Transcription
I've seen you be once again quite stoic about your emotions. You ever get angry? You ever get lonely? You ever get sad? The roller coaster of human emotion. And what do you do with that when you make difficult decisions?
I'm a human being like everybody else. I do get to experience emotions and some of them are not very pleasant. But I believe that it's the responsibility of every one of us to cope with these emotions and to learn to work through them. Self-discipline is particularly important because without it, how can you overcome this seemingly endless loop of negativity or despair that ultimately leads to depression for some people?
I normally never have depression. And I don't remember having depression in the last 20 years at least. Maybe when I was a teenager. But one of the reasons for that is I start doing things. I identify the problem. I can see a solution and I start executing the strategy. If you are stuck in this loop of being worried about something, nothing's ever going to change. And people often make this mistake thinking, "Oh, I should just have some rest and then regain energy." This is not how it works. You gain energy by doing something. So, you start doing something, then it happens. You feel motivated. You feel inspired. And then ultimately you do something else a little bit more, a little bit more. And in a few years, who know you may end up achieving great things.
Yeah, that's the thing that people really confuse. If if you're stuck in in a depressive cycle, even when you really, really, really, really don't want to do anything, just do something. Try try to make progress because the good feeling comes on the end of that. The whole point is to do first and then feel. not feel and then do.
>> Exactly. And going to the gym is a good example. There are many days when you don't want to start working out, but they have you have to overcome this initial reluctance and then you get to a point that you enjoy it and you think, "Oh my god, it was such a good idea to come to the gym today." But it's similar to pretty much every activity. You get to write some code. Write a small piece of code first and then you get inspired. Then you'll come up with more ideas. You need to write a novel or just write a paragraph. This is pretty obvious and it's not a secret. But because we are bombarded with all kinds of information that is not really important for us in terms of becoming successful, we often forget the important things and this is one of them.
We've been working out every single day. You have been working out for many years pretty intensively. So, I think a lot of people would love to um know what's your perfect daily workout regimen. Let's say on a daily on a weekly basis.
>> I do 300 push-ups and 300 squats every morning. And in addition to that, I go to the gym normally five, six times a week, spending between one or two hours every day.
>> So, push-ups and squats are still a big part of your routine.
>> Yes, this is how I start my day. I'm not sure they do a lot in terms of changing your body, but they're definitely a good way to practice self-discipline because you don't want to do this push-ups in the morning most of the days. Squats are particularly boring. They're not that hard. They're just boring. But you overcome it and then it's much easier to start doing other things. related to your work. For example, when I can, I also take a nice bath because it's another exercise of self- discipline. I think the main muscle you can exercise is is this muscle, the muscle of self-discipline, you know, not not your biceps or or or your pecs or anything else because if you get to train that one, everything else just comes by itself.
>> Yeah. everything else becomes easy. We should mention I went with you uh to BA and um I think it's fair to say you're nuts in terms of how much you can handle. Um and I didn't even see the worst of it. Can you can you just speak to the the your crazy escapes in the BA? What value you get from it? So both the heat and the cold.
>> I I don't know if it's crazy. I think it's quite natural and normal by this time.
>> Yeah. Yeah,
>> but maybe I could just got used to it. So, ba is this uh extreme kind of sauna practiced by Eastern Europeans.
>> Yeah.
>> But it is done in a way that maximizes heat and they also use all kind of herbs and branches and it's a much more holistic and natural experience. Then a necessary part of it is you get the cold plunge and then you go back. And again, this is one of the things that maybe in the moment is not always that pleasant, particularly if you go to extreme temperatures, you don't feel great. I don't always feel great, but this feeling is passing. It's only a few minutes. Same with the ice bath. you have to suffer a bit and then you get to feel great for hours and days after. What's more, it gives you this long-term health benefits. In a way, you can look at it as alcohol in reverse. Alcohol will give you this short fleeting pleasure for an hour, for a couple of hours, but then you will be paying for it with long-term negative consequences. I'd rather do banana in ice bath.
>> We uh swam the length of a large lake in France a couple times. Can you u talk through why you value these multi-our swims?
