of these other social media platforms are committing slow-motion suicide through these kinds of activities.

00:57:00.000 That was a stunning one, though, that they would give up this guy who's a laborer because he made a parody video or he made someone look foolish with editing.

00:57:08.000 Well, you now have basically the media views it as their job to go after individuals they don't like.

00:57:13.000 Yeah, I use media with air quotes in that regard because I don't think this is something that the New York Times would have done or anything responsible.

00:57:19.000 But the media is getting more and more desperate, right?

00:57:21.000 Because what happened was before the internet, you could have two local newspapers in every town and you could have two local news stations, you know, TV stations in every town.

00:57:30.000 And then CNN came along and started commoditizing the news 24-7 broadcasts.

00:57:35.000 And then the internet came along.

00:57:36.000 That was the final nail in the coffin.

00:57:37.000 Because what the internet did was it said, actually, if there's a fact that's news, you can distribute that immediately.

00:57:43.000 It can go on Twitter.

00:57:44.000 It can go on Facebook.

00:57:45.000 It gets reprinted on Google News a thousand times.

00:57:48.000 You know, you go on Google News, you're like, okay, what's the piece of news?

00:57:50.000 Which source?

00:57:51.000 And 3,000 other articles.

00:57:53.000 Too many, right?

00:57:54.000 So news has become commoditized.

00:57:56.000 So the entire news media has shifted into peddling opinions and entertainment.

00:58:01.000 And so now they've become...

00:58:03.000 A variation between cheerleaders, shock troops, enforcers, talking heads. 0.97

00:58:09.000 These are now propaganda machines signaling for their tribes.

00:58:14.000 There's a right-wing one, there's a left-wing one.

00:58:16.000 There's the alt-right, there's a control-left, and the two of them are just fighting it out using their various media organs and memes.

00:58:21.000 So, basically, when you see one of these news organizations doxing an individual, that's like a tank running over a soldier.

00:58:29.000 That's what's going on.

00:58:30.000 It's just war. 0.80

00:58:31.000 And so, there's no such thing anymore as a neutral media commentator.

00:58:36.000 The illusion of objectivity that journalism had is lost.

00:58:40.000 There's no longer one guy like a Walter Cronkite that everyone's going to listen to.

00:58:44.000 It's now all just shock troops fighting wars with each other.

00:58:47.000 How does this play out?

00:58:49.000 Have you thought about it?

00:58:50.000 Yeah, a little bit.

00:58:51.000 So what the internet does, a lot of this is internet driven.

00:58:55.000 What the internet does is the internet creates one giant aggregator or two for everything.

00:59:02.000 One taxi dispatcher, one e-commerce store, one search engine.

00:59:06.000 One, you know, one social media site for friends and family, one for business, etc.

00:59:12.000 So the internet is this giant aggregator where it creates one big hegemon for everything.

00:59:18.000 And it creates an atomized long tail of millions and millions of individuals.

00:59:24.000 What it gets rid of is the medium-sized ones in the middle.

00:59:27.000 So, for example, you might have had like seven Hollywood studios.

00:59:31.000 Well, it's all going to be Netflix.

00:59:32.000 You had, you know, like 10 large e-commerce players from Walmart to Costco to, you know, Kmart and whatever.

00:59:41.000 Now it's just going to be Amazon and a ton of small individual brands.

00:59:45.000 So that's the world that we're headed towards.

00:59:47.000 One hegemon and millions of individuals. 0.64

00:59:50.000 So where it ends up long term is media will be a few gigantic outlets.

00:59:56.000 You know, it could be the New York Times, it could be Facebook, a few like that.

00:59:59.000 And there's going to be just a really long tail of millions of independent people.

01:00:03.000 So this idea of who's a journalist and who's not, you know, is Assange a journalist or not?

01:00:07.000 Everyone's a journalist.

01:00:08.000 That's the world that we're headed towards.

01:00:10.000 I do think that extreme power, the most powerful people in the world today, and this is not well known, but the most powerful people in the world today are the people who are writing the algorithms for Twitter and Facebook and Instagram.

01:00:23.000 Because they're controlling the spread of information.

01:00:26.000 They're literally rewriting people's brains.

01:00:28.000 They're programming the culture.

01:00:29.000 And they're doing it very subtly.

01:00:31.000 Like 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?

01:00:40.000 And he said, no, we do not manipulate search results.

01:00:42.000 Really?

01:00:43.000 That's your job.

01:00:44.000 That is literally all Google does.

01:00:46.000 Google has one job, which is to manipulate search results, to pull them out of the noise and rank them properly.

01:00:51.000 And the precise algorithms of how they do that is very hidden, very complex, but influences the hearts and minds of everybody, including all the voters.

01:01:01.000 Now, if Google, Facebook, and Twitter had been smart about this, they would not have picked sides.

01:01:06.000 They would have said, we're publishers, whatever goes through our pipes goes through our pipes.

01:01:11.000 If it's illegal, we'll take it down, give us a court order, otherwise we don't touch it.

01:01:15.000 It's like the phone company.

01:01:16.000 If I call you up and I say something horrible to you on the phone, the phone company doesn't get in trouble.

01:01:20.000 But the moment they started taking stuff down that wasn't illegal because somebody screamed, they basically lost their right to be viewed as a carrier.

01:01:29.000 And now all of a sudden, they've taken on liability.

01:01:32.000 So they're sliding down the slippery slope into ruin, where the left wants them to take down the right, the right wants them to take down the left, and now they have no more friends, they have no allies.

01:01:42.000 Traditionally, the libertarian-leaning Republicans and Democrats would have stood up in principle for the common carriers, but now they won't.

01:01:47.000 So 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.

01:01:57.000 The day is coming when the politicians realize that these social media platforms are picking the next president, the next congressman.

01:02:07.000 They're literally picking, and they have the power to pick, so they will be controlled by the government.

01:02:12.000 In what way?

01:02:13.000 How do you think they're going to be controlled?

01:02:15.000 Do you think they're going to have to adhere to strict principles of freedom of speech?

01:02:18.000 No, no.

01:02:19.000 Unfortunately, it's headed the opposite direction.

01:02:21.000 I wish it was freedom of speech.

01:02:24.000 Much more likely, they're going to be, in the short to medium term, they're going to be hauled in for hearings.

01:02:29.000 They're going to be pressured massively, do this, don't do that.

01:02:32.000 My concern about that is the hearings that I saw with Zuckerberg, those people were completely incompetent.

01:02:37.000 They didn't seem to understand.

01:02:38.000 They don't.

01:02:39.000 But they're just applying pressure.

01:02:40.000 They're just trying to scare him so he'll do what they want.

01:02:43.000 What do they want him to do?

01:02:56.000 All the sensors, and that's really what they are.

01:02:58.000 There are sensors working inside these companies.

01:03:00.000 They're called by different names, obviously, right?

01:03:03.000 It's doublespeak.

01:03:03.000 You call it the Department of Defense when it's the Department of War.

01:03:06.000 So in this case, the Department of Safety and Trust when really it's the Department of Censorship.

01:03:10.000 The sensors are inside Silicon Valley, so it's going to reflect Silicon Valley's politics.

01:03:14.000 Which is extremely progressive left wing.

01:03:16.000 And if you're not that, you really have no place.

01:03:20.000 That's right.

01:03:20.000 Try being a conservative, an open conservative at Google.

01:03:24.000 Good luck. 0.87

01:03:25.000 Now you get lynched. 0.74

01:03:26.000 It's crazy!

01:03:27.000 I mean, I don't think that there was ever a thing like that that was so influential and so politically, ideologically one-sided.

01:03:39.000 Yeah, there's a little saying on the internet, I think it's called conquest law, that any organization that's not explicitly right-wing eventually becomes left-wing.

01:03:48.000 And I don't know why that's true, but it does seem to me to be true.

01:03:51.000 It's a fascinating battle that's going on right now.

01:03:54.000 I mean, it really is.

01:03:55.000 And conservatives, as far as social media is concerned, they're just getting chopped off at the hams, left and right.

01:04:02.000 What will eventually happen is that whenever you suppress speech, The organism metastasizes.

01:04:10.000 Then it has to start turning towards other means.

01:04:12.000 If you're unlucky, it goes towards violence.

01:04:15.000 If you're lucky, they find other outlets.

01:04:17.000 I think what will happen is we will start creating decentralized media that's not owned by any single entity that can't be suppressed or shut down that will then start spreading these various things.

01:04:27.000 And that will take the place of Twitter or Facebook or whatever.

01:04:30.000 That's right.

01:04:30.000 But it's going to take 10 years, 20 years.

01:04:31.000 It's not overnight.

01:04:32.000 Well, you know, Twitter took 10 years to get to the point where it's at this mess right now.

01:04:36.000 But it was so interesting to have Jack Dorsey and to talk to him about where it's going, where he thinks it's going, and his own principles, which he believes that it's a fundamental right, and he believes that freedom of speech is something that we all should have, and that these...

01:04:53.000 Platforms should essentially be like utilities, like the electric company.

01:04:59.000 Jack is correct, and he has the right vision.

01:05:01.000 It's just he's in an organization where the other individuals in the organization feel differently.

01:05:05.000 Very differently.

01:05:06.000 So the organization itself can get hijacked.

01:05:08.000 And his timeline for changing things is like… It's decades.

01:05:15.000 I shouldn't say decades, but I was like, when do you think that something...

01:05:19.000 There was one idea of having an uncensored Twitter.

01:05:25.000 Like one Twitter that's the Wild West.

01:05:27.000 You can have regular Twitter, or you can try Wild West Twitter.

01:05:30.000 Well, that already exists in a network called Gab.

01:05:33.000 Yes, but Gab isn't even Wild West Twitter.

01:05:35.000 When people dox people, they remove things like that.

01:05:39.000 Yeah.

01:05:40.000 I mean, I think there's certainly lines around violence and illegality that you don't want to cross, but Gab is closer to a free speech platform, but it's still not decentralized.

01:05:49.000 It can still get shut down.

01:05:50.000 It can still get taken out.

01:05:52.000 It's also suppressed heavily.

01:05:54.000 Yes.

01:05:54.000 And the people on there are right now extremely right-wing, so it's not a pleasant place for someone like me to hang out.

01:05:59.000 Well, it's all the people that have been kicked off of something else.

01:06:02.000 That's right.

01:06:03.000 Try going over there and being moderate.

01:06:05.000 Try going over there.

01:06:06.000 There's no room for you.

01:06:07.000 Yeah, unfortunately, because I don't identify as any party or any creed.

01:06:11.000 It doesn't work for me.

01:06:13.000 Is that a problem in Silicon Valley when you don't identify as anything?

01:06:17.000 Do you get pressure?

01:06:18.000 Totally.

01:06:18.000 It used to be okay.

01:06:19.000 It's not okay anymore.

01:06:20.000 When was it okay?

01:06:21.000 Like 10 years ago, I would say it was okay.

01:06:24.000 And then you started seeing a shift?

01:06:25.000 Yeah, and now you have to pick sides.

01:06:27.000 Otherwise, you're automatically the enemy.

