Transcription
One thing that always excited me was this concept the ancient Greeks had: that more harm is caused in this world by stupid, incompetent people than by evil people. Right? And they had a word in Greek called *phronesis*, which is a form of wisdom, to use your title here, but it's a form of practical wisdom to be able to get things done, to navigate through life, navigate through people, to be balanced and get things done.
Okay. So, what makes people stupid? And right now, we have a lot of stupid people in this world. There always have been stupid people, but because there are more people on the planet exponentially, there are more stupid people on the planet. What makes people stupid? And I'm sorry, I'm just going to tell it like it is: it's their certainty that they have all the answers. This is what's going on with our government. This is what's wrong, you know, with this or that. This is what people should be like. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So, you're narrowing your focus to this little, tiny, little rail, something that you heard from somebody else. It's not even your own stupid idea. You've absorbed it on the internet, whatever, and you're going down on this, this kind of monorail path. Meanwhile, the world is all around you, and you're just going like, "Zoom!" like that, because you're so certain you have the answer.
And when you have leaders, this is to get back to the Greek thing, when you have leaders who are so certain, they enter a country into a war that they haven't thought through. Because, and so the paradigm in ancient culture was the Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta, the war that ended up kind of being the end of Athenian democracy and of their golden era, right? And it was the idea, and Thucydides, one of the greatest writers who ever lived, wrote the history of the Peloponnesian War, living at that time. He was saying that people, the leaders, thought, "Oh, this will be so easy!" and "Think of all the great things when we go and we take Sicily and we conquer, that the whole world will..." and "Sparta will be destroyed." Right? It wasn't thought through. They were so certain of the answer that they didn't think of the parameters. Right? They didn't think really on a grand, strategic level. So, people who are certain of things are very stupid, and when they have power, they're very, very dangerous. I'm not saying evil people aren't dangerous, but incompetent, stupid people who are so certain, who haven't thought things through, are just as dangerous as evil people.
"I think there's far more stupid people than there are evil people as well."
"Probably. Probably. Yeah."
"Yeah. It's very interesting to think about the Venn diagram intersects for people who are always cynical and people who always have the right answer, or who always know. They go hand in hand."
"Correct. Totally overlap. Yeah."
"Correct. Yeah."
So, one of your fellow countrymen from 200 years ago, exactly 200 years ago, a gentleman named John Keats, a poet, came up with a concept called negative capability. And negative capability, he wanted to answer the question: why is Shakespeare, another one of your countrymen, why was Shakespeare so brilliant? Well, his characters were so realistic because he made them as real human beings. And what he could do was, they weren't stick figures. Shakespeare could think of a person and entertain two things about them at the same time. They could be both evil but also have a strain of goodness inside of them. They were complex. Human beings are complex.
And negative capability is the essence of being, of being creative. It means you can hold two thoughts in your head at the same time, two thoughts that apparently contradict each other, but you can entertain them and not grasp at one or the other.
"Not pass judgment immediately."
"Yeah. So, you're kind of able to deal with ambiguity and you're able to say, life isn't this, and isn't that. It's kind of both at the same time. That is creativity. That is real thinking. You know, I mean, I could go on and on about my ideas about live ideas and dead ideas, but this is real live thinking."
I have been playing with an idea that's basically the same thing, just repurposed with a silly meme from me, which is a cognitive superposition. So, like how in physics...
"Physics."
"Yes. And then when you decide, you collapse the superposition down. But I try to, you know, think in superpositions as much as possible. There's a very good book written about, like that. It's not perfect, it's a pretty good book called *The Possibility Principle*. You can look that up. He tries to apply those kind of ideas in physics to day-to-day life and psychology. It is interesting. It's worth looking at."
"So much depends on reputation. Reputation is the cornerstone of power. Through reputation alone, you can intimidate and win. Once it slips, however, you are vulnerable and will be attacked on all sides. Never let others define it for you."
