Joe Rogan Experience #1309 - Naval Ravikant

Two, one, boom! All right, we're live. Thank you very much for doing this, man. I really appreciate it. I've been absorbing your information and listening to you talk for, uh, quite a while now, so it's, uh, it's great to actually meet you.

Thanks for having me. My pleasure, my pleasure. You are one of the rare guys that is, uh, you're a big investor, you are, um, you're deep in the tech world, but yet you seem to have a very balanced perspective in terms of how to live life, as opposed to not just be entirely focused on success and financial success and tech investing, but rather how to live your life in a happy way. That's a, it's a, it's not balance.

Yeah, you know, I think the reason why people like, uh, hearing me is because, like, if it's like, if you go to a circus and you see a bear, right? That's kind of interesting, but not that much. If you see a unicycle, that's interesting. But you see a bear on a unicycle, that's really interesting, right? So when you combine things you're not supposed to combine, right? People get interested. It's like Bruce Lee, right? Striking thoughts, philosophy, plus martial arts. And I think it's because at some level, all humans are broad, we're all multivariate, but we get summarized in pithy ways in our lives. And at some deep level, we know that's not true, right? Every human basically is capable of every experience and every thought. Uh, you know, you're UFC, comedian, commentator, podcaster, but you're also more than that. You're also father, uh, lover, you know, thinker, etc. So I like the model of life that the ancients had, the Greeks, the Romans, right? Where you would start out, and when you're young, you're just like going to school. Then you're going to war. Then you're running a business. Then you're supposed to serve in the Senate or the government. Then you become a philosopher. There's sort of this arc to life where you try your hand at everything. And as one of my friends says, specialization is for insects, right? So everyone should just be able to do everything. And so I don't believe in this model anymore of trying to focus your life down on one thing. You've got one life, just do everything you're going to do.

I couldn't agree more. And I, 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 almost out of fear. Well, it's hard because there's a, you know, the analogy around mountain climbing, like if you find a mountain and you start climbing, you spend your whole life climbing it, and you get say, two-thirds of the way, 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. 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. Nobody wants to do that. People don't want to start over. Yeah, and it's the nature of later in life that you just don't know the time. So it's very painful to go back down and look for a new path. But that may be the best thing to do. And that's why when you look at the greatest artists, uh, and and creators, they have this ability to start over that nobody else does. Like Elon will, you know, be called an idiot and start over doing something brand new that he supposedly is not qualified for. 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. And a lot of times they'll just miss completely. 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. If you're not doing that, you're just getting older.

Yeah, I mean, I don't even know if it's willing to be a fool. It's just, to me, that the most exciting thing is to try to get better at something, to learn things. I mean, it's really exciting when you just have incremental progress in something that you're completely new to. 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. That's what I live for.

Yeah, it's like curiosity fulfilled. And it's what little children do too, you know. My little son is always asking why, why, why, why, why? And I always try and answer him. And half the times I realize, actually, I don't really understand why. I just have a memorized answer for you. But that's not really understanding.

Yeah, those are weird conversations, right? When you're, you're talking to your kids and you say, look, uh, the reality is, I don't know a lot of things. Yes, I've just memorized a lot of things. And there's certain things that you just can't know. Yeah, you realize that, you know, you have, you have answers for a few things that you've thought through. Then you sort of have cover-ups, like, like trap doors. Like, don't go here. This is just a cover-up. I don't really know the answer to what the meaning of life is, or how we got here. Yes. And then you've got a whole bunch of memorized stuff, because a lot of your, uh, a lot of intelligence these days is just the external brain pack of civilization. I know it's out there. I know the answers are out there. Know how to look them up. And I've memorized some of them. And I, I kind of understand how money works, and the Federal Reserve prints it, and what this government thing is, but not really, right? So not good enough to teach it in university.

Yeah, yeah. Uh, I think people do that with almost everything in life these days, in terms of like, have a, like a one-page, a one-cheat, like a brief summary of what and the explanation for what this very complex subject might be. TLDR, right? Don't give me the lecture, give me the book. Don't give me the book, give me the blog post. Don't give me the blog post, give me the tweet. Don't give me the tweet, I just, I already know.

Yeah, I got really fascinated by the way you read, because I thought there was something wrong with me by doing that. But you, you don't really just read a book to completion. You read and then you pick something else up and you just kind of go based on your whims, whatever you're interested in. Well, I was raised by my, 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. And so she would basically say, when you get back from school, go straight to the library and don't come out until I pick you up late at night. So I used to basically live in the library. And I read everything. I read every magazine, I read every pictograph, or every book, or every map. I just ran out of stuff to read. I just read everything. So I got over this idea of that reading a large number of books or reading a book to completion as a vanity metric, because really, when people are putting up photos on Twitter, Instagram of, look at my pile of books that I'm reading, it's a show-off thing. It's a signaling thing. Yeah, sure. And the reality is, I would rather read the best hundred books over and over again until I absorb them, rather than read all the books, right? Yeah, because your, your brain has finite information in a finite space. You get enough advice, it all cancels to zero. There's a lot of nonsense in books out there too. So I don't read anymore to complete books. I read to satisfy my genuine intellectual curiosity. And it can be anything. It could be nonsense, it could be history, could be fiction, it could be science, it could be sci-fi. These days, it's mostly sci-fi, philosophy, science, because that's just what I'm interested in. But I will read for understanding. So a really good book, I will flip through. I won't actually read it consecutively in order, and I won't even just even finish it. I'm looking for ideas, things that I don't understand. And when I find something really interesting, I'll reflect on it, I'll research it. And then when I'm bored of it, I'll drop it, or I'll flip to another book. 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. It's also a little bit of a defense mechanism to how in modern society we get too much information too quickly. And so our attention spans are very low. So you get Twitter, you get Instagram, you get Facebook, you're just used to being bombarded with information. So you can take that to you, you can view that as a negative and be like, I have no attention span. Or you could view that as a positive, I multitask really well, and I can dig really fast. I can, if I find a thread that's interesting, I can follow it 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. It's like the Library of Alexandria that I can research at my disposal. So I, I no longer track books read, or even care about books read. It's about understanding concepts.

Yeah, you brought up two awesome points. First of all, the, the social media aspect of of books and basically anything. It's like, it's such a weird way to display your life because it's, you know, you're displaying the best aspects of your life in some sort of a glass case, you know, just, it's an unrealistic version of your life that you cultivate and you curate. And I'm, I'm as guilty of that as anybody. Everybody's guilty of it. I'm guilty of it too. Yeah, you know, I mean, I pose with my dog every time I run. Yeah, we're always signaling. Yeah, it's like, rather than really looking at yourself, you're looking at how other people look at you. So it's like this one remove mental image. 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, because they're this strong self-image that gets built up. It gets built up by compliments. Every time somebody pays you or me a compliment, and we're like, oh, well, thank you, right? Then that builds up an image of who we are. And then one idiot comes along, one out of ten, one out of a hundred, and they can easily tear it down. Because it doesn't take many insults to cancel out a lot of compliments. And now you're carrying around this big, weighty self-image. And it's just very easy to be attacked. And because you're, you're famous or you're well-known, people want to attack you. So being a celebrity is no good. It's actually a problem. Like one of my tweets is, and these are all reminders to myself, is you want to be rich and anonymous, not poor and famous.

There are benefits to it, of course. Of course, but we wouldn't do it. It has unusual problems that you don't get trained for and you really will not understand unless you experience it. You know, I was having this conversation with my wife. We were talking about, um, people that just come up to you and they don't care what you're doing. They don't care if I'm with my daughter, if I'm holding her, if I'm feeding her, for, you know, we're in the middle of an intense conversation, she's crying, she could be crying. And some bro will come over and just immediately have to take a picture. Doesn't care. His needs supersede the daughter. And my wife was saying, I, before she knew me, she used to think that that's just part of the price of being famous. That people, people like you, that's just part of the price of being famous. And now when it interrupts her life, and you know, it interrupts the children, and it interrupts friends, and you know, she now she's like, this is annoying. Like, this is not, this is not healthy. This is not a smart way to to interact with people. And that people have this weird challenge, this weird thing that if you're, if you become famous, there's this weird challenge where people just want to come to you. Especially today, because if they can get a photo of you, then that boosts their social media profile. Like, hey, I'm sitting here with the vault. Look at that smile. Anonymity is a privilege.

On the other hand, it's self-inflicted. I mean, we brought it on ourselves. Yeah, we don't think we knew what it was, though. We did, but we carry on. So yeah, it tells us we are getting something out of it. So I, you know, there are times when someone will approach me in public and I'm a little resentful. And there are other times I'm just like, actually, I'm really grateful that, you know, I worked for this. I got this, right? This is the payoff. Just embrace it, smile, grit and bear it. But you have a different sort of celebrity, too, right? You're, you're a hero amongst investors and amongst, I mean, you've just, I'm a hero among young male geeks, which is those are some of my favorite people, right? But that's not the kind of celebrity I think most people set out to get, especially most guys, right? Right, right. You want the cute females. Yeah, yeah. I look at my brief little YouTube clips. I have a tiny little podcast going now, and it's like 95% male. Oh, sure. Yeah. This is very highly 18 to 35. Yeah. We, what do we, what is the numbers? Yeah, it's in the 90s. Yeah.

Um, you did that one, you do that one very small podcast where you just have small, like three or four minute clips. Yeah. So what it was, I, I did a tweet storm, uh, called "How to Get Rich Without Getting Lucky." And it got pretty popular on Twitter. And it's really about wealth creation. I just used the clickbaity title. And 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. And my theory behind that is, like, there are three things everybody wants. There's actually more than three, but let's just start with three. The three basics: everybody wants to be wealthy, everybody wants to be happy, and everybody wants to be fit. And I know there's a lot of virtue signaling that goes on, like, we don't want money, and, you know, I don't care about being happy, and happiness is for stupid people. But let's face it, like, you want to be rich and happy and healthy. That's the trifecta. Now, of course, you also want an internally calm state of mind, you want a loving household, so there are other things that come into it. But those three, I think they can actually be taught, right? And the fitness, I'm not going to teach. 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. But I was born poor and miserable, and, uh, I'm now pretty well off, and I'm very happy. And I don't, and I worked at those. And so I've learned a few things. There are some principles. And so I try to lay them out, but in a timeless manner, where you can kind of figure it out yourself. Because at the end of the day, I can't really teach anything. 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. So this podcast actually ended up explaining this tweet storm. So there's a tweet storm with like 36, 38 tweets, got very famous, got translated to dozens of languages. 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, and I've been sort of living them. 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. And do it in a very long-term kind of way, not let the, you know, banker crash the economy, get filled out kind of way, but, you know, 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. So the podcast is just explaining each tweet. So these are little three, four, five-minute snippets. I don't like to say the same thing twice. I don't like to explain in detail. I just, I, I feel like if you have something original and interesting to say, you should say it. Otherwise, it's probably been said better. So that podcast tries to be information-dense. It tries to be very concise. It tries to be high-impact. It tries to be timeless. And it has all the information I think you need, the principles that if you absorb these and you work hard over 10 years, you get what you want. So I've got the one on wealth creation. I'm going to attempt to do one on happiness. It's a big word, but, you know, happiness and inner peace and calm and all that. 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 leading the trail of emotional wreckage with you and your loved ones, which is more common than not. Yeah, because you got to focus. And it's very hard to be great at everything. You want to be the guy or the gal who gets there calmly, you know, quietly, without struggle. Uh, 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. Um, if you can be.

You were 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. And so you've sort of developed a social contract: I'm a happy person, and I have to live up to that. Yeah, I've got hundreds of techniques.

And then how did you develop that one? Well, there's just a, there's social consistency, right? Humans have a need to be highly consistent with their past pronouncements. So the way I started my first tech company was, I was in working inside a larger organization, and I told everybody that I was going to go start a company. I was like, I hate this place, I'm going to do my own thing, I'm going to be a successful entrepreneur. Six months passed, nine months passed, then people start, you're still here? I thought you were going to go start a company. Are you lying? Right? That was the implication. So we kind of know this, right? Social contracts are very powerful. Like, if you want to give up drinking, right? And you're not serious about it, you'll say, I'm going to cut back. I'm going to have only one drink a night. I'm going to only drink on weekends. You tell yourself. But if you're serious, you'll announce it on Facebook, you'll tell all your friends, you'll tell your wife, you'll say, I'm done drinking. I'm throwing everything out of the house. You'll never see me drink again. When you say that, you know you're serious. So I think a lot of these are choices that we make. And happiness is just one of those choices. And this is unpopular to say, because there are people who are actually depressed, you know, chemically or what have you. And there are people who don't believe that it's possible, because then it creates a responsibility on them. It says, oh, now if I'm, you're saying if I'm not happy, that's my fault. 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. If you're so smart, how come you aren't happy? How come you haven't figured that out? That's my challenge to all the people who think they're so smart and so capable. If you're so smart and capable, why can't you change this?