01:06:28.000 Really?

01:06:29.000 Yeah, struggle sessions and all that.

01:06:31.000 God, struggle sessions.

01:06:33.000 I'm exaggerating for a fact, but it definitely has that oppressive feeling to it.

01:06:37.000 Right.

01:06:37.000 And you also have to be politically outspoken.

01:06:40.000 It can't be something that you just stay neutral about.

01:06:43.000 Right.

01:06:43.000 It's like when Tim Ferriss, I think at some point, put out a tweet about how you can't just say anything anymore and people are being suppressed.

01:06:49.000 And a whole bunch of people, a lot of them from Silicon Valley, piled in and said, what is it that you can't say?

01:06:54.000 What are you afraid to say?

01:06:54.000 You can say whatever you want, Tim.

01:06:56.000 Go ahead.

01:06:56.000 What are you afraid of?

01:06:57.000 They were like baiting him.

01:06:59.000 Yeah, what was he trying to say?

01:07:01.000 Wow, we have to put him in that box.

01:07:03.000 He was someone who was thinking about saying something he shouldn't have said.

01:07:05.000 Exactly.

01:07:06.000 Now we know.

01:07:07.000 One great tweet I saw was, you know, the left won the culture wars, now they're just driving around shooting the survivors.

01:07:12.000 Wow, that's hilarious.

01:07:14.000 Yeah, I wonder.

01:07:16.000 I wonder who has won the culture war.

01:07:18.000 There's certainly a battle that's been won in terms of, like, control of social media.

01:07:23.000 Control of social media is absolutely left.

01:07:25.000 Well, this is unfortunate for conservatives, but technology is a force that also pushes left.

01:07:31.000 So if you look all throughout human history, like the left essentially grows and grows and grows, right?

01:07:36.000 Why is that?

01:07:37.000 Why is it inexorably that...

01:07:39.000 As some commentators have said, Leviathan slouches left.

01:07:42.000 Leviathan is the government.

01:07:44.000 Why does this slouch left? 1.00

01:07:45.000 And I think a lot of that has been because of technology.

01:07:48.000 Technology has made it so that it makes more like industrial revolution technology.

01:07:52.000 We all band together.

01:07:54.000 We're wards of the state, right?

01:07:56.000 Contraception is a technology that kind of helps lean leftward.

01:07:59.000 It takes away from the family unit.

01:08:00.000 Abortion is a technology. 0.99

01:08:02.000 It wasn't possible thousands of years ago.

01:08:05.000 So technology actually empowers the individual.

01:08:08.000 The 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.

01:08:17.000 Now we're getting a small set of technologies that actually can take you more rightward.

01:08:22.000 Encryption is an example, because encryption makes it easier to have privacy.

01:08:25.000 It makes it easier to have money that is outside of the state.

01:08:29.000 Guns, 3D printing of guns is an example of a technology that is more of a rightward shift.

01:08:35.000 But generally, technology leads the world left.

01:08:38.000 Yeah, it's also usually highly educated people that are involved in technology in the first place.

01:08:45.000 And I think when you look at universities in particular, they tend to lean left in this country as well.

01:08:53.000 Well, universities...

01:08:54.000 What happened with universities is very interesting.

01:08:58.000 Universities first became the arbiters of data and intellectualism and what's right and wrong.

01:09:05.000 So there's a time period when it was like, should we be doing that or not?

01:09:08.000 Well, let's look at the university.

01:09:09.000 What do they have to say?

01:09:10.000 What are the smartest people, the professors, the think tanks have to say?

01:09:14.000 And the universities got this credibility from the hard sciences.

01:09:18.000 So they got this from...

01:09:20.000 You know, physics and math and computer science and chemistry because these deliver real things.

01:09:25.000 The Manhattan Project, the microprocessor, the space vehicles and so on, the electric car.

01:09:31.000 So they gain this mantle of authority and legitimacy from the hard sciences.

01:09:36.000 So then come the social sciences kind of sneak in.

01:09:39.000 Then you get economics.

01:09:41.000 And microeconomics is a real discipline, real science, real math behind it.

01:09:44.000 I think?

01:10:03.000 And 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.

01:10:12.000 And so essentially what you see going on today in the universities is a war between the social sciences and the physical sciences.

01:10:20.000 And the crossover point is biology.

01:10:22.000 Where you can see the whole gender is a social construct movement is attacking biology and evolutionary biology. 1.00

01:10:29.000 Just like in the social sphere, they're coming after the comedians.

01:10:31.000 But you can see the struggle going on in the universities.

01:10:34.000 And I would say the physical sciences are essentially losing that war.

01:10:38.000 What can be done?

01:10:40.000 Or is it just something that has to play out?

01:10:42.000 Do we have to realize the consequences of the foolishness?

01:10:45.000 Well, the good news is the physical sciences have a reality on their side.

01:10:49.000 Yeah, but it's not even, I mean, in many ways it's not respected.

01:10:55.000 Yeah, but at the end of the day, your aircraft still has to fly.

01:10:59.000 You know, your microprocessor still has to compute.

01:11:01.000 So there's only so far they can take it.

01:11:04.000 But I do see, for example, in biology, a lot of biologists are facing this difficult thing where they have to say things that they know are not true to keep their job.

01:11:12.000 Like what?

01:11:13.000 Well, you had Brett Weinstein on here, right?

01:11:15.000 So that's a clear example.

01:11:17.000 So there's just the crossover line of what is acceptable and what's not is entering into biology, and biology will probably suffer the most.

01:11:25.000 Synthetic biology, for example, a lot of this will end up in China because you won't be able to map facts and reality and actions together. 0.95

01:11:36.000 You won't be able to get grants.

01:11:38.000 You won't be able to get the adulation of your peers.

01:11:41.000 I don't know enough here, so now I'm in shaky territory, but it's just my sense that that crossover battleground right now is in evolutionary biology.

01:11:49.000 Economics lost.

01:11:50.000 Well, it's certainly in terms of gender and that... 0.88

01:11:54.000 That seems to be one of the major battlegrounds.

01:11:58.000 It's also going to happen, for example, blank slate theory.

01:12:01.000 Are we nature?

01:12:02.000 Are we nurture?

01:12:04.000 It's kind of socially unacceptable to say that a lot of it is nature and not nurture or vice versa depending on which side you're on.

01:12:11.000 Those kinds of discussions get corrupted.

01:12:14.000 They do get corrupted and it's really unfortunate because that's a...

01:12:17.000 It's an unbelievably important thing to understand.

01:12:20.000 Like, what makes a person a sociopath?

01:12:22.000 What makes a person a super successful person, a winner?

01:12:27.000 What makes a person a drug addict?

01:12:29.000 What are these factors?

01:12:31.000 You can't have a reasonable conversation about climate science anymore.

01:12:34.000 It's not a science.

01:12:35.000 It's all politicized.

01:12:36.000 You can't even bring it up.

01:12:37.000 Everyone's got their minds made up already.

01:12:39.000 Well, what's uncomfortable to me is people have their minds made up and they don't even have the data.

01:12:45.000 On most of these topics, people are talking past each other anyway.

01:12:48.000 They're talking about different things.

01:12:49.000 Like when you get into gun control, for example, right?

01:12:55.000 One side is talking about the right to bear arms in case a tyrannical ruler or king tries to take over the country.

01:13:01.000 The other side is talking about school shootings and protecting people in their homes from crime.

01:13:07.000 So they're just talking about two different things.

01:13:09.000 And it's just not politically acceptable to even talk about the same thing.

01:13:13.000 Or when it gets to immigration, the left is bundling together illegal immigration and legal immigration into one thing.

01:13:23.000 Yes.

01:13:24.000 Whereas on the right, sometimes you've got racist hiding in there, so it doesn't help their cause.

01:13:28.000 They're talking about two different things.

01:13:30.000 If 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.

01:13:41.000 And 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.

01:13:51.000 To me, the test of any good system is you build a system, hand it over to your enemies to run for the next decade.

01:13:58.000 So for example, if you want a censorship on Twitter or Facebook, you should build that system and then hand it over to the other side to run.

01:14:05.000 So if you're a left-winger who's promoting censorship, let somebody else run it.

01:14:09.000 Same with immigration. 0.54

01:14:10.000 If you want an immigration system, build the system, then hand it over to the other side to run it. 1.00

01:14:15.000 That's how you know it's a good system.

01:14:16.000 There's no room for nuance when you're dealing with these political battlegrounds, when you're dealing with right versus left and one side has a clearly established stance that you're supposed to take.

01:14:30.000 Gun control is a great example of that, right? 1.00

01:14:32.000 There's no room for what about mental health?

01:14:35.000 What about the fact that so many of these people are on psych medications?

01:14:40.000 Why is that not being discussed?

01:14:42.000 We're running one of the greatest...

01:14:44.000 Mental health experiments in history.

01:14:46.000 The greatest.

01:15:03.000 Yeah, there's no room for nuance, which is why I stay out of politics, largely.

01:15:07.000 Do they drag you in, though, sometimes?

01:15:08.000 They always try.

01:15:09.000 Well, this conversation is going to force you to get dragged in.

01:15:12.000 Sure.

01:15:12.000 I'm sure there's going to be some people that… Here's the thing about politics.

01:15:15.000 Because 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?

01:15:24.000 It's not like proportional representation where the Greens have 10% and the Libertarians have 3% or whatever.

01:15:29.000 It's just like you're all Democrat in power, now we're all Republican.

01:15:32.000 Because of that, to win, you have to pick one of these two sides.

01:15:36.000 You have to choose.

01:15:38.000 You can't just basically say, I'm going to be nuanced about it.

01:15:44.000 You can't vote for a third party that's throwing away your vote.

01:15:46.000 I have a friend who's trying to fix that.

01:15:48.000 He's starting this thing called a good party where you kickstart your vote.

01:15:51.000 So you combine all your votes, you hold them in reserve, and then when you have enough to win, then you vote that person in power.

01:15:57.000 So you don't throw away your vote.

01:15:58.000 Outside of those hacks, we're never going to get a third party elected.

01:16:01.000 So because of that, all of your beliefs have to neatly fit into the Democrat bundle or the Republican bundle.

01:16:07.000 And so when you get into that tribe, if you signal out of that bundle, you get attacked.

01:16:14.000 So it's literally, it's making you into an unclear thinker.

01:16:18.000 It's making you into a muddled thinker.

01:16:20.000 If all of your beliefs line up into one political party, you're not a clear thinker.

01:16:25.000 If all your beliefs are the same as your neighbors and your friends, you're not a clear thinker.

01:16:29.000 You're literally just, your beliefs are socialized.

01:16:31.000 They're taken from other people.

01:16:32.000 So if you want to be a clear thinker, you cannot pay attention to politics.

01:16:36.000 It will destroy your ability to think.

01:16:38.000 Ugh.

01:16:40.000 What dread?

01:16:43.000 Most of modern life, all our diseases are diseases of abundance, not diseases of scarcity.

01:16:48.000 Old times, I may have starved.

01:16:51.000 Old times, if I got sugar, that was a wonderful thing.

