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I'm flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking and oils you a personal question. No it is I'm a cybernetic organism living tissue over metal endoskeleton.
Hello boys and girls. Ladies and germs, this is Tim Ferriss. Welcome to another episode of the Tim Ferriss show where it is always my job to interview and deconstruct world-class performers from all different fields. My guest today is a dear friend. He does very few podcasts are going to get into a disclaimer around that navall ramakant. You can find him at navall and a VA L on Twitter. He is the co-founder and chairman of Angel list is an angel investor and has invested more than 100 companies including many mega successes such as Twitter Uber notion.
Open Door Postmates and wish it is a long long list. You can subscribe to navall his podcast on wealth and happiness on Apple podcast Spotify or wherever you get your podcast. You can also find his blog at any of the AL for even more in of all plus Tim. That's me check out my wildly popular interview with him from 2015, which was nominated for a podcast of the year. You can find that and resources and much more at Tim dot blog / Nev all of all, welcome back to the
show.
Yeah, thanks for having me you're going to call correctly. I was I was crushed and podcast there by Jamie Foxx. So that's right. So Joe and I need week of competition this time around if you could just tone it down this year, please
I will do my best. Yeah, Jimmy Jimmy. Basically I could have been a completely non-responsive critical care patient. As long as the equipment functioned Jamie Foxx is the the consummate performer. So he is he is formidable competition and podcast but you are a different breed and
I understand that you get asked to do podcasts a lot. So what type of disclaimer would you
like to play? I don't go on other people's podcast anymore. I had to make an exception for you because you're the OG you put me on the map your good friend and frankly. I wouldn't even be known if it weren't for you. So I definitely have to thank you and honor your request to have me back. I generally don't do podcasts anymore or at least other people's podcast for a couple of reasons. First is I just don't believe in sequels. I think sequels suck right you look at sea.
Equals on in movies and whatnot and they're usually pretty bad. They cost three times as much, you know, they're long-winded the person now has an ego in a reputation to defend they've already said what they were going to say, so they're just repeating themselves to some level and you know, maybe the first run they took it idea they've had for a decade or three decades and expounded on it. It sounded great and then in the sequel whether it's a book or a movie they have to come up with something equally good, but they only have two years to do it and it's just really difficult to do so, I think sequels just make everybody.
Bad and I'm not a fan of sequels yet. Here. We are. The thing about sequels did they make money people want them people crave them because there's a certain familiarity to it. But hopefully we won't embarrass ourselves too much. So yes, I don't do sequels will make an exception here and kind of see how it goes. Just don't have Jamie Foxx back on at least at least not this
year. Well I'm looking right now is a framework for starting this conversation at your Twitter account. And that might seem like an odd place for me to start people who listen to this show will
know that I don't often do that, but I want to know two things you follow 0 people on Twitter yet. You have almost a million followers and also trending right now in the United States is Jamie Foxx hilarious. He's right next to these are my methods cannot keep this guy down. So let's talk about your account. I find your account fascinating. I find your use of Twitter fascinating and I'd like to begin with a photograph of a professor at a Blackboard that you have.
As your profile suppose header, who is the person in the photograph? I think I recognize this person, but I want to hear you describe. Why you chose this Photograph and who it
is. Yeah there that's Professor Richard Fineman who was a Pioneer in the field of quantum electrodynamics. He was part of the Manhattan Project. He's known colloquially for his book surely. You're joking. Mr. Feynman a couple of related ones like so what do you care what other people think but he's also very well regarded in the field of physics, obviously.
Passed away a while back, but he invented a lot of quantum electrodynamics Fineman path integrals. He was part of the Manhattan Project brilliant brilliant guy and I loved him because finding was one of the first characters that are encountered that did science and serious work and was accomplished in so-called real life but was also like a he was a character. He was a happy person. He was deeply philosophical. He didn't take himself nor life too. Seriously. He appreciated the mysteries of life. He
Living life and he had a lot of fun along the way so it was kind of a to me. He was like a full stack intellectual hacker of life and was just very inspirational to me as a kid growing up, you know, even though I read a lot of philosophy and you know, just kind of normal nonfiction my hero and even though I'm in the business world the tech world, my heroes are scientists because I think applied science is the engine that pulls Humanity forward it eventually becomes technology that technology allows us to engage in all kinds of
Of Pursuits around civilization rather than be scrapping for just basic substance and survival. And so I think scientists are still the most unsung heroes of human history and finding was one of the greats and he was admirable in many regards as to how he lived his life. Although I think recently they tried to cancel him. But you know, they try to cancel
everybody Fineman is a character certainly is a character was a character and a figure who has fascinated me for decades. And actually I
collect very few things but managed to buy some of his papers and drawings at auction a handful of years ago because it was the first time that they had been made available so I can show you some of his equations from the Manhattan Project which is wild to think about and my Fascination though is in many respects uninformed because I don't have these scientific literacy to fully appreciate the genius that he brought to bear on physics for instance, but
I could appreciate his cleverness and his questioning of assumptions and also his distaste for uniforms and other accolades most notably some of the prizes he was awarded that he seemed to have particular dislike for
on sale. He famously said that science is the belief in the ignorance of experts and it's so funny but these days, you know, so many people are on Twitter saying believe in science or
In science and if they realize there's no such thing as science with a capital S science. The foundation of science is doubt. It is all about falsifiability David Deutsch who was kind of one of my current modern living physicist Heroes is a pop Aryan lucky. He subscribes the Karl Popper's philosophy and he basically says that you know, if it's not falsifiable, it's not scientific. If you can't prove it false if there's if if you if it's true up or down or left or right. It's not science. It doesn't require belief. You should be able to
to challenge it at all times. It should make risky predictions that are not obvious and those predictions should then be tested and you shouldn't be able to after the fact change the goal move the goal post or change how the you know how the predictions were set up. And so those are the Hallmarks of good science falsifiability independent verifiability and making risky and narrow predictions with details that are hard to very both before and after the fact and that's how you end up with good science and good explanations not by.
People on Twitter voting that's politics. So like everything has become politics now science has become politics to people politicize in their big science, but I think Fineman would be very unhappy with that. Although he was just a generally happy character and non-political intended not to get involved in these things. But I think he would realize that that is not actually science, but it's masquerades a science. It's almost becoming social science and you know going to Twitter like Nassim taleb is one of my favorite Twitter followers, even though he's a he's a bit, you know in cantankerous survey.
Yeah, it's cantankerous. Yeah, he's annoyed people for sure. But you know, you want to hear the truth. You got to you got to be prepared to be hurt a little bit, but he had a great tweet recently. I retweeted which I'm sure made a lot of people mad where he said the opposite of education is not ignorance. The opposite of education is an education and social science and I thought that was hilarious but you know it hurts because there's some truth to it if there was no truth to it. It wouldn't hurt at all. You know, if I say Tim Ferriss is fat that would just bounce right off.
But if I said, you know Tim Ferriss and of all our fake gurus that might hit us right because I suspect some deep level. There's a part of that. That's true. So I think the same way like would you know social science does kind of lead you down the road to ignorance because it's about social in anything social is about groupthink and group behavior and individuals can search for truth but group search for consensus because if a group doesn't have consensus of can't get along they can't get along and falls apart and there's conflict.
And so the last place you're going to find truth is in large groups and the moment you make science about large groups and about voting and about consensus. You're not really practicing science anymore.
Yeah, and this science with a capital S is dangerous. Very dangerous. All right,
it says yeah, it's propaganda. It's and then it becomes like macroeconomics again another not until a blind. He says it's easier to macro bullshit then it's a micro bullshit and so big science as equivalent of
Where's the code of microeconomics a little science which is you know mean a lab or me with my computer and trying out various things. And so you can just like with macroeconomics you can pick and choose whatever data you want to prove whatever point you want with big science. You can pick your choose whatever papers you want. So look at the fights right now on the internet about what covid means you can go down that Hall of Mirrors and find scientific quote-unquote substantiation for many points of view depending on which
Papers you choose to cherry pick and so then we reduce back to consensus. But again science isn't done by consensus. It should be done by experimentation verifiability falsifiability rigorous testing and you know in an ideal Science World, you don't go and serve a ten thousand scientists. You actually pick the one smartest scientist, but that's very hard to do now. No one can agree on who the smartest scientist is. So unfortunately, I think that the nature of what science is being corrupted and that started the day we let the so-called
Sciences masquerade as Sciences, you know the day we said psychology is a science and politics can be a science and and so on and you can apply the scientific method to those things then I think that's day. We started corrupt science or at least the word science. So real science, you know these days is relegated to a very small corner, you know physics maybe like molecular biology and chemistry mathematics theory of computation, but it's a fairly limited
set. Yeah, very quantitatively.
Literate friend of mine said at one point most of the disciplines that have science at the end of them are not actually science the only exceptions right? So you're cute computer science computer science if it's hard Neuroscience right be an exception, but very often if there's science appended to it. It is not in fact something that is falsifiable. According to someone like Karl Popper, right? It cannot be it cannot be proven or disproven using
Experiment at least that's right people
if there isn't some experiment Could That Could theoretically disprove it and it's not science. Yeah, it's like honest Abe's Law Firm, right? He he needs to put honest in the title. Then you have to wonder
so the same way if it's
science in the word other than as you said computer science and Neuroscience you sort of have to wonder
let's look at a couple of quotes from Fireman. There. Are there few that I think about a lot and these are on Goodreads, but number one.
One and I think this is really applicable with respect to science in media particularly a term that bothers me a lot which is studies prove or studies show just like capital S science shows which isn't really a thing the facts can get contorted quite a lot the quote from Fineman is I learned very early the difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something right? Yeah words. If is a
very deep point and I think that
A lot of times that we just Define something with another definition or we just throw out a piece of jargon as if that means we know something and you know, it's a difference in memorization and understanding understanding is the thing that you want you want to be able to describe in 10 different ways in simple sentences from the ground up in re-derive whatever you need if you just memorize your lost, so I think this is one of the things that I get stuck on a lot which is like just keep going back and reading the basics over and over trying to understand them. So don't necessarily have that.
Tall edifice of knowledge that is very seductive in Academia. But as anyone who's operated much in the real world knows in the real world, you get paid for making good judgments and decisions based on the basics. For example, if you know arithmetic statistics probability at a high level and you understand some basic math, you have all the math that you need to succeed in life. You don't need calculus or even trigonometry or number Theory or set theory or any of these kinds of things unless you're going into a deeply technical.
Our mathematics yet. We spend so much of our time in school covering precalc and calculus when the kids were taking those courses aren't even that good at basic math. So the basics are really important. That's the steel frame the foundation for understanding that you need to get through life and too much of it is reduced to memorization and understanding things as names and as definitions and I think the firemen example is, you know, his dad would take him for walks and they would see birds and you know,
His dad would say this bird is a such and such a warbler, but that doesn't tell you anything about the bird that tells you about humans and humans gave that bird that name really the bird, you know, it likes to stand on one leg at this point. It likes to pick it lies in its feathers doing this and it likes to eat these kinds of things and it flies, you know this way for that reason and these are its predators and these are its prey. So I mean, those are the kinds of things that really give you understanding who cares what the bird is called the name of the bird is irrelevant.