There are a bunch of people though that actually take pleasure in being miserable. There's something about the pursuit of excellence and of success that supersedes all other pursuits. That, in their eyes, it is, it is that the peak, the pinnacle, the most important thing. It's not a trade-off. I would argue that if, now, when I say happy, happy is one of those words that means a zillion different things. It's like love, right? What does that mean? Right? I love cheese. Yeah, I'm going to define it a little bit more tightly, right? So let's go back to desire, right? This is old, old Buddhist wisdom. I'm not saying anything original. But desire, to me, is a contract that you make with yourself to be unhappy until you get what you want. Okay? And I keep that in front of mine. So when I'm unhappy about something, I look for what is the underlying desire that I have that's not being fulfilled. It's okay to have desires. You're a biological creature. You're put on this earth. You have to do something. You have to have desires. You have a mission. But don't have too many. Don't pick them up unconsciously. Don't pick them up randomly. Don't have thousands of them. My coffee is too cold. Doesn't taste quite right. I'm not sitting perfectly. Oh, I wish it was warmer. Uh, you know, my dog, you know, pooped in the lawn. I didn't like that. Whatever it is, pick your one overwhelming desire. It's okay to suffer over that one. But on all the others, you want to let them go so you can be calm and peaceful and relaxed. And then you'll perform a better job. Most people, when you're unhappy, like a depressed person, it's not that they have a very clear, calm mind. They're too busy in their mind. Their sense of self is too strong. They're sitting indoors all the time. Their minds working, working, working. They're thinking too much. 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 your limbs are flailing out of control? The same way, if you want to be effective in business, you need a clear, calm, cool, collected mind. Warren Buffett plays bridge all day long and goes for walks in the sun. He doesn't sit around like constantly loading his brain with non-stop information and and getting worked up about every little thing. We live in an age of infinite leverage. What I mean by that is that your actions can be multiplied a thousandfold, either by broadcasting at a podcast, or by investing capital, or by having people work for you, or by writing code. So because of that, 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. So a clear mind leads to better judgment, leads to a better outcome. So a happy, calm, peaceful person will make better decisions and have better outcomes. 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.

I love what you're saying. 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, and he's still alive somehow. So that shows you that low stress is more. Nobody looks like [ __ ] like how old is he? I mean, he's, he's a fairly old man. Charlie Munger's, I think, in his 90s, right? Yeah, he's made it really far. I wonder what Warren's doing, you know, I mean, just he's got to know that's bad for him. But it's terrible. He doesn't care. He doesn't care. I think he's just a little stressed. Yeah, stress is right. So he just enjoys that Coca-Cola, and that's probably maybe there is a trade-off, right? Like maybe him enjoying that junk food and that Coke just, ah, that that pleasing of the mind is maybe better than him just eating wheatgrass shots and, yeah, and salads and just being, yeah, just super worked up about everything. 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, right? Right. And I think that that's applicable not just in business, but in probably any pursuit. And I like what you're saying about allow that one thing to be your obsession, but everything else, just, you know, learn how to, learn how to let things go. Pick your battles. And we like to think that we, 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? It doesn't work that way. Guy running the corner grocery store is working just as hard or harder than you and me. How much output is he getting? What you do, who you do it with, how you do it, way more important than how hard you work. Outputs are non-linear based on the quality of the work that you put in. The right way to work is like a lion. You don't, you and I are not like cows. We're not meant to graze all day, right? We're meant to hunt like lions. We're closer to carnivores in our omnivorous development than we are to herbivores. Um, we don't tell vegans that. Yeah, sorry. Look, I wish all that stuff worked. I don't want to eat meat. This future generation will look back at us as worse than slavers, you know, because the holocaust we're committing with the animals. But they'll have artificial meats that taste and are healthier, is, uh, better than the real thing. So allegedly, allegedly. But so 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, get your feedback loop, then you train some more, then you sprint again, then you rest, then you reassess. This idea that you're going to have linear output just by cranking every day at the same amount of time, same, that's, that's machines. You know, machines should be working nine to five. Humans are not meant work nine of, are not meant to work nine to five.

No, I agree wholeheartedly. But that's it for people that are working for someone. There's not really that option. So that's unfortunately the, the rub, right? 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. Even lawyers and doctors who are charging three, four, $500 an hour, they're not getting rich because their lifestyle is slowly ramping up along with their income, and they're not saving enough. Uh, they just don't have that ability to retire. So the first thing you have to do is you have to own a piece of a business. You need to have equity, either as an owner, investor, shareholder, or a brand that you're building that accrues to you to gain your financial freedom.

Yeah, and I was really fascinated by another thing that you were bringing up about working for yourself, that you feel in the future, whether it's 50 or 100 years from now, virtually everyone is going to be working for themselves. And I believe the way you put it is that the information age is going to reverse the industrial age. Yeah, if you go back to hunter-gatherer times, how we evolved, we basically work for ourselves. We communicated and cooperated within tribes, but each hunter, each gatherer stood on their own and then combined their resources with the family unit. But there was no boss hierarchy, hierarchy, hierarchy. Or you're like the third middle manager down. 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. 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. 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 has to tell you, if somebody can tell you when to be at work and what to wear and how to behave, you're not a free person. You're not actually rich. So we're in this model now where we think it's all about employment and jobs. And intrinsic in that is that I have to work for somebody else. But the information age is breaking that down. So Ronald Coase, an economist, who has this Coase theorem, a very famous theorem, but it basically just talks about why is a company the size that it is? Why is a company one person instead of 10 people, instead of 100, instead of a thousand? And it has to do with the internal transaction costs versus the external transaction costs. Let's say I want to do something. Let's say I'm building a house, and I need someone to come in and provide the lumber. I'm a developer, right? Do I want that to be part of my company, or do I want that to be an external provider? A lot of it just depends on how hard it is to do that transaction with someone externally versus internally. If it's too hard to keep doing the contract every time externally, I'll bring that in-house. 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. Well, information technology is making it easier and easier to do these transactions externally. It's becoming much easier to communicate with people, gig economy, I can send you small amounts of money, I can hire you through an app, I can rate you afterwards. So we're seeing an atomization of the firm. We're seeing the optimal size of the firm shrinking. It's most obvious in Silicon Valley, tons and tons of startups constantly coming up and shaving off little pieces of businesses from large companies and turning them into huge markets. So what looked like the small little vacation rental market on Craigslist is now suddenly blown up into Airbnb. One example. That's a great example. 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. We're not talking about driving an Uber. 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 it. It's kind of like how Hollywood already works, a little bit, with how they're organized for a project. You decide whether to take the project or not. The contract is right there on the spot. You get paid a certain amount. You get rated every day or every week. You get the money delivered. 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. And I think the smart people have already started figuring out that the internet enables this, 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. And that's actually how we are the most productive. So the information revolution, by making it easier to communicate, connect, and cooperate, is allowing us to go back to working for ourselves. And that is my ultimate dream. 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. Maybe not everybody will get there, but it would be fine if we were even working a ten-person company or twenty-person company is way better than working in a thousand-person company, a ten-thousand-person company. 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, it's 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. And when those missions are done, we collect our money, we get rated, and then we rest and reassess until we're ready for the next sprint.

Has there ever been a study done on happiness and as it regards the size of companies? Not that I'm aware, but to me, it's obvious. It's just obvious. 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 betray like a human, just because you're able to do multiple things. Yeah.

Um, this brings me to what is a subject that keeps getting brought up nowadays is universal basic income. With the oncoming apocalypse of automation, this is how it's being portrayed by Andrew Yang, who's running for president. I sat down and talked to him. He's very compelling, and he's a very smart guy, and he's an entrepreneur himself. And when he starts talking about automation and how it's going to just eliminate massive amounts of jobs and leave people stranded, what do you, when I know you're a guy who thinks about the future, and I'm going to take this popular point of view on this. I don't. I think it's a non-solution to a non-problem.

[Music]

And I mean that in the sense that automation has been happening since the dawn of time. Electricity came along, that put a lot of people out of work, did it, right? A lot of people carrying buckets of water and, you know, lighting lamps and all those kinds of things. And this was the concern with factories as well. Apps, everything. Literally every single thing that comes, even the printing press. Absolutely. And what it does is it frees people up for new creative work. So the question is not, is automation going to eliminate jobs? There is no finite number of jobs. We're not like sitting around dividing up the same jobs that we're around since the Stone Age. So obviously new jobs are being created, and they're usually better jobs, more creative jobs. So the question is, how quickly is this transition going to happen? And what kinds of jobs will be eliminated, and what kinds of jobs will be created? It's impossible looking forward to predict what kinds of jobs will be created. If I told you 10 years ago that podcaster was going to be a job, or that, you know, 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. Those are nonsense jobs. But yet here we are. So society will always create new jobs. Civilization creates new jobs. But it's impossible to predict what those jobs are. So the question is, how quickly is that transition happening? Well, the reality is, even though everybody keeps talking about this automation apocalypse, we're at a record low unemployment. Explain that. Where's the transition? Donald Trump. That's hard. All I'm saying is it's, it's, I don't see it in the numbers. I don't see it actually happening. The question is, how quickly can you retrain people? So it's an education problem. The problem with UBI, there's a couple of problems with UBI. One is, you're creating a straight, you're creating a slippery slide transfer straight into socialism. The moment people can start voting themselves money combined with a democracy, right? It's just a matter of time before the bottom 51% vote themselves everything in the top 49%. Yeah, and it just, it, and by the way, slippery slope fallacy is not a fallacy, and I know people like saying that, but they haven't thought it through. Um, 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. You're also forcing the entrepreneurs out or telling them not to come here. The estimate I saw for $15k a year basic income for everybody would be three-quarters of current GDP. And of course, GDP would shrink in response as all the entrepreneurs fled. So you would essentially bankrupt the country. Another issue at UBI is that people who are down in their luck, they're not looking for handouts. It's not just about money. It's also about status. It's about meaning. And the moment I start giving money to you and put you on the dole, I've lowered your status. I've made you a second-class citizen. So I have to give you meaning. And meaning comes through education and capability. You have to teach a man to fish, not to basically throw your rotting leftover carcasses at him and say, here, eat the scraps. So it doesn't solve the meaning problem. And lastly, it's nonsense to hand $15k out to everybody. You want to means-test people. There's no reason to give it to you and me. So you end up back towards the welfare system, where you do have to figure out who needs it and who doesn't. 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. So get basic housing, get basic food, get basic transportation, get high-speed internet access, get a phone in your pocket. Those are the kinds of things you want to give people. And finally, in terms of the rate of automation, I think we can educate people very quickly. One of the myths that we have today is that adults can't be re-educated. We view education as this thing where you go to school, you come out when you're out of college, and you're done. No more education. Well, that's wrong. You have all these great online boot camps and coding schools coming up. They're ones that will even pay you to go there now. You can educate people and mass, and you can educate them into creative professions. People who are talking about AI automating programming have never really written serious code. Coding is thinking. It's automatic structure thinking. An AI that can program as well or better than humans is an AI that just took over the world. That's end game. That's the end of the human species. And I can give you arguments why I don't think that's coming either. People who are thinking, and I know I take the opposite side from some very famous people in this debate, but we're nowhere near close to general AI, not in our lifetimes. You don't have to worry about it, even in our lifetimes, really. It's so overblown. Uh, it's, it's another, it's a combination of Cassandra complex, you know, 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 in some kind of end of history, right? Right. Um, the reason why I don't think AI is coming anytime soon is because a lot of the advances in so-called AI today are what we call narrow AI. They're really pattern recognition, machine learning to figure out like, what is that object on the screen, or how do you find this signal and all that noise? There's nothing approaching what we call creative thinking to actually model general intelligence. You run into all kinds of problems. First, we don't know how the brain works at all. Number two, we've never even modeled a paramecium or an amoeba, let alone a human brain. 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. It uses everything at its disposal. There's a lot of machinery inside the cell that is doing calculations that is intelligent that isn't accounted for. And the best estimates are, 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. So putting it at saying that I'm just going to model neuron is on or off and then use that to build a human brain is overly simplistic. Furthermore, I would posit there's no such thing as general intelligence. Every intelligence is contextual within the context of the environment that it's in. So you have to evolve an environment around it. So I think a lot of people who are peddling general AI, the burden of proof is on them. 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. But it's not sexy to talk about that.