Yeah. Um, you know, so when I wrote *The 48 Laws of Power*, I tried to... I've somebody through my whole life loves playing games. I don't mean that in the abstract sense, I mean literally, like chess, backgammon, sports, poker, whatever. And, um, I like the cleanness of a game. It's like, you do this, and you can win it. But there's also a psychological element in it. So, particularly when you're playing poker and you're bluffing, and you're... and I was always fascinated by this. It's a game of chance. You don't really know what cards you're going to get. But that fellow over there, he's been bluffing. He bluffed before. I'm sure he did. He's going to do it again, right? So, the psychology starts entering into the picture in a game of chance. It's not a game. There's skill, certainly skill involved, but a lot of it's chance. And because he bluffed before and he's got that look in his eye, it could be a woman. I don't mean to generalize. All right, I'm going to fold. Okay.
So, you don't realize that so much of the game of power has nothing to do with data and you being a better person at something. A lot of it is pure psychology and intimidating people and winning before you even enter into a battle. So, if you have a reputation, you carry it with you. And the reputation doesn't have to be real. Personally, I don't know how valid this is. I have this reputation now of being this Machiavellian character who's, you know... And so if Robert's five minutes late for a meeting, that means he's playing a game, even though it was probably just the traffic.
"But my reputation now kind of puts people a little bit on their heels, you know?"
"Where it's not necessarily true about me, but it kind of goes ahead of me, and it makes it influence... "
"Yeah. And so it's an extra form of power. So, the idea you have to... the overall arching idea to pull us out of the specific is power is pure psychology. Pure psychology."
And what I mean by that is, um, the CEO of a company, he doesn't get there based on... it's not like baseball where his balls and stars... soccer. I'm sorry, you probably don't probably even know.
"I'm a Ranger. I'm a Texas Rangers fan, I'll have you know."
"Oh, okay. All right. Well, it's not like baseball where balls, you know, you hit, you have a good batting average or OPS, all right, you're you're you're going to get in the lineup, they're going to bat you in the cleanup spot. Okay. Um, life isn't like that. So, the way somebody rises to the CEO, and I know because I was on the board of directors of a publicly traded company, is not about metrics. It's not about things that they've actually done. It's about psychology, right? People rise to positions of power because they know how to play the game, and they know how to play the game of psychology. They know how to appear. They know how to play the optics. They know how to intimidate. They know how to say less than necessary. They know all the psychological little gambits. And that's why I wrote *The 48 Laws of Power*. It's kind of like, this is the game of life, the game of power. The rules are a little bit nebulous, but here's how you play. You play by mastering these little psychological bits. One of them is your reputation."
"I'm fascinated by reputation and credibility, especially given what I do now. But my previous life, I was a club promoter. I ran..."
"You were a what?"
"Club promoter. I ran nightclubs for a very long time."
"Club promoter. What... what do we call that here?"
"Club... It would still be... It's just a promoter. It's called... uh..."
"Marketing for nightclubs, essentially."
"The guys stood on the front door with the guest list and the bands for VIP and all of the hot girls' names. And then after a while, we owned a group of guys that did that. And then we owned a group of guys that owned a... and you start to build up this company."
"And, um, in that, every single nightclub that you've ever been to is the same thing. It's people getting drunk in a room to music. It'll never be anything else. You can dress this one up pink and give out inflatable flamingos on the door, or this one's really cheap, or this one's on a wedding day and it's sort of naughty that you shouldn't be going out on a wedding day. Dress it up however you want. It's people getting drunk in a room to music. That's all it's ever going to be. And what I realized from doing that was the power of reputation. This isn't the reputation of a person, it's the reputation of a brand. But if your company is known for always putting on good parties, then you get to benefit from that. And..."
"And what happens is when you have a reputation for good, putting on good parties..."
"People come."
"More people come. Yep. Correct."