And you see a lot of professions in professional life. This happens a lot, which is jargon people try to protect their knowledge by basically saying well, I understand this term and that term and what this term means but the reality is most people don't actually know what these things mean underneath. I find this very common in accounting a lot of business people don't know counting and even a lot of accountants will have fancy words for things. But when you dig underneath they don't really understand the principle of what's going on below it and if you just understand the
apples and even if you don't understand the words you will have an advantage in for example negotiating deals because you understand underneath how the pieces are actually moving on the board as opposed to what they're called
and I just want to point out developing that foundational knowledge is akin to learning the basics of shooting foul throws and basketball. It is not becoming Michael Jordan right with a very limited set of colors with which to paint if you spend
Few weeks maybe not even a few weeks a few days with a decent YouTube tutorial or book Gathering the basics of accounting you will be able to make significantly better decisions. Right? I mean, it's I just want to underscore that. This is not an it a master's degree or PhD or any type of commitment like that that can separate you from the pack in terms of
Advantage. Well, it's just just run a business run a lemonade stand will teach you better accounting not a textbook now you may need
Need to learn certain conventions because you need those to communicate with other humans so that there's efficient communication when you say one thing they understand that thing and that's where jargon can be useful because it can be compressed way of communicating knowledge rather than having to, you know, try and explain it from first principles every time but when it's not useful is when it becomes a substitute for understanding understanding is the thing, you know, that's what separates humans from the other animals. That's what separates us from the robots that we actually understand what's going on underneath
Like for example in the artificial intelligence world is a new algorithm GPT 3, which is the Rage which is text completion. So people are saying hey I can make up like really plausible sounding writing. And so the AI is here is going to take all the jobs. Well, no because the AI doesn't actually know what's going on underneath if I were to ask it a question of a why did you write that or what does that mean? It would very quickly fall apart. So you always want to strive for understanding not for memorization. You should be able to rearticulated five different ways and every language that you know,
Otherwise, you don't really understand it. And the good news is you don't have to understand that many things while we're on the topic of find a Fineman one of the phrase the quotes from him as he says like, you know nature uses only the longest threads to weave her tapestry. And so what he means by that is that there are only a few basic principles that you have to understand kind of understand that sum total of our knowledge in physics. There's not a lot and as physics becomes more and more advanced. We're actually
And theories were collapsing them into one thing like we do with electricity and magnetism were statistical mechanics and heat and thermodynamics, you know, those turn out to be one thing. So we're trying to do currently with gravity and quantum mechanics were trying to reconcile them in Quantum Loop gravity or in string theory or what have you. So you just kind of have to understand a few of the basic things in then you'll see them recurring over and over and over again, like for example, I study and read physics in computer science just for entertainment. I don't this
No practical application for me. But there's this really interesting Theory as reading about call solomonoff induction and it's basically formalizes Occam's razor, which is at the shortest answer is the correct one, but it's more advanced than that, but it basically says like if you want to figure out why something happened you take all the different reasons why it could have happened all the different theories why I could have happened and then you sort of way each of them based on how compressed they are. How short they are How likely
They are and then that gives you the probability that kind of gives you the the explanation for why that theory happened. Now Fineman has a very similar and elegant thing in a completely different field where he basically says if you want to understand why this particle took that path, what did this Photon take that path? What you do is you look at all the possible paths that Photon could have taken and you sort of wave them you use some them probabilistically based on How likely that path was it's actually the same observation except one is about
Photons traveling through space time and the other is about the causality and why an event may have happened what the theory is behind that and these are two completely different fields in two completely different characters thinking about two completely different things and these are very very fundamental theories in their fields, but deep down. They're actually the same which is to me is fascinating. It's just shows how much of what we look at as complexity actually emerges from a set of very simple rules.
Just fascinating. So understanding is the thing to strive for not the word. So even though use the fancy words like Solomon of induction and and finance path integral Theory. Whatever the heck it's called. I don't know what the actual name is. The name is irrelevant. It's the concept that's that's fascinating
you spoke to learning accounting through building a business. Let's segue to business. Your PIN tweet is a tweet storm. So it's a series of tweets the headline of which is how to get rich and then in parentheses without getting lucky it.
As as we record this forty four point eight thousand retweets a hundred and ten plus thousand favorites. We're not going to go through this whole thing. It's quite long, but I'm curious to know what parts of it you think people are paying too much attention to our overemphasize and what parts of it. Do you wish people would pay more attention to because there are many different pieces of advice in this thread
that tweet storm is a series of principles that I kind of wrote for myself in my head when I was
Teen and I was trying to figure out how to make money and it kind of came with a framework of how to be rich but not by accident to do it in a way that I could repeat it over and over and I would be very little up the chance because I think there's kind of this it's not completely mythology. But there's this belief that you know to make money you have to be born rich or your to be privileged or you have to be in the right circles if they get lucky and I think that there are still ways to accomplish the original American Dream which is make money, but do it in a deliberate systematic way and when I say money I mean
Mean wealth I don't mean like a law firm where you make, you know, a couple hundred bucks an hour, but you're still tied to the clock. I mean like when you wake up when you want you go to sleep when you want, you know, you live where you want and you have freedom. So to me the purpose of money is freedom and for that you need to create wealth and can you do it? Ethically can you do it sustainably? Can you do reliably can you do it with people that you like and you doing things that you enjoy and I think it's absolutely possible and I'd like to think that I'm at least one of many living proof points.
That you know, Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger examples of others. Not that I'm in their status of their league, but you know other people have done it. So that was the whole point of that framework and the Tweet storm has wrote it down one day and it's funny because obviously have some experience at Twitter so I know how to craft things but I think that was written back in the day when the Tweet limit was a hundred and forty characters to so it's harder but I just woke up one night when I've been thinking about it. I wrote out the whole tweets to him almost exactly like you see it.
There are lots and lots of missing pieces like obviously that is just like a very high level very Zen cone like or or Haiku like or even Hallmark card like framework. It's missing a ton of details, which I then tried to extrapolate on and my podcast series on the same topic what do people over emphasize and what are people missing
and actually the volume you paused me just read a few of them. This is from jerk May 31 2018. So a few examples and you don't have to comment on this specific examples, but just for people
Who haven't seen this on I give them an idea. So the second of these various Tweets in this sequence is understand that ethical wealth creation is possible. If you secretly despise wealth, it will elude you and of that particular tweet and then there's another one you're not going to get rich renting out your time. You must own Equity a piece of a business to gain your Financial Freedom.
That one right? There is the most important one, which is you basically in Modern Life. What happens is like the
person who is the best at doing something in the world will get to do it for the entire world through a combination of Leverage and distribution accountability and specific knowledge where all of which I talked about in the Tweet storm. If you're the best in the world at doing something like if you're the best teacher in the world that math you should be teaching the entire world math. If you're the best podcast interviewer, you should be doing all the top interviews and the returns with a crew to you especially in this highly digital world that we live in where the cost of Distributing something is very close to zero. And so what you kind of want
do is you want to productize yourself into a business and then you want to own that business that is the way to make wealth clear example, is that Tim Ferriss podcast and the Tim Ferriss brand write your it's an eponymous brand your name is on it your leverage through this podcast and through the books that you write and through the army of followers that you have on the various media platforms and you're taking on big accountability and their specific knowledge only, you know how to be Tim Ferriss their learning machine who can then connect to other Learners and extract value out of them and share that
With the audience, so that's an example of you having productized yourself. But ultimately you own the Tim Ferriss business. Now, you can go lower levels down from that. You don't have to own the entire business you could be investor in public equities or private stocks. You could be a partner in a private business. You could be an employee of startup where you have stock options, but if you don't own a piece of a business you're going to it's going to be extremely hard to get wealthy. It will be nearly impossible almost not worth that route. So I think that is the most important function
They tional tweet. I think where people kind of all kind of miss the plot the most though is we have pain avoidance in life. We don't want to face things where it's clear. We've made bad decisions because one good definition of suffering is that's the moment when you see things that they clearly are and you kind of don't like what you see like, for example, if you if you and your spouse have been fighting for a long time, you know, you've kind of been sweeping it under the rug and you've sort of been suffering along but you're sleeping on the rung and then you get divorce at that moment. You can no longer.
Iran see all the damage that was in the relationship and what all the consequences are there real the same way. If you haven't been taking care of your health, but then suddenly you find out that you've just fallen off a cliff and something irreversibly bad has happened the moment of suffering arrives and you're in pain because you can no longer unsee this thing. You can no longer avoid it. So I think the same way the unfortunate part is that a lot of these principles are written for young people because you can set yourself on a certain trajectory in life earlier. And so for example, if you went and you got to you know,
D in a social science, and I'm basically saying hey learn to code you can avoid that. You're not gonna want to see that because you have all this sunk cost in the degree. So I think a lot of people don't want to pick up the new skills that are necessary or they don't want to for example physically move or they don't want to disappoint the people in the relationships that they already have to make room for new relationships. So everybody wants to start where they are. Nobody wants to go back down the mountain to find the PATH going to the top. Everybody wants to stay on the path. They're on new make a few tweaks and get to the top.
Or like Charlie Munger jokes, you know people always ask me like, how do I get to be rich like you except quicker? I don't want to be old rich guy want to be the young rich guy. So I think these are the hard part's the the hard parts are not the learning is the unlearning. It's not the climbing up. The mountain is the going back down to the bottom of the mounting and starting over is The Beginner's mind that every great artist or every great business person has which is you have to be willing to start from scratch. You have to be able to hit reset and go back to 0 because you have to realize that what you
Already know and what you're already doing is actually an impediment to your full potential and most people just don't want to acknowledge that and I'm guilty of that too. That's just human nature. I'm not faulting anybody for it, but it's just human nature.
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If we look at your specific case as it relates to equity, you mentioned owning part of a business. You also mentioned in this conversation productizing yourself. So would you view your success in following that principle predominantly in for instance the equity that you own in a company like AngelList or is it the identity and the brand meaning associations that you've built as navall?
Human, or is it / investor therefore being sought after as an investor or is it something else? How would you think of that Principle as applying most in your own life? Because you've created wealth not just through say your equity and Angeles but also through many successful Investments and then I'm sure there are other ways that we could identify wealth as coming from your path that you have a
what I like about my path is that I've made money doing a lot of different little things. So I've made you know,
Money consistently in sort of small to medium sized chunks. I haven't had like one gigantic payday that set me up forever. Although it depends on your standards, right? I'm talking about by Silicon Valley standards, obviously for most parts of the world. I've had many of those gigantic paydays, but they've been consistent and they've been varied varied in the sense of that. There are completely different kinds of investments in Endeavors, but consistent in that I get one every couple of years,
which would I just want to interject for a second which would seem to suggest that there is a there are principles.