If you, you're talking about mirroring the actual abilities of cells, or are you talking about recreating the actual mechanism? Like, what, what is going on inside cells and and biological organisms? Yeah, we just don't know how intelligence works, right? We don't know. We literally have no idea. So most of the AI approaches basically say, we're going to try and model how the brain works, but the model at the neuron level, which is saying, this neuron's on, that neuron's on, combining their signal. But I'm saying, in the neuron is a cell. Inside the cell, there's all this machinery going on that's operating the neuron that is also part of the intelligence apparatus. You can't just ignore that and abstract that out. You have to model it down to the, in, inside the cell level.

It's also a part of the biological organism itself, exactly. And it has all these needs that, you know, the biological organism has to have food and rest and, exactly. There's a balance going on. 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, 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, stores all of their points, all their counterpoints, all their contradictions, applies logic and reason and some sort of sense of the future, and starts improving upon these patterns, and then starts acting on its own based on the information that it's been provided with. Well, first, you would have to actually simulate a structure, the human brain, that can hold all that information. You're basically talking about tens of thousands of brains' worth of information, right? We can't even build one brain.

The next decade or two or three. Well, in terms of an actual physical brain, yes. But what about something that recreates the abilities of a brain? Like I said, nature is parsimonious. So we've got this three-pound wetware object that can hold all this data. Nature has been very efficient in evolving kind of how we get there. I, I just don't think computers are anywhere close to that. 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. And then I don't think you can evolve a creature to be intelligent outside of the boundaries of feedback in a real medium. Like if you evolved, 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. They wouldn't evolve properly. So I think just dumping information into into a thing isn't enough. It has to have an environment to operate in to get feedback from. It needs to have context.

But isn't that biological? I mean, what if you, 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? 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 could beat someone at Go, which is far more complex than chess? They figured out how to do that too. And that was a giant shock, right? These are still man-made, very closed, bounded games. They're, they're not, they're not on the road to the unbounded game of life. They are completely artificial. But this didn't go, didn't that give you like a little bit of a pause? A little bit? Go is not Go, or League of Legends, or Fortnite. They're not completely deterministic, right? But they're still very artificial, very bounded games. Being good at Go doesn't mean that you can then suddenly figure out how to...

Write great poetry. Right? The creativity for sure is something that's. Creativity is the last frontier. So I do believe that automation over a long enough period of time will replace every non-creative job or every non-creative work. But that's great news. 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. Yeah.

What are you doing right now? This is a creative job. Sure. Um, that that brings us back to the idea of meaning and universal basic income. Uh, I think the idea of giving someone $15,000 a year doesn't necessarily cause whatever. What everyone would worry about is people being on the dole. You would have a bunch of listless people out there with no meaning in life. But the idea is that $15,000 a year, and I'm not necessarily sure I agree with this, I'm not even endorsing this, but that $15,000 a year would just provide you with the necessities to get by in life. It would give you food, it would give you shelter.

Well, it's not gonna stop at 15. Because the moment people are like, I mean, like 15? Like, then people would demand more. Bernie Sanders would be on this. $16, $7, $45,000 a year. Yeah. These companies are too big. Yeah. That could. It doesn't. It doesn't stop. It just it just goes all the way to bankruptcy. The concern is the slide to socialism. It's obvious. Yeah. I mean, heck, if I was on, 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.

What do you say to the people that don't believe that there is such a thing as ethical or compassionate capitalism? And there's many people today that are espousing Marxism and they're espousing some sort of a socialist society where they believe that capitalism has screwed people over and eliminated the middle class. And there are absolute problems with capitalism. I think monopolies are a problem. I think that, uh, crony capitalism is a problem with the government, you know, kind of gets in bed with them and sort of forces things. Uh, I think the bankers have really, you know, raped society and the rest of us are suffering for it. Yeah. They've essentially taken huge risks where they privatize the gains and they socialize the losses. So when it fails, they basically get bailed out and bankrupt everybody else. So capitalism has gotten a really bad name.

Let's talk about its free exchange. Free markets, free markets and free exchange are intrinsic to humans 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? So specialization, labor, we trade. That's built into the human species. Basic math comes from accounting, keeping track of debts and credits and so on. We need to be able to engage in free trade. The correct criticism of capitalism is when it does not provide equal opportunity. And so we should always strive to provide equal opportunity. But people confuse that with equal outcome. When you have equal outcome, that can only be enforced through violence. Because different people, free people, make different choices. And when they make different choices, they have different outcomes. If you don't let them suffer the consequences of bad choices or reap the rewards from good choices, then you are forcibly redistributing through violence. It's interesting that there isn't, there are no socialist working socialist examples that exist without violence. You basically need someone to show up with a gun and say, "Okay, you're not allowed to do that. You hand this over to that person."

So one of the reasons why this podcast is because I believe everybody can be wealthy. Everybody. It's not a zero-sum game. It is a positive-sum game. You create something brand new. You exchange it with me for something brand new. I've created higher utility for both of us. The sum of the value created is positive. It's not like status where it's like, you're higher up, I'm lowered down. You're president, so must be vice president. You're a plus one, I'm a minus one, and it has to cancel a zero. We should all be all for playing positive sum ethical games. The problem is, because of these looters who have ruined capitalism's name, that then you get socialists coming in and saying, "Burn the whole system down." Right? You burn the whole system down, we end up like Venezuela or the former Soviet Union. You know, you don't want to be a failed socialist state with emaciated teens hunting cats in the streets to eat, right? That's literally what happens in some of these places. So I think it's very important not to destroy the engine of progress that brought us here.

Yeah, the idea that socialism just hasn't worked yet, that it needs to. The, we just need to do it right. If we do it right, we can. If you ever 100 million dead. Yeah. Yeah. Well, let's keep trying all over the world. Yeah. And and every single time it's been implemented. Have you ever had a conversation with someone who's a socialist who? Many times. Some of my better friends are socialists. Really? We really get into it. Yeah. And what is there? I mean, does anyone have a compelling perspective at all? I, I think really socialism comes from the heart, right? You all, we all want to be socialist. Capitalism comes from the head because they're always cheaters in any system. Yes. And there's incentives in any system. So when you're young, if you're, if you're not a socialist, you have no heart. When you're older, if you're not a capitalist, you have no head, right? You haven't thought it through. So I understand where it comes from. I always liked Nassim Taleb's framing on this where he said, "With my family, I'm a communist. With my close friends, I'm a socialist. You know, at my state level politics, I'm a Democrat. At, you know, higher levels, I'm a Republican. And at the federal level, I'm a libertarian." Right? 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. 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. With my aunts, with my brother, with my cousins, with my uncles, with my mom, with your family, I'm a socialist. That's the right way to live a loving, happy, integrated life. Yes. But when you're dealing with strangers, I mean, you want to be a real socialist? Great. Open all your doors and windows tomorrow. Please. Everybody come take what you want. See how that works out.

Yeah. This idea of income inequality that always strikes me as a very, it's a deceptive term. Income inequality. Well, let's flip it around. It comes from outcome inequality. Yeah. And the outcome inequality is there because you made different choices. Now, again, going back, if it was because you didn't have the same opportunities, that's a problem. Yes. So society should always try to give people equal opportunities. 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 10, you can take one year out and we'll pay for you to go retrain completely, 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. That would be much better for society on all levels than basically just saying, "Now you're going to be on the dole for the rest of your life." Yeah. You just, you'd have to lead that horse to water and then make them drink. It requires people to put in some effort. Yeah. You know, we can't all just sit around. It's just not. Well, that's my my perspective on income inequality. There's always effort inequality and and thought inequality. There's just some people that are obsessed. And if those people become successful, it doesn't mean they stole from you. It just means that they put in the amount of energy and effort that it's required to reach where they're at. And there's a lot of virtue signaling that goes on now where people say, "Well, it's because you're privileged." Well, you know, you know what the greatest privilege is? You're alive. 85% of humanity is dead. So how privileged are you then? You're living in the first world and you're, you know, you have four limbs, etc. So you can take that argument all the way. It's kind of a nonsense discussion.

What's a very weird progressive argument and it as it pertains to, uh, race is always a weird one, right? Because white privilege, to me, it, 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. I'm sure there's more black people who are treated suspiciously by shop owners and the like. But the problem isn't the people who aren't treated poorly. The problem is the people who treat the people poorly. The problem is racism. The problem is not people that didn't ask to be born white or whatever they are and they don't get harassed. So this idea of white privilege or male privilege or whatever it is, that's not the problem. You're just looking at someone who's not a victim of this particular problem that you're highlighting, but you're not looking at the perpetrators of the problem. You're making people perpetrators by simply existing and having less melanin in their skin or having their ancestors come from. Actually, it's a sneaky way of being racist. And then they say, "You can't be racist. It's not racist because you're white." That's right. That is this hilarious. If you can't be racist against white people, that one. That's what. There's a variation of the whole, "Still while I hit you" argument, you know? "Stop struggling while I'm hitting you." But it's just so silly. You've just completely changed what racism means. But what's hilarious is mostly the people who are yelling "racist" are not the minorities. When I look on my Twitter, my social media, or on my news, it's white on white violence. Virtue signaling. Yeah. It's white on white violence. Yeah. What's mostly going on is its elitist whites, blue-state whites, college-educated whites beating up on high school-educated whites, blue-collar. It's a white-collar versus blue-collar war that's going on. And the rest of us are just kind of watching like, "Oh, that's kind of interesting."

Well, it's also a side effect of the ability to broadcast, right? Like everyone with a Twitter handle has the ability to broadcast. Everyone with a Facebook page has the ability to pontificate and have these long, rambling, these huge statements that people put out. When you, you read them, it's like, "How much time did you put into this? What the f? Do you put that much time into your kids, or your job, or your job, or your life, or your future, or planning for your?" You know, how much do you work out a day? I mean, are you just these? Some people's Facebook posts, I'm like, "This is a preposterous amount of effort that you put into saying virtually nothing."

Let's see. Humans are being creative. Yeah. And AI do that. Well, that's true. It is creative. It's it's creative in a very odd way, right? Because it's creative in that they're trying to elicit a response from people and they're trying to raise their their social value or raise their their position on the social totem pole. It's signaling, and it's easy signaling because the kind of thing that everybody has to agree with you on because nobody wants to be seen as a horrible person. Yeah. And it's very hard to make the nuanced arguments against than it is to just kind of go along. Right. Well, it's also, it's some of it is so cliché that it seems like. I know one guy who poses as a woman on on Twitter, but he does it just obviously. Uh, what is this? The name Tatiana McGregor? Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Used to be Godfrey Elwick. Oh, is that the same guy? I think so. Yeah. That's hilarious. I did not. They killed his account. They killed his account for 100% sure for pretending to be transracial. That's right. They did. He basically says all the crazy stuff that people on the left say, but he says the craziest version. Yes. And kind of just shows how it's okay. Like I saw a tweet from recently just said, "Or her, that it's not okay to be white." Yes. And then some people agree. But it's, it's so close to what they say. It's so close that it's like the most artful form of subtle parody because it's, well, if you, if you replace in half of these things, if you replace the word white with black or Asian, lynch. Yeah. Yeah. It's it's a strange time in that respect. There's a favor saying that if you want to see who rules over you, see who you're not allowed to criticize. Excellent. Yeah. That is a, that's so true, right? Yeah. That's so true.