"So, this is the... this sort of odd... and this is the, the really important point. Uh, never let others define it for you. Uh, and, uh, when you are vulnerable, you'll be attacked on all sides because as it's going up, it... it does precede you. It continues to do work for you exponentially, growing and growing. But when you're starting to go down, even your best work will sometimes be derided to be worse than it is. So, you have done something that is good, but because of your reputation, you're a liar, you're a phony, you're a grifter, you're a shill, you're a fake."
"That's right."
"Yeah. Credibility is the one thing that you should never sell because you cannot buy it back. There is no return policy on your credibility."
"And, and people are so... getting back to the word stupid. I mean..."
"It's a theme, too. They post things on social media when they're young, not realizing that five years later, when they're trying to get a job at a law firm, they're like, you know, sure, they're doing incredibly ridiculous things on Instagram. And that part of their reputation. Everything you do is reflected through the social world, right? Nothing is in isolation. People are continually judging you. So, you have to be aware. You have to think before you post. You have to think, how are people going to take this? If I say this stupid, rude thing that comes right out of me because I don't control my, my, my tongue, it's going to ruin your... one false step will ruin your reputation."
"There's a British MP who is receiving on the receiving end of a tweet from 2009 which has come back around. I think I read about this before."
"Like, 'Get these Estonian retards out of my house right now!'"
"[Laughter]"
"So, I don't mean to laugh, but they're terrible."
"Estonians are very smart people."
"'Get these Estonian retards out of my house right now!' Or, 'I want these...' whatever. And, uh, she's had to do this groveling apology."
"But I mean, you know, when was Twitter? When did Twitter start? Probably 2008. Or this is, you know, early. This is the equivalent of the Big Bang. You know, this is the, whatever it is, microwave cosmic background of tweets. And, um, yeah, the, I, I just love that. I really, I really think that the reputation point can't be overstated. And, you know, I've got to see in this industry as well, both whether it's authors, podcasters, YouTube. There are some people who have traded reputation and credibility for, uh, money or for short-term trades that didn't make sense, and they've not ended up coming off in one form or another. They've tried to cash it in."
"Like going to Spotify and..."
"[Laughter]"
"No, no, not that."
"To not name names."
"No, not that. Um, interestingly, with with Joe's move to Spotify, that was something that he got an awful lot of credibility for. And that's one of the interesting things. Had it have been with a different platform that didn't carry as much, uh, weight, gravitas, they have their own reputation. It becomes multiplicative as opposed to sort of subtractive."
"Yeah, I know. Of course."
"Like, uh, getting a Nike sponsorship is cool. Hooray for you. That's not you selling out. But getting a sponsorship with some brand that everybody thinks is really, like, lame, that is selling out. You're obviously only doing it for the cash. Um, but, you know, there's a ton of guys that have held political positions or have swayed with the wind, just blown with the, whatever it goes this way, whenever it goes that way. And the interesting thing is, even if they've made a ton of money from it, even if it's been advantageous in one domain, I actually think that if you gave them the opportunity, they would give all of it back and some to be able to regain their reputation. I think they would give anything they could to be back in the cool kids' club. And there's no return policy on credibility."
"Well, the other thing about reputation and credibility is it has to be consistent. So, um, you have to, like, it's like a brand. You're you're known for something. You're known for being strong. You're known for being self-confident. You're known for being Machiavellian, or whatever it is."
"Or funny, or lighthearted, or..."
"Yeah. And there's a certain kind of, you know, shape to it. And if you're like all over the map, and you're going over here, your reputation is about that, it's about this, it looks weak. It makes it look like, because we want to, we want to feel like people judge on appearances. They don't judge on the reality of who you are. They don't know who I am or who you are. They judge on what they see and what they how we appear. And if those appearances, they want to have something consistent that they can grab on to. They want to say something simple. That guy is funny, and that's who he is. You know, this guy is that. They want a very simple formula. And if you can't be consistent, if you're all over the place, if you're changing your ideas, you're conservative and you're liberal, blah blah, and you're trying to to tack with each wind to get power. Yeah, you'll get some power that way, but it'll make you look weasly."