Guiding your approaches or absolutely man. I protest right there for ya. You're not relying on winning the Powerball lottery or that
equivalent. No, not at all. No, there's no Lottery here to win. The lottery is for losers lotteries are just attacks on people who can't do math yet Rich because get-rich-quick schemes are just other people getting rich off of you. There are no shortcuts. So what I'm doing is I am taking my specific knowledge, which is my ability to understand deeply technical Concepts and communicate them.
to the rest of the world to be an interface between great programmers and developers and designers and the capital markets and consumers and using that to put myself in a position where then I can identify great Trends as their emerging invest in those companies or help start those companies own equity in those things help bring them to market help do the strategy on how to navigate the world's of fundraising and exiting and recruiting and Company building and cultures and Technology development all that and have a brand around it and
Use that to kind of make money and that is just one of several ways. You know, I've also done it by investing early on in public markets and cryptocurrencies and starting funds and all kinds of things but I don't it's funny. I don't really follow my own principles anymore, like the for example the whole podcast thing and the whole Twitter thing, even though I've got reasonably good brands and followers and those I'm not monetizing them at all. I'm not charging anybody for anything because I'm not trying to make money anymore to me that making money is like you become the kind of person that makes money.
And you put yourself in long-term situations where you're always going to make money. So I have the brand and I have deep relationships with a dozen people who I know and I trust that I can do business with the rest of my life and they're very high integrity people. They're very capable people and just makes it easy to do things. So I've set up that infrastructure now the money just kind of makes itself as I go about my life. I don't want to have to work hard. I don't have to roll out of bed at a certain time. They don't have to answer to somebody so I optimized for Independence and freedom. I could have made a lot more money by raising a human.
Fund or joining a big VC firm early on or being executive one of the massive companies in Silicon Valley or early on but I always optimized for Independence. I'm lazy, you know, I wake up at 7:00 8:00 9:00 10:00 a.m. I go to sleep at 2:00 3:00 a.m. You know, I don't work a lot of days some days I work morning tonight, but it's just based on whatever I'm curious about and never will have to answer to a boss. No one's ever going to tell me what to do. I don't want to order people around. I don't want to have someone reporting to me and kind of asking me all the time. What do
Do I want peer relationships? I want to flow. I want to be able to do business while walking, you know in a forest talking on a cellphone or sitting in a meeting or in front of a computer or I want to be on a beach if I don't feel like it the ideal would be to make money with your mind not with your time. So if I can just make one good decision a year and that makes me all the money that I need for that year then that's perfect. And that's the way it should be because we're living in an age of infinite leverage and your judgment just gets multiplied through this massive Force multiplier through
Capital Community labor what have you so if you're smart and you kind of know what you're doing. You don't need to work hard working hard is the last least important thing. You have to pay your dues. You have to put in all the iterations ten thousand iterations, not 10,000 hours to figure out what to do and how to do it well, but once you know, you don't have to put in the time anymore, it's your judgment and the Judgment comes from Clear thinking the clear-thinking comes from having time to reflect and to pursue your genuine intellectual curiosity and you'll see that
A lot of the great investors for examples to sit around reading most of the time or Warren Buffett famously plays a lot of bridge obviously not everyone can be just an investor. Although that is becoming more and more democratized and I've picked something that suits my temperament in particular capabilities, but there's lots and lots of ways to make money if you apply your mind to it so I don't work to make money. I mean if I make so much money that I'm donating Hospital wings and universities and all that stuff. I overshot, you know, I'm not trying to have some influence on the world through money. Ironically. I have more influence of the world through pie.
Cast like this and so, you know making more money doesn't change my life. It doesn't change the world as much as I could by doing other things. So there's not much incentive for me to make money anymore other than Justice practicing my craft.
Well, let's let's talk about a few of your your missives missives is probably not the right word.
Yeah, I'm not telling you anything. I'm not trying to persuade anyone of anything. So if people don't like it, you know, some people get triggered on Twitter and they start arguments like just leave just don't listen to it.
The one I'm going to read would be a great one for people to get really upset about or I would find it comical to to look at the comments of people are upset. But the the line is this imagine how effective you would be if you weren't anxious all the
Time, why did you put this out? And have you seen highly anxious people become people who experience very little anxiety. Is that something you've seen But first? Why did you put this up what was behind it? And then have you seen anxious people become largely like a son anxious or not anxious
people get most of my tweets are not very deliberate or thought through what's happening is I've been thinking about some concept for you know months.
It's years whatever. It's been percolating and then all of a sudden it'll come to me. It's sort of the neck once pithy sentence from like oh, this is how I will remember this thing. This is how I can distill this down into a pointer for myself so that when I need to make decisions, I can retrieve that whole line of reasoning and so where this comes from is basically like everybody after a certain age. I am taking responsibility for my own happiness and peace and quality of life and
And one of the things you learn after you make money is that money doesn't make you happier. It takes care of your money problems, but it's nestled not initially going to put you in a place where you're in some kind of bliss all the time. In fact, there's nothing out there that will make you happy forever. So you sort of have to take responsibility for guiding yourself in such a way that your mental state ends up where you want it. And so I've been working on my mental state and I have you know working as a big word. I don't even want to say I've been working on it, but I would say my mental state has gotten to a place.
A switch is much better than it used to be and people will often say well, I don't want to do that because it will take away my ambition. I want to succeed right now. And so I've thought about that a fair bit. And is that true or not? Well it certainly for me in the last few years since I've become calmer my Effectiveness has gone through the roof and I've been more successful but it's hard to disambiguate that from well. Also, maybe you just later in your career. You're in a better position for it. And that's a valid criticism. So one of the things I've been trying to figure out is like would I have
A successful it's hard to the counterfactual. Obviously if I wasn't as anxious because anxiety is, you know comes from fear and it's also motivator makes you get off your butt and one of the ways to make the anxiety go away at least until the next piece of anxiety comes along is to go do something about it. So what is the role of anxiety? Well firstly I noted that pretty much everybody's anxious all the time. It's a rare human being who is an anxious and it makes sense where Alpha Predators, you know, we took over this Earth and domestic kid or kill dog.
The other animals and we did that by being the most paranoid the most fearful the most angry Predators. This world has ever seen so anxiety is built into the core of who we are. In fact, you could argue that all the Mind does all day long is fear-based scenario planning for survival and then maybe a little bit of greed for replication. So anxiety is at the core level of who we are but certainly some people are more anxious and others. There's no question and some people seem to you much calmer about it. So which is more useful for Effectiveness, so assuming that
Goal is your motivation is intrinsic you're doing the thing because you love it or because you really want it and you can separate that motivation from anxiety Then I think you can take on certain superpowers and we kind of all intrinsically know this like if you look at you know, Samurai Warriors, right like Miyamoto Musashi is in a duel with somebody else. You know that the person who is Kamar is going to win in all those movies. It's the one who can like who's like incredibly still.
Then swipes with a sword incredibly quickly as then still again. That's the winner the one who was a Zen state of mine similarly in The Terminator movies part of the reason you feel the Terminators because it's a robot. He's Unstoppable his implacable. You can't argue with him. You can't communicate with him. You can't make him slow down and he has no remorse. He's just keeps coming or in that old Clint Eastwood movie Unforgiven, you know, the guy who wins the gunfight is the one who doesn't Flinch. She's just keeping his cool while he's loading his Gun and shooting he's not like all over the place running around. So I just think we waste so much.
Energy through anxiety that if you can be calm and still go about your business. It's a superpower and I realized this myself recently where I was in a conflict situation business was a high conflict situation. It was unfortunate. We I think we've solved it but as I went through this high conflict situation, I'd been through one like it years before whereas much more anxious and I remember that time period I remember how much I was sweating it and how nervous I was and how I went through bouts of fear and anger and
And how kind of worked up I was the entire time intense and didn't get much sleep. But this time I was incredibly calm and it was almost enjoying it because it was like practicing my craft and of course is easy to do now because I have more money but at the same time it just didn't bother me. It was just very mechanical and because of that I could be very effective about it and I can be effective about it while doing lots and lots of other things. My mind wasn't constantly spinning in a Whirlpool taking on 10 different problems and just feed her.
Scenario planning all the time. Most of these things were never going to happen. So I do believe that being calm and still going about your business is the superpower now. Yes, if anxieties your only motivator, then you have a problem but I would argue the pure motivation is don't come out of
anxiety. So let's talk about attribution here to what would you attribute the and I know this that it's difficult to isolate variables Etc. But if let's just say that you have a family so let's just say one of your
Kids comes to you. It's like Dad. I'm suffering from a lot of anxiety. What should I do or You observe it and you want to help your kid out what types of recommendations would you make or might you make another question if you prefer it is what has helped you to go from the whirlpool experience of anxiety in high conflict experience round 1 versus calm the Vol and high-conflict experience round
two. Yeah. It's really hard to separate all the pieces out. I mean it comes from a combination.
action of philosophy yoga meditation getting older having kids, you know like you I've had some psychedelic experiences, but those are very far back in the past just a distant memory at this point, but I would say the number one thing that has been very very important for me is meditation and it's a stupid thing to say because so trite everybody just says it now but when I say meditation, I don't mean sitting there and watching your breath or chanting the Mantra I mean self-examination
And meditation is a great way to do that self-therapy. It's sitting there with your thoughts. So anxiety the anxiety anxiety this this pervasive nonspecific anxiety. We were just constantly on edge about everything that comes from an unexamined life. You know, I think was the Socrates said like an unexamined life is not worth living. I forget who said that quote something like that. Yeah, but it's a great on all Socrates one of those one of those smart philosopher types, but it's correct. It's your unexamined life that is causing the problem.
And you can examine it multiple ways. You can examine it through you can have some crazy mushroom trip where it all comes out one night. You could do a lot of meditation sitting there with yourself and letting your mind run crazy and then seeing what's actually in your mind that your mind wants to tell you and Have you listened to and have you resolved that is unresolved. It could be through therapy. It could be through Reading lots of philosophy and reflection and long walks. So there's many many ways to tackle it but it's that spending that time with yourself to examine, why are
You having these thoughts think about it this way we spend so much time in our relationships. Our relationship with our wives are really sure their colleagues or religious their business partners our relations with our friends the most important relationship you have is with yourself. It's with his voice in your head that is constantly rattling. Every waking hour. Its is crazy roommate living inside your mind who's always chattering always chattering never shuts up and you can't control these thoughts. They just come up out of you don't even know where that quality of those quality of your thoughts.
Congress those conversations, you're having your head all the time. That is your world. That is the world you live in those. That's the world view you have that's a lenses you see through and that's going to determine the quality of your life more than anything else. And if you want to see what the quality of your life actually is put down the drink put down the computer put down the smartphone put down the book put down the headphones just sit by yourself doing nothing and then you will know what the quality of your life actually is because that's what you're always running away from. That's why people when they try to meditate
The sit down like I hate it. I can't sit still why because your mind is eating you live. Your life is unexamined. Your mind is running in Loops over things that it has not resolved. And because they're not resolved when you run around your normal life. It's not those problems have gone away. It's that they're just there there there and but they're provoking anxiety and what you think of as the anxiety that's that's kind of consuming. You can't identify the source. That's just the tip of an iceberg poking out from underneath the water.