I wonder where this is going. I really do. I wonder because this is it seems like this newfound ability to broadcast that we have with whether you have a YouTube page or whether you have Twitter or whatever you're doing, this newfound ability to spread whatever you're trying to say to so many people with very little understanding on the most part. From I think it's actually a great thing overall. Yeah. Now it means that any human can broadcast any other human on the planet at any time. 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. There would be an instant outrage hue and cry rallying. So in that sense, it helps bring attention to the plight of anybody. But 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. So it becomes very easy to set up a mob and have it attack somebody, take all the context out. Like even this conversation, I'm sure people will take out snippets, put them on social media and try and get somebody outraged. Of course. And so you have to learn how, first of all, society just has to get over this idea of outrage. Like, to me, like outraged people are just people who get easily outraged are the stupidest people on social media. Those are the people I block instantly. It's just kind of very low-level thinking, right? These are the foots of the, these are the foot soldiers and the mob. Eventually, society just has to get over it. They have to understand that these are all snippets being taken out of context. These are doctored video clips. These are just someone who's trying to get outraged over something. Eventually, there'll also be anti-mob tactics. Like, for example, if if I go to someone's Twitter feed and all it is is full of political ranting, raving, conspiracy theories, do I want to work with this person? Do I want to associate with this person? Do you want to be friends with this person? Their mind is just cluttered with junk. Now, I don't necessarily blame them. I think that the human brain is not designed to absorb all of the world's breaking news, 24/7 emergencies injected straight into your skull with clickbait headline news. 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. This goes back to Clockwork Orange where he's, you know, has his eyes opened up, he's forced to watch the news. But I think that's what's happening right now because these are addictive. Right? Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, these are weaponized. You have social statisticians and scientists and researchers and people in lab coats, literally best minds of our generation, figuring out how to addict you to the news. Yes. And if you fall for it, if you get addicted, your brain will get destroyed. And I think this is the modern struggle. The modern struggle. So the ancient struggle used to be the tribal struggle. You had your tribe of friends and family, you had your religion, you had your country, you had your loyalty, you had your nationality. At least you had meaning and support. But now you would struggle against other tribes. Modern life, we're so free. Everything's become atomized. We stand alone. You live in your apartment alone, you live in your house alone. Your parents don't live nearby. Your friends don't live nearby. You don't have any tribal meaning. You don't believe in religion anymore. You don't believe in country anymore. It's fine. You got a lot of freedom. It's fantastic. But now when they come to attack you, you're alone and you can't resist. So how do they attack you? It's all well-meaning. I don't fault capitalism. I love capitalism. But look at how it happens. Social media, they've massaged all the mechanisms to addict you like a Skinner's pigeon or a rat who's just gonna click, click, click, click, click, can't put the phone down. The food, they've taken sugar and they've weaponized it. They've put it into all these different forms and varieties that you can't resist eating. Drugs, right? They've taken pharmaceuticals and plants and they've synthesized them. They've grown them in such a way that you can't, you get addicted, you can't put them down. Porn, right? If you're a young male, you wander on 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. Video games, another way to addict people. So you have this, you have entire large factories of people that are working to addict you to these things. And you stand alone. 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. That's terrifying. I mean, it is a new road that needs to be navigated by young people that are. There's no map. There's no guidebook on how to handle this. Our generation is the transition generation. I think our kids will know how to handle it better because they'll grow. But I hope, I hope, I hope too. Because you're seeing some ridiculous behavior from people today that's so common. I mean, I don't know if you've been paying attention to this, but there was a guy who he made a video. 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. And then a bunch of people retweeted it like, "Oh my God, look, she's drunk." And so one of the online publications, some website, tracked him down and doxxed him. And it turns out he's just a day laborer who is an African-American Trump fan 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. What's even more disturbing is Facebook gave up his information to this website for what? Because he made something funny that made people seem drunk. There's a million of those about me. I mean, you could find them. I mean, I think Facebook and Twitter and a bunch of these other social media platforms are committing slow-motion suicide through these kinds of activities. 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.

Well, you now have basically the media views it as their job to go after individuals they don't like. Yeah. I use "media" with air quotes in that regard. So I don't think this is something that the New York Times would have done anything responsible. But the media is getting more and more desperate 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. And then CNN came along and started commoditizing the news 24/7 broadcast. And then the internet came along. That was the final nail in the coffin. Because what the internet did was it said, "Actually, if there's a fact that's news, you can distribute that immediately. It can go on Twitter, it can go on Facebook, it gets reprinted on Google News a thousand times." You know, you're on Google News, you're like, "Okay, what's the piece of news? Which source?" And three thousand other articles. Too many, right? Yeah. So news has become commoditized. So the entire news media has shifted into peddling opinions and entertainment. Yes. And so now they've become a variation between like cheerleaders, shock troops, enforcers, you know, talking heads. So these are now tribal. These are not propaganda machines signaling for their tribes. It's a right-wing one, this left-wing one. Right? There's the alt-right, there's the controlled left, and the two of them are just fighting it out using their various media organs and memes. So basically, when you see one of these news organizations doxing an individual, that's like a tank running over a soldier, right? That's what's going on. It's just war. And so there's no, there's no such thing anymore as a neutral media commentator. The, the illusion of objectivity that journalism had is lost. There's no longer one guy like a Walter Cronkite that everyone's going to listen to. It's now all just shock troops fighting wars with each other.

How does this play out? Have you thought about it? Yeah, a little bit. Uh, so what the internet does, a lot of this is internet driven. What the internet does is the internet creates one giant aggregator or two for everything. One taxi dispatcher, one e-commerce store, one search engine, one, uh, you know, one social media site for friends and family, one for business, etc. So the internet is this giant aggregator where it creates one big hegemon for everything and it creates an atomized long tail of millions and millions of individuals. What it gets rid of is the medium, medium-sized ones in the middle. So, for example, you might have had like seven Hollywood studios. What's all going to be Netflix? You had, uh, you know, like 10 large e-commerce players. So commerce players from Walmart to Costco to, you know, Kmart and whatever. Now it's just going to be Amazon and a ton of small individual brands. So that's the world that we're headed towards. One hegemon and millions of individuals. So where it ends up long term is media will be a few gigantic outlets. You know, it could be the New York Times, it could be Facebook, a few like that. And there's going to be just a really long tail of millions of independent people. So this idea of who's a journalist and who's not. You know, is Assange a journalist or not? Everyone's a journalist. That's the world that we're headed towards.

I do think the 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. Because they're controlling the spread of information. They're literally rewriting people's brains. They're programming the culture. And they're doing it very subtly. Like Google, I believe that, you know, one of their execs got up in front of Congress and the congressman asked him, uh, you know, "Do you manipulate search results?" And he said, "No, we do not manipulate search results." Really? That's your job. That is literally all Google does. Google has one job, which is to manipulate search results, to pull them out of the noise and rank them properly. And the out, 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. Now, if Google, Facebook, and Twitter had been smart about this, they would not have picked sides. They would have said, "We're publishers. Whatever goes through our pipes goes through our pipes. If it's illegal, we'll take it down. Give us a court order. Otherwise, we don't touch it." It's like the phone company. If I call you up and I say something horrible to you on the phone, the phone company doesn't get in trouble. But the moment this started taking stuff down that wasn't illegal because somebody screamed, they basically lost their right to be viewed as a carrier. And now all of a sudden, they've taken on liability. So they're sliding down the slippery slope into ruin. Sloping to 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. Traditionally, the libertarian-leaning Republicans and Democrats would have stood up in principle for the common carriers. But now they won't. So my guess is, as soon as Congress, this is this day is coming. If not already here, it might have even been here today, actually, because I saw something related in the news. The day is coming when the politicians realize that these social media platforms are picking the next president, the next congressman. They're literally picking. And they have the power to pick. So they will be controlled by the government.

In what way? How do you think they're going to be controlled? You think they're going to have to adhere to strict principles of freedom of speech? No. Particularly, unfortunately, it's headed the opposite direction. Absolutely. I wish it was freedom of speech. Much more likely, they're going to be in the short to medium term, they're going to be hauled in for hearings. Uh, they're going to be pressured massively. Do this, don't do that. My concern about that is the, the hearings that I saw with Zuckerberg, those people were completely incompetent. They don't seem to understand. They don't. But they're just applying pressure. They're just trying to scare him so he'll do what they want. And what do they want him to do? They want him to basically suppress the other side. So if you're right-wing, you want to suppress the left-wing. If you're left-wing, you want to suppress the right-wing. And if you just see where these companies are headquartered in Silicon Valley, all the censors. And that's really what they are. There are censors working inside these companies. They're just called, they're called by different names, obviously, right? It's double speak. You call it the Department of Defense when it's the Department of War. So in this case, the Department of Safety and Trust, when it releases the Department of Censorship. The censors are inside Silicon Valley. So it's going to reflect Silicon Valley's politics, which is extremely progressive, left-wing. Yeah. And if you're not that, you really have no place. There's, I mean, right, try being a conservative, an open conservative at Google. Good luck. Now you get lynched. Yes. That's crazy. I don't think that there was ever a thing like that that was so influential and so politically ideologically one-sided. Yeah. There's a, 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. And I don't know why that's true, but it does seem to me to be true. Well, it's a fascinating battle that's going on right now. I mean, it really is. And conservatives, as far as social media is concerned, they're just getting chopped off at the hams left and right.

What'll eventually happen is that whenever you suppress speech, the organism metastasizes. Then it has to start turning towards other means. If you're unlucky, goes towards violence. If you're lucky, they find other outlets. 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. And that will take the place of Twitter or Facebook. That's right. But it's going to take 10 years, 20 years. It's not overnight. Well, you know, Twitter took 10 years to get to the point where it's at this mess right now. But it was so interesting to to talk to 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 platforms should essentially be like like utilities, like the electric company. Jack is correct, and he has the right vision. It's just he's in an organization where the other individuals in the organization feel differently, very differently. So the organization itself can get hijacked. And his timeline for changing things, it's like it's decades. I mean, I, I don't know. I shouldn't say decades, but I mean, I was like, when do you think that something? Well, there's a part, there was one idea of having an uncensored Twitter, like one Twitter that's the wild west. Like you could have regular Twitter, or you could try wild west Twitter. Like, well, that already exists. There's a network called Gab. Yes. But Gab isn't even wild west Twitter. They, when people dox people, they remove things like that. Yeah. I mean, I think there's certainly lines around violence and illegality that you don't want to cross. But yes, Gab is closer to a free speech platform. But it's still not decentralized. It can still get shut down. It can still get taken out. It's also suppressed heavily. Yes. So that, so there, and the people on there are right now are extremely right-wing. So it's not a pleasant place for someone like me to hang out with all the people that have been kicked off of something. That's right. So that's right. Try going over there and being moderate. Try going over there. There's no room for you. Yeah. Unfortunately, because I don't identify as any party or any creed, you know, it doesn't work for me.

Is that a problem in Silicon Valley when you don't identify as anything? Do you get pressure? Totally. It used to be okay. It's not okay anymore. When was it okay? Like 10 years ago, I would say it was okay. And then you started seeing a shift. Yeah. And now you have to pick sides, otherwise you're automatically the enemy. Really? Yeah. Struggle sessions and all that. God, struggle sessions. I'm exaggerating for effect, but but it definitely has that oppressive feeling to it, right? And you also have to be politically outspoken, right? Yeah. It can't be something that you just stay neutral about, right? It's like when, uh, Tim Ferriss, I think at some point, put out a tweet about how you can't just say anything anymore and, you know, people are being suppressed. And a whole bunch of people who love them from Silicon Valley piled in and said, "What is it that you can't say? What are you afraid to say? You can say whatever you want, Tim. Go ahead. What are you afraid of?" Right? They don't like baiting. Yeah. What was he trying to say? Wow. We have to put him in that box. What is someone who's thinking about saying something he shouldn't have said? Exactly. Now we know. One great tweet I saw was, you know, "The left won the culture wars. Now they're just driving around shooting the survivors." Wow. That's hilarious. Yeah.