01:16:54.000 I should have eaten all the sugar to get my hands on.

01:16:55.000 If I'd gotten a piece of news or gossip, that was interesting data.

01:16:58.000 That would have helped my life and moved me forward.

01:17:01.000 If I'd gotten some brief amount of entertainment, whether through video games or magazines or whatever, that would have been good.

01:17:07.000 Now it's all diseases of abundance.

01:17:09.000 We are overexposed to everything.

01:17:11.000 So the way to survive in modern society is to be an ascetic. 0.96

01:17:15.000 It is to retreat from society.

01:17:17.000 There's too much society everywhere you go.

01:17:19.000 Society in your phone, society in your pocket, society in your ears.

01:17:22.000 You're being socialized right now by listening to this podcast.

01:17:25.000 We're socializing you.

01:17:26.000 We're programming you.

01:17:27.000 Everyone's trying to program everybody.

01:17:29.000 The only solution is turn it off.

01:17:31.000 The only solution is to turn it off and concentrate on your breathing.

01:17:36.000 Meditation, yeah.

01:17:37.000 Yes, I mean, that's huge.

01:17:38.000 It's been a lifesaver for me.

01:17:40.000 Oh, I do it, and I do it whenever I get, like, spare time.

01:17:43.000 I was at the doctor's office this morning, and I knew it was going to be 20 minutes, so I just sat there with my eyes closed for 20 minutes, and I meditated.

01:17:51.000 You know, when I was growing up, there was this statement, I think it was Pascal, he said, you know, all of man's problems arise because he cannot sit by himself in a room for 30 minutes alone.

01:18:00.000 And it's very true.

01:18:01.000 I always needed to be stimulated.

01:18:03.000 And when the iPhone came along, boredom was dead.

01:18:06.000 I would never be bored again.

01:18:08.000 Even if I'm standing in line, I'm on my iPhone.

01:18:10.000 And I thought it was great.

01:18:11.000 And when I was a kid, I used to try and overclock my brain.

01:18:14.000 Like, how many thoughts can I think at once?

01:18:15.000 The answer is only one.

01:18:16.000 But I would try to think multiple thoughts at once.

01:18:19.000 And I was proud of that.

01:18:19.000 I was proud that my brain was always running.

01:18:22.000 This engine was always moving.

01:18:24.000 And it's a disease.

01:18:25.000 It's actually the road to misery.

01:18:26.000 And now that I'm older, I realize you actually want to, again, rest your mind.

01:18:32.000 You want to learn how to settle into your mind.

01:18:34.000 Now, I look forward to solitary confinement.

01:18:37.000 You leave me alone for a day, it'll be like the happiest day I've had in a while.

01:18:41.000 And that is a superpower that I think everybody can attain.

01:18:45.000 The superpower of learning to be alone and enjoying it.

01:18:48.000 Yeah.

01:18:49.000 Well, 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.

01:19:00.000 And I think during those rare times is when you really get to understand what you actually believe or don't believe.

01:19:09.000 Yeah, it's funny.

01:19:10.000 When I first started meditating, it was really hard, right?

01:19:14.000 I think a lot of people who listen to this broadcast have heard of meditation.

01:19:17.000 It has a good rep, so everybody tries it.

01:19:19.000 They struggle.

01:19:20.000 They kind of give it up.

01:19:21.000 It's one of those things that everybody says they do, but nobody actually does, right?

01:19:25.000 It's like not eating sugar, right?

01:19:27.000 Everyone talks about how, yeah, I don't eat sugar, but like, yeah, then the dessert tray rolls around and everyone's going for the cookies, right?

01:19:34.000 So it's become one of those things.

01:19:35.000 And in fact, it's now even become a signaling thing where it's like, oh, how much did you meditate?

01:19:39.000 I meditated this much.

01:19:41.000 Or, 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.

01:19:46.000 I don't know how they make it work, but they'll be like, I got a lot of chirps today.

01:19:49.000 How many chirps did you get?

01:19:50.000 Oh, your meditation technique is wrong.

01:19:52.000 Mine is right.

01:19:53.000 But really, all it is is the art of doing nothing.

01:19:57.000 And it's important because I think when we grow up, it's all this stuff happening to you in your life.

01:20:05.000 And some of it you're processing, some of it you're absorbing, and some of it You should probably think a little bit more about and work through, but you don't.

01:20:12.000 You don't have time.

01:20:13.000 So it gets buried in you.

01:20:15.000 And it's all these preferences and judgments and unresolved situations and issues.

01:20:18.000 And it's like your email inbox.

01:20:20.000 It's just piling up, email after email after email that's not answered, going back 10, 20, 30, 40 years.

01:20:26.000 And then when you sit down to meditate, those emails start coming back at you.

01:20:29.000 Hey, what about this issue?

01:20:30.000 What about that issue?

01:20:31.000 Have you solved this?

01:20:31.000 Did you think about that?

01:20:32.000 You have regrets there?

01:20:33.000 You have issues there?

01:20:35.000 And that gets scary.

01:20:36.000 People don't want to do that.

01:20:37.000 It's not working.

01:20:38.000 I can't clear my mind.

01:20:39.000 I better get up and not do this.

01:20:41.000 But really what's happening is it's self-therapy.

01:20:44.000 It's just that instead of paying a therapist to sit there and listen to you, you're listening to yourself.

01:20:48.000 And you just have to sit there as those emails go through one by one.

01:20:52.000 You work through each of them until you get to the magical inbox zero.

01:20:55.000 And there comes a day when you sit down, you realize the only things you're thinking about are things that happened yesterday.

01:21:00.000 Because you've processed everything else.

01:21:02.000 Not necessarily even resolved it, but at least listened to yourself.

01:21:05.000 And that's when meditation starts.

01:21:07.000 And I think it's a very powerful thing that everybody should experience.

01:21:10.000 And that's when you arrive upon the art of doing nothing.

01:21:13.000 Well, I think it's even a problem that most people are getting their meditation from an app.

01:21:18.000 I will not use an app.

01:21:19.000 It's sneaky.

01:21:20.000 I mean, Sam Harris is a very good meditation app, I should say that.

01:21:23.000 But you should be able to just do it.

01:21:25.000 And many people can't.

01:21:27.000 It is literally the art of doing nothing.

01:21:29.000 All you need to do for meditation is just sit down, close your eyes, comfortable position, whatever happens, happens.

01:21:35.000 If you think, you think.

01:21:36.000 If you don't think, you don't think.

01:21:37.000 Don't put effort into it.

01:21:38.000 Don't put effort against it.

01:21:39.000 It's all you need.

01:21:40.000 Do you concentrate on your breath or do you have a specific technique?

01:21:43.000 Nothing.

01:21:44.000 You just sit.

01:21:46.000 I think about my breath.

01:21:47.000 That's all I do.

01:21:48.000 I just try to only concentrate on breathing.

01:21:51.000 I used to do that, but at some level, all the concentration, every meditation technique is leading you to the same thing, which is just witnessing.

01:21:59.000 And concentration is a technique to still your mind enough that you can then drop the object of concentration.

01:22:05.000 So you could also just try going straight to the endgame.

01:22:08.000 The problem with what I'm talking about, which is not focusing on your breath, is you will have to listen to your mind for a long time.

01:22:14.000 It's not going to work unless you do at least an hour a day, and preferably at least 60 days before you kind of work through a lot of issues.

01:22:21.000 So it'll be hell for a while, but when you come out the other side, it's great.

01:22:24.000 You get rid of the chatter.

01:22:26.000 Or when the chatter comes, it's in the background, it's dimmer, it's smaller, you've heard it before, you see the patterns, it's more recent, it's something you need to resolve anyway, and you will get moments of actual silence.

01:22:40.000 What's your ultimate state?

01:22:43.000 When you meditate?

01:22:44.000 Is there a state where you've achieved, rarely if ever, where you're in bliss or you're in harmony or you're in enlightenment?

01:22:55.000 It's kind of indescribable because when you're really meditating, you're not there.

01:23:01.000 When there's no thoughts, there's no experience or there's nothing.

01:23:03.000 There's just nothing.

01:23:06.000 So 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.

01:23:19.000 And I've definitely hit some of those states.

01:23:21.000 You've hit some transcendent psychedelic states where you're hallucinating the whole deal?

01:23:26.000 I've had trippy visuals.

01:23:27.000 I've had the lights and colors.

01:23:28.000 I've had the so-called downloads.

01:23:30.000 I've had the realizations.

01:23:32.000 I've had the bliss.

01:23:33.000 I've had the light.

01:23:34.000 I've had the colors.

01:23:35.000 But not every time.

01:23:36.000 No, it's rarely.

01:23:37.000 And in fact, I would say that's also like an experience that you can start craving, which will then actually take you out of meditation.

01:23:45.000 Where you really, and I'm not enlightened or anything close to it, so not even the ballpark, but my own experience, and this is just personal experience, is the place where I end up the most that is really the one that I want to be at is peace.

01:24:00.000 It's just peace.

01:24:01.000 Peace.

01:24:02.000 Happy.

01:24:02.000 Yeah, peace, to me, peace is happiness at rest, and happiness is kind of peace in motion.

01:24:08.000 You can convert peace to happiness anytime you want, but peace is what you want most of the time.

01:24:13.000 That's interesting.

01:24:14.000 You can convert peace to happiness anytime you want.

01:24:18.000 Yeah, if you're a peaceful person, anything you do will be a happy activity.

01:24:22.000 Hmm.

01:24:23.000 And by the way, being on social media and engaging in politics will not bring you peace.

01:24:27.000 There's nothing less peaceful.

01:24:28.000 Right.

01:24:29.000 In today's day and age?

01:24:30.000 The way we think you get peace is by resolving all your external problems.

01:24:34.000 But there's unlimited external problems.

01:24:36.000 So the only way to actually get peace is on the inside by giving up this idea of problems.

01:24:41.000 Who thinks you can get peace by resolving external problems other than politicians?

01:24:45.000 Everybody.

01:24:46.000 That's what everybody's struggling to do, right?

01:24:47.000 Why are you trying to make money?

01:24:48.000 To solve all your money problems.

01:24:50.000 Why are you trying to win at politics?

01:24:52.000 Because then you'll be at peace because your people will have won. 0.99

01:24:57.000 It's a daunting task to get your shit together. 0.98

01:25:00.000 It's easier to change yourself than to change the world. 0.99

01:25:04.000 That's true.

01:25:04.000 And the best way to change the world is to change yourself.

01:25:07.000 Exactly.

01:25:09.000 All these people who are shouting on social media, the best way is just to actually live the life that you want other people to live.

01:25:16.000 I went out in New Zealand, and there's this guy that I met with.

01:25:20.000 You know, everyone's on social media shouting about environmentalism and conserve and sustain.

01:25:24.000 And I go to this guy's house and he was doing a, very quietly, very gently, he was doing a two-week long zero-waste experiment where he was throwing out nothing.

01:25:34.000 So every package that he opened, he would keep.

01:25:37.000 And he would like clean it up.

01:25:39.000 So he would keep his Amazon boxes.