And underneath this giant pile of garbage of decisions that were made without too much thought of situations that you're in that you haven't resolved that you need to resolve of problems that you have or desires that you have that have gone unmet or unmanifested or contradictions that you living in or ways that you which you feel trapped. So proper meditation proper examination should ruin the life that you're currently living. It should cause you to leave relationships. It should cause you to re establish boundaries.
He's with family members with colleagues issue cause you to quit your job. It should cause you to change your eating patterns. It should cause it to spend more time with yourself as you call it a change. What books you read? It should cause it to change who your friends are. If it doesn't do that. It's not real examination. If it doesn't come attached with destruction of your current life than you can't create the new life in which you will not have the anxiety
or at least parts of it. Not necessarily whole cloth. So let's ask let's let's dive into meditation because
as you mentioned it's a term that is used a lot and in the minds of most it is represented by things that you just said you do not do like the Mantra based meditation or a following the breath and you and I have meditated before I don't know if your approach is still similar but it is quite a hate to talk about trite paradigm shift in a sense at least in the way that I experienced it alongside you at one point which was literally
Lee doing nothing for extended periods of time. I don't know if that's still the case, but could you describe the practice a bit because it's it was such a burden lifted in a sense when the pass-fail is removed and the experience that I had after say week of doing this twice a day, which is not necessarily what people do in normal life, but was pretty profound so it could you describe the current practice.
Maybe different from what I experienced.
Yeah, I actually have two different things that I do and I almost hate calling it meditation because everyone has in their mind a preconceived notion of what meditation is. Listen. I recall it that I would say that there are two self-examination practices that I do and I don't even call them practices anymore because sometimes I do them because I feel like them and I enjoy them or because it feels right and sometimes I don't because anything done routinely sort of becomes its own trap and is not going to get you anywhere. It just becomes like another spiritual High and a low
The checkbox
right now. Is it fair though to say that you are able to opt in and out now because you had a certain front-loading period-correct doing it
consistently. Actually I'll say there are three different things that I do and I'll go through them. The first is I just read a lot of philosophy especially at night time before I go to
bed. Which ones schopenhauer Maxim's
who are we talking about? Yeah schopenhauer Western philosophy is my current favorite. Although I've definitely moved around in that one Eastern philosophy. I'll read everything from Osho. I know he's discrediting been cancelled but fantastic that makes me
Can even more krishnamurthy. I don't know cocktail Gupta Rupert Spira. I mean, it's all over the place Anthony De Mello. He's fantastic actually gonna start with one book start with Anthony De Mello the way to love or his book awareness. They're both really good, but there's a ton of them. I basically read a lot of philosophers Siddhartha wisest says yoga bhagavad-gita the daodejing, you know, I'm always going through one of these books at any given time and usually reading for inspiration and I'll read these at
night. Usually they'll be one or two things. I'll catch on to it'll reflect on it before I go to sleep. So that is a form of self-examination and it's it's not done because it's a formula it's done because I'm genuinely interested in these things. So it's not work to me. It's fun. The second thing that I do is which I've been doing for a long time now is just trying to be aware of my thoughts and not in a you know, sit there and be like Oh, I'm gonna be aware of my thoughts kind of way, but just realizing that a lot of these thoughts that come up are unbidden. I
Troll them. It's not like I decided to have this thought even know what I'm saying to you right now. It's coming out of my mouth at the same time as I'm thinking it. So, where is this coming from? Who is this person? What is this person saying? Is this true? Is it correct? Has he been correct in the past? Is he just being paranoid now, is it being crazy? What is underlying motivations? And I'm not even question is so much but more just kind of seeing it and after a while when you see it, you start seeing through your own BS. You start seeing how you're mainly just justifying whatever the heck you want to believe because it's good.
For your survival, it's good for your replication or it's good for your money or it's going to get you later or any of these various things and you
when you're doing that reflection, is it sitting at a table pen and paper is it now, you know it have half Lotus with your eyes closed. What is no it's literally just
walking around just walking around its eyes. I got it's just life. Just just if you say something to me, I'm always going to listen to it with a slightly critical filter because your external to me applying that same filter to my own thoughts gives me a level of peace and distance.
Them and the ability to see through my own BS, which I think makes my life better. So I've just found that to be a useful thing way of life, but there are lots of times we forget to do it. I caught up in some emotion some runaway train of thought but usually these days I can catch myself and be like, okay. I'm in that mindset again and having that mode of reactions again, and when the Mind sort of sees me chattering it quiets down a bit, right? Like I said, is that go back to that crazy roommate analogy, which I originally picked up from Michael singer, by the way. He is a good book called The untethered soul, but you know,
The room the crazy roommate analogy like you would eventually tell your roommate to shut up or you tell them to start justifying their claims or you would at least at some level you start dismissing them for just kind of rambling all the time in this fear paranoiac mode. So I think just kind of viewing your thoughts a sort of these unbidden things that arise from within you but aren't really necessarily the whole story and should be viewed with the same level of skepticism that you would apply to an outside Observer. I think that framework is helpful and if you find it to be true
Then you'll find yourself doing it more often. If you find a not to be true if you like. No, actually I choose these thoughts and I want to have them and that's who I am and this all makes sense to me. Then you can stop viewing it with a critical eye that's up to you. But the last one is the one that I think people think of as more traditionally meditation, which is sitting down and meditating and on that one. I learned from an Indian gentleman same same character you learned from who had a very simple system and I just found it the most compelling for meditation I've ever tried, which is you sit there for 60 minutes.
So unfortunately not less than an hour at a time because it takes 30 to 40 minutes to sink in past the initial chattering. So you get to the good part there or the so-called runner's high equivalent and you sit for 60 Minutes every day and you did for at least 60 days and you do it first thing in the morning when your mind is clear and your alert and you've had a good night's sleep and you sit up with your back straight and you can use questions or you can use a chair or whatever. There's no magic position and just whatever happens happens. Whatever your mind wants to do is just let it do if you want to talk that it
I'll give you wants to fight you let a five want to be quiet. You let it be quiet if it wants to chant a mantra or pay attention to breathing you can do that. But you don't force anything. You just kind of let it happen. And so you don't fight it. You don't resist it. You don't argue with it. You don't double down on it. We just kind of let things happen and when you do that for at least 60 days, my experience has been that you kind of clear out your mental inbox and all the craziness that was going on. All the chattering will come out some problems will get resolved. You will have some effect.
Tiffany's you will make changes to your life. Some will be self-examination. Some of you just get tired of some of it just needs to be heard once and then it goes away and eventually you'll get to a mental state of inbox zero where now you're just thinking about what happened yesterday, you're kind of caught up in your mind is relatively clear and just your anxiety level goes down your living more peacefully and I've been doing this for about two and a half years now and I probably missed about a dozen days total and but there's some days where I'm done two hours a day or more and I will tell you that is the single most important thing that I do.
It is a sheer Joy much of it is highly entertaining pleasurable. Sometimes it's just flat its nothingness. I can't even tell you why I do it. I can't even tell you what's going on in that state, but I will tell you that that time spent by myself is the most important time that I have and thanks to that. I am now much more self-contained. I don't feel like I need other people. I don't need external sources of pleasure or happiness all the time. I drink less. I'm not attracted to trying any drugs whatsoever. It's just life is easier.
It's more pleasant. I don't take things too. Seriously. I'm not afraid of my mortality as much anymore. I don't fear aging. I don't I don't lust after things. I don't have this constant pervasive need to find something outside of me to make my life better when the best hour of my day is spent by myself. Then the world has very little to offer me and I can still participate in it, but it doesn't have that grip on me that it used to I don't fear solitary confinement and I think that is a superpower and I think everyone should have
Everyone does have its easy. It requires doing nothing. It's your Birthright. You can't fail at it. There's no there's no way to fail at it. Literally all you have to do to sit down and close your eyes and just just be by give yourself a break for an hour every day. Just take the time off from the
world few follow-ups. Krishnamurti. Do you have any any favorites of his or anything that you would suggest someone start with if they have no familiarity with krishnamurthy and I'll II Anthony De Mello
also. Yeah, I actually wasn't ready.
Starting with krishnamurthy. He's a tough one. But if you were going to start somewhere I started with this book called think on these things. There's also the Book of Life. He's very cerebral very intellectual and a little confusing but he definitely speaks truth and he walks the walk and in the Mellow the way the love osho's book The Great Challenge and of people think oh shows a fake career and all that but he had some real stuff to is very articulate. He he understood a lot. There's a great clip from him on.
That says it's called life has no goals. No purpose. I listened to that that one a lot. There's a lot of them out there. Once you start going down this Rabbit Hole, you'll find them the classics the bhagavad-gita get a good translation. Steven Miller I think is a good translation. He also has good translation of the daodejing. Those are both really interesting again only if it appeals to you. I mean, there's ancient wisdom and schopenhauer read councils and Maxim's, you know, these are smart people self-reflecting but overall the point is not to read the point is to inspire
fire so that you yourself can reflect and couple Gupta has an account in Twitter. He has a couple of great books direct truth is a fantastic book, you know, written very recently and pulls no punches. But you know, all of these are basically there to inspire you to self-reflect and if you're not interested in self-reflection, if you're not at that stage in life than don't do it as a waste of time. In fact, I would say the reason to do these things is just because they make your life better because they make you more effective because they have some utility to you if they do not have
To lie to you. If they don't make your life better than drop it it's useless. I will
also second the reading of philosophy and this is not the for kind of idle or abstract like semantic tail-chasing right? It's it's for whatever reason on a very pragmatic level deeply soothing to read the insights and observations of those who are considering things that are not of today. They're not
Not of this week. They're not of this month. They are for much broader periods of time or Timeless in some capacity, right? It alleviates some of the manufactured emergency and urgency of the bullshit that is foisted upon us by every possible
input. Oh, yeah, they the new and Twitter. So toxic the human brain is not designed to manage every emergency in the world in real time. We're not designed to process all the breaking news in the
Our heads and this is one of my recent tweets, but the goal of the media these days is to make every problem your problem. That's how they get attention inside the get clicks. You know, you have Tribal wars going on zombies battling each other and they want to pull you in where even non-participation is not allowed any more neutral by standards are not allowed. So it's a crazy world out there. There's a circus going on with the monkeys fling feces at each other. They want to drag you into the fight. Really what you want to focus on is what Timeless Timeless is great. You know, the old questions all
Vole dancers and their best consumed from the old practitioners because they were very clear minded about it. They weren't busy trying to fit into the politics of this time. They're fitting to the politics of that time, but that's lost to us now. So actually another great sources. I have your doubts Seneca series inaudible and I wasn't it on repeat when I'm working out a lot. So that's a very no kidding. Yeah, there's letters to look Ilyas amazing. Yeah amazing stuff and every time I go through it, I learned something new.