"It'll make you look distrustful, and people won't like that. And your reputation will be one of somebody who has no soul, who has no core. So, reputation also has to have a consistency, a core to it, a soul that binds it all together."
"Especially if it seems like it's being done for a contrived reason. You know, I think people are fine with people changing their mind as long as... show me you're working. Explain to me how you got from that position to this one. Don't do it beyond the sort of tolerance level that we all have of, this is a little bit too much. I've updated. I used to be pro this. Now I'm anti that. Um, yeah, I, I really do think an awful lot about the value of of reputation. And, um, in another way, it's very... never let anybody else define it for you. Um, you know, allowing that sort of vacuum to to seep in loses you your power over your reputation and allows other people to deride it. On the other hand, if you're a very Machiavellian person, poke holes in the in your enemy's reputation, and you will destroy them. Bring up things that are inconsistent with the reputation, and you will have ruined... be like popping a balloon. It'll just go like that, you know. And I talk about how in that chapter how P.T. Barnum played that game to ruin other people's reputation and make people wonder, is he really like that? I guess not, because I just saw this fact that contradicts it. So, I'm giving you some very evil, Machiavellian advice out there. If you have enemies, one of the meanest things..."
"I'm not a mean person. I don't like being mean."
"Sure."
"It's true. But I spent a thousand nights on the front door of nightclubs with drunk people. So, you need a few defense mechanisms. And what you realize, especially when people have had alcohol, is that people fall into only a small number of buckets, and behavior is usually pretty predictable. And one of the things that we realized as kind of a script that we could run when somebody was getting a little bit mouthy, remembering that we're flanked by big British gorillas, you're right, you've got door staff all around you. No, not me. I was I was the guy that I was the dude in the skinny jeans with the clipboard. I had the, you know, 6'6" dudes with leather gloves on either side of me. They were give me your ID, etc., etc. And, um, one of the things that used to work, it was so mean, but it worked so well. If somebody started, they'd been ejected or they hadn't been allowed into the club or something had happened. We'd always say, 'Mate, sorry. You need to get away from me. Your breath stinks.'"
"And [Laughter]"
"It's completely unfalsifiable because unless someone's going to come over and smell it, they can't say, 'No, it doesn't.' And it just immediately enters this person into this. You just watch the color drain from them. So, yeah, I, uh, oddly, breath apparently. Halitosis is reputation as well."
"Or, or just body odor."
"Yep."
"That's great."
"Any smell. It's just, it's so..."
"I'm going to remember that."
"It's really good. It's re... Your breath stinks. I need to just... Can [Laughter] you give me a little bit of room? Oh, it's just used to pull people apart."
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"Always stick to what makes you weird, odd, strange, different. That's your source of power, which is similar to occupy your niche. Embrace your strangeness, identify what makes you different, fuse those things together, and become an anomaly."
Yeah. Well, um, you know, uh, in this world, if you're replaceable, you will be replaced, right? So, if in your job you're in your 20s and you're doing something that other people could do, by the time you become 28, they can hire somebody 24 when they hired you, but for less money. They will do that right away. It's a brutal world. So, if you're replaceable, you will be replaced. So, the only defense about that against that is to be irreplaceable in this world. And the good news is that you are at, at your core, irreplaceable. There is something strange and weird about you. Once again, I hate to say it, but it's a chapter that I'm writing right now for my, my sublime book. Okay? And so, and I explain in *Mastery* where that comes from biologically, your DNA, how you are marked as a unique individual at birth, the combination of variance in your chromosomes. It's mathematically impossible for it to ever be replicated. Yes, the variations are marginal. The differences aren't great between you and me, but those little differences are the differences between me liking this kind of hip-hop music and you liking a different kind of hip-hop music, right? It creates your inclinations. It creates your tastes. And so, what the game of life is involves is knowing your uniqueness, is knowing who you are, is knowing what makes you weird and what makes you odd. Okay? And the problem is, is that we're social animals. And the pressure continually on us is to fit into a group, is to be like other people, to have their ideas, to have their values, to dress like them. Okay? And that happens when you're young, you're in your adolescence. We all go through that phase. I went through that phase. But if you keep on that track when you're in your 20s and on, which is happening a lot today through social media, you're going to lose that sense of what makes you odd and different.