01:25:40.000 He would keep the little containers.

01:25:41.000 Even a tea bag.

01:25:42.000 If 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.

01:25:49.000 So there was no trash.

01:25:50.000 He was literally living with zero trash waste.

01:25:53.000 And he was doing it.

01:25:55.000 And it was really inspirational.

01:25:56.000 Meeting people like him made me far more environmentally conscious than, you know, any amount of people yelling at me on social media ever will.

01:26:03.000 How long did he do that for?

01:26:04.000 I think it was two weeks.

01:26:05.000 It was hard.

01:26:09.000 He had quite the collection.

01:26:11.000 He was filling them with little things.

01:26:13.000 He sounds like a crazy hoarder, like a hoarder person with stacks of tea bags in his house.

01:26:18.000 Very impressive guy. 0.81

01:26:19.000 Yeah, that's a strange way to go about things.

01:26:21.000 I appreciate it.

01:26:22.000 I mean, look, it is entirely possible to somehow or another engineer all of our cups and all of our things to be biodegradable.

01:26:33.000 You know, the struggle with the modern environmental movement is that they identify the correct problem, which is finite earth, spaceship earth, this is all we've got, don't ruin it.

01:26:44.000 But they don't have the solution.

01:26:46.000 So what they say is no growth, no growth, no growth.

01:26:48.000 Well, the problem is you got 3 billion Indian and Chinese who aren't going to stay in poverty.

01:26:52.000 They're going to grow whether you like it or not.

01:26:54.000 So you can yell at them, you can scream at them, you can yell at us and scream at us, but that's not going to happen.

01:26:59.000 So the only way out, unfortunately, is again through technology, which is you have to build green technology.

01:27:05.000 And I give Musk a lot of credit for being one of the few people who's out there trying to do that.

01:27:10.000 So you build things that are biodegradable and good for you and healthier and healthier.

01:27:14.000 Everybody wants to be healthier.

01:27:16.000 Chinese want to be healthier.

01:27:44.000 So I think the modern environmental movement identifies the correct problem but then doesn't come up with the right set of solutions that are appealing to people.

01:27:53.000 People are not going to give up economic growth.

01:27:55.000 They're going to have to get rich first. 0.85

01:27:58.000 Yeah, that's a very good point.

01:28:00.000 But how do you do both?

01:28:03.000 You lower the price of clean technologies massively.

01:28:08.000 So you basically make clean technologies cost-competitive.

01:28:11.000 Through subsidies?

01:28:13.000 Innovation, ideally, you can subsidize in the short to medium term until the innovation curve is crossed.

01:28:19.000 I mean, Tesla doesn't have any patents, right?

01:28:21.000 Right.

01:28:40.000 And then you educate the Chinese, like, hey, this is petroleum. 0.97

01:28:44.000 You know, this plastic that you're drinking is petroleum.

01:28:46.000 This is bad for you.

01:28:47.000 Here's the chemical composition.

01:28:48.000 Here's the things that are going in your bloodstream.

01:28:50.000 And they want healthy, happy kids also.

01:28:53.000 So they're going to have their kids use paper straws. 1.00

01:28:55.000 Maybe straws aren't the best example, but you can, you know, this is true with fossil fuels, for example.

01:29:00.000 That's probably the best one.

01:29:01.000 Or replacing a lot of plastics with glass and paper and so on.

01:29:05.000 Yeah, there's a new technology that was just – Rhonda Patrick had it on her Twitter today about they're able to convert plastic waste into fuel and that there's companies that are actively trying to do that now.

01:29:19.000 So then in that way, plastic waste will become valuable.

01:29:23.000 It'll become a commodity.

01:29:25.000 It'll become something that people will resource.

01:29:27.000 Now there's certain problems this doesn't solve.

01:29:28.000 This doesn't solve carbon.

01:29:29.000 This doesn't solve deforestation.

01:29:32.000 So there you kind of have to step in with other means.

01:29:35.000 So for example, look at the Amazon, right?

01:29:37.000 Everyone's complaining about the Amazon being deforested.

01:29:40.000 Well, you're not the poor Brazilian farmer, right?

01:29:42.000 So you're sitting here in your comfortable chair like social media hammering away at the evil Brazilians for deforesting the Amazon. 1.00

01:29:50.000 The Amazon has incredible resources.

01:29:52.000 If we really care about it, we should turn it into an incredible tourist park and put your money where your mouth is, start doing ecotourism in the Amazon, start paying for it, and then maybe take the future rights for all the pharmaceuticals that are going to come out of all the incredible plants there and start selling those off.

01:30:06.000 So that people, so that maybe give the pharmaceutical companies an incentive to preserve the biodiversity of the Amazon.

01:30:12.000 Say, hey, if you buy this patch of the Amazon, you conserve it, and you conserve it, whatever plant medicines that come out of there that you can then license, you get the patent for 20 years or 30 years or whatever.

01:30:22.000 So I think there are solutions where we, as the first worlders who have money, can put our money where our mouth is and go and rescue these kinds of properties.

01:30:31.000 That's a very interesting solution, but I could see immediate pushback from people that don't think the pharmaceutical companies should have the rights to this natural plant.

01:30:39.000 Or the government does it, and then the government gets the patents, and the government will auction off the patents later.

01:30:45.000 That's even worse.

01:30:46.000 Or they'll license them, or whatever it is, right?

01:30:49.000 Often, like, just this.

01:30:51.000 Often the problem is there is no really good solution.

01:30:55.000 There's a bunch of solutions that also have drawbacks.

01:30:59.000 That's life.

01:31:01.000 That's a trade-off.

01:31:02.000 That's being a human.

01:31:03.000 It's very messy.

01:31:04.000 Yeah, it's a constrained environment.

01:31:06.000 Obviously, I skew more towards a private property capitalist type solution because even though they're not perfect, they have been proven to actually work.

01:31:14.000 Once something is your property, you take care of it.

01:31:16.000 You're not going to crap all over your own house.

01:31:19.000 But it should probably be temporary property, not permanent property.

01:31:23.000 You see a lot of countries around the world now doing this no foreign ownership of land thing, for example.

01:31:28.000 Or Mexico has no private ownership of beaches, right?

01:31:31.000 So you can draw the line at certain points.

01:31:35.000 Do you enjoy doing this kind of thing where you break things down and give your perspective on things and try to illuminate certain complex subjects?

01:31:45.000 I'm not trying to illuminate so much as, you know, talking to you I learn as much as I do.

01:31:53.000 And I learned it for myself because I'm being forced to articulate it.

01:31:56.000 I can sit around and think my thoughts all day long, but a lot of it's going to be nonsense.

01:32:01.000 Because there are gaps in thinking where you make leaps because you're kind to yourself that you don't realize you're making.

01:32:08.000 But when you're forced to write it down, and this is why I tweet, or when you have to talk to somebody, you have to complete those gaps and make it a proper logical chain.

01:32:17.000 And the mistake that I made when I was young was, you know, I always wanted to seem like the smartest kid in the room.

01:32:23.000 You know, like just like you probably want to seem like the funniest kid in the room or the toughest kid in the room, right?

01:32:27.000 We're all losers starting out.

01:32:28.000 We want to be winners.

01:32:29.000 So we pick the thing we're good at and we double down on it.

01:32:32.000 So I always wanted to be the smartest kid in the room.

01:32:34.000 So what did I do?

01:32:35.000 I read a lot of books.

01:32:36.000 I memorized a lot of things.

01:32:38.000 And then whatever I hadn't memorized is pre-Google.

01:32:40.000 I made it up.

01:32:40.000 So it sounded good.

01:32:41.000 Okay.

01:32:42.000 Pre-Google.

01:32:43.000 After Google, fact-checking started and I had to get better, right?

01:32:46.000 So Google improved me that way.

01:32:48.000 Yeah, a lot of people.

01:32:49.000 Exactly.

01:32:49.000 So now what I realize is that the biggest mistake was memorization, right?

01:32:54.000 Because when you're actually trying to live your life in congruence with reality, you want to have a deep understanding of what you do and why you do it.

01:33:03.000 And so it's much more important to know the basics really well than is to know the advanced.

01:33:08.000 Yeah.

01:33:08.000 Knowing calculus wouldn't help you today.

01:33:09.000 It doesn't help you in business.

01:33:10.000 It doesn't help you in most things.

01:33:11.000 But knowing arithmetic really well will help you really.

01:33:14.000 Whether it's at the corner grocery store counting change to figuring out the value of your podcast business to figuring out how to do the probability math on some action that you want to take.

01:33:23.000 So, understanding basic mathematics cold is way more important than memorizing calculus concepts.

01:33:30.000 And the problem is, and this is true of I think all reasoning, it's much better to know the basics from the ground up, solid foundation of understanding, a steel frame of understanding than it is to just have a scaffolding where you're just memorizing advanced concepts.

01:33:43.000 This is why there are a lot of people I'm sure that you listen to who are really smart.

01:33:46.000 They use a lot of jargon and you can't quite follow their reasoning.

01:33:50.000 You don't know how they're putting things together and you have this deep down suspicion they don't even really understand.

01:33:55.000 So if you look at the most powerful thinkers, especially the ones where money or life is on the line, They have to understand the basics really, really well.

01:34:05.000 Richard Feynman, the famous physicist, was able to – he had this piece in one of his lectures where he takes you from counting numbers on your hand all the way to calculus in four pages of text, orally, but written down as four pages of text.

01:34:18.000 And it's a complete unbroken logical chain that takes you through geometry, trigonometry, pre-calculus, analytic geometry, graphs, everything, all the way to calculus.

01:34:27.000 I think?

01:34:41.000 So do you apply that to things other than mathematics?

01:34:45.000 Everything.

01:34:45.000 You apply that to everything?

01:34:46.000 Everything, yeah.

01:34:46.000 You don't even make attempt to memorize things.

01:34:48.000 Just make attempt to understand them.

01:34:50.000 You can't help but memorize things.

01:34:52.000 Right.

01:34:52.000 But if you can't, and this is where Twitter is great for me, is I try to understand something, and then I try to write it down in such a way that I can remember it.

01:35:01.000 Just the basic hook that'll point towards the deeper understanding, and I'm forced to explain it to people.

01:35:06.000 And that's how I know I understand something.

01:35:08.000 So this is what I meant originally when we talked about reading.

01:35:10.000 A good book, I'll read one page in a night, and then I spend the rest of the night thinking about it, or I'm chasing down references on Wikipedia or weird blog posts trying to understand it.

01:35:21.000 You know, so for example, there was a, I was dealing with, this is a few months back, I was dealing with a question of, stupid topic, but the meaning of life. 0.57

01:35:31.000 Right? 0.99

01:35:32.000 How could that be stupid, though? 1.00

01:35:34.000 It's trite. 1.00

01:35:35.000 It's trite.

01:35:36.000 You're not supposed to think about it.

01:35:37.000 It's something you ask your parents when you're young.

01:35:39.000 They tell you don't worry about it.