Yeah, the top Seneca the the moral letters to Luke Ilyas, if people want to look on public domain from on public domain sources, you can find these letters the moral letters to looky-loos also spelled as you might read lucilius by Seneca. And so that's an audio book series that that I produced and you can find the PDFs for free online as well. Let's talk about some brass tacks stuff since I think people will be very interested. You mentioned monkeys throwing feces.
Tribalism in times like this. This is being recorded in 2020. And first day of October. A lot of folks are interested in stores of value. They are fearful of what could happen and considering Investments like gold or cryptocurrency and I wanted you to explain one of your recent tweets is just from the last few days and it is crypto stable coins.
- choose between blow-up risk censorship risk and fraud risk water crypto stable coins. And what does this tweet mean?
Yeah. It is backing up for a second. Like I think cryptocurrencies are probably one of the greatest inventions in human history. And the reason why they're interesting is because if you look at the technology industry technology plays an unregulated spaces, it's very hard for Technologies change regulated spaces as Uber and Postmates and companies like that find out but generally the reason technology works is because it creates its own front.
Tear it is a digital Frontier that is being created. Not the physical Frontiers are all closed in the new world has been colonized. The wild west has been tamed. Where do you go to create new things free of interference and Regulation and kind of exercise maximum creativity. And so that's been done mostly in the technology space and one of the areas that has been protected by technological innovation from technological innovation is Wall Street because they're Ritz, you know, they have regulatory capture very bureaucratic, you know, the money industrial complex that runs.
Of our economy and runs a lot of Washington DC where twenty percent of our GDP goes into Financial engineering and into the Wall Street casino. And so cryptocurrencies are kind of how we get around that and so their Sovereign resistant through designed to be completely decentralized. You don't need the violent power of the state to enforce the value of a cryptocurrency and it allows for truly trustless transactions between humans without some king or authority or government or Corporation having to be in the middle. And so it's very liberating.
To disconnect wealth creation well storage and what protection from the state and that's what cryptocurrencies really enable one
second. Let me just pause to say that at one point you and I did a very thorough cryptocurrency 101 conversation with a domain super expert named Nick Szabo SZ ABO, which people can also find for morons kind of the the history and basics of some of
the crypto. Yeah. Nick is a bona fide genius and a Pioneer in this.
Is he also has a great blog called unenumerated that I highly recommend. But anyway, so the best-known cryptocurrency is Bitcoin and Bitcoin is trying to be the new gold or the new Swiss bank account kind of all rolled into one. It has some advantages, you know, as a store of value it can be stored digitally. So it's hard to seize. It's very easy to verify technologically speaking on my gold. It's easy to send across National boundaries and electronically over the Internet. It's easily divisible and verifiable down to its authenticity is very verifiable. Where gold is hard to do.
Do it can be divided down to millions and trillions of a Bitcoin very very easily. It is somewhat programmable so you can put it inside smart contracts and you can do some intelligent things with it. So it has a lot going for the store value. What's Difficult about it is it's not really private. It doesn't although there are parts of it that are private. It's not completely private and it's untrusted. It's brand new as far as stores of value go. It's only from 2009. And so people don't know if it'll be around forever and how dependent is on the internet and people aren't really certain about
It's not like the proof-of-work mining algorithm that makes it possible and can it be hijacked? Can it be centralized Can it have a bug can it break and every year the Bitcoin survives and goes through one of the various challenges facing it. It gets more valuable as people entrusted a little bit more and more but it is extremely volatile you buy Bitcoin you're buying a very speculative asset at the moment and you're speculating that it will become digital gold or possibly even you know, all store value and so be incredibly valuable but along the way there's lots of hiccups and any point it could break.
It could go to 0 and so a lot of people who are now participating in the crypto world. They're building a decentralized Wall Street. They call it D Phi D EFI for decentralized finance, but I actually think it's more like defy as and just defy the government dfy and at so I think let's see me. Yeah, we
can government's love that. Yeah. Exactly.
We're seeing a whole new casino that's better than Wall Street Spring spring up and decentralized finance. Unlike Wall Street. This one is 24/7 open is 365
Days a year, it's available around the world to everybody. It's trustless in that it's you know, there's math and algorithms and code underneath that not Goldman Sachs front running your trades or whatever. Not that I'm saying they do but you know, there's Flash Boys and kind of all that kind of craziness that goes on and you can program it to do things and to make bets or Hedges or calls that you just can't even do on Wall Street. So I think we're building a better Wall Street using crypto currencies, but everyone who participates in that doesn't necessarily want to take on
the volatility of these cryptocurrencies. So we've created these things called stable coins which track the value of the US dollar so that when you're trading for example, you can still do it in dollar-denominated terms and this is a tricky thing because the moment you're now trying to track some acid in the real world like dollars, then you have to basically Peg the value somehow to something that exists in the real world and cryptocurrencies do best when everything is on the blockchain when everything is electronic and digital and controlled by computers in the cloud. So
Is stable coins of come along that mimic the value of the US dollar and the best known ones are tether u.s. DC which is coin basis coin and and maker die which is an algorithmic least able coin but there's no value lunch in life. I was for one second of all,
she's this should people think it will be a comparable that people might be more familiar with it's not an index. It's like an ETF or how would you think about
is there another good digital dollars these are designed so that you can live in crypto.
Owl, and it's a living in a blockchain. It's math based code but really your value is pegged to dollars. So it's not going up or down with Bitcoin. It's just it's just worth $1 all the time. So if you want to hold a dollar in crypto land the way you do it is by buying one of these so-called stable coins, but all my tweet was observing is that there's no free lunch the what you're actually doing underneath is you have crypto and crypto is incredibly volatile and you're trying to convert a volatile asset into a stable asset. So there has to be a cost for that.
Is that called Psych the subprime mortgage crisis? That's right. Exactly. There's no
free lunch. So what does that cost? And all I was saying is that the three main categories of stable coins today? They each impose one or more of these costs and so one cause is fraud risk where people suspect this of tether. We're like actually distinct says it's back by dollars was not actually backed by dollars. I don't know if this company is dollars underneath so you have to kind of take their word for it. So now your crust underneath meaning they
would have actual physical dollars. Correct you have
Chuckle gold,
correct. Yeah. So for every tether they issue you they claim to have a dollar somewhere. But what if they don't you just don't know so you're trusting them and there could be fraught underneath. I'm not saying there is I've no evidence but that you're basically now back to the trusted third party model that exists in just putting your money in the bank. The second kind is where you're dealing with someone like coinbase or some company that is well known and trusted and is regulated. But then it's no different than holding normal dollars their censorship risk, where if the government says, hey, we don't like this character.
Their bank account coinbase can turn off your USD see account and your stable coin is basically and seized. You're no longer decentralized and Sovereign like you are with Bitcoin and the last kind of risk is a blow-up risk to something like a maker, you know, it's collateralized but it's collateralized with Bitcoin and etherium. And so what they're hoping is that the price of Bitcoin aetherium won't move so drastically at the peg breaks and you lose money on your so-called stable coin. It's just it's just an observation. There's no free lunch. And so if
or trying to create this this mythical stable currency out of thin air in what is inherently very volatile space you have to pay for it and people think today they're not paying for it through just getting these free crypto stable dollars or they getting the stability aspect for free but they're not they're either taking on fraud risk or censorship risk or blow up risk or some combination of them.
So if you're advising and this is not Financial advice is just two friends talking obviously for informational purposes only but if
If you're talking to a friend who has a fair amount of savings or investable capital and they say no of all I want to do something with crypto. How can I get started or how should I get started? What do you say to them? Because there's such a broad spectrum of options. It's still even though it's been simplified a lot crypto is still quite
confusing to it's very complicated. So yeah
people who are very smart. I would consider it's still quite confused
probably confusing. It's a domain of mathematicians.
Packers, you know Tech entrepreneurs and and a few people who really dig in but it's still too hard to handle manages dangerous. Like I can't hold my own crypto. I have to stick it inside funds and custodians because I'm a known public figure and it's a bearer asset. So ironically I can't
actually take are dangerous. You don't hold it because you'd be I'd be Rob
risk. Yeah, exactly. It's a better asset. So, you know, you don't want to Bear a better asset you have to put it inside vaults, you know, the equivalent of the Goldman Sachs and the space so like they're custodians like
Riches, you know the an amazing one. There's big go there's coinbase. So they're these large custodians required list, which is a company. I helped start who can hold onto your crypto assets for you, but that's not really the point of crypto the point of cryptos to be your own bank. So if the government is coming to seize money or if they're printing lots of it, you can always withdraw your crypto assets from these organizations and you can carry it yourself. You can put on your laptop which is kind of crazy and risky and hard you can do it through a hardware wallet like a ledger or treasure which are pretty
three well-known Hardware wallets where you have a small specific device that's designed just for carrying crypto, but you have to understand you're replacing the banking system. You're literally replacing the government all the guns and the police that back up the banking system, you're replacing all that and all the control that comes with it. So, of course it's going to require some level of sophistication. You're literally building your own Swiss bank. So it is it is quite complicated where to start. Well, I don't I don't like giving people buy
Because if you're going to be a good investor, you also have to have your own conviction because then you'll know when the cell if you call me and ask me when to buy are you going to call me every day and say should I sell should I
sell you don't know that are really really important
right? So you have you have to fundamentally understand it yourself. So I would say the first thing is go down the crypto Rabbit Hole listen to the interview. We did with Nick Szabo go online and start reading up on bitcoin read upon the theory mm read up on the Privacy coins XZ cash and Monaro learn about the different.
High-level stuff in the crypto space decide how much exposure that you want go buy it at a coin list or coinbase or what? Have you figure out which custodian you want to use, you know, put it somewhere safe probably in the cloud unless you really know what you're doing. And if you if you really know what you're doing, then you can use one of the hardware wallets and one of the offline schemes make sure that it is protected in case that you're attacked or kidnapped or someone comes to your house or steals your computer, you know, if the cover all those base cases, so it's not easy, but
you're literally creating every extra Sovereign money you're creating money where you know if you ever have to flee the country you know like the Jews had to leave Vienna back in the 1930s you're not like scrambling for gold you're using crypto you're not if you're living in some country where they tend to seize all the money in your bank account then you have unseasonable money if you're worried about hyperinflation as we print too many dollars then you have a hedge against the mmt and all the various excuses that they're going to use to print money probably the scariest thing that
and 2020 from a financial perspective is both the Republican and the Democratic party figured out that oh actually we can just print lots and lots of money and the US has this Reserve dollar that's Reserve currency status with the dollar where most of our dollars I think something like 70% are held by foreigners because the trustee Reserve currency of the world that use it for trading oil to use it for settling International transfers the use it just to kind of hide money that you to protect money from their local inflationary authorities so because of that when we print a doll
Or 70% of that inflationary defect is cost is borne by the rest of the world not born by us. And so the US government kind of figure this out and we printed six trillion dollars to fight the coronavirus and so now both parties can agree that they can just print money to get out of any problem that they're in a great tweet that I saw was somebody wrote that now we know what would happen if aliens would invade the Earth the FED would just lower interest rates the FED would cut interest rates, right? And so unfortunately, that's just a situation where
In so they're going to keep doing that until it's some point the you know, the rest of the world throws in the towel and says, you know, this dollar thing is not working for us. And what we rely upon is that the European Euro or the Chinese religion be and these other currencies are in worse situations, but that's not necessarily always true. I think there are well-managed currencies that the Swiss franc and Singaporean dollar. There's also hard assets like gold and crypto and real estate and even there.