"I compare it to a voice. When you're very young, that little voice in you is going, 'Robert, you should be a writer. Chris, you should be a blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.' I don't know what it is, right? It's telling you something. And as you get older, you don't hear it anymore because you're hearing all the other... you're hearing the voices of your parents, the teachers, the culture around you, your peers, your friends telling you, 'This is what's cool. This is what's not cool.' And that little voice becomes completely drowned out. And so you don't know who you are anymore. And you're afraid, particularly young people today, I mean, maybe it's always been that way, are so afraid of being different. They're so afraid of being odd. But look at all the powerful people in this world. Look at your Elon Musks. Look at your celebrities in in entertainment, in business, in politics. They're one of a kind. They they have, like you, I hate that word, but it's like a brand. They're different. They stand out for something that's truly different. You know, even Albert Einstein, there's nobody else like Einstein. There's nobody like Da Vinci. Okay, that's where your power lies. And you'll go, 'Oh, but Robert, those are people that were brilliant, that were talented. I'm not like that. I don't have that.' Well, [expletive] you do have that. It's just you're... it's you're not... you're forgetting about it, and you don't want to put the effort into it. I talked in *Mastery* of a woman named Temple Grandin, who was born with severe, severe autism, and she was able to find her way to become a very brilliant professor, academic writer, and about animals, animal behavior, and about autism itself. She found her way to it when she couldn't... when she was three or four, she couldn't even speak any language. She was going to be hospitalized. You have that potential. It's just you're not putting the effort in. You were lazy. You want to fit into the group. You want to conform because it's easy. But your oddness, what makes you weird, what makes you different, that little strange quirk in how you want to dress yourself, that little strange quirk in your musical tastes, that little quirk in the food that you like to eat, that is who you are. Those are signs from deep within, from your core, from your soul. There's that. This is who you are. And if you lose that, not only are you not going to be successful in life, you will also lose yourself, and you will be mis... you will be unhappy, you'll be unfulfilled, you'll be alienated from who you are. And you can get away with that when you're young because you're happy, you look good, you've got energy, things are going right. You get into your 30s, and you're like everybody else, and you don't know who you are, and you don't know what you like anymore, and you're just following the trends, you start to get depressed, and you start going down this, this rabbit hole, and things can turn really ugly. So, you need a bit of courage in life. You need to go, 'Okay, I am weird. I am strange.' You know, lean into it."
So, um, when I had *The 48 Laws of Power*, when it first, when I first wrote the book, um, without it being published yet, it was a very strange-looking book, and it reflects my own strangeness. Things on the margins, stories, everything broken up, images, quotes here and there. It's kind of how my brain is, a hodgepodge, kind of a mess, really. And the publishers, they bought the book, but then they came back to us and they said, "Robert, can you kind of maybe make this more like other books? Can you get rid of all those sections and everything?" And I said, "No, take it or leave it. This is the book as it is. It's odd. It's strange." They didn't like that because if it doesn't fit into all the other books that have had success, it's too big of a risk. If this movie isn't like the movies that were made last year, who knows? We'll go see it. People are so conservative. But because it was odd, it stood out, and it was successful. If I had succumbed and I compromised and made it more like other books, I wouldn't be here talking to you. So, sometimes you need a little bit of cojones. You need a little bit of courage. You need to stand up and say, "I'm okay being different."