I wonder who has won the culture war. There's certainly a battle that's been won in terms of like control of social media. Control of social media is absolutely left. Well, this is unfortunate for conservatives, but technology is a force that also pushes left. So if you look all throughout human history, like the left essentially grows and grows and grows, right? Why is that? Why is it inexorably that as some commentators have said, Leviathan sloughs left, right? Leviathan is the government. Why does it slouch left? And I think a lot of that has been because of technology. Uh, technology has made it so that it makes more like industrial revolution technology. We all band together, we're wards of the state, right? Contraception is a technology that kind of helps lean leftward. It takes away from the family unit. Abortion is a technology, right? It wasn't possible thousands of years ago. So technology actually empowers the individual. The individual means that you have the breakdown of family structure and religion and all that. And I'm not mostly opposed to that, but it does mean that there's a leftward shift to it. Now, we're getting a small set of technologies that actually can take you more rightward. Encryption is an example, because encryption makes it easier to have privacy. It makes it easier to have money that is outside of the state. Guns, 3D printing of guns is an example of a technology that is more of a rightward shift. But generally, technology leads the world left. Yeah. It's it's also usually highly educated people that are involved in technology in the first place. And I think when you look at universities in particular, they tend to lean left in this country as well.

Well, universities, what happened with the university is very interesting. Universities, first, when, you know, became the arbiters of data and intellectualism and what's right and wrong. So there's a time period when it was like, "Should we be doing that or not? Well, let's look at the university. What do they have to say? What are the smartest people, the professors, the think tanks have to say?" And the universities got this credibility from the hard sciences. So they got this from, uh, you know, physics and math and computer science and chemistry because these deliver real things. The Manhattan Project, the microprocessor, the space vehicles, and so on. The electric car. So they gained this mantle of authority and legitimacy from the hard sciences. So then come the social sciences, kind of sneak in. Then you get economy, economics, and microeconomics is a real discipline, real science, real math behind it, logic, reason. And then you get macroeconomics, which can be politicized a little bit more, voodoo. And then you get social studies, and then you get gender studies, and then you get blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And so what happened is that because we took scientists to be the high priests of our new world, science itself has gotten corrupted. And the social sciences, and you can tell they're fake sciences because the word "science" tacked on at the end, have come in and hijacked the universities and become the new think tanks. And so essentially, what you see going on today in the universities is a war between the social sciences and the physical sciences. And the crossover point is biology, right? Where you can see like the whole "gender is a social construct" movement is attacking biology and evolutionary biology, just like in the social sphere, they're coming after the comedians, right? But you can see the struggle going on in the universities. And I would say the physical sciences are essentially losing that war.

What can be done, or is it just something that has to play out? Is it, do we have to realize the consequences of the foolishness? Well, the good news is the physical sciences have a reality on their side. Yeah. But it's not even, I mean, in many ways, it's not respected. Yeah. But you, at the end of the day, your aircraft still has to fly. You know, your microprocessor still has to compute. So there's only so far they can they can take it. Uh, 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. Like what? Well, you had Brett Weinstein on here, right? So that's a, that's a clear example. 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. Synthetic biology, for example, will, you know, a lot of this will end up in China because it won't be, you, you won't be able to map facts and reality and actions together. You won't be able to get grants. You won't be able to get the adulation of your peers. I don't, 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 an evolutionary biology. Economics lost. Well, it's certainly in terms of gender and that, that sort of that seems to be one of the major battlegrounds. Yeah. I mean, it's also going to happen, for example, blank slate theory. You know, are we nature? Are we nurture? Um, it's kind of, uh, socially unacceptable to say that, you know, a lot of it is nature and not nurture, or vice versa, depending on which side you're on, right? Those kinds of discussions get corrupted. They do get corrupted. And it's really unfortunate because that's an unbelievably important thing to understand, like what makes a person a sociopath, what makes a person a super successful person, a winner, what, what makes a person a drug addict? What are these factors? You can't have a reasonable conversation about climate science anymore. Right? It's not a science. It's all politicized. You can't even bring it up. Everyone's got their minds made up already.

Well, it's what's uncomfortable to me is people have their minds made up and they don't even have the data. Well, on most of these topics, people are talking past each other anyway. They're talking about different things. Like when you get into, uh, you know, when you get into gun control, for example, right? One side is talking about the right to bear arms in case a tyrannical ruler or king tries to take over the country. The other time, the other side is talking about school shootings and, you know, protecting people in their homes, right? From crime. So they're just talking about two different things, right? And it's just not politically acceptable to even talk about the same thing. Or when it gets to immigration, the right is talking about, uh, you know, the left is like bundling together illegal immigration and legal immigration into one thing. Yes. Right? Whereas in the on the right, sometimes you've got racists hiding in there. So it doesn't help their cause, right? They're talking about two different things. Yeah. If they were talking about the same thing, which is how many immigrants should we let into the country and, you know, what are the criteria for that, that would be a very different conversation than no immigrants or everybody comes in. And then also on the left, you know, 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 in their socioeconomic circumstances. 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. So, for example, if you want censorship on Twitter or Facebook, you should build that system and then hand it over to the other side to run. So if you're a left-winger who's promoting, uh, censorship, let somebody else run it. Same with immigration. If you want an immigration system, build the system, then hand it over to the other side to run it. That's how you know it's a good system.

There's no room for nuance when you're dealing with these political battlegrounds. When when you're dealing with right versus left, and one side has a clearly established stance that you're supposed to take. Like gun control is a great example of that, right? There's no room for, "What about mental health? What about the fact that so many of these people are on psych medications?" Why is that not being discussed? We're running one of the greatest, uh, mental health experiments in history when we're doping everybody up on SSRIs. Yeah. And, you know, maybe if you give 30 million people SSRIs, maybe like 29.9 million are a lot happier. And then you have a fraction that commits suicide or detonates. Yeah. You're basically trading the mean for the variance, right? You have blow-up risk. Yeah. There's no room for nuance, which is why I stay out of politics largely.

Do they drag you in though, sometimes? They always try. I mean, these conversations, in this conversation, you get to get dragged in, sure. But I'm sure there's going to be some people here. Here's the thing about politics, because they're, we, 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? It's not like proportional representation where the Greens have 10% and, you know, Libertarians are 3% or whatever. It's just like, you're all Democrat in power now, we're all Republican. Because of that, to win, you have to pick one of these two sides, right? You have, you have to choose. You can't just, you can't just basically say, "I'm going to be, uh, you know, nuanced about it." You, you can't vote for a third party that's throwing over your vote. I have a friend who's trying to fix that. He's starting this thing called a Good Party, where like you kick-start your vote, 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. You don't, you don't throw away your vote. But outside of those hacks, we're never going to get a third party elected. So because of that, all of your beliefs have to neatly fit into the Democrat bundle or the Republican bundle. And so when you get into that tribe, uh, if you signal outside of that, out of that bundle, you get attacked. Yeah. So it's literally, it's making you into an unclear thinker. It's making you into a muddled thinker. If all of your beliefs line up into one political party, you're not a clear thinker. If all your beliefs are the same as your neighbors and your friends, you're not a clear thinker. You're literally just your beliefs are socialized. They're taken from other people. So if you want to be a clear thinker, you cannot pay attention to politics. It will destroy your ability to think.

What dread most of modern life? All our diseases are diseases of abundance, not diseases of scarcity. Old times, I may have starved. You know, old times, if I got sugar, that was a wonderful thing. I should have eaten all the sugar to get my hands on. If I'd gotten a piece of news or gossip, that was interesting data that would have helped my life and moved me forward. If I'd gotten some brief amount of entertainment, whether through video games or magazines or whatever, that would have been good. Now, it's all disease of abundance. We are overexposed to everything. So the way to survive in modern society is to be an ascetic. It is to retreat from society. There's too much society everywhere you go. Society in your phone, society in your pocket, society in your ears. You're being socialized right now by listening to this podcast, right? We're socializing you. We're programming you. Everyone's trying to program everybody. The only solution is turn it off. The only solution is to turn it off and concentrate on your breathing, meditation. Yeah. Yes. I mean, it works. It's it's been a lifesaver for me. Oh, I do it. And I, I do it whenever I get like spare time. I was in 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. 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." And it's very true. I always needed to be stimulated. And when the iPhone came along, boredom was dead. I would never be bored again. Even if I'm standing in line, I'm on my iPhone. And I thought it was great. And when I was a kid, I used to try and overclock my brain, be like, "How many thoughts can I think at once?" The answer is only one. But I would try to like think multiple thoughts at once. And I was proud of that. I was proud that my brain was always running, this engine was always moving. And it's a disease. It's actually the road to misery. And now that I'm older, I realize like, you actually want to again, rest your mind. You want to learn how to settle into your mind. Now I look forward to solitary confinement. You leave me alone for a day, it'll be like the happiest day I've had in a while. And and that is a superpower that I think everybody can attain. The superpower of learning to be alone and enjoying it. Yeah. Yeah.

Well, I think it's critical. And I, and I do think that this, these times where you just think about things, just be alone and think about things are so rare these days. And I think during those rare times is when you really get to understand what you actually believe or don't believe. It's it's funny. When I first started meditating, it was really hard, right? Because everybody, I think a lot of people who listen to this broadcast, they've heard of meditation, it has a good rep. So everybody tries it, they struggle, they kind of give it up. It's one of those things that everybody says they do, but nobody actually does, right? It's like not eating sugar, right? Everyone talks about how, yeah, I don't.

Eat sugar, but like, yeah, then right, then the dessert tray rolls around and everyone's going for the cookies. Yeah, right. So it's become one of those things. And in fact, it's not even become a signaling thing where it's like, "Oh, how much did you meditate?" "I meditated this much." Or, you know, there are people now wearing headbands saying with Tweety Birds, "Chirp!" And then when they're in deep meditation, I don't, I don't know how they make it work, but they'll be like, "I got a lot of trips today." "How many trips did you get?" "Oh my god." "Oh, your meditation technique is wrong. Mine is right."

But really, all it is is the art of doing nothing. Okay? And it's important because I think when we, when we grow up, right, it's all this stuff happening to you in your life. 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, you don't have time. So it gets buried in you. And it's all these preferences and judgments and unresolved situations and issues. And it's like your email inbox. It's just piling up email after email after email that's not answered, going back 10, 20, 30, 40 years.

And then when you sit down to meditate, those emails start coming back at you. "Hey, what about this issue?" "What about that issue?" "Have you solved this?" "Did you think about that?" Your regrets there. You have issues there. And that gets scary. People don't want to do that. It's like, "It's not working. I can't clear my mind. I better get up and not do this."

But really, what's happening is it's, it's self-therapy. It's just that instead of paying a therapist to sit there and listen to you, you're listening to yourself. And you just have to sit there as those emails go through one by one. You work through each of them until you get to the magical inbox zero. And there comes a day when you sit down, you realize the only things you're thinking about are things that happened yesterday because you've processed everything else. Not necessarily even resolved it, but at least listened to yourself. And that's when meditation starts. And I think it's a, it's a very powerful thing that everybody should experience. And that's when you arrive upon the art of doing nothing.

Well, I think it's even a problem that most people are getting their meditation from an app. I will not use an app. It's sneaky. I mean, Sam Harris is a very good meditation app, I should say that. But you should be able to just do it. And many people can. It is literally the art of doing nothing. Yeah. All you need to do for meditation is just sit down, close your eyes, comfortable position, whatever happens, happens. If you think, you think. If you don't think, you don't think. Don't put effort into it. Don't put effort against it. It's all you need.

"Do you concentrate on your breath or do you have a specific technique?" "Nothing, nothing." "No?" "You just sit. You just sit." "I think about my breath. That's all I do. I just need to try to only concentrate on breathing."

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. Yes. And concentration is a technique to still your mind enough that you can then drop the object of concentration. So you could also just try going straight to the end game. 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. 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. So it'll be hell for a while. But when you come out the other side, it's great. You get rid of the chatter. 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.

"What is your, what's your ultimate state when you meditate? Like, is there a state where you've achieved, rarely if ever, where you just, you, you're in bliss or you're in harmony or you're in enlightenment? Like, what?"

It's kind of, it's kind of indescribable. Uh, because when you're really meditating, you're not there. When there's no thoughts, there's no experience, there's nothing. There's just nothing. Uh, so it's, it's hard to describe. But I would say that, uh, it's like a, you can definitely, every psychedelic state that people encounter using so-called plant medicines can be arrived just through pure meditation. And I've definitely hit some of those states.

"You've hit some transcendent psychedelic states where you're vaccinating the whole deal?"

I've had trippy visuals. I've had the kind of the lights and colors. I've had the so-called downloads. I've had the realizations. I've had the bliss. I've had the light. I've had the colors. But not every time. No. It's really. And in fact, I would say that that's a, that's also like an experience that you can start craving, which will then actually take you out of meditation. Um, where you really, and I'm not enlightened or anything close to it, so not even in the ballpark. But my own experience, and this is this personal experience, is the place where I end up the most, that is really the one that I, I want to be at, is peace. It's just peace.