Up in tech stocks at some level is because equities are attack sufficient inflation hedge or relatively tax-efficient inflation hedge because someone like Google can just raise prices and they don't have to hire more people because their Monopoly, you know, they can lay off half their engineers and the company will work just fine. So people are realizing this and there is a flight into hard assets to get away from inflation and crypto is one of the few places where you can really put your money in and defend against something like the dollar reserving is reserve currency status, and these are Black Swan this
Be hard to talk about black swans because obviously since the dollar became the US Reserve currency. It hasn't lost the status. Even when we went off the gold standard, but at the same time the pound sterling used to be the reserve currency of the world and it lost its status at one point money used to be gold back and that went away. So it's not inconceivable that will happen. And if it were to happen, then you would basically have the true Reckoning then our ability to print our way out of recessions would go away. You would probably have an inflationary collapse in the US and you
To see kind of our global economic system start breaking down in those scenarios crypto does really well, assuming the internet stays up right? There are scenarios where the internet goes down to and then all hell breaks loose and you better have golden guns, but we're not talking about
that depends aggressive tampons. That's right for your water.
Yeah. That's right. Well bullets of the ultimate one, right as we as we also see in 2020 would we have five million new gun owners in the US, but it just depends how much of a prepper you are how paranoid you want to be and how many standard deviations out you want to
You want to handle risk? But I think this is the year where a lot of people feel like risks that were inconceivable has suddenly gotten pulled in.
Let me ask a dumb newbie question as a hypothetical So speaking as someone who I'm a great example of someone who can use words associated with crypto who really has no fundamental understanding. I'm the I'm the guy pointing at the bird who thinks he's got it all figured out because he's able to name the yellow-throated warbler. I don't think I have it all figured out but let's just say I'm a
and it's just somehow like a thousand monkeys typing out Shakespeare on a million laptops given infinite time I somehow managed to get a bunch of cryptocurrency onto a hardware Ledger right or a hardware wallet rather so I have this thing u.s. is going to hell in a handbasket I somehow managed to get that to fill in the blank I'll just arbitrarily choose Spain like I land in Spain I'm like oh my God that was so close thank God I got out in time
I managed to make it over how the hell do you buy an apartment or pay your rent or anything like that with crypto when it still feels like the crypto landscape and the tools are kind of computers pre graphic user interface do you know what I mean like eating smart people can't quite figure it out but what would you how would you if that were two years in the future as me that I think that's unlikely but let's just say
yeah for most of my friends this scenario recommend is like you
Buy it on something like, you know coinbase coin list, whatever you move it into a dedicated custodian like an Anchorage or a bit go then you kind of hold it there. Now if the shit is hitting the fan and you decide you want to get out of town, then you contact your rep there you move it into a hardware wallet and then you flee the country right or go wherever you're going and when you land on the other side now you have this crypto in your Hardware wallet in theory. You can log into a local crypto exchange, you know go through their verification processes and upload it and
now you've got Bitcoin that can be traded for cash or you can go find any of the local Bitcoin meet up people and groups the Enthusiast so-called maximalist the die-hard Believers in the holders and you can trade any of them Bitcoin for cash now in the distant future, it's possible that people will just take Bitcoin directly because it is a you know, fungible high-quality hard asset that can be transported and he'll like cash, but if you can't do that, you can always find either a local
Lever, or you can find crypto exchange where you can convert it the thing that makes Bitcoin so interesting is not that it's necessarily the best technology. It is definitely robust in this the OG what makes it really interesting is it has the most die-hard Believers and because it has the most die-hard Believers as long as there's five thousand or fifty thousand wealthy brilliant people who just that
won't be part is really important. Yeah, that wealthy part 8,
they will always trade it for you for trade it with you for hard assets, you know.
No, I think recently microstrategy started. It's a company started moving half of its treasury into Bitcoin and the CEO Michael sailor was quoted as saying something along the lines of I can't believe people willing to sell me Bitcoin, right he figured out what was and then he was just like I want to get as much as possible. So, you know here take pieces of my company, but give me Bitcoin and there are there are lots of people like him there are lots and lots of people like him and they exist in every major country in the world. And as long as there are believers because it's as much a movement or
Religion as it is a currency and well because what is a currency at the end of the day money is just the bubble that never pops right? It's just if we all agree tomorrow that if we all managed to come upon the story tomorrow that is not the US dollar. It's actually the Euro that is really money than the world was such the Euro Heck if we agreed that clam shells were money the you the world would switch to clamshells now, obviously their underlying characteristics that make euros and dollars better than clam shells and so therefore we converge upon those but if the world were to decide
Side that Bitcoin is better money than US Dollars the world would switch to bitcoin. It's a story. It's a consensus belief and the beauty of Bitcoin is that there are these hot die-hard maximalist and I fight with them on the internet all the time. They don't like me by the way. So I've had Twitter battles with them running but I still really appreciate that they exist because they are actually the core of what makes Bitcoin always tradable always valuable. There's always some guy in some locations somewhere in the world.
Who will give you his house for a Bitcoin? And as long as that is true and I don't see why was stopping true because if anything more and more people are being added to that list every day, it has real value and has redeemable value.
What do you think the conceivable near-term looks like with the possible entrance of more institutional investors in other words if we see let me ask a better question.
It was very noteworthy and newsworthy when Paul Tudor Jones wrote his memo detailing why he was investing. I think it was something like a hundred million into Bitcoin or Bitcoin like equivalence some type of crypto equivalent. If not crypto itself. Do you anticipate that more institutional's are going to come in Sovereign wealth funds things like that. And how do you think the story and the landscape could
Change over the next handful of years.
I think it's inevitable. Look Bit Coin and crypto still have a risks right A lot of these algorithms and schemes renew even Bitcoin through its proof-of-work mechanism You could argue that it tends towards centralization because it gets managed by these Anonymous Miners and data centers. It is centers of economies of scale. And so it will end up being more centralized and people would like their up-and-coming competitors like etherium. There's privacy issues, you know on the Bitcoin blockchain you can be trapped forever, so it's not perfect.
T' you know, people talk about Quantum Computing breaking it. I don't think that's true. I think you can upgrade the encryption algorithm, you know, just as well or better but there are always potential problems, right which are not completely resolved. But every time we faced one of these reckonings and that problem gets resolved the value goes up the story becomes stronger and so the same way when Paul Tudor Jones or microstrategy buy Bitcoin, the story is becoming stronger. The set of Believers is increasing the validation is increasing and now more people can come in and hang their
On this and say okay if Paul Tudor Jones agrees Michael seller agrees, then I agreed to be in that set of people who believe that this is going to be the new way to store value and wealth, and so now I'm joining their wealth storage scheme and the early people and get rewarded for it. So one way to think about a Bitcoin in particular is or even actually any of the cryptocurrencies is it's a Swiss bank account, but it's a Swiss bank account with finite space, and if you want shelf space in that fine Swiss bank account with finite space you
You have to buy out one of the existing holders in that space. So imagine a Swiss bank account. That's impregnable is the new one. No government can break into it. It's secured by consensus across millions of people using massive computation power on the globe. And if you want one of those safety deposit box, you got to buy it from someone who's already there. So as long as the demand for new people trying to get in the Swiss bank account is greater than the supply of people who are trying to get out of that Swiss bank account. Then you're going to pay more for that box and that's
The speculative power of it comes from and I think it's going to take a good crisis to really see what crypto is worth and actually so far. It's been weird
because yeah, the people people that have said that crypto failed the crisis test with covid
right? I mean, it didn't didn't what it didn't do was it didn't Skyrocket right? I didn't like go, you know Bitcoin didn't go to a hundred K as everybody fled the US dollar but that kind of shows you how resilient the dollar is and how far we are from losing Global Reserve currency status.
But at the same time I didn't collapse either, you know, it didn't go down. It went down briefly as people need a cash to meet various margin calls and Loan but overall still very stable and I would say the number of people have gotten involved in crypto recently as a true wealth protection mechanism is the largest I've ever seen. So I do think that the holder base has gone up. I don't know if we're going to see like real, you know, $3,000 Bitcoin ever again in my lifetime. We might see Zero if something breaks completely, but I don't think we're going to see like a, you know, a bunch of people leaving.
Losing faith in it. And that's why it goes to 3K Bitcoin tends to hit these highs then crash back down to a plateau. Hang on a plateau for a while and then go back to a new high and I kind of feel like we're you know around the 10K level who knows. I don't want to make price predictions. But you know, I feel like there's a stronger base of holders not in there has ever been so each one of these people comes and validates and you know, Paul Tudor Jones Valley desert for other hedge fund managers hedge fund managers validated for Sovereign wealth funds Sovereign wealth funds, you know will be validated for central banks.
Eventually some country out there is going to say actually we inflate our currency too much our currency collapse. Nobody trusts us anymore. We have to adopt a new National currency instead of begging to the dollar. Let's pack the Bitcoin. Well, let's use Bitcoin or let's use some other cryptocurrency or let's be clever and buy up a bunch of Bitcoin and then announce we're going to use Bitcoin and then Bitcoin will Skyrocket. We're all rich, right. So I think there are other scenarios where it ends up being a lot more valuable, but it's going to be stumbling steps forward and backward. It's
To be like necessarily, you know in one Fell Swoop until it is right. That's the nature of black swans. You can't predict them. It happens. It happens suddenly. Like I had a friend who used to tell me. He's now a hardcore Bitcoin. It's funny actually helped write a book on Bitcoin now, but when I first talked about Bitcoin years and years ago, he said, what's the big deal? He's like if I ever have to flee the country, you know, I'll just buy Bitcoin that and I said, yeah when you have to flee the country your entire Fortune going to buy you one Bitcoin, right? That's the problem. Here's it's supply and demand so you can
I think it's like anything else to store a value. It's a hedge. You can't wait till the last second and I do think more and more smart people are coming into it every every single day
and I think the psychological dynamics of crypto volatility or a lot like casino slot machine right this this variable reward with high variability where you just see things spiking and dropping and then they stay flat and then they Spike and they drop in a way that is unlike most equities that you are.