"It's fascinating that lots of people, maybe most people, want to be extraordinary in some way, but also don't want to stand out in a way that allows them to be mocked. But, you know, the latter is the price of the former. You can't behave the way that everybody else does and expect to not get the results that everybody else gets. It's like, I think about regressing to a mean that doesn't exist. Uh, you know, that everybody is idiosyncratic and unusual in their their own way, and we're all imagining this sort of odd 50th percentile avatar that is the most acceptable. But when we think about why we love the people that we love, we don't love them for how average they are. No one's ever said, 'Do you know what it is? I'm just besotted with how predictable all of her opinions are.' No one's ever said that. We love people for their eccentricities. And, uh, our friend George has the idea of non-fungible people, like non-fungible tokens, that it's irreplaceable. There is nobody else like them."
"Yeah. Yeah."
"Uh, if you think about your favorite memories from your favorite people, it's not from the things that are easily replaceable. It's from the fact that they were just obsessed with football, and when the football was on the TV, you could talk to them and they wouldn't even turn to you. Or it was the fact that they hated violence, or they loved dogs. Every dog walked into the room, and they would be gone. They would be away. That's what we love people for. And my favorite, uh, strange person from history, Salvador Dalí. And I would take it one step further. You said you kind of have this, uh, it's it's advantageous and also, uh, psychologically healthy for you to embrace who you are fully. I actually think in some ways it's a... maybe I would go as far as to say that it is our duty to humanity. I think it's, yeah, our duty to embrace the things that only you can do."
"Yeah. Well, in, um, in nature, um, the diversity of species in a habitat make it vital, make it alive, make it sustainable. And that comes from mutations in the genetic code. Some insect has a mutation, and therefore a whole new species, a whole new thing splinters off from that, and it creates variety. Well, in human culture is like a habitat in a way. Um, so you're marked with uniqueness by your genetic code. Insects don't really have individuality. We have individuality, and they are like mutations. And so your mutation, your difference, you being Chris, is for a purpose. You're marked that way because by mining your uniqueness, your weirdness, your oddness, your little quirky tastes, you're going to contribute something new to the culture. And in contributing something new to the culture, you enrich it and you keep it turning around and round and round. Cultures in the past that die on the vine don't have any variety. You know, you can look at like the Soviet Union at its most, you know, decadent, or when it was really at its worst phase, like in the '70s and '80s. There's no change. There's no variety. Early on, there was all sorts of weird, different voices. They ended up getting imprisoned and murdered. Okay. But a culture has to have variety. It has to have a diversity of voices."
"Like a gene pool or an immune system."
"Yeah. And so you, by being odd, you're contributing to that. You're contributing to the culture. By not doing that, you're not contributing at all. And it's a real waste of what nature gave you. I always think again about Dalí. I spent quite a bit of time researching him, and I think as brilliant as they were, Michelangelo didn't do Dalí, and Da Vinci didn't do Dalí. In fact, there's that, uh, famous job application that Da Vinci sends, I think, to the king of Italy, and Da Vinci's sort of listing all of the different things that he can do. 'I can make machines for war and a trebuchet and a blah, blah, blah.' The final paragraph, he writes the sentence, 'Also, I can paint.' [Laughter] I, I always think about, 'Also, I can paint.' What is the 'also I can paint' that I don't see in myself? What are the things that my friends really value?"
"Perfect example. The guy that I was talking about earlier on, George. I, um, I've been learning a little bit about myself and I, I discovered over the last year that I'm a people pleaser in some regard. And I was lamenting this to him over Christmas as we were driving to go and get food. And I sort of brought up something I'd done with him, which was sort of being overly cautious that I, I would have done something that would have annoyed him or or or stepped on his toes in in some manner. And he said, 'I just want to sort of stop you there because I'm aware that to you, you've been able to frame that as people-pleasing in this thing that is malignant and you want to get rid of, but to me, that's you thinking about me first, which is actually one of the things that makes me love you as a friend. So be very careful sort of labeling areas, creating an unnecessary value judgment.' And I think getting another perspective, and that that really gave me pause. I just thought, 'Yeah, I'm so agreeable with all of these things, and I, I hate disappointing people, and I think that other people's emotional states are my responsibility and so on and so forth.' And then I bring it up to a friend, and he says, 'Yeah, that's why I love you.'"