"Peace?"

"Happy?"

"Yeah."

Peace to me, peace is happiness at rest. And happiness is kind of peace in motion. You can convert peace to happiness anytime you want. But peace is what you want most of the time.

"That's interesting. You can convert peace to happiness anytime you want?"

Yeah. If you're a peaceful person, anything you do will be a happy activity. And by the way, being on social media, engaging politics, will not bring you peace. There is nothing less peaceful. And today's day and age, the way we think, you get peace is by resolving all your external problems. But there's unlimited external problems. So the only way to actually get peace is on the inside by giving up this idea of problems.

"Who thinks you can get peace by resolving external problems other than politicians?"

Everybody. That's what everybody's struggling to do, right? Why are you trying to make money? To solve all your money problems. Why are you trying to win a politics? Because then you'll be at peace because your people will have won. It's a daunting task to get your shit together. It's easier to change yourself than to change the world.

"That's true."

"Yeah."

And the best way to change the world is to change yourself. Exactly. It's all. Yeah. It's 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. Like, I went down to New Zealand and there's this guy that I met with. And, you know, everyone's on social media shouting about environmentalism and conservative and sustain. 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. So every package that he opened, he would keep. And he would like clean it up. So he would keep his Amazon boxes. He would keep the little containers. Even a tea bag, if you open the 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. So there was no trash. He was literally living with zero trash waste. And he was doing it. And it was really inspirational. 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.

"How long did he do that for?"

I think it was two weeks. It was hard.

"What the fuck are you gonna do with tea bags?"

He had quite the collection. He was filling them with little things.

"He sounds like a crazy, this hoarder, like a hoarder person with stacks of tea bags in his house."

A very impressive guy. Yeah. That's a strange way to go about things. I, I appreciate that. I mean, look, it is entirely possible to somehow or another engineer all of our cups and all of our things and all our about to be biodegradable. 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 they got, don't ruin it. But they don't have the solution. So what they say is, "No growth, no growth, no growth." Well, the problem is, you got three billion Indian and Chinese who aren't going to stay in poverty. They're going to grow whether you like it or not. 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. So the only way out, unfortunately, is again through technology. Which is, you have to build green technology. And I give Musk a lot of credit, you know, for being one of the few people who's out there trying to do that. So you build things that are biodegradable and good for you and healthier. And everybody wants to be healthier. Chinese want to be healthier. Indians want to be healthier. They want to be cleaner. If you say, "I can clean up your rivers, I can clean up your forests, I can have your children not get sick with cholera and diphtheria and typhoid, I can cure your diseases, I can help make your immune system stronger, I can give you clean drinking water." Like, that is what causes people to become environmentalists, not shouting and screaming at them that they shouldn't grow and they should stop pumping things into the sky. And, you know, they have no concept of that. They're just trying to get out of poverty. 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. People are not going to give up economic growth. They're going to have to get rich first.

"Hmm. That's, yeah, that's a very good point. But how do you do, how do you do both?"

You lower the price of clean technologies massively. So you basically make clean technologies cost-competitive through subsidy technologies, innovation. Ideally, you can subsidize in the short to medium term until the innovation curve is, is crossed. I mean, like Tesla doesn't have any patents, right? Right. Or they, they freely give away their patents. That's the example of how you can do it. Um, so, you know, someone in, if you want to get rid of plastic straws, yeah, you can do it here and there. You can get San Francisco to ban plastic straws. But China's not going to ban plastic straws. Not until you build a paper straw that is, you know, same cost, good durability. And then you, and then you educate the Chinese like, "Hey, this is petroleum. You know, this plastic that you're doing is petroleum. This is bad for you. Here's the chemical composition. Here's the things that are going in your bloodstream." And they want healthy, happy kids. Also, so they're going to have their kids use paper straws. Maybe straws aren't the best example, but you can, you know, this is true with fossil fuels, for example. That's, that's probably the best one. Or replacing a lot of plastics with glass and paper and so on. 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. So then, in that way, plastic waste will become valuable, right? And it'll become a commodity. It'll become something that people now, there's certain problems, this doesn't solve. This doesn't solve carbon. This doesn't solve deforestation. Uh, you know, so there you kind of have to step in with other means. So, for example, you look at the Amazon, right? Everyone's complaining about the Amazon being deforested. Well, you're not the poor Brazilian farmer, right? So you're, you're sitting here in your comfortable chair, like social media hammering away at, you know, the evil Brazilians for deforesting the Amazon. But the Amazon has incredible resources. 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. So that people, so that maybe give the pharmaceutical companies an incentive to preserve the biodiversity of the Amazon. Say, "Hey, if you buy this patch of the Amazon, you conserve it, and you can serve 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." So I think there are solutions where we, as the first worlders who have money, can put our money where where our mouth is and go and rescue these kinds of properties.

"That's a very interesting solution. But I could see immediate pushback from people that don't think the pharmaceutical company should have the rights to this natural plan."

Or the, or the government does it. And then the government gets the patents. And the government will auction off the patents later. Or they'll worse, or they'll license them, or whatever it is, right? Well, that's often like, just this, the often the problem is there is no really good solution. There's a bunch of solutions that also have drawbacks. That's life. Yeah. Right? That's the trade-off. So it's being human. Very messy. Yeah. It's a constrained environment, obviously. I skew more towards a private property capitalist type solutions because even though they're not perfect, they have been proven to actually work, right? Once something is your property, you take care of it, right? You're not gonna, you're not gonna crap all over your own house. Um, but it should probably be temporary property, not permanent property. You see a lot of countries around the world not doing this, no foreign ownership of land thing, for example. Or Mexico has no private ownership of beaches, right? So you can draw the line at certain points.

"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?"

I'm not trying to illuminate so much as, you know, talking to you. I learn as much as I say. And I learn it for myself because I'm being forced to articulate it, right? I can sit around and think my thoughts all day long, but it's a lot of it's going to be nonsense. It's not, I'm going to, because there are gaps in thinking where you make leaps because you're kind to yourself that you don't realize you're making. 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. 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. Uh, you know, just like you probably want to seem like the funniest kid in the room or the toughest kid in the room, right? We're all losers starting out. We want to be winners. So we pick the thing we're good at and we double down on it. So I always want to be the smartest kid in the room. So what did I do? I read a lot of books. I memorized a lot of things. And then whatever I hadn't memorized, is pre-Google, I made it up. So it sounded good. Okay. Pre-Google. After Google, fact-checking started and I had to get better, right? So Google improved me that way. A lot of people, exactly. So now what I realize is that the biggest mistake with memorization, right? Because when you're actually trying to live your life in congress with reality, you, you want to have a deep understanding of what you do and why you do it. And so it's much more important to know the basics really well than is to know the advanced. Knowing calculus wouldn't help you today. It doesn't help you in business. Doesn't help you in most things. But knowing arithmetic really will help you, really. 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, you know, some action that you want to take. So understanding basic mathematics cold is way more important than memorizing calculus concepts. 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. This is why there are a lot of people, I'm sure that you listen to, who are really smart, they use a lot of jargon, and you can't quite follow their reasoning. You don't know how they're putting things together. And you, this deep down suspicion, they don't even really understand, right? So if you look at the, the most powerful thinkers, especially the ones where money or life is on the line, they have to understand the basics really, really well. Richard Feynman, the 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 is four pages of text. And it's a complete unbroken logical chain that takes you through geometry, trigonometry, precalculus, analytic geometry, graphs, everything, all the way to calculus. He understood numbers at a core level. He didn't have to memorize anything. When you're memorizing, it's an indication that you don't understand. You should be able to rederive anything on the spot. And if you can't, you don't know it.

"So do you apply that to things other than mathematics?"

Everything. Everything. You don't even make an attempt to memorize things. Just make an attempt to understand them. You can't help but memorize things. 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. Just the basic hook that'll point towards the deeper understanding. And I'm forced to explain it to people. And that's how I know I understand something. So this is what I meant originally. We talked about reading a good book. I'll read one page in a night and then I spend the rest of night thinking about it. Or I'm chasing down references on Wikipedia or weird blog posts trying to understand it. 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.

"What's the meaning? How could that be stupid though?"

Well, it's just trite. It's trite. You're not supposed to think about it. It's something you ask your parents when you're young. They tell you, "Don't worry about it." Or they'll get a job. Yeah, exactly. "Good job, you freaking hippy." Or, "Here's God. God is the meaning of life, right?" And so I was just trying to resolve for myself, like, what could the answer be, right? Not what is the answer, but what could the answer be? And so at a core level, I was forced to kind of hunt down all these weird little things and really understand for myself. And it's got to be personal, right? But I have to establish for myself what it could and could not be. And that gave me some level of peace. So now I have to keep asking that question.

"What is the meaning of life?"

I mean, you, you should, I think the question is more interesting than the answer. Everyone should explore this on their own. But let me just explore a few parts with you, right? So first is, if I gave you an answer, if I said, "The meaning of life has to please God." Well, which God? Okay. Judeo-Christian God? Well, okay. Why that one? Why this thing? The problem is, it's a "why" question. You can keep asking "why" forever, right? Any answer I give you, you'll just ask "why" again. "Why" again.

"That's right."

And you end up in a place called Agrippa's Trilemma. Okay? This is a philosophical exercise. But I, I kind of thought it through, then Googled around, and there's a thing called Agrippa's Trilemma. And Agrippa's Trilemma says that any questioning like this, "why," will always end in one of three places, okay? First is infinite regress. Right? "Why?" "Because of this." "Why?" "Because of that." What? And just keep going forever. The second is circular reasoning. Well, "Why A?" "Because of B." "Why B?" "Because of A." Right? You get trapped in that. Or the third is an axiom. And the most popular axiom is God. But it could be anything. Because of math. Because of science. Because the Big Bang. Because the simulation. Right? These are all axioms. These are all just stopping points. Saying "simulation, we're in a simulation" or saying "it's the Big Bang" is just another way of saying God. It's just God's a dirty word, so we don't use it as much anymore. But same thing. So you end up in one of these three dead ends, essentially, right? So there is no answer. The real answer is, "Because."

"What is the meaning of life?"

Yeah, you get to make up your own answers. The beauty, if there was a single answer, we would not be free. We would be trapped because then we would all have to live to that answer. Then we'd be bored like robots, each one competing with each other to fulfill that single meaning more than the others. Back to signaling, like, "I'm better at it than you are." But luckily, there is no answer. So you just do whatever you want.

"The meaning of life. It's funny that that, what, that's the basis of all existential angst, that you don't, you don't know why you're here and you have this feeling that it could be meaningless."

It is. I mean, if you, when you start pondering the, the multiverse, the universe, the galaxies, the solar system, the planet, the organism, the cells inside the organism, the bacteria, the parasites, right? The symbiotic relationship we have to our environment. And you start going, "Jesus Christ, what am I? Just a little piece of this thing?" It's like, well, the answers to all the great questions are paradoxes.

"Yeah."

"So for example, you're asking like, do I matter? That's like, really the question you asked, right? Well, how do I matter in this infinite universe?" Well, you know, on the one hand, you're separate. No two points are the same. Every point is, every two points are infinitely different. You're completely separated. No one will have your thoughts, your emotions, your feelings, your experience. So your life is a single-player game. You're trapped inside your head and you're just aware of a bunch of things going on, and that's it. On the other hand, I cannot say the word "Joe Rogan" without invoking the entire universe. Joe, alien comes along, says, "What's that?" "Joe Rogan." "What's Joe Rogan?" "A human." "What's a human?" "Bipedal ape." "What's an ape?" "On the Earth." "What's the Earth?" "Planet." "What's a planet?" "Solar system." "Where was the carbon made?" "Inside stars." Right? Instead, I have to create the entire universe to just say the words "Joe Rogan." So in that sense, you're connected to everything. It's inseparable. So the answer to that question of "Do I matter?" is, I am nothing and I am everything. And you'll find this with all the great questions. 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. 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.

"I feel like there's, with many people, this stress of this question is also accentuated by unhappy lives. It's actually accentuated by unhappy choices, by being trapped. 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. I have to. I can't live my life this way.' What's the meaning of life if this is my life?"