Goodbye on the public market even Wall Street at some level is Big casino with a potential positive expected value and creating some value for society in terms of hedging and liquidity first companies raising money and so on and crypto doing the same thing. It's a global 24/7 365 Casino where anybody in the world can play but through decentralized Finance underneath. You're actually making loans. You're protecting wealth, you're storing it you're letting people, you know by derivatives you're letting people hedge. So all of these things are coming up, we're not have
Insurance in the crypto markets, we now have lending in the crypto markets we have shorting in the crypto markets, you know, we have computation going on that requires crypto underneath look if you have two computers are talking to each other if two mini a eyes are talking to each other and high-speed exchanging resources to run a company. How are they going to change money? You think they can send US dollars through PayPal or through fedwire? He'll know they're going to use crypto cryptos going to is the native currency of the internet, of course, the internet is going
Have its own currency, we know otherwise like saying like the internet's going to use email through the USPS US Postal Service Act. No, it's going to have its own native on chain on wire protocol for communicating data. And so what cryptocurrencies really are Bitcoin isn't a thing if the coin is not like there's a coin sitting somewhere Bitcoin is an entry in a light bulb what? Yeah,
exactly. Um, can I get it get it?
It's an impact. Yeah. It's an entry in a virtual Ledger and that virtual Ledger is maintained by
Tons of machines running across the world and what you're doing is you're communicating value securely across the internet with no third parties in the middle of validating that that is the correct communication. It's done by the entire network at once and you're communicating and transmitting scarcity and value the internet and that's a new thing what the internet gave us before was digital abundance. I can make copies of everything and that was a very big idea. I can make one podcast and ship it to everybody I can make one web page and ship it to
That was a very big idea and create a huge fortunes and huge revolutions the same way digital scarcity is an equally interesting idea, which is I can only have one of this thing if Navarro has a Bitcoin than Tim Ferriss doesn't have that Bitcoin or vice versa that ability to create scarcity and transmit scarcity and value through the Internet is just as important as the ability to create abundance and transmit that through the internet and so the native language of the internet in Communications and protocols around valuable things and on.
Finance is going to be in cryptocurrencies. It's not going to be any other any other
way, so I want to bring up two more tweets and then we can bring this this to to a close and put a bow on it first. I just want to mention again and I very rarely do this, but I am very happy with how this discussion turned out of people want more of the history and the design of cryptocurrency, which is endlessly fascinating. Just Google Nick Szabo s
Za Bo and then if you're interested in diving into audio of all and I spoke with them to tweets, these are both from September 1. I'm going to read just because I agree with it super strongly and I also have observed you following this advice very well, which is all self-help boils down to choose long-term over short-term. I would modify the Tweet to say though all truly effective self-help boils down to choose long term over short-term and I mean
That it's being that is the entire challenge which is long-term. Thinking gets you long-term results. And I've said this a thousand different ways in business you want to play long-term games with long-term people in your Modern Life and an addictions and kind of just dealing with the Anvil and shove all that the abundance of things that are thrown at you that are really traps like video games or trap there. There's a shadow career that substitutes for your real career or you know, smoking weed or drinking alcohol substitutes for like
Go through more simple things like some light and walks and point substitutes for sex and the list just goes on and
on. I thought you were saying walking sunlight and poor and I was like, yeah, we're talking. Yeah, that's it. But the trifecta but
look so related to it I had is the modern devil is cheap dopamine and some interesting people on Twitter point out to be actually the ancient devil is cheap dopamine as well and but in modern times, we've just hyper hyper accelerated it, you know, the modern mind is over.
Elated the modern body is under stimulated. We've just taken all the Creature Comforts with maximize them to a thousand times and so literally all the success in life boils down to a variation of the marshmallow test where you know, can the kid like hold off in the eating the marshmallow for 15 minutes exchange. They get two marshmallows and the claim is that turned out to be a big predictor for future success, although like many psych experiments. I don't think it replicates well, but anyway, so it just boils down to long term versus short-term and if you can just adopt long-term thing.
King in your mindset, you're just going to have a much easier life or as our favorite trainer Jersey Gregory says hard choices easy life easy choices hard life. That's it. Right. So just can you take a long-term View and anything compound interest applies everywhere applies in relationships that applies in money. It applies in health and fitness. Can you change your habits to read the kinds of books that you think will serve you best in the long term the foundational books. Can you change your eating habits so that you're eating
see food as opposed to unhealthy food. Can you create an exercise routine that you can do every day or every other day so that it's a consistent part of your life. And so I think a lot of it boils down to just choosing the long term of the short term and all the hacks the good hacks basically helped make the long-term Choice palatable or they help inspire you to kind of keep your eyes focused on the long-term. So an example is if you're doing something that you love if you're running a business that you enjoy it is probably going to be more fun than playing a video game.
If you if you come home at night from work, and your first instinct is to play a video game, you're suffering at work, you're working just as hard in the video game, but the rewards are all fake because they're going to change the rules on you are some 13 year old kid on the internet will destroy you because this Play that video game all day long and I used to be a hardcore video gamer. I had a lot of fun doing it and I did learn playing games for sure. But you know at this point this age I pick up a video game. I'm doing it to get away from suffering and I'm not really getting anything out of it. I could play the video game of investing or I could
the video game starting companies or I could play the video game of you know, go and play tennis and they'll be good for my health. So it's good to find. So I think a lot of it is about finding the thing that you can do that is fun for you that looks like play that feels like play to you but looks like work to others that you can do that sustains you for the long term. So for example in foods, which you want to find is you want to find what is the health food out there that other people considered healthy and is nutritionally healthy profile, but that I find tasty because
If I can create those Foods if I can become a good cook and create great foods that I enjoy eating and I like them and I can eat them regularly, but they're actually super healthy. That's amazing. That's a hack now. I'm eating for the long term, but I'm not giving up too much of the short-term pleasure the same way being in a good relationship is you know is going to be watching porn and having a good career or working enjoyable job or hacking on some code that I enjoy is going to be far more productive than playing a video game. I don't want to sound.
Preachy but I will just say that as I my love for reading came from another one of my tweets is read what you love until you love to read. So just fall in love with the idea of reading itself. So it's okay to read the junk food stuff just fall in love with reading it eventually get bored of the simple stuff and you'll go to the more interesting stuff and I love to read enough that I don't like watching TV. I don't watch movies, you know, people start talking about shows that they're watching on Netflix or what have you and I give them this empty. Look, I don't watch shows on Netflix or not interesting. It's far more interesting to
Need to go for a walk and be meditative and I'll be in a very happy place or to read a book which will be intellectually stimulating and sure once in a while watch a movie with friends or with my wife but it's a social thing. You know, I'm doing it as a way of kind of sort of being on the same Common Ground as them is I'm not I would never watch a movie on my own unless maybe I was trapped in like a 15-hour airplane flight and I was really bored and I run out of everything else to do and I just want to zone out even then. I don't think I watch a movie anymore. So I just feel like a lot of it is like finding
and the hacks finding the things that make the long-term feel effortless to you and then you
win. Okay last last question first recommendation, if you ever do decide to watch
something right before we finish that topic very important people find the people that doesn't take work to be around the best relationships. Don't feel like work you make the other person happy being yourself. They make you happy by being themselves. Everyone's honest. No one's putting on an act. They can't carry on for the next decade same thing with friendships, you know, the
French ships are friendships that were formed or nothing. It's not because you went to school. It's not because you stayed in the same things not because you're working together. It's not because you enjoy rugby or whatever. It's because your Chemistry matches your temperament is similar and so you can be friends with this person for 30 years 50 years. So the compound interest in relationships part, ironically means that the best relationships whether friendships or family or love are the ones we don't have to work too hard at them. So you have to sustain that workload for the rest of your life and you can do it effortlessly.
Yeah, totally.
Well, one of the one of your quotes that I think of often and I might be paraphrasing. This is if you want to avoid conflict rule number one is avoid people who are constantly involved with conflict that mean something along those lines. I
mean the for example when you're in a relationship just watch how the other person treats their worst enemy because eventually they'll just redefine you as enemy and you'll get to feel that behavior. So I think the number one criteria I look for in a relationship. Is that person has
Just have to be a nice person and because eventually they will reclaim in a certain context. You can always be reclassified from friend to enemy. So you just want to see the boundaries of someone's ethics. If you see someone being bad to a server or someone engaging in unethical Behavior or suing other people are fighting other people all the time. It's only a matter of time before they fight you so just stay away from these high conflict people. Everyone has conflict. No one is clean, but that said like there are definitely people who
Age in conflict and do it regularly and they make it a part of their lifestyle just walk away. It's not work there plenty of evening people who are low conflict and easy to get along with
ya lo conflict low-maintenance who can also be brutally candid when necessary, right? Which doesn't equal I conflict.
Well, the one thing I've noticed and I haven't written a tweet on this because I've had a hard time figuring how to say it. But the people that I want to spend time around these days when I look at what the common
Stickers they're highly self-aware. They're very very aware of themselves. They're not running on autopilot. They don't get angry easily. They don't get unhappy easily. They don't take themselves too. Seriously. They have a certain separation from their own thoughts and personality that prevents circumstances and their personality from overwhelming them. They don't have a victim mentality. They're not caught up in some story of what happened to them when they were younger. They've had those issues for sure, but they've just gotten past them and been like,
I don't want to be that person. I don't be trapped in that mindset. They're not trying to Signal all the time how important they are or who they know what they've done a virtuous my virtuous. They are that I've brought you signaling or bigoted earring. They have low egos. Generally. I can literally plot on a line the more self-aware somebody is I guarantee you the more attractive that there are to a large number of people and to to the degree that I would sheave Denny modicum of Fame and fame is a trap and I'm going to pay for this. I know I
Pay for this but any modicum of Fame that I've achieved I think is because I am one of the few people who has been successful in business that thinks out loud in public and because I'm willing to think out loud in public that's a risk that I take on that improves my thinking but other people say, oh, yeah, he's somewhat self aware. He's thinking about himself and I think that helps Inspire other people to also say, okay. It's okay for me to think about myself and I just I just find her.
Hang around self-aware people is a lot easier than people who are running on autopilot almost like NPCs.
Mmm NPCs. What does that mean?
Non-player characters, like the it's a reference to certain kinds of video games where it's like a computer control character right there predict.
All right, so speaking of games this is this is the final tweet. Finally we podcast countries final one here. It is. The reason to win the game is so
You can be free of it. And my questions about this are right one more time. The reason to win the game is so that you can be free of it. I would be curious to know what game you are free of or what game you are playing so that you can be free of
it. I like to think I'm free of almost all the games at this point. What are the games? All of life is games right? You start out with the family game you do the school game. The grades game the getting girlfriends and boyfriends game the getting married game the having kids game the
The making money game that having the career game the getting famous game the dressing well game, you know, it's so much of a social games. There are a few that are not gained like meditation. You're not doing if you're scoring points in meditation, you're doing it wrong. Yoga. These are single player games, right? So it's really the multiplayer games are the ones that suck you into society and into anxiety Now you kind of have to play them. You have two choices towards peace in your life one is you can play these games and you can win them and when you win them, this is
Hard part realizing You've Won and stop playing new ones or setting new goals for yourself that are even higher and higher. It's like my friends who have made so much money and they continued all the cut try to do is make money and they just don't seem very happy about it. It's fine if they're happy if they're anything like Elon Musk seems like he's having a grand old time. That's fine. But if it's making you miserable and you continue doing it and you only have one life and you kind of can't see past that then I would argue you're playing the game too far. So there's kind of two ways out of the Trap one is
Not wanting something is as good as having it. Right? I think it was loud Chabot. So this on Twitter. I thought it was really good or there's a recent Socrates quote that I retweeted where he was taken to the story as he was taking to a market back in ancient Greece and it was full of luxurious and fine items and he said there are so many things that that I do not want right and it wasn't he looked at all these fineries said so many things here that I do not want and I thought that is freedom that is power that is self-contained.