01:35:40.000 Go get a job, hippie. 1.00

01:35:41.000 Yeah, exactly. 1.00

01:35:42.000 Go get a job, you freaking hippie. 1.00

01:35:43.000 Or here's God. 1.00

01:35:43.000 God is the meaning of life, right? 1.00

01:35:45.000 And so I was just trying to resolve for myself, like, what could the answer be?

01:35:50.000 Not what is the answer, but what could the answer be?

01:35:53.000 And so at a core level, I was forced to kind of hunt down all these weird little things and really understand for myself.

01:35:59.000 And it's got to be personal, right?

01:36:01.000 But I have to establish for myself what it could and could not be.

01:36:04.000 And that gave me some level of peace.

01:36:06.000 So now I don't have to keep asking that question.

01:36:08.000 What is the meaning of life?

01:36:13.000 I mean, I think the question is more interesting than the answer.

01:36:16.000 Everyone should explore this on their own.

01:36:18.000 But let me just explore a few parts with you, right?

01:36:21.000 So first is, if I gave you an answer, if I said the meaning of life is to please God, well, which God?

01:36:27.000 Okay, Judeo-Christian God. 0.67

01:36:28.000 Well, okay, why that one?

01:36:29.000 Why this thing?

01:36:30.000 The problem is it's a why question.

01:36:32.000 You can keep asking why forever, right?

01:36:34.000 Any answer I give you, you'll just ask why again?

01:36:37.000 Why again?

01:36:38.000 Why again?

01:36:38.000 That's right.

01:36:39.000 And you end up in a place called Agrippa's Trilemma.

01:36:42.000 This is a philosophical exercise, but I kind of thought it through and Googled around and there's a thing called Agrippa's Trilemma.

01:36:49.000 And Agrippa's Trilemma says that any questioning like this, why, will always end in one of three places.

01:36:57.000 First is infinite regress.

01:37:00.000 Why?

01:37:00.000 Because of this.

01:37:01.000 Why that?

01:37:01.000 It'll just keep going forever.

01:37:03.000 The second is circular reasoning.

01:37:05.000 Well, A. Why A? Because of B. Well, why B? Because of A. You get trapped in that.

01:37:10.000 Or the third is an axiom.

01:37:11.000 And the most popular axiom is God.

01:37:13.000 But it could be anything because of math, because of science, because of the Big Bang, because of simulation, right?

01:37:18.000 These are all axioms.

01:37:19.000 These are all just stopping points.

01:37:21.000 Saying we're in a simulation or saying it's the Big Bang is just another way of saying God.

01:37:26.000 God's a dirty word, so we don't use it as much anymore, but same thing.

01:37:29.000 So you end up in one of these three dead ends, essentially.

01:37:33.000 So there is no answer.

01:37:36.000 The real answer is because.

01:37:40.000 What is the meaning of life?

01:37:41.000 Yeah, you get to make up your own answer as the beauty.

01:37:43.000 If there was a single answer, we would not be free.

01:37:47.000 We would be trapped.

01:37:48.000 Because then we would all have to live to that answer.

01:37:50.000 Then we'd be Borg-like robots, each one competing with each other to fulfill that single meaning more than the other's.

01:37:56.000 Back to signaling, like I'm better at it than you are.

01:37:59.000 But luckily there is no answer.

01:38:01.000 So you just do whatever you want.

01:38:03.000 The meaning of life.

01:38:05.000 It's funny that that's the basis of all existential angst.

01:38:11.000 That you don't...

01:38:12.000 You don't know why you're here.

01:38:14.000 And you have this feeling that it could be meaningless.

01:38:18.000 It is...

01:38:19.000 I mean, if you...

01:38:20.000 When you start pondering the...

01:38:23.000 The multiverse, the universe, the galaxies, the solar system, the planet, the organism, the cells inside the organism, the bacteria, the parasites, the symbiotic relationship we have to our environment.

01:38:37.000 And you start going, Jesus Christ, am I just a little piece of this thing?

01:38:41.000 Well, the answers to all the great questions are paradoxes.

01:38:44.000 So, for example, you're asking, do I matter?

01:38:47.000 That's really the question you asked, right?

01:38:49.000 How do I matter in this infinite universe?

01:38:52.000 On the one hand, you're separate.

01:38:54.000 No two points are the same.

01:38:57.000 Every two points are infinitely different.

01:38:59.000 You're completely separated.

01:39:00.000 No one will have your thoughts, your emotions, your feelings, your experience.

01:39:03.000 So your life is a single-player game.

01:39:04.000 You're trapped inside your head, and you're just aware of a bunch of things going on, and that's it.

01:39:08.000 On the other hand...

01:39:10.000 I cannot say the word Joe Rogan without invoking the entire universe.

01:39:15.000 Alien comes along and says, what's that?

01:39:17.000 Joe Rogan.

01:39:18.000 What's Joe Rogan?

01:39:18.000 It's a human.

01:39:19.000 What's a human?

01:39:19.000 Bipedal ape.

01:39:20.000 What's an ape on the earth?

01:39:21.000 What's the earth planet?

01:39:23.000 What's a planet?

01:39:23.000 Solar system.

01:39:24.000 Where was the carbon made?

01:39:25.000 Inside stars, right?

01:39:27.000 I have to create the entire universe to just say the words Joe Rogan.

01:39:31.000 So in that sense, you're connected to everything.

01:39:33.000 It's inseparable.

01:39:34.000 So the answer to that question of do I matter is I am nothing and I am everything.

01:39:40.000 And you'll find this with all the great questions.

01:39:42.000 The answers are all paradoxes, which is why at some level it's sort of pointless to pursue them, to find a trite answer like I'm giving.

01:39:49.000 But the act of pursuing them is actually really useful because then it gives you certain intrinsic understanding in your life that brings a level of peace.

01:39:59.000 I feel like there's, with many people, this stress of this question is also accentuated by unhappy lives.

01:40:07.000 It's accentuated by unhappy choices, by being trapped. 0.98

01:40:11.000 There's a big difference between not knowing what the meaning of life is and, God, I gotta get the fuck out of this job.

01:40:18.000 I have to, I can't live my life this way.

01:40:20.000 What's the meaning of life if this is my life?

01:40:22.000 Which is why I always start with, let's get you rich first.

01:40:27.000 That's why I'm very practical about it.

01:40:28.000 Because look, Buddha was a prince.

01:40:31.000 He started out really rich and then he got to go off in the woods.

01:40:34.000 And in the old days, what happened was if you wanted to be peaceful inside, you would become a monk.

01:40:40.000 You would renounce everything.

01:40:41.000 You would become an ascetic.

01:40:42.000 You would give everything up.

01:40:43.000 You would renounce women, men. 0.81

01:40:45.000 You'd renounce children.

01:40:46.000 You'd renounce money.

01:40:47.000 You'd renounce politics, science, technology, everything.

01:40:50.000 And you would go out in the woods by yourself.

01:40:51.000 You had to give everything up to be free inside.

01:40:54.000 Well, today we have this wonderful invention called money, where you can just store stuff up in a bank account.

01:40:59.000 And 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.

01:41:09.000 I think?

01:41:30.000 Are those things even possible?

01:41:32.000 Absolutely.

01:41:33.000 Everyone can be rich?

01:41:34.000 Everyone can be rich.

01:41:35.000 Here's my thought exercise for you.

01:41:36.000 Now it seems like we're in an infomercial.

01:41:38.000 Everyone can be rich.

01:41:39.000 Look at my home.

01:41:41.000 This is my Rolls Royce.

01:41:42.000 Yeah, so that's a good point.

01:41:43.000 So everything that I've ever created on this topic of how to make money, I will never charge a dollar for.

01:41:49.000 Because that would ruin it.

01:41:50.000 That would show that I'm just another huckster who's trying to get rich off of you.

01:41:54.000 There are no get-rich-quick schemes.

01:41:55.000 That's just somebody else trying to get rich off of you, right?

01:41:58.000 So to me, it's more of a philosophical contribution where for it to have meaning and to be legit, I can't charge you anything for it.

01:42:07.000 But yes, everybody can be rich.

01:42:09.000 And let me give you a thought exercise, okay?

01:42:11.000 Imagine if tomorrow we could wave a wand, And everybody was trained as a scientist or an engineer.

01:42:19.000 Everybody.

01:42:20.000 Even if you weren't very good.

01:42:21.000 You had enough understanding of computers.

01:42:23.000 You could write some code.

01:42:24.000 You could build some hardware.

01:42:26.000 And don't tell me people can't do it.

01:42:27.000 Because they can.

01:42:28.000 That's just a tyranny of soft expectations.

01:42:30.000 That's just you looking down on somebody else.

01:42:32.000 They can't do it.

01:42:33.000 They just have to be educated.

01:42:34.000 Now, if they're educated all as hardware, software, engineers, scientists, biologists, technicians, hard sciences, not the social sciences, We would all be done within five years.

01:42:43.000 Robots would be doing everything from cleaning toilets to cooking food to flying airplanes to driving Ubers.

01:42:48.000 And what would we be doing?

01:42:50.000 We would be doing all creative jobs to entertain each other and researching science and technology.

01:42:54.000 We would have wonderful lives.

01:42:55.000 So it is really just a question of education, nothing else.

01:42:59.000 Is this a scale issue, though?

01:43:01.000 I mean, you're talking about it as if this would work with 300 million people.

01:43:06.000 It'll work with 10 billion people.

01:43:07.000 It'll work with a space-faring race with 100 trillion people.

01:43:10.000 We have the resources.

01:43:12.000 We have the ability.

01:43:14.000 The universe is infinite resources.

01:43:16.000 Have you heard of a Dyson sphere?

01:43:18.000 You build a Dyson sphere on a star and you gather all its energy.

01:43:21.000 There's so much energy out there.

01:43:23.000 One asteroid's got all the minerals that we need.

01:43:25.000 One sun, one solar system has got all the power we will need for a long, long time.

01:43:31.000 We can extract it out of nuclear fusion.

01:43:33.000 We're not that far from those kinds of technologies working.

01:43:37.000 It's just a question of guts and interest.

01:43:41.000 We should be building nuclear fusion test plants on the moon.

01:43:44.000 The moon should be littered with them.

01:43:46.000 There's no downside.

01:43:47.000 Right.

01:43:48.000 Yeah.

01:43:50.000 How would that work?

01:43:52.000 Send a bunch of people up there to work?

01:43:55.000 Robots.

01:43:55.000 The problem with nuclear fission is that nature creates energy through nuclear energy.

01:44:02.000 The sun creates energy, nuclear energy.

01:44:05.000 Now, for transmission, we use photons because photons don't interact.

01:44:08.000 And so photons are great for information transmission, but they're actually not great for energy transmission.

01:44:12.000 For energy creation...

01:44:14.000 You want nuclear to work.

01:44:16.000 And the problem is because nuclear energy, you know, we built it with a bomb, we have dirty nukes, all those kinds of problems.

01:44:23.000 We have Fukushima, Three Mile Island, Chernobyl.

01:44:25.000 We don't innovate anymore on nukes.

01:44:27.000 Imagine if when the first steam engine blew up, we said, oh, no more steam engines for a while, or very carefully regulated billion dollars of regulation.