Which is why I always start with, "Let's get you rich first." That's why I'm very practical about it. Because look, the, you know, Buddha was a prince, okay? He started out really rich. And then he got to go off in the woods. And in the old days, what happened was, if you wanted to be peaceful inside, you would become a monk. You would renounce everything. You would become an ascetic. You would give everything up. You renounce women, men, you'd renounce children, you'd announce money, you'd renounce politics, science, technology, everything. And you would go out in the woods by yourself. You could give everything up to be free inside. Well, today we have this wonderful invention called money, where you can just store stuff up in a bank account, okay? And you can basically save up. You can, you can work really hard. You can do great things for society. And society will give you money for giving things that it wants and it doesn't know how to get. And then you can save that up. And you can live well below with your means. And you can find a certain freedom in that. And that will give you the time and the energy to pursue your own internal peace and happiness. So I believe the solution to making everybody happy is to give them what they want. Let's get them all rich. Let's get them all fit and healthy. And then let's get them all happy.

"Is are those things even possible?"

Everyone can be rich. Everyone can be rich. Here's my thought exercise for you now. It seems like we're in an infomercial.

"Everyone can be rich."

Not selling my home. This is my Rolls-Royce. Yeah. No. So that's a good point. So everything that I've ever created on this topic of how to make money, I will never charge a dollar for. Because that would ruin it. That would show that I'm just another huckster who's trying to get rich off of you. There are no get-rich-quick schemes. That's just somebody else trying to get rich off of you, right? So it's, 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. But yes, everybody can be rich. And let me give you a thought exercise, okay? Imagine if tomorrow we could wave a wand and everybody was trained as a scientist or an engineer. Everybody. Even if you weren't very good, you had enough understanding of computers, you could write some code, you could build some hardware. And don't tell me people can't do it because they can. That's just the tyranny of soft expectations. That's just you looking down on somebody else. They can't do it. They just have to be educated. 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. Robots would be doing everything from cleaning toilets to cooking food to flying airplanes to driving Ubers. And what would we be doing? We would be doing all creative jobs to entertain each other and researching science and technology. We would have wonderful lives. So it is really just a question of education. Nothing else.

"Is this a scale issue though? I mean, you're talking about it as if this would work with 300 million people. It'll work with 10 billion people. It'll work with a spacefaring race with 100 trillion people."

Just we have the resources. We have the ability. The universe is infinite resources. You build it. You know, have you heard of a Dyson sphere? You know, you pull the Dyson sphere on a star and you gather all its energy. Like that. There's so much energy out there. One asteroid's got all the minerals that we need. One sun, one solar system has got all the power we will need for a long, long time. Uh, you know, we can extract it out of nuclear fusion. You know, we're we're not that far from those kinds of technologies working. It's just a question of guts and, uh, you know, and interest. Like we should be building nuclear fusion test plants on the moon. The moon should be littered with them. It's no downside, right?

"Yeah. If you could, how would that work?"

Well, it doesn't send a bunch of people up there to work. Oh, the problem. Robots. The problem with fission, nuclear fission, is that, you know, nature creates energy through nuclear energy, right? Like the sun creates energy, nuclear energy. Now, for transmission, we use photons because photons don't interact. And so photons are great for information transmission. But they're actually not great for energy transmission. For energy creation, you want nuclear to work. And the problem is, because nuclear energy, you know, we built it with a bomb, we have dirty nukes, all those kinds of problems with Fukushima, Three Mile Island, Chernobyl. We don't innovate anymore on nukes. 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. You can't innovate that way. When the first airplane crashed, we said, "No more innovation in airplanes." Right? So we need a way to iterate on nuclear fission and eventually fusion and get them working safely, cleanly, passive, fail-safe, etc. If we're going to find our way out of the energy trap. And the best place to do that is someplace like on the moon or Mars.

"Do you think that it's actually a possibility that they could get nuclear power to the point where it's not a detriment? Because what everyone's worried about is a meltdown, right?"

Yeah. And we do have these old plants that are running that are running on this, this is 50-year-old technology. It's crazy because there's no ability to shut them off, right? Very old technology. They do now have Gen 4 nuclear reactors that are passive fail-safe. So in other words, when they fail, they fail into a state. When you pull the plug on them, they fail into a state where there's no leakage, there's no problem, right? Their default is a positive outcome as opposed to the current ones, the old ones, where if you unplug them. And these even these Gen 4 are just Gen 4. They're not Gen 5. They're not Gen 80, Gen 100, where we're in microprocessors. And that should be something that people are working towards.

"I hope so. I mean, in an ideal world, we would now."

The problem is, if you have nuclear energy on the moon, how do you get it home? Right? 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. And that's the initial use case. Um, but then eventually the technology gets so good, you can bring it home.

"Now, I want to go back to this idea of getting people rich. That somehow or another, that's going to make people happy. How do you stop the natural progression that people have of, you know, 'Oh, you know, I have got a nice Chevrolet, yeah, but I really want a BMW. I've got a nice BMW, but now I want a Mercedes. I have Mercedes, I want a Ferrari.' How do you stop that material possession trap?"

Because you can't, at some level. But I think most smart people over time realize that possessions don't make them happy. Right? It's just, you have to go through that. You have to buy your stupid car to realize that it doesn't attract attractive girls. It actually just attracts other dudes who are like, "Hey, I like that car, man." Right? Like, like you have some expensive cars out there, some fancy cars. Tell me how, you know, how much that attracts women versus men.

"Well, I'm married. Those are for me. I just enjoy machines."

Yeah. So for me, they're toys. That's a particular thing where you enjoy machines. But I think very, as you get older, you just realize that there's no happiness in material possessions. Now, lack of material possessions can make you very unhappy. So being poor can make you unhappy. But being rich is not going to make you happy. And what happens, unfortunately, a lot of people struggle through their whole lives to make money. They make some, they're exhausted. And then they're like, "Well, now why am I not happy?" "I guess I'm just not a happy person." And smart people aren't happy. That's like a great little way to people feel better about it. They say, "Well, if you're smart, you're not happy." Where's I positive the other way? If you're smart, you should be able to figure out how to be happy. Otherwise, you're not that smart.

"Yeah. That is an offensive statement. That if you're smart, you're not happy. I've heard that before and I just do not understand the logic of that other than self-justifying."

I understand where it comes from. It comes from if you're smart, it's usually because you thought things through and you have a very busy mind. Yeah. And so a busy mind can often rob you of peace of mind. Because what the peace that we seek is not peace of mind, it's peace from mind. 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, you know, extreme sports, or looking at something beautiful, or taking a psychedelic, you're trying to get out of your own mind. You're trying to get your monkey mind to stop chattering at you for a moment. You're trying to get peace from the mind. And there are other better ways to do that. Most of the ways we try to get peace from mind are indirect. Whereas if you understand things, if you see things properly, you will naturally slowly develop peace from mind. Sorry if I went on a tangent there.

"No, it's a good tangent. 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. That's the fundamental delusion that there is something out there that will make me happy and fulfill forever."

Yeah. Golden years. There is. It's called death. Oh, that's the great leveler. But when people look at, particularly social media, 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, "I want that. That's what I want." What you really want is freedom. You want freedom from your money problems. Right? And I think that's okay. 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 the retirement. But not retirement in the, "I'm 65 years old, sitting in a nursing home collecting a check." Retirement, different definition. Retirement is when you stop sacrificing today for some imaginary tomorrow. Okay? Yes. When today is complete in and of itself, you're retired. Yeah. And so how do you get there? 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. Keep your burn rate low, right? A second is you just drive your burn rate down to zero. You become a monk. A third is you're doing something you love. You enjoy it so much, it's not about the money, right? So there are multiple ways to that path. But the most common is people just say, "I need to make more money." And the kind of wealth creation that I talk about is about creating timeless principles and adapting yourselves. That making money won't be an issue. And you can do it by doing what you love, right? Like we get into this model of, "I must work for other people, work my way up the ladder. I must, like, do what that person is doing to make money." 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. It doesn't know how to get other than through you. So the most powerful money makers are actually individual brands. People like yourself, or Elon, or Kanye, or Oprah, or Trump. Right? These are individual brands, eponymous name brands, who themselves are leveraged. Like you're leveraged. You have podcast media going out to everybody. That's leveraged. The podcasts work for you when you sleep. They have knowledge that nobody else has, which is your knowledge. Is the knowledge of being Joe Rogan. 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 those all these people can't replace you. Um, so we have to pay you what you're worth. And who's, "I never fought in the UFC though." Oh, you didn't? Okay. Sorry. Um, or, you know, you're whatever you're you're involved in that whole scene. You just have a unique set of skill sets. Um, so because of this unique, what I call specific knowledge, because of the accountability that you have with your name, because the leverage that you have through your media, you're a money-making machine. You're, 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 because you have all the skill sets. So once people have those skill sets, and the beauty is, the way you've done it is you don't have any competition. There's no substitution. 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. No, it's, it's just gone. So the way to get out of that competition trap is actually to be authentic. The way to retire is actually to find the thing that you know how to do better than anybody. And you know how to do that better than anybody because you love to do it. No one can compete with you if you love to do it. Be authentic. And then figure out how to map that to what society actually wants. Apply some leverage. Put your name on it. So you take the risks, but you gain the rewards. Have ownership and equity in what you do. And then just crank it out.

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. And 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't afford, but now you, you're saddled down to this job. You have no, you're not saving, you're not, you're not putting things in a good place. And you're working for these things. Working for things as rewards is a real trap that a lot of people fall into. It's the biggest one. You know, Nassim Taleb also says that, you know, under two great addictions, heroin and a monthly salary. Right? And and that's why you can't get rich writing out your time. 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, break your car at the same time, move in the neighborhood. You really also have to get used to ignoring your peers or upgrading or changing the definition of your peers. A lot of people here who are poor here, but they would be rich if they were living in Thailand and Bali. And if they have the luxury of a remotely doable job, they may want to be living there and saving up money. But the ignoring the peers is an issue because the keeping up with the Joneses is a real phenomenon.

"Envy makes the world go around, right?"

"Yeah."

And then there's another thing that people have to avoid even allowing their mind to think 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."

"Yeah."

That is a terrible trap. I mean, look, 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. You know, I washed dishes. I was, I was working catering jobs. I was mowing lawns. I was working since the age of 11 on and off here and there. Didn't have two cents to rub together. You know, I had to borrow $400 to go to college. Like, literally, I was short $400. $400. I had to find $400. I didn't have it. You know, got rejected from a job at Dunkin Donuts. So like, okay, it's not to say that it's easy. It's not easy. It is actually really freaking hard. It is the hardest thing you will do. But it's also the rewarding thing. You know, look at the kids who are born rich. No meaning to their lives. You're in a terrible place. Yeah. Your real, your real resume is just a cataloguing of all your suffering. Right? 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?" And it's all going to be around the sacrifices that you made and the hard things that you did. Anything you're given doesn't matter. You know, you have your four limbs, you have your brain, you have your head, you have your skin. That's that's all for granted. So you have to do hard things anyway to create your own meaning in life. Making money is a fine one. Yeah. Struggle. It is hard. I'm not gonna say it's easy. It's a really hard. But the tools are all available. It's all there. There's also these these traps that people sort of establish in their own mind of giving themselves excuses or giving themselves insurmountable obstacles. Insurmountable paths.

"Victim mentality?"

"Yes."

"It's somebody else's fault. It's my skin color's fault. It's the system's fault."

Yeah. Those people are sinking. I feel bad for them. I want to shake them out of it and say, "Actually, you can get out of it. You just have to stop thinking it's everybody."

"You have to alter the perspective."

"Yeah. But it's so difficult for people to do. It's one of the most difficult things for people to do is to change the way they approach approach reality itself."