"Yeah."
"And, uh, I was... it's interesting. Yeah. I mean, um, it's good to have a little bit of control over something. So, if in certain situations, sometimes it's good to be able to not be so pleasing, cuz I'm a people pleaser, too. It's my nature. So, I understand that. And sometimes you have the feeling that it's not coming from the right place."
"Correct. You're not choosing to. You're obligated to by your nature."
"And you're feeling a little bit of fear involved in it."
"Fear of displeasing, a fear of rejection, a fear of being different. Um, and it could probably goes back to childhood and to my parents. We probably have similar parental, uh, dynamics. Um, so, but what's good about what you're saying is, and I completely agree, and I wrote about this, I think, in *Human Nature*, is that you have this quality. You can't really control it. It's who you are. You know, it's either genetic or it comes from those first couple of years with your mother or father. So, make it work for you. Find the way that it's a strength, and see it as a strength, and use it, and don't have second thoughts about it. Use it for power, right? And don't be so conflicted about it. It's all how you look at it. And there's a reason why you're a people pleaser. And you can, if you weren't a people pleaser, you wouldn't be doing podcasting. You'd be this [expletive]. I would never have agreed to be on [Laughter] the podcast. Right. So, um, it's just that in moments, you wish you could control it a little. Kind of like the grass is greener thing that we were talking about before we got started. You know, this [snorts] assumption that the thing you don't have is more valuable than the one that you do, or that things would be fixed if only you could have that. But what else comes along for the ride?"
"You know, if you got rid of your people-pleasing nature, what are the little parasites that your lack of people-pleasingness would also have attached to it? Are you sure? Are you really sure that that's the thing that you want?"
"Exactly. Yeah. Well, that's where it comes down to, um, knowing yourself and knowing what makes you different, and knowing these are things you can't really change. So, um, my wanting to be a writer, or Tiger Woods wanting to be a golfer when he's like 2 years old, there's probably some genetic component in it. And maybe there's some early bonding, but there's probably a genetic component to it. You can't control it. It's who you are. And maybe that you can't control it is a good thing. And maybe it's there for a reason. And maybe if you wanted to do something else, it wouldn't work out. So, my knowing that I wanted to be a writer instead of, you know, a businessman or a lawyer like my parents wanted to be, probably saved my life, to be honest with you. So, knowing what makes you different is kind of going to guide you past these, these dangerous moments in life to..."
"And, and make you want to do, to change who you are because you feel pressure, social pressure to change who you are."
"Yeah. To regress to this imaginary mean. Yeah."
"Two, um, elements I think of me that are genetically predisposed or, uh, at least very deeply embedded. Um, the first one is I've always liked to talk, uh, and ask questions. And as a child, uh, I always used to get in trouble in school because unfortunately, my voice appears to carry further than everybody else's. So, even though the naughty kids would be genuinely being naughty, poking other people with [expletive] protractors or something, I would be the one that was heard. Even though I wasn't misbehaving as much, I would be the one that was heard. 'You're being nosy. You know, children should be seen and not heard. You stop being so...' No. 'Why are you asking all of these questions?' would be one of them. And the other one is solitude. I'm an only child. I spent a lot of time listening to audiobooks in my room, playing with toys on my own, throwing a ball off the wall and seeing if I could kick it off that wall and then catching it. Hours, hours and hours and hours. I didn't have anybody else for me to..."
"Didn't have anybody else to play with."