01:44:34.000 You can't innovate that way.

01:44:36.000 When the first airplane crashed, we said, no more innovation in airplanes, right?

01:44:41.000 Right.

01:44:41.000 So 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.

01:44:52.000 And the best place to do that is someplace like on the Moon or Mars.

01:44:55.000 Do you think that it's actually a possibility that they could...

01:44:59.000 Get nuclear power to the point where it's not a detriment because what everyone's worried about is a meltdown, right?

01:45:05.000 Yeah.

01:45:06.000 And we do have these old plants that are running on this ancient… This is 50-year-old technology.

01:45:12.000 It's crazy because there's no ability to shut them off.

01:45:15.000 Right.

01:45:15.000 Very old technology.

01:45:16.000 They do now have Gen 4 nuclear reactors that are passive fail-safe.

01:45:20.000 So, in other words, when they fail, they fail into a… When you pull the plug on them, they fail into a state where there's no leakage, there's no problem.

01:45:27.000 Right.

01:45:28.000 Is a positive outcome as opposed to the current ones, the old ones, where if you unplug them...

01:45:33.000 And even these Gen 4 are just Gen 4. They're not Gen 5, Gen 6. They're not Gen 80, Gen 100, where we have microprocessors, right?

01:45:40.000 And that should be something that people are working towards.

01:45:43.000 I hope so.

01:45:44.000 I mean, in an ideal world, the problem is if you have nuclear energy on the moon, how do you get it home?

01:45:49.000 Right.

01:45:49.000 So what you actually got to do is you got to rev it on the moon and you're using it there maybe to launch more satellites, more rockets further out into the solar system.

01:45:58.000 And that's the initial use case.

01:46:00.000 But then eventually the technology gets so good you can bring it home.

01:46:04.000 Now, I want to go back to this idea of getting people rich, that somehow or another that's going to make people happy.

01:46:09.000 How 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.

01:46:22.000 I have a Mercedes.

01:46:23.000 I want a Ferrari.

01:46:25.000 How do you stop that material possession...

01:46:30.000 You can't at some level, but I think most smart people over time realize that possessions don't make them happy.

01:46:36.000 You have to go through that. 1.00

01:46:38.000 You have to buy your stupid car to realize that it doesn't attract attractive girls. 1.00

01:46:42.000 It actually just attracts other dudes who are like, hey, I like that car, man. 1.00

01:46:47.000 You have some expensive cars out there, some fancy cars.

01:46:50.000 Tell me how much that attracts women versus men.

01:46:53.000 Well, I'm married.

01:46:54.000 Those are for me.

01:46:55.000 I just enjoy machines.

01:46:58.000 For me, they're toys.

01:46:59.000 That's a particular thing where you enjoy machines.

01:47:01.000 But I think as you get older, you just realize that there's no happiness in material possessions.

01:47:06.000 Now, lack of material possessions can make you very unhappy.

01:47:10.000 So being poor can make you unhappy, but being rich is not going to make you happy.

01:47:14.000 And what happens, unfortunately, a lot of people struggle through their whole lives to make money.

01:47:18.000 They make some, they're exhausted, and then they're like, well, now why am I not happy?

01:47:22.000 I guess I'm just not a happy person, and smart people aren't happy.

01:47:25.000 That's like a great little way that people feel better about it.

01:47:28.000 They say, well, if you're smart, you're not happy, right?

01:47:31.000 Whereas I posit it the other way.

01:47:32.000 If you're smart, you should be able to figure out how to be happy, otherwise you're not that smart.

01:47:37.000 Yeah, that is an offensive statement that if you're smart, you're not happy.

01:47:41.000 I've heard that before and I just do not understand the logic of that other than self-justifying.

01:47:46.000 I understand where it comes from.

01:47:47.000 It comes from if you're smart, it's usually because you thought things through and you have a very busy mind.

01:47:52.000 And so busy mind can often rob you of peace of mind.

01:47:55.000 Because the peace that we seek is not peace of mind, it's peace from mind.

01:48:00.000 So 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. 0.94

01:48:13.000 You're trying to get your monkey mind to stop chattering at you for a moment. 0.82

01:48:17.000 You're trying to get peace from the mind.

01:48:20.000 And there are other better ways to do that.

01:48:23.000 Most of the ways we try to get peace from mind are indirect.

01:48:27.000 Whereas if you understand things, if you see things properly, you will naturally slowly develop peace from mind.

01:48:35.000 Sorry if I went on a tangent there.

01:48:37.000 No, it's a good tangent.

01:48:38.000 It's a good tangent because I think that oftentimes the pursuit is what's thrilling to people and the possibility that one day they'll be able to rest and that they'll reach this goal.

01:48:50.000 That's the fundamental delusion, that there is something out there that will make me happy and fulfilled forever.

01:48:56.000 The golden years.

01:48:57.000 There is.

01:48:57.000 It's called death.

01:48:58.000 Oh! 0.60

01:48:59.000 I'll take care of everything.

01:49:01.000 That's a great leveler.

01:49:02.000 But when people look at, particularly social media, let's bring it back to that, when you see someone who, you know, you see them posed in front of their mansion with their beautiful car and they're leaning against it with their designer clothes on, their expensive watch, you go,

01:49:17.000 ah, I want that.

01:49:18.000 That's what I want.

01:49:20.000 What you really want is freedom.

01:49:22.000 You want freedom from your money problems.

01:49:24.000 Right.

01:49:24.000 And I think that's okay.

01:49:25.000 So people, once someone can solve their money problems, either by lowering their lifestyle or by making enough money, and, you know, essentially what you want to get everybody to is retirement.

01:49:37.000 But not retirement in the, I'm 65 years old, sitting in a nursing home, collecting a check, retirement.

01:49:43.000 Different definition.

01:49:44.000 Retirement is when you stop sacrificing today for some imaginary tomorrow.

01:49:51.000 Yes.

01:49:51.000 When today is complete in and of itself, you're retired.

01:49:55.000 And so how do you get there?

01:49:57.000 Well, one is you can have so much money saved up that just your passive income off of that without you having to lift a finger covers your burn rate.

01:50:04.000 Keep your burn rate low, right?

01:50:06.000 A second is you just drive your burn rate down to zero.

01:50:09.000 You become a monk.

01:50:10.000 A third is you're doing something you love.

01:50:13.000 You enjoy it so much.

01:50:14.000 It's not about the money.

01:50:15.000 So there are multiple ways to that path.

01:50:17.000 But the most common is people just say, I need to make more money.

01:50:20.000 And 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.

01:50:27.000 And you can do it by doing what you love.

01:50:30.000 We get into this model of, I must work for other people, work my way up the ladder.

01:50:35.000 I must do what that person is doing to make money.

01:50:39.000 But really, today in society, you get rewarded for creative work, for creating something brand new that society didn't even know yet that it wanted, that it doesn't know how to get other than through you.

01:50:48.000 So the most powerful moneymakers are actually individual brands, people like yourself, or Elon, or Kanye, or Oprah, or Trump, right?

01:50:56.000 These are individual brands, eponymous name brands, who themselves are leveraged, like you're leveraged.

01:51:02.000 You have podcast media going out to everybody that's leveraged.

01:51:05.000 The podcasts work for you when you sleep.

01:51:06.000 They have knowledge that nobody else has, which is your knowledge is the knowledge of being Joe Rogan.

01:51:11.000 I 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?

01:51:19.000 Can't replace you.

01:51:20.000 So we have to pay you what you're worth.

01:51:22.000 I never fought in the UFC, though.

01:51:24.000 Oh, you did?

01:51:25.000 Okay, sorry.

01:51:27.000 Whatever, you're involved in that whole scene.

01:51:30.000 You just have a unique set of skill sets.

01:51:32.000 So because of this unique, what I call specific knowledge, because of the accountability that you have with your name, because of the leverage that you have through your media, you're a money-making machine.

01:51:42.000 I'm sure at this point I could make you start over tomorrow, wipe out your bank account, you'd be rich again in no time.

01:51:47.000 Because you have all the skill sets.

01:51:49.000 So once people have those skill sets, and the beauty is, the way you've done it, is you don't have any competition.

01:51:55.000 There's no substitution.

01:51:56.000 If Joe Rogan were to disappear off the air tomorrow, it's not like random podcaster number 12 would step in and fill that thing.

01:52:02.000 No, it's just gone.

01:52:03.000 So the way to get out of that competition trap is actually to be authentic.

01:52:08.000 The way to retire is actually to find the thing that you know how to do better than anybody.

01:52:13.000 And you know how to do that better than anybody because you love to do it.

01:52:15.000 No one can compete with you if you love to do it.

01:52:18.000 Be authentic.

01:52:19.000 And then figure out how to map that to what society actually wants.

01:52:22.000 Apply some leverage.

01:52:23.000 Put your name on it so you take the risks but you gain the rewards.

01:52:27.000 Have ownership and equity in what you do and then just crank it out.

01:52:30.000 I think people have to be very careful to not get trapped along the way with things that you can afford with your current lifestyle, like the way you're living and the way you're earning, but they're also imprisoning you 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,

01:52:49.000 but now you're saddled down to this job.

01:52:52.000 You're not saving.

01:52:54.000 You're not putting things in a good place, and you're working for these things.

01:52:59.000 Working for things as rewards is a real trap that a lot of people fall into.

01:53:04.000 It's the biggest one.

01:53:05.000 Nassim Taleb also says that there are two great addictions, heroin and a monthly salary.

01:53:12.000 And that's why you can't get rich renting out your time.

01:53:15.000 Because even when you start charging more and more for your time, it's a slow upgrade loop, and then you upgrade your house at the same time, you upgrade your car at the same time, you move in the neighborhood.

01:53:28.000 Yeah.

01:53:34.000 Yeah.

01:53:49.000 And then there's this other thing that people have to avoid even allowing their mind to think.

01:53:55.000 When they're hearing what you're saying and all this logical, fantastic advice, there's these six dirty words, that's easy for you to say.

01:54:06.000 That is a terrible trap.

01:54:09.000 I grew up as a first-generation immigrant in Jamaica, Queens, with zero money, single mom, two kids, working day and night, going to school.

01:54:19.000 I washed dishes.

01:54:21.000 I was working catering jobs.

01:54:23.000 I was mowing lawns.

01:54:24.000 I was working since the age of 11. We're good to go.

01:54:44.000 It's not to say that it's easy.

01:54:46.000 It's not easy.

01:54:47.000 It's actually really freaking hard.

01:54:49.000 It is the hardest thing you will do.

01:54:51.000 But it's also the rewarding thing.

01:54:53.000 You know, look at the kids who are born rich, no meaning to their lives.

01:54:56.000 It's a terrible place.

01:54:58.000 Yeah, your real resume is just a cataloging of all your suffering.

01:55:03.000 If I were to ask you to describe your real life to yourself, when you look back on your deathbed, you're going to go back and say, what are the interesting things I've done?

01:55:11.000 And it's all going to be around the sacrifices that you made and the hard things that you did.