At the end of the day, I do think even despite what I said earlier, life is really a single-player game. It's all going on in your head. You know, whatever you think, you believe 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. 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. I don't like that. Oh, she's not attractive. That guy's fat. This person's a loser. Oh, who put this in my way?" You know, the more you judge, the more you're gonna separate yourself. And you'll feel good for an instant because you'll feel good about yourself. "I'm better than that." But then you're gonna feel lonely. And then you're just gonna see negativity everywhere. The world just reflects your own feelings back at you. Reality is neutral. Reality has no judgments. To a tree, there's no concept of right or wrong or good or bad, right? You're born, you have a whole set of sensory experiences and stimulations and lights and colors and sounds, and then you die. Yeah. And how you choose to interpret that is up to you. You do have that choice. So this is what I meant that happiness is a choice. If you believe it's the choice, then you can start working on it. And I can't tell you how to find it because it's your own conditionings that are making you unhappy. So you have to uncondition yourself. It's just like, I can't fix your eating habits for you. I can give you some general guidelines, but you gotta go through the hard habit-forming of how to eat right. But you have to believe it's possible. And it is absolutely possible. I was miserable. I'm happy as a clam. It's not just the money.

"You got happy before the money, mostly?"

"Yeah."

"How did you get happy before the money?"

I started getting older, you know, I just realized like, life is short. I'm going to die.

"Again, trite. Try it in 20 ways."

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." Wow. And I read that. It was one of those book-dropping lines, you know? It's like, mic drop. Confucius had a lot of mic drops. Confucius was a bad motherfucker. He was that's a crazy.

One that was a great one. Um, or another one is, next time you get sick, you know, because everybody gets sick every now and then. It's like a happy person wants 10,000 things. A sick person just wants one thing, right? So it's your, it's your unlimited desires that are clouding your peace, your happiness. Have desires, your biological creature stands up and says, "I can do something. I, I move, I resist, I live." But just be very careful of your desires. This is the oldest, most trite wisdom. Desire is suffering. That's what it means, right? Every desire you have is an access where you will suffer. So just don't focus on more than one desire at a time. The universe is rigged in such a way that if you just want one thing and you focus on that, you'll get it. But everything else, you gotta let go.

Did you make a gradual shift to happiness, or was it a radical change? It's ongoing. It's gradual. Every day. So you're happier today than you were a month ago? Yeah, allegedly. Yeah. Yeah, I'm, I'm very happy these days, deliriously so. It's actually hard for me to hang out with normal people. Really? Yeah. So you, you've made a significant shift over the period of like, how many years? About eight years. Eight years? Yeah. Wow. And is this something that you've pursued through certain books, or is it just like, you, you've made an understanding or gained an understanding in your own mind and then started pursuing it based on that understanding? Yeah, it's very, very personal. Uh, it's basically, you have to decide it's a priority. And then I tried every hack I possibly could. I used to, you know, I tried all the, I tried meditation, I tried witnessing. Uh, you know, I even tried an SSRI just to see what it would feel like.

How did it feel? Uh, it was, 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. So I dropped it. And it did turn you into an optimist? Yes, at the time. I used to be a pessimist. Yeah. Um, 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? And so I used to do that forcibly, and then I trained it until it became second nature. So, for example, like a friend of my wife's was over and she, when we were dating, and she took all these photos. She took like hundreds of photos and then she sends them all to us. And my immediate reaction was like, "Why are you dumping hundreds of photos on my phone? I don't need hundreds of photos. Have some judgment." That's my immediate reaction. And then I could say, "Actually, how nice of her. She sent me hundreds of photos. I can pick the one that I like, right?" There are two ways of seeing almost everything. 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?" But I slowly worked through every negative judgment that I had until I saw the positive end. Now it's second nature to me.

I also realized that like, what you want is, you want clear minds. You want to let go of thoughts. Happy thoughts disappear out ahead automatically, very easy to let go of them. Negative thoughts linger. So if you interpret then the positive in everything, very quickly you let it go, right? You let it go much faster. Simple hacks. Get more sunlight, right? Learn to smile more. Learn to hug more. These things actually release serotonin. In reverse, they aren't just outward signals of being happy, they're actually feedback loops to being happy. Spend more time in nature. You know, these are obvious. Watch your mind. Watch your mind all day long. Watch what it does. Not judge it, not try to control it. But you can meditate 24/7. Meditation is not a sit down, close your eyes activity. Meditation is just basically watching your own thoughts like you would watch anything else in the outside world and say, "Why am I having that thought? Does that serve me anymore? Is that conditioning from when I was 10 years old?" Like, for example, getting ready for this podcast. You got ready. I didn't. But good. I did. But I did. I did. I couldn't help it. And what happened was, the few days leading up to this, my mind was just running. And normally my mind is pretty calm. And it was just running and running and running. And every thought I would have, I would imagine me saying it to you. My brain couldn't help but rehearse. What, what it's doing? It's just rehearsing all the time to talk to you. And then I was even rehearsing, rehearsing telling you about the rehearsal, right? So it was all playing all these meta games. And I was just like, "Shut up. Stop it. What is going on?" And it took me a while to figure out, "Oh, yeah, you know what it is?" When I was a kid in Queens, and I had no money, and I had nothing, and I needed to save myself. The way I got out was by sounding smart, not being smart. Sounding smart. That was the skill I perfected. So I am hardwired to always rehearse things. So I will sound smart. It's a disease. It keeps me from being happy. But when you see that, when you realize that, when you understand something, then it naturally calms you down. So after that, I stopped rehearsing as much. Wow. But it's still a trained habit.

That is a really interesting point that you want to sound smart. That, that many people do that, and especially young people. When you, you see someone who is smart, or someone who appears smart, they say smart things. Oh god, I want to sound smart. I want people to think about me the same way I think about that person. That, that is my disease. That is my feeling. It is what clutters my mind. I, the, the thing I have to ask myself now is, if I can, would I still be interested in learning this thing if I couldn't ever tell anybody about it? That's how I know it's real. That's how I know it's something I actually want to know. That's a common thing though. I know I suffered from that when I was young. The desire to sound smart. That's, it's very, it's very common. Well, all of us start out, you know, every, everything. You're a winner now in your life. You were a loser because you were a loser at some point, right? If, if you had gotten all the girls, if you had all the money, if you had everything you want, you were good looking and in junior high or high school, uh, you wouldn't have done anything with your life and you would have peaked early. It's like the Bruce Springsteen Glory Days song, right? You would have married your high school sweetheart, you'd be living in your hometown, you know, you'd be a manager at the local McDonald's, whatever the first dream job you had. Thank God we didn't all get what we wanted when we were young, right? Or we would be trapped in that. So you have to be able to break out of where you came from. I don't know where I was going.

That is interesting too about people who peak too early. Yeah. 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, the joys of sucking at something. Yeah. And actually, though, in our professions, especially when you're high visibility, the problem with peaking is that you then get drowned in death of a thousand cuts. People have expectations of you. "Hey Joe, can you come to my event? Hey Joe, can you look at my business plan? Hey Joe, can you give me advice on this? Can you, you know, talk to my friend? Can you come on this podcast?" You're just being assaulted all the time with inbound opportunities. So you have no time to start over with anything. So you have to ruthlessly, ruthlessly disappoint everybody, eliminate and clear your schedule, drop all the meetings, not even respond to the emails. The only way you're going to be able to start over with anything. Yeah. And I, we talked about this, that I'd love your approach to meetings. If they're not meeting life or death, I'm the same way. I avoided a good one recently. And this was someone that was just tracking me down as a high-profile person in a big organization. And I'm like, "Can we just talk on the phone?" And then we talk on the phone. There was nothing to say. It was just, they wanted to get me in the office. And yeah, and the meetings should really be phone calls. Phone calls should be emails. And emails should just be text, right? Many of them, right?

With meetings, I, I mean, I, I despise meetings. I used to own the domain, I don't do coffee.com. I eventually let go. But I used to respond from the wallet, "I don't do coffee." You know? Oh, that's hilarious. But it was a little bit of a jerk move. But really, where it comes from is when I was young, one of my principles was, I knew I had to make money. It was my overwhelming desire. 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. Okay? No one's going to pay me more than what I think I'm worth. So what am I worth?" So I, I picked an hourly rate for myself that I was worth. And I said, "I'm never going to squander my time for less than this." So if originally there's $500 an hour, then I upgrade to $5,000 an hour. And it's ludicrous. But pick an aspirational hourly rate. Aspirational. It has to be a little ludicrous. 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. If I have to, or give it away. If I have to do some tasks and I can hire somebody to do it for less than my hourly rate, I would hire them. And so I just became extremely jealous of my time. Which doesn't mean you can't have fun, rest, leisure, spending time with your friends and family. That's all great. Don't count that. 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, otherwise don't do the work. And so once it came out of that, then I just realized the cost of meetings. The cost of meetings is so high, especially given all the people who are in there, right? One person is talking, seven people listening. You're literally just dying an hour at a time. So you have to just drop non-urgent meetings or figure out how to be more efficient with them.

If you're gonna do anything great, the extreme example is business travel. Getting on a plane to fly halfway around the world for one meeting, which never amounts to anything, and then like wasting your whole little life there, and then flying back. So about five years ago, I resolved, "I am never going to travel for business." Wow. And I haven't traveled for business since. I only travel if the travel experience will be so entertaining and joyous because I have friends, or it's a place I want to see, or whatever, that it will be complete in and of itself. Because I know that whatever the business meeting I came from is never worth it. Wow. And actually, that principle applies larger than just travel. It applies to life in general. The, this one of the secrets to happiness is to really embrace what you're doing in that moment. That's trite. But where that, where that comes from is saying, "I only want to do actions that are complete in and of themselves." Right? If I'm looking for some ulterior motive down the line, it's not going to materialize. And, and if you think it is, maybe even if it does, it'll be very short-lived. 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. Your brain had hedonically adapted to it, and you were looking for the next thing.

That's a great statement. Hedonically adapted. That is what happens to people. You get accustomed to whatever it is. I realized that when I first got a new apartment. It was a nice apartment. After a while, I got used to it. I was like, "Oh, okay. This is just an apartment. It's just where I live. I'm used to it. It's nice, but I'm used to it." Yeah. We all go through this. Learning. It's, it's, you know, it's riding the Ferris wheel of life. It's like, you get at the bottom like, "I want to get to the top. This is so exciting." You ride it up, you get a little dopamine rush, get a little serotonin. Then you ride it back down. As that wears off, then you need another high. Then you ride it back up and ride it back down. In fact, the more highs you get, the harder it gets to go around the wheel. And the more bored you get, the harder it goes to go back up. So what lights your fire now? Like, what, what gets you motivated to do things and to act? Art. Art. This is art. Oh, okay. Art is just creativity. It's just anything that's done for its own sake. So what are the things that are done for their own sake? There's nothing beyond loving somebody. Uh, creating something. Playing. Art, to me, creating business is play. I create businesses, early stage, because it's fun. Because I'm into the product. 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. So these days, I will pass on all kinds of great investments because I'm like, "I just, the product's not interesting. It's boring. I'm not going to learn anything."

That's a beautiful luxury. It is a luxury. Art and learning. Yeah. It is a luxury. These are not 100 or zero things, right? You can, in your life, start moving more and more towards that. Right? But that's a goal. It's a goal. When I was younger, I used to be so desperate to make money that I would have done anything, right? If you'd shown up and said, "Hey, I got a sewage trucking business, and you're going to go into that," I'd say, "Great. Let's do it. I'm going to make money." Thank God no one gave me that opportunity. I'm glad that it went down the road of technology and science, which I genuinely enjoy. And so I got to like combine my vocation and my advocation. I mean, what are you doing? You're playing. You're having fun. You're doing art. You're not, you're not working. No. That's what I always say when people say, "I work hard." I'm like, "Sorta, not really. I'm always working, but it looks like work to them, but it feels like play to me." And that's how I know no one can compete with me on it. Because I'm just playing 16 hours a day. And if they want to compete with me and they're going to work, they're going to lose because they're not going to do it 16 hours a day, seven days a week.

Well, listen, man, there are some gems of wisdom in this conversation. And I hope people pull things out of this and apply them to their own life. And I'm certainly going to listen to you again and and and try to apply some of this to my own life, stuff that I'm not already applying. But I really appreciate your time and I really appreciate you coming in here. Thanks for having me. And, um, please tell people, you, those small little podcasts, it's just the Naval podcast, right? Yeah. Best way to find me is on Twitter, actually. Okay. Just at Naval. Then I have a website at nav.al. I have a YouTube channel, Naval. And I have a podcast, in the world. That's it. Well, thank you very much. Thank you. Really appreciate it. Thank you. Bye, everybody.

[Music]

[Applause]

[Music]

[Music]

I