"Uh, and you think, well, God, you know, this... the things that you're punished for when you're a child are the things that you think are malignant when you're a child, you're often rewarded for if you can just find the way to alchemize them as an adult. So, I'm sure that your ability to sit and read or go to a cabin or write in your room and you nobody's come and gone and you haven't noticed, and you think, well, my solitude as a child was maybe something that I lamented or or that I saw as a weakness or something like that, and yet it's a superpower when I become an adult if I can find the way to channel it. And the same thing for the, the question asking or the listening to audiobooks. You know, what's the 2024 internet version of an audiobook? It's a podcast. It's what I'm doing right now."
"Uhhuh. Yeah. Yeah. Um, and, uh, you know, it really just comes down to, um, being aware of of who you are, what makes you different, and being comfortable with it. And so you're going to have moments where you're not comfortable with it. You want to conform, and you want to be like other people. And, you know, you went through that, and I went through that in adolescence, in particular, on through the '20s. You make some changes to things because you think it's cool, but you keep coming back. You keep coming back to being alone. You keep coming back to doing, throwing the ball against the wall in some metaphorical way."
"No, no, no, no, no. I'm kid you not. The way that I like to relax now, in between sessions of work, I get a tennis ball and throw it against a wall. It's the most bizarre thing."
"I, I had the same thing, but I, uh, because I'm American, mine was baseball. And I, I had a ball and I'd throw it against the garage door, and I would play all these different games, but with my glove on, and I would catch it, and I would imitate the crowd cheering me, and I had this was a home run. This was a setter, you know. And if I had, if I could do it today, I still would. So, I understand that."
"But you come back to these things because they're so strong in you. Yeah."
"And you can't help it, and they give you relief, and they give you comfort, and they're who you are. And so it all comes down to, do you come back to these things, or do you change because of the pressures of other people? And what is the difference? Why are some people like that, and some people are not? And that's the million-dollar question."
"I think it's swimming upstream or swimming downstream, is working against or working with your nature. Yeah. And trying to find a way to make it work for you as opposed to trying to change it so that you can find a way to make it work."
"Yeah."
"Makes a lot of sense. Sean Puri, who does *My First Million*, very, very smart guy. I remember one of the first conversations I ever had with him on Zoom, he had a sort of small, leather, black basketball, uh, in his hand, and we were just talking, and he was a little bit further back in his desk, and he was tossing it like this and rolling it along the desk and sort of, you throw it in the air, like what we're on. So, it wasn't like we were writing anything. It was a casual conversation between friends. I said, 'What? What are you doing?' He says, 'Oh, I grew up playing basketball. I'm happiest with a ball in my hand.'"
"Yeah."
"And I thought, 'Holy [expletive], that's me.' Every time that I go to the park, if there's a tennis ball, that's now mine for the rest of it, and I'll bounce it in my hands until we finish up. And then I'll, you know, the tennis ball charity pool, it goes back, it goes back into the park."
"And I thought, 'Holy [expletive].' So, I, I came up with a name for that, which is a weirdness role model. And it's somebody who does a thing that sort of breaks the ceiling on what you thought was acceptable behavior. You've seen this guy do a thing, and you go, 'Oh my god, like, maybe I could have a ball on my desk. Maybe I could have a tennis ball or a cricket ball on my desk,' and that means that I can, because I've seen this guy do it, and it's, it's a weirdo role model, or a weirdness role model."
"Yeah. Yeah. Well, uh, I think we all need that in our life. Um, people who are different. I remember in in high school, I had an English teacher who kind of changed the course of my life, and um, he was very weird. He was very different. His way of thinking was different, and how he talked about writing and literature was very odd, and I, other students hated him, and I thought he was just fantastic. So, it's kind of interesting what you say that was a role model. I could see, and it was just a high school teacher, so it wasn't like a career path for him, but I could see that having that kind of quality was a good quality, and I was attracted to it."
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