01:55:14.000 Anything you're given doesn't matter.

01:55:16.000 You have your four limbs, you have your brain, you have your head, you have your skin.

01:55:20.000 That's all for granted.

01:55:22.000 So you have to do hard things anyway to create your own meaning in life.

01:55:27.000 Making money is a fine one.

01:55:29.000 Yeah, struggle.

01:55:29.000 It is hard.

01:55:30.000 I'm not going to say it's easy.

01:55:31.000 It's really hard, but the tools are all available.

01:55:33.000 It's all there.

01:55:34.000 There's also these traps that people sort of establish in their own mind.

01:55:41.000 Of giving themselves excuses or giving themselves insurmountable obstacles, insurmountable paths and terrain.

01:55:50.000 Victim mentality.

01:55:51.000 Yeah.

01:55:51.000 It's somebody else's fault.

01:55:52.000 It's my skin color's fault. 1.00

01:55:54.000 It's the system's fault.

01:55:55.000 Yeah, those people are sinking.

01:55:56.000 I feel bad for them.

01:55:57.000 I want to shake them out of it and say, actually, you can get out of it.

01:56:01.000 You just have to stop thinking it's everybody else's fault.

01:56:03.000 You have to alter the perspective.

01:56:04.000 Yeah.

01:56:04.000 But it's so difficult for people to do.

01:56:06.000 It's one of the most difficult things for people to do is to change the way they approach reality itself.

01:56:12.000 At the end of the day, I do think, even despite what I said earlier, life is really a single-player game.

01:56:17.000 It's all going on in your head.

01:56:19.000 Whatever you think you believe...

01:56:22.000 Will very much shape your reality, both from what risks you take and what actions you perform, but also just your everyday experience of reality.

01:56:29.000 If you're walking down the street and you're judging everyone, you're like, I don't like that person because their skin color.

01:56:34.000 I don't like that.

01:56:35.000 Oh, she's not attractive. 1.00

01:56:37.000 That guy's fat. 1.00

01:56:38.000 This person's a loser. 1.00

01:56:39.000 Oh, who put this in my way? 1.00

01:56:41.000 The more you judge, the more you're going to separate yourself.

01:56:44.000 And you'll feel good for an instant because you'll feel good about yourself.

01:56:47.000 I'm better than that.

01:56:48.000 But then you're going to feel lonely.

01:56:50.000 And then you're just going to see negativity everywhere.

01:56:52.000 The world just reflects your own feelings back at you.

01:56:55.000 Reality is neutral.

01:56:57.000 Reality has no judgments.

01:56:58.000 To a tree, there's no concept of right or wrong or good or bad, right?

01:57:02.000 You're born.

01:57:02.000 You have a whole set of sensory experiences and stimulations and lights and colors and sounds, and then you die.

01:57:07.000 And how you choose to interpret that is up to you.

01:57:09.000 You do have that choice.

01:57:11.000 So this is what I meant, that happiness is a choice.

01:57:13.000 If you believe it's a choice, then you can start working on it.

01:57:17.000 And I can't tell you how to find it because...

01:57:19.000 It's your own conditionings that are making you unhappy.

01:57:21.000 So you have to uncondition yourself.

01:57:23.000 It's just like, I can't fix your eating habits for you.

01:57:25.000 I can give you some general guidelines, but you gotta go through the hard habit forming of how to eat right.

01:57:29.000 But you have to believe it's possible.

01:57:31.000 And it is absolutely possible.

01:57:32.000 I was miserable.

01:57:34.000 I'm happy as a clam.

01:57:35.000 And it's not just the money.

01:57:36.000 I got there before the money.

01:57:37.000 You got happy before the money?

01:57:39.000 Mostly, yeah.

01:57:39.000 How did you get happy before the money?

01:57:41.000 I started getting older, you know?

01:57:43.000 I just realized, like, life is short.

01:57:44.000 I'm gonna die.

01:57:45.000 Uh... 0.82

01:57:47.000 Again, trite, right?

01:57:48.000 Trite, trite.

01:57:49.000 In many ways.

01:57:49.000 Yeah, well, Confucius had a great saying that, you know, every man has two lives, and the second starts when he realizes he has just one.

01:57:57.000 Wow.

01:57:59.000 And I read that, and it was one of those book-dropping lines.

01:58:01.000 You know, it's like, mic drop.

01:58:03.000 Confucius had a lot of mic drops. 1.00

01:58:05.000 Confucius was a bad motherfucker. 1.00

01:58:06.000 He was. 1.00

01:58:07.000 That's a crazy one.

01:58:07.000 That was a great one.

01:58:09.000 Or another one is next time you get sick, you know, because everybody gets sick every now and then.

01:58:13.000 It's like a happy person wants 10,000 things.

01:58:16.000 A sick person just wants one thing, right?

01:58:19.000 So it's your unlimited desires that are clouding your peace, your happiness.

01:58:24.000 Have desires.

01:58:25.000 You're a biological creature that stands up and says, I can do something.

01:58:29.000 I move.

01:58:30.000 I resist.

01:58:30.000 I live.

01:58:31.000 But...

01:58:32.000 But just be very careful of your desires.

01:58:35.000 This is the oldest, most trite wisdom.

01:58:36.000 Desire is suffering.

01:58:37.000 That's what it means, right?

01:58:39.000 Every desire you have is an access where you will suffer.

01:58:42.000 So just don't focus on more than one desire at a time.

01:58:45.000 The universe is rigged in such a way that if you just want one thing and you focus on that, you'll get it.

01:58:50.000 But everything else, you gotta let go.

01:58:52.000 Did you make a gradual shift to happiness or was it a radical change?

01:58:58.000 It's ongoing.

01:58:59.000 It's gradual.

01:59:00.000 Every day gets better.

01:59:01.000 So you're happier today than you were a month ago?

01:59:03.000 Yeah.

01:59:03.000 Allegedly.

01:59:04.000 Yeah.

01:59:05.000 Yeah.

01:59:05.000 I'm very happy these days.

01:59:08.000 Deliriously so.

01:59:08.000 It's actually hard for me to hang out with normal people.

01:59:10.000 Really?

01:59:11.000 Yeah.

01:59:11.000 So you've made a significant shift over the period of like, how many years?

01:59:17.000 About eight years.

01:59:19.000 Eight years.

01:59:19.000 Yeah.

01:59:20.000 Wow.

01:59:21.000 And is this something that you've pursued through certain books?

01:59:25.000 Or is it just like you've made an understanding or gained an understanding in your own mind and then started pursuing it based on that understanding?

01:59:33.000 Yeah, it's very, very personal.

01:59:35.000 It's basically you have to decide it's a priority.

01:59:38.000 And then I tried every hack I possibly could.

01:59:40.000 I used to, you know, I tried all the...

01:59:42.000 I tried meditation.

01:59:43.000 I tried witnessing.

01:59:45.000 I even tried an SSRI just to see what it would feel like.

01:59:48.000 How did it feel?

01:59:50.000 It turned me from a pessimist to an optimist, but I didn't like the physical side effects, nor did I want to be on a drug for a sustained basis.

01:59:56.000 So I dropped it.

01:59:57.000 But it did turn you into an optimist.

01:59:58.000 Yes.

01:59:59.000 At the time, I used to be a pessimist, yeah.

02:00:01.000 I started doing things like I would start looking at the, you know, in every moment and everything that happens, you can look on the bright side of something, right?

02:00:09.000 And so I used to do that forcibly, and then I trained it until it became second nature.

02:00:13.000 So for example, like a friend of my wife's was over when we were dating, and she took all these photos.

02:00:20.000 She took like hundreds of photos.

02:00:21.000 And then she sends them all to us.

02:00:23.000 And my immediate reaction was like, why are you dumping hundreds of photos on my phone?

02:00:26.000 I don't need hundreds of photos.

02:00:28.000 Have some judgment.

02:00:29.000 That was my immediate reaction.

02:00:30.000 And then I could say, actually, how nice of her.

02:00:33.000 She sent me hundreds of photos.

02:00:34.000 I could pick the one that I like, right?

02:00:36.000 There are two ways of seeing almost everything.

02:00:38.000 There are a few things that are like high suffering, so you can't do that other than just saying, well, this is a teacher, right?

02:00:43.000 But I slowly worked through every negative judgment that I had until I saw the positive.

02:00:48.000 And now it's second nature to me.

02:00:49.000 I also realized that what you want is you want a clear mind.

02:00:53.000 You want to let go of thoughts.

02:00:55.000 Happy thoughts disappear out of your head automatically.

02:00:57.000 Very easy to let go of them.

02:00:58.000 Negative thoughts linger.

02:01:00.000 So if you interpret the positive in everything very quickly, you let it go.

02:01:04.000 You let it go much faster.

02:01:07.000 Simple hacks get more sunlight.

02:01:09.000 Learn to smile more.

02:01:11.000 Learn to hug more.

02:01:11.000 These things actually release serotonin in reverse.

02:01:13.000 They aren't just outward signals of being happy.

02:01:16.000 They're actually feedback loops to being happy.

02:01:19.000 Spend more time in nature.

02:01:20.000 You know, these are obvious.

02:01:21.000 Watch your mind.

02:01:22.000 Watch your mind all day long.

02:01:24.000 Watch what it does.

02:01:25.000 Not judge it.

02:01:26.000 Not try to control it.

02:01:27.000 But you can meditate 24-7.

02:01:29.000 Meditation is not a sit-down, close-your-eyes activity.

02:01:32.000 Meditation is just basically watching your own thoughts like you would watch anything else in the outside world.

02:01:37.000 And say, why am I having that thought?

02:01:39.000 Does that serve me anymore?

02:01:40.000 Is that conditioning from when I was 10 years old?

02:01:43.000 Like, for example, getting ready for this podcast.

02:01:46.000 You got ready?

02:01:47.000 I didn't.

02:01:48.000 Oh, good.

02:01:49.000 I did.

02:01:50.000 But I did.

02:01:51.000 I couldn't help it.

02:01:52.000 And what happened was the few days leading up to this, my mind was just running.

02:01:57.000 And normally my mind is pretty calm.

02:01:58.000 And it was just running and running and running.

02:02:00.000 And every thought I would have, I would imagine me saying it to you.

02:02:04.000 My brain couldn't help but rehearse.

02:02:07.000 What it's doing.

02:02:08.000 It's just rehearsing all the time to talk to you.

02:02:10.000 And then I was even rehearsing, telling you about the rehearsal, right?

02:02:15.000 So it's all playing all these meta games. 0.99

02:02:16.000 And I was just like, shut up, stop it. 0.96

02:02:18.000 What is going on? 0.97

02:02:19.000 And it took me a while to figure out, oh yeah, you know what it is?

02:02:23.000 When I was a kid in Queens and I had no money and I had nothing and I needed to save myself.

02:02:35.000 Wow.

02:02:43.000 Wow.

02:02:44.000 Wow.

02:02:54.000 That is a really interesting point, that you want to sound smart.

02:03:01.000 That many people do that, and especially young people.

02:03:03.000 When you see someone who is smart or someone who appears smart, they say smart things.