>> I left swimming for hours. The longest I swam was 5 and 1/2 hours in Finland. Was quite cold. I got lost in the process. Barely could find my way back. But the reason I do it, yes, you feel great after you're shaking a little bit. You feel great after you cross a huge lake and I cross many lakes. Geneva Lake, Zurich Lake, and every time you feel this achievement, which makes you happy, makes you feel strong, and then you're more ready to other challenges. And of course, when you know you're going you're going to start a journey that will last a few hours, you're reluctant to do it. But you swim for 10 minutes and then for 20 minutes and then for 30 minutes and it teaches you this incredible patience that I think is necessary if you want to achieve anything in life and it's pretty meditative lake versus ocean.
>> Yes. And you don't have to go too fast.
>> Yeah.
>> You can be slow and enjoy the moment
>> until you get lost and it's 5 and 1/2 hours. Did you panic like if you're going to be able to find the shore or find your way out?
Not really. I'm a reasonably stress resilient person. I didn't panic at that moment. And there were worse swims I had that were shorter but involved accidents and you know about some of them. So that wasn't the worst by far. But an important thing about swimming and physical activity in general is that it makes your mind clear and your thinking process is becoming more efficient. Because at the end of the day, the efficiency of our brain is limited by how much sugar and oxygen our heart can push through blood to our brain. So how can you make this go faster or how to do you make your lungs more efficient? How do you make your heart more efficient in doing that? The physical activity is the only way I know of. So, it's not just staying healthy or trying to look good. It's also being productive. It's also being stress resilient. All of these qualities are necessary if you want to run a large company, if you want to start a company. I'm surprised when I started doing this more than 10 years ago that more CEOs didn't engage in sports. The situation changed in the last several years, which is great because back in the day, if you take 20 years ago, there was this stereotype that if you're strong, you must be not very smart and vice versa, which is a complete lumacy. Very often these two things go together.
>> So for you working out it's not just about staying healthy. It's actually valuable for the work that you do as a tech leader, as a engineer, as a technologist.
>> Oh yes. When I can't train, I can instantly feel that stress is creeping on me.
>> Yeah. So even in situations where I'm constrained, I can't go to the gym. I would just keep doing push-ups. I keep I just keep doing squats.
>> Yeah. I mean, that's the cool thing about body weight exercises. You can just do it anywhere. You can just pop off 50, 100 push-ups before a meeting.
>> I don't you feel weird when you have a day without physical activity?
>> Yeah. If I go a day without doing push-ups at the very minimum, that's a shitty day.
>> And if you can do pull-ups, it's even better.
>> Yeah. I got to ask you about your diet, too. No processed sugar, no fast food, no soda, intermittent fasting, sometimes once a day only. Sometimes a couple times a day. Uh, so take me through your philosophy on the no sugar, no no soda, just clean food.
>> Well, sugar is pretty easy because it's addictive. The more you consume sugar, the more you want it. The hungrier you get.
>> So if you want to stay efficient and healthy, why consume processed sugar? You'll just end up snacking all the time. intermittent fasting. So say eating only within six hours and not eating for 18 hours every day also brings structure into your day and into your eating um habits. So you don't crave sugar anymore because you know if you eat sugar and then you're unable to snack, you're just punishing yourself. I read a few books on longevity. I think something everybody agrees on is that sugar is uh harmful. No, I'm not militant about sugar. Like you can eat berries, fruit if you feel your body needs it, but it's not true to think it's necessary to consume sweet things. Not for children, not for adults. Red meat, I stopped eating it about 20 years ago because I just felt heavy every time I had it. So, I guess it's individual. It's my metabolism. My digestive system isn't uh agreeing with with with this kind of food. So, I normally eat seafood of all kinds and vegetables. This is the basic source of calories for me.
>> Yeah. And like all things uh you said short-term pleasure isn't worth your future. So a lot of things we all know that alcohol is destructive to the body. Tobacco, pills, processed food, sugar, but society puts that on you makes it very difficult to avoid. So I I guess it all boils down to just discipline.