That is a person who has found himself in these nothing outside of himself. That is so inspirational. So the same way I look upon the world and I say well I could just say that right you can't just say that if I just said there's so many things that I don't want. It's not true. I want the money. I want the girl, you know, I want I wanted the fame or I wouldn't have gone on podcast and I wouldn't be on Twitter at some level that is true. So obviously there's certain things that I want. I'm not a monk. I'm not a I'm not living in ashram. But what I can do is I've gotten the things that I
I want and I'm careful not to want more. I don't want more Fame. I don't want more money. You'll if I get it's fine. It's part of the crafts by the Bonus, you know, so I have to be careful about what I say about not unconsciously taking on new desires if I'm taking a new desire, I better go fulfill that so these are all just games that I'm playing and you know, you got to play some game you're on this planet. You're alive you might as well play something. Now. The question is what game do you play and how do you get out of the game? So you're not just trapped playing that game forever and one way is you
Was your games very carefully if you're a monk you only choose very very few games to play or you play no games and you live content Blissful harmonious peaceful, or the other is you play the game and you win it. And then you say I'm now free of this. So what that tweet is that tweet is the reason to play the game play the reason to win the game is to be free of it. It's a reminder to myself that for the games that I've won. It's time to let go of them and to be free of them.
Not to unconsciously Double Down by comparing myself to the Joneses and continuing to level up and level up and level up and level up and then one day you die. And then you're like, okay that was pointless. Like you know how I did all that work for what like for nothing. So if you're not enjoying it anymore, if you've already won the game by the definition you had when you started playing the game and one hack is to set the definition early on so that when you go past it, you know you one to not get trapped into playing this game forever and just
Living in some anxious future as opposed to actually enjoying yourself in the present. You have to know when to stop playing the game. And so to me the reason to play these games is to win them and then you can be free of them and to see what else then that you want to do or not. Do not to keep playing the same game forever because these games are the adult games are very cleverly designed you can keep playing them infinitely and they're all ups and downs and ups and downs and I guarantee you every time you get money. You'll be afraid you're going to lose it or you can compare it to the
next person who has it or every time you get famous now, that's that's a that's image that you have to live up to and now insults can hurt you and now you don't have your privacy anymore as you've written about so all of these games have downsides or if you're you know, very you're good at dating give a lot of men and women in your life. Then you're also gonna have a lot of relationship trauma and you got a lot of tumultuous unless you know, a lot of hurt people you got a lot of emotional drama in your life. So you just have to kind of realize when you won the game and say I'm done with this so I would have spy.
To be like Socrates and say there are so many things in this world that I do not want and I like to think that I'm kind of there for the most part either. I don't want it or I have it now, of course through the fear of losing it which is always there but I don't want to pick up new desires unconsciously and I don't want to keep upgrading my lifestyle and my expectations to match my circumstances. Otherwise, I'll be on this treadmill forever.
We are all playing games and the key is knowing which game you are playing so you can at least
attempt to consciously choose the game finite and infinite games by James Carson has an interesting read and I just want to close with and then you're certainly more than welcome to add any closing comments, but a quote that really makes me think of you. It's one of my favorite quotes from Fineman Richard P Fineman. Once again, here's the quote. The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool.
I love that quote. I love that quote. I read it when I was 9 or 10 years old, and I've never
Forgotten it.
It is so important and none of us are perfect. We all have flaws. We all have weaknesses. We all have vices or I'll speak for myself. Certainly. That's true with me but univ all as much as anyone else perhaps more than anyone else. I know have gone to Great Lengths to become self-aware furthermore. And this is I think the one of the distinguishing characteristics for me that you represent becoming self-aware and spending time on
on the Timeless while also preserving the right with competency to be a very high-level operator in the real world, right because you can be not of This World by opting out completely and go into a world of introspection, but in truth lack the resilience and emotional awareness to interact with any type of real stressor, which doesn't appeal to me certainly and you can be so engulfed by
Being in the world that you lose self-awareness you stop realizing that you are playing certain games. You become addicted and self identified with things that come from sort of consensus reality. That's also not appealing but you have managed in a way that I find fascinating to combine the cultivation of self-awareness with operating in the world at a high
level. I wouldn't say I'm nicely there yet, but it gets a little easier every year like, yeah, the Fineman quote is a brilliant.
He's right you we fool ourselves all the time and I still feel myself all the time because I still have strong beliefs and opinions. For example, even though I don't tweet a lot about politics. I do have strong political opinions and that is a form of fooling myself because you know politics is a man-made game. It doesn't really exist in the real world. There's no trees aware of politics and I do even though I don't like to even some of my beliefs are filtered and lineup in bundles based in My Chosen media sources and whatnot. So I fooled myself all the time, but just if you can fool yourself a little bit less.
Then you can navigate reality much better. It doesn't take a lot. Most people are just living very unconsciously, you know on the unexamined life. So it just gives you kind of a leg up and I agree with you in that you can always take check out of the game and it's easier that way but then you're fragile, right the you kind of build resilience by working out hard and it's hard to be calm until you've lost a lot and want a lot like you have to see the ups and the downs and the ups and the Downs before you get tired.
The dopamine Chase and you sort of realize like okay, this is down, but eventually they'll be an up or there's not there will be a down. I know how this game works. So one of the things I've been tracking recently is I've been trying to kind of make a list of what are the activities that are sort of non-dual in nature. They don't create their own opposite down the road. So chasing money does create anxiety and suffering down the road as you compare and you win lose and so on, you know chasing Fame also has its downsides where you can you're not open to insult and attacks and be
Canceled and whatnot. So what activities are intrinsically true in and of themselves and are kind of our free lunch. And so those include things like meditation yoga creating art playing reading for fun. Not necessary for knowledge or education writing journaling. You can even be building a business as long as you're doing it for the craft of it for the flow of it not necessarily for a given outcome. All that's hard to do that at least externally, it seems like Elon Musk is doing that. He's you know building.
Rockets to get to Mars not to make money or to be famous. Although he's doing the he's getting those the byproducts. So I think that kind of this whole not fooling yourself paying attention to yourself not taking yourself too. Seriously examining your own Thoughts From First principles and kind of doing activities that are done intrinsically for you as opposed to for the external World. They just make your life better. I'm not doing these things to be a stud.
Sage the honestly one of the downsides of the stoics is they don't look like they're having a lot of fun. I still like that right now. Obviously a lot has been Lost in Translation. I know they had their vomitorium and they had their orgies and whatnot. But you know the specifics just at least the waves of modern projected and this is one of the reasons why I do like oh show, you know people give our show a lot of flak and they should he was a little crazy in some ways, but he was having fun. He had a good time and
You know, you're alive you have one very short life when it when your life ends. It goes to 0 it's to you it's indistinguishable from your perspective your death is indistinguishable from the end of the world. As far as you're concerned the world has disappeared because when you came into existence the world appeared when you go out of existence the world disappears and that is so consequential that it makes the rest of your life inconsequential and that is a form of freedom and so you
Enjoy yourself. You should not suffer in this life. If you are just constantly suffering than figure out how to get out of that suffering. If you can't get out of that suffering then figure out how to redefine your internal world view so that you don't necessarily view it as suffering anymore to the extent that you need to to get out of it these days. We borrow a lot of suffering on behalf of other people a lot of people want to be a little Christ carrying crosses for others. It's a miserable existence. You're actually not doing them any favors either you carrying their Cross isn't making their life any better.
The better way is for you to be happy and successful and healthy and then go save them like literally save them physically not necessarily just you know, sit around suffering for them or at least that's the life that I choose to live. I'm going to I'm going to end with one story. There was a guy that I met in Thailand Craig Africa's last name, but he used to work for Tony Robbins, and I met this guy and we were on vacation in Thailand, and he was just a happiest person. He was just happy all the time and he
Seem to be able to laugh it off. And as far as we know he had a good life he had stuff going for him, but it wasn't like, you know, he had this incredibly enviable life where you would drop everything and move to Thailand doctors lifestyle have an okay life, but he was just happy and not in a forced way, but he was genuinely happy and so I asked him I said like, you know, what's your secret? Why not and he said that you know, he used to work for Tony Robbins and he's to fly around setting up events for Tony and you know, he was always sitting in the front row and taking notes and setting things up and learning.
Listening and he just kind of started seeing through his own internal BS. He got to this point where like you said like he was he was fooling himself into unhappiness and he just decided one day. He said, you know what? I have no responsibility to anybody in this world other than me and the or if I do have responsibly this kind of weight of responsibility that goes on we're like, oh I need to live up to some imagine self what he realized what he said somebody in this world. Somebody has to be happy all the time.
That is somebody's job to be that role model for people in the world that might as well be me. I'll be that guy I'll take on that burden and he decided to be the happy one and I just thought that was simple and Brilliant and he did you live. So no I want to be that guy who is successful peaceful. Happy enjoying life Blissful meditative spiritual successful and you know as healthy as I can be and Famous
and Rich and not give a damn about any of it. So if I lose it all tomorrow, I still want to be happy. That's it. That's where I want to be and I'll just make that decision because somebody has to be that person it might as well be
me. I love it man. Navall ramakant Otherwise Known. Okay novel Robert cats, but navall Rebecca at the Vol on Twitter and a VA L. And he has the podcast of course navall and
LL you can find that anywhere you find your podcast the blog and AV dot Al previous conversations. We've had we've had quite a few you can just search in a ball on the website. But Tim top log, /ne of all anything else you would like to add any other resources places people can say hello on the internet recommendations asks of the audience them all.
I'm mostly on Twitter Eric Jorgensen recently put out a book which had a bunch of my sayings called The Almanac of Navarre avocados. Very nice of him. I don't make any money.
Money off of it. It's free on the internet. You can just download it. I think it enough Almanac clever little turn of phrase. Yeah, I think I think that's it. We'll see you on the interwebs. You know, I wish everybody has a wealthy healthy and happy life like go get it.
Thanks so much and of all for taking the time, this is awesome and to everybody listening. Thank you for tuning in and until next time don't fool yourself sit down spend some time with your mind and
Be too hard on that roommate in your head. Hey guys, this is Tim again. Just a few more things before you take off. Number one. This is five. Bullet Friday. Do you want to get a short email from me? And would you enjoy getting a short email for me? Every Friday is that provides a little more soul of fun for the weekend and five bullet. Friday's a very short email where I share the coolest things I've found or that I've been pondering over the week that could include
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