02:03:08.000 God, I want to sound smart.

02:03:09.000 I want people to think about me the same way I think about that person.

02:03:13.000 That is my disease.

02:03:14.000 That is my feeling.

02:03:15.000 It is what clutters my mind.

02:03:17.000 The thing I have to ask myself now is, would I still be interested in learning this thing if I couldn't ever tell anybody about it?

02:03:26.000 That's how I know it's real.

02:03:27.000 That's how I know it's something I actually want to know.

02:03:29.000 That's a common thing though.

02:03:31.000 I know I suffered from that when I was young, the desire to sound smart.

02:03:36.000 It's very common.

02:03:38.000 Well, 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.

02:03:50.000 If 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.

02:03:59.000 And you would have peaked early.

02:04:01.000 It's like the Bruce Springsteen Glory Days song, right?

02:04:03.000 You would have married your high school sweetheart.

02:04:04.000 You'd be living in your hometown.

02:04:06.000 You'd be a manager at the local McDonald's, whatever the first dream job you had.

02:04:10.000 Thank God we didn't all get what we wanted when we were young.

02:04:13.000 Or we would be trapped in that.

02:04:15.000 So you have to be able to break out of where you came from. 0.99

02:04:19.000 I don't know where I was going.

02:04:20.000 That is interesting too about people who peak too early.

02:04:22.000 Yeah.

02:04:23.000 Or maybe those people that peak too early can do the Elon Musk thing and just abandon it and start something new and then learn the joys of sucking at something.

02:04:33.000 Yeah.

02:04:34.000 And actually the...

02:04:35.000 In our profession, especially when you're high visibility, the problem with peaking is that you then get drowned in death of a thousand cuts.

02:04:43.000 People have expectations of you.

02:04:45.000 Hey Joe, can you come to my event?

02:04:46.000 Hey Joe, can you look at my business plan?

02:04:48.000 Hey Joe, can you give me advice on this?

02:04:49.000 Can you talk to my friend?

02:04:51.000 Can you come in this podcast?

02:04:52.000 You're just being assaulted all the time with inbound opportunities.

02:04:55.000 So you have no time to start over with anything.

02:04:58.000 So you have to ruthlessly, ruthlessly disappoint everybody.

02:05:02.000 Eliminate and clear your schedule.

02:05:04.000 Drop all the meetings.

02:05:05.000 Not even respond to the emails.

02:05:07.000 The only way you're going to be able to start over with anything.

02:05:09.000 Yeah, and we talked about this, that I love your approach to meetings.

02:05:14.000 I hate meetings.

02:05:15.000 Life or death.

02:05:15.000 I'm the same way.

02:05:17.000 I avoided a good one recently, and this was someone that was just tracking me down as a high-profile person at a big organization, and I'm like, can we just talk on the phone?

02:05:27.000 And then we talked on the phone.

02:05:28.000 There was nothing to say.

02:05:30.000 It was just they wanted to get me in the office.

02:05:32.000 Yeah, and meetings should really be phone calls.

02:05:34.000 Phone calls should be emails, and emails should just be texts.

02:05:38.000 Right.

02:05:39.000 Many of them, right?

02:05:40.000 With meetings, I mean, I despise meetings.

02:05:43.000 I used to own the domain idondocoffee.com.

02:05:45.000 I eventually let it go, but I used to respond from the wallet, idondocoffee.com.

02:05:49.000 Oh, that's hilarious. 0.99

02:05:50.000 But it was a little bit of a jerk move. 0.98

02:05:51.000 But really, where it comes from is when I was young, one of my principles was I knew I had to make money. 0.97

02:05:56.000 It was my overwhelming desire.

02:05:58.000 And one of the things I did was I said, okay, I'm never going to be worth more than what I think I'm worth.

02:06:03.000 Okay, no one's going to pay me more than what I think I'm worth.

02:06:05.000 So what am I worth?

02:06:06.000 So I picked an hourly rate for myself that I was worth.

02:06:10.000 And I said, I'm never going to squander my time for less than this.

02:06:14.000 So if originally it was $500 an hour, then I would upgrade to $5,000 an hour.

02:06:18.000 It's ludicrous.

02:06:19.000 But pick an aspirational hourly rate.

02:06:22.000 Aspirational. 0.93

02:06:22.000 It has to be a little ludicrous. 0.93

02:06:23.000 And then what I would do is if I have to return something, I'm standing in line to return something, and it's below my hourly rate, I'll throw it away.

02:06:32.000 Or give it away.

02:06:33.000 If I have to do some task and I can hire somebody to do it for less than my hourly rate, I would hire them.

02:06:39.000 And so I just became extremely jealous of my time, which doesn't mean you can't have fun.

02:06:44.000 Rest, leisure, spending time with your friends and family, that's all great.

02:06:47.000 Don't count that.

02:06:48.000 But if you're doing anything you don't want to do, which is the definition of work, it's a set of things that you have to do that you don't want to do, if you're working, it better be for your hourly rate.

02:06:58.000 Otherwise, don't do the work.

02:07:00.000 And so once it came out of that, then I just realized the cost of meetings.

02:07:04.000 The cost of meetings is so high, especially given all the people who are in there, right?

02:07:08.000 One person's talking, seven people listening, you're literally just dying an hour at a time.

02:07:12.000 So you have to just drop non-urgent meetings or figure out how to be more efficient with them if you're going to do anything great.

02:07:18.000 The extreme example is business travel.

02:07:21.000 Getting 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.

02:07:30.000 So about five years ago, I resolved, I am never going to travel for business.

02:07:35.000 Wow.

02:07:36.000 Wow.

02:07:53.000 Actually, that principle applies larger than just travel.

02:07:56.000 It applies to life in general.

02:07:59.000 One of the secrets to happiness is to really embrace what you're doing in that moment.

02:08:04.000 That's trite, but where that comes from is saying, I only want to do actions that are complete in and of themselves.

02:08:11.000 If I'm looking for some ulterior motive down the line, It's not going to materialize.

02:08:17.000 And if you think it is, maybe even if it does, it'll be very short-lived.

02:08:21.000 Anything you wanted in your life, whether it was a car or whether it was a girl or whether it was money, when you got it a year later, you were back to zero.

02:08:28.000 Your brain had hedonically adapted to it and you were looking for the next thing.

02:08:33.000 That's a great statement, hedonically adapted.

02:08:37.000 That is what happens to people.

02:08:39.000 You get accustomed to whatever it is.

02:08:41.000 I realized that when I first got a new apartment.

02:08:44.000 It was a nice apartment.

02:08:45.000 After a while, I got used to it.

02:08:46.000 I was like, oh, okay.

02:08:47.000 This is just an apartment.

02:08:49.000 It's just where I live.

02:08:50.000 It's nice, but I'm used to it.

02:08:52.000 We all go through this learning.

02:08:54.000 It's riding the Ferris wheel of life.

02:08:56.000 It's like you get at the bottom.

02:08:58.000 You're like, oh, I want to get to the top.

02:08:59.000 This is so exciting.

02:08:59.000 You ride it up.

02:09:01.000 You get a little dopamine rush and get a little serotonin.

02:09:03.000 Then you ride it back down as that wears off.

02:09:06.000 Then you need another high.

02:09:07.000 Then you ride it back up and you ride it back down.

02:09:08.000 In fact, the more highs you get, the harder it gets to go around the wheel.

02:09:12.000 The more bored you get of it, the harder it goes to go back up.

02:09:15.000 So what lights your fire now?

02:09:16.000 What gets you motivated to do things and to act?

02:09:20.000 Art.

02:09:21.000 Art?

02:09:22.000 This is art.

02:09:23.000 Oh, okay.

02:09:24.000 Art is just creativity.

02:09:25.000 It's just anything that's done for its own sake.

02:09:28.000 So what are the things that are done for their own sake?

02:09:30.000 There's nothing beyond loving somebody, creating something, playing, art.

02:09:36.000 To me, creating businesses is play.

02:09:38.000 I create businesses early stage because it's fun, because I'm into the product.

02:09:42.000 Even when I invest, it's because I like the people, I like hanging out with them, I learn from them, and I think the product is really cool.

02:09:49.000 So these days I will pass on all kinds of great investments because I'm like, the product's not interesting.

02:09:54.000 It's boring.

02:09:55.000 I'm not going to learn anything.

02:09:56.000 That's a beautiful luxury.

02:09:58.000 It is a luxury.

02:09:59.000 Art and learning, yeah.

02:10:00.000 It is a luxury.

02:10:03.000 These are not 100% or zero things, right?

02:10:06.000 You can, in your life, start moving more and more towards that.

02:10:09.000 Right, but it's a goal.

02:10:10.000 It's a goal.

02:10:10.000 When I was younger, I used to be so desperate to make money that I would have done anything, right?

02:10:15.000 If you'd shown up and said, hey, I got a sewage trucking business, and you're going to go into that.

02:10:19.000 I was like, great, let's do it.

02:10:20.000 I'm going to make money.

02:10:22.000 Thank God no one gave me that opportunity.

02:10:24.000 Yeah.

02:10:25.000 I'm glad that it went down the road of technology and science, which I genuinely enjoy.

02:10:30.000 And so I got to combine my vocation and my avocation.

02:10:34.000 I mean, what are you doing?

02:10:34.000 You're playing.

02:10:35.000 You're having fun.

02:10:35.000 You're doing art.

02:10:36.000 You're not working.

02:10:37.000 No.

02:10:38.000 That's what I always say when people say I work hard.

02:10:40.000 I'm like, sort of.

02:10:41.000 Not really.

02:10:42.000 I'm always working.

02:10:44.000 But it looks like work to them.

02:10:46.000 But it feels like play to me.

02:10:48.000 And that's how I know no one can compete with me on it.

02:10:51.000 Because I'm just playing 16 hours a day.

02:10:53.000 And if they want to compete with me and they're going to work, they're going to lose.

02:10:57.000 Because they're not going to do it 16 hours a day, 7 days a week.

02:10:59.000 Listen, man, there are some gems of wisdom in this conversation.

02:11:03.000 And I hope people pull things out of this and apply them to their own life.

02:11:08.000 And I'm certainly going to listen to you again and try to apply some of this to my own life, stuff that I'm not already applying.

02:11:14.000 But I really appreciate your time, and I really appreciate you coming in here.

02:11:17.000 Thanks for having me.

02:11:18.000 And please tell people, those small little podcasts, it's just the Naval podcast, right?

02:11:23.000 Yeah, best way to find me is on Twitter, actually.

02:11:25.000 I'm just at Naval.

02:11:27.000 Then I have a website at nav.al.

02:11:29.000 I have a YouTube channel, Naval, and I have a podcast, Naval.

02:11:33.000 That's it.

02:11:33.000 Well, thank you very much.

02:11:34.000 Thank you, brother.

02:11:35.000 Really appreciate it.

02:11:35.000 Thank you.

02:11:36.000 Bye, everybody.

02:11:38.000 Bye bye.

The Joe Rogan Experience - June 04, 2019

Joe Rogan Experience #1309 - Naval Ravikant

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