>> Yes. and trying to identify the real cause of an issue you're experiencing. If you experiencing a headache, one solution would be to take a pill and then the headache disappears. What this pill would actually do in most cases, it would mute the consequence, your feeling of pain. It's a painkiller. it will not eliminate the root cause. So you have to ask yourself what is it that is causing this headache. Uh do I need to drink some water? Is the air quality here bad? Do I need to start getting more sleep? Is there something wrong with people around me? They're stressing me out. There must be some reason why you're experiencing a headache. But if you take a pill, you're not removing this reason. you're actually making it worse because this harmful factor is still there. It's like you're piloting a helicopter and there is some red signals and red lamp starts to blink and and it starts producing bad unpleasant noise. What would you do? You would try to figure out the cause and eliminate it. Maybe there is some mountain next to you and you have to avoid it or you take a hammer and smash the signal. I think the answer is quite obvious. So why are we constantly doing this regardless? Oh, because everybody else is doing it because there's a whole industry trying to persuade you that this is the right thing to do. So, it's incredibly important to analyze yourself and try to get to the bottom of things.
So, you generally try to avoid all pills, all pharmaceutical products.
>> Yes, I've been staying away from all of that since I became an adult. When you're a teenager, your mom would typically say, "We need to take this pill, otherwise, you know, the world collapses." Um, yeah. Yeah,
>> once I became a grown-up, I said, "No, I don't think that the producers of pill are incentivized in the right way. They are not really interested in eliminating the root of the problem. They would rather have me dependent on the pills they're producing um so that I could buy them forever." And then I also realized, no, I'm not saying that you should never take pills. There obviously is some diseases that you can only fight with antibiotics, for example. So I'm not suggesting we go back to the middle ages. Uh but what I'm saying is we overuse pills.
Yeah, it's always good to uh study and deeply understand the incentives under which the world operates so that you don't get swept up into the forces that operate under these incentives and big pharma is certainly one of them. Pharmaceutical companies have a huge incentive to keep the problem going versus solving the problem. It's wise.
Well, this is something I practice every day. I read some piece of news and I ask myself who benefits from me reading this. Then you can end up coming to this conclusion that maybe 95% of things we read in the news have been written and published because somebody wanted you to buy some product, support some political cause, fight some war, donate some money. Let's do something that would benefit other people. And this is not a problem to support causes that you truly believe in as long as it was your intentional choice and you're not being manipulated into fighting other people's wars. And that takes us back to the original thing we started talking about which is freedom. One of the ways to achieve freedom of thought is to remove your mind from uh the influences, the forces that manipulate you. That's really important to realize. the the content you consume, especially on the internet, when a large percentage of it is designed to manipulate your mind, you have to disconnect yourself and be very proactive understanding what the biases, what the incentives are so you can think clearly, independently and objectively. And again it ties back with uh restraint from alcohol.
>> Yeah.
>> Because if your mind is clouded, how can you analyze yourself? You'll always be def dependent on opinions of others. you always follow the mainstream and with then whatever the authorities or whoever in charge will tell you you believe it because you don't have a tool of your own to rely on to come to your own conclusions. I have to ask you this this is something that came up. You don't watch porn. I don't think I've heard you talk about this before. What's the philosophy behind not watching porn? You know, there's a lot of people that talk about uh porn in general having a very negative effect on young men on their view of the world, on their development of their sexuality, and how they uh get into relationships and all that kind of stuff. So, what's your philosophy in not consuming porn?
I don't watch porn because I just feel it's a surrogate, a substitute for a real thing that is not necessary in my life. If anything, it just forces you to exchange some energy, some inspiration to a fleeting moment of pleasure. Doesn't make sense. And in any case, as I said, it's not the real thing. So, as long as you can u access the real thing, you don't need to watch porn. But then if you can't access the real thing, it's you shouldn't watch porn as well because it means there's some deficiency in your life, some problem that you have to overcome.
>> Yeah. Analyze the underlying cause. Uh and again this goes back to the theme of investing in uh long-term flourishing versus uh short-term pleasure. There's this there's a theme to the way you approach life. I try to be strategic. I try to act under assumption that I'm not going to die in 1 hour from now
>> and I'm going to stick around for a bit despite the fact that we are all mortal. So why would I exchange the mid and longterm for the short term? Doesn't make any sense.