Naval Ravikant Seventh Periscope 2019-01-28/

let's try this again hopefully this will work okay can you hear me now yeah I had a I had a custom mic on and it keeps breaking it's very fidgety so then I switched the air pods which don't sound great but at least I'm consistent hired a sound engineer what you think is a professional operation okay this is not a professional operation I don't know we can keep fiddling with the audio I can try something different if you want or we can just get into it what do you think should we go next five boats go or try again on the audio okay we're gonna go good we're underway hello periscope I actually have nothing to talk about but I figured I would let you folks drive the agenda what's on your mind I'm actually not far away from the mic I'm wearing air pots there was a little apple wireless headphones a lot that I liked so much they only do so much however some people say it's fine some people say it's not okay people are saying let's start okay what do people want to discuss what is on your mind I don't come to these things that with an agenda because I have no agenda so I'm literally here for you what can I help you with advice for making new friends be the kind of person that people want to be friends with what written media do you pay for strategic Ben Thompson's strategic have a read the book The Four Agreements yes I have it was okay it was a little fluffy for me but I liked it I've recommended that in the fifth agreement in the past who are the three people you most admire in Silicon Valley I don't to pick just three there's lots of big people Silicon Valley it's it's a magnet for creators and doers Howard Schultz not getting a good reception for president yes well the time of elites is over Donald Trump only won because he's essentially a populist / nationalist even though he is of course an elite by birth and profession and career and status he is not won by representation how to break the steps no startup ecosystem that's a good one you know I think actually one of the biggest problems that that kind of humanity faces today or I shouldn't say problem but I would say missed opportunities is that the entire tech industry in the Western world is inordinately concentrated in San Francisco and that's a tragedy because really technology is a set of things that doesn't quite work yet and it's the it's the frontier that as we invent new technology we move the human race forward we move productivity forward we tame nature we are capable of doing things people doing before so it's kind of sad there's just one geographic region in the Western world which is responsible for most of the innovation output in technology and that has to change and so you know how do we change that and I think the internet is going to change it it's going to do it well naturally but it's happening very slowly the video tools video conferencing tools are gonna get better and better slack things like slack and chat has a big impact we're gonna see kind of a new generation of video conferencing tools coming up but I think we're designed specifically for remote teams I think we're also gonna see a lot more remote matching remote working tools we're gonna see we're gonna see websites that sort of do remote gig economy contracts I think crypto will have a part to play here in fact crypto I CEOs even though they were full of scams and fraud and lots of junk they were at least pointing to a way to do fundraising outside of Silicon Valley so you know overall I think I I think that the next 20 years breaking tech free from Silicon Valley is gonna be a big deal and I actually hope that I have some part to play in that I think angel has helped a little bit especially with the talent jobs board site and I think even with a fundraising side but over time I'd like to do more in that domain I think every the tech innovation of startups should it be possible anywhere in the world of course they'll always be easiest in Silicon Valley but I don't think they should be restricted to Silicon Valley because Silicon Valley you know the Golden Goose is there and so the local politicians and people you know also just take it for granted and frankly you know long-term capital and innovation goes where it's most welcome oh great someone got to Charles via angel is included working at periscope that's great someone says I'm gonna talk to a billionaire soon how can I come across as a competent engineer you know if you the great thing about engineering is it's a software engineering I assume it's what you're talking about it's a very accountable it's a very counter profession you don't have to talk you can show you can just go create something you can code something up and just show them your work and I think that right there is better than talking about it you know sales is a job where you can sell yourself an interview it helps because a good salesperson should also be able to sell themselves but a lot of good engineers are actually really bad at interviews so for engineers design product oriented jobs it's better just to show your output but now it specifically if you're talking to a billionaire you know assuming that this is not one of those crony capitalist billionaires this is someone who got there by doing something great from scratch then they're gonna be a risk-taker and they're going to be a high initiative person so what they're going to look for is what Keith no boy those are what Khosla Ventures calls barrels not bullets he's gonna look for doers he's gonna look for people who are enthusiastic people who leave in people who basically say that they will or will take things from scratch with founder mentality and get them done as opposed to someone who will wait for orders you know I get like a larger number of unsolicited emails from people basically saying hey I really want to work with you is kind of my life's dream you know unfortunately that's not enough first of all I'm retired semi-retired I don't really work with other people that much but even if I weren't going to work with somebody it wouldn't be because of their passion unfortunately because passion is in high supply what's in short supply is passion and capability so you have to be able to demonstrate your capabilities somehow I want to see what have you done what have you done on your own without being paid for it without being into it what have you done for the sheer joy of it what have you done for the passion of it what have you created and that's the only way that I have to sift through the noise because otherwise there's too much noise and for this billionaire person is probably going to be even a lot worse so it's good to stand out by showing independent initiative founder mentality in a short cut what have I done I did this periscope how about you is it possible to stop socialism in the US I'm kind of down on that to be honest I think that because it's either the way this country used to run was that money and media sort of used to control everything because there was a finite amount of media and shelf space and you had to buy access on me in media or you had to get in good with journalists who you know frankly like high status people so you sort of needed their permission to get elected especially in you know things like the presidency but now what's happened thanks to the Internet we've got to you know we've got to contradictory things going on contradictory thing number one is that the Internet is bypassing all of those old tools so you know regular news media's being bypassed and people are going directly to social media and then number two is crowd funding is also bypassing sort of traditional money and politics and ads are becoming more and more useful useless so the combination of all of this means that basically the gates that used to keep the people at bay that kept this as a republic rather the to true democracy are breaking down and we're getting kind of a true democracy and a democracy at the edges can degenerate into mob rule so we're shifting from Republicans versus Democrats to nationalists versus socialists both of which are very scary to me long term because both of them are sort of a very populist mob driven mentality if I had to pick one that I'm more scared of it's definitely socialism just cuz I've read enough history in the 20th century to see what that leads to you know cuz socialism eventually leads to the death of the American dream and it leads to coercion and and and it creates a simply slippery slide economically into ruin which certainly I don't want to be for so but I'm not that confident that anything can really be done about it but I think what does happen is that we're moving to the age of the sovereign individual and if you haven't read that book I highly recommend it even though it's almost 20 years old it's you know it's very prophetic and the thesis of sovereign individual we'll see it's not my 20 years ago I was a little harder which is that you know eventually the the most intelligent most capable people in human society will be able to earn from anywhere and nations are going to kind of have to bid for their presence you know the US had a monopoly on high quality immigrants for the last couple of decades because if you were if you were Indian or Chinese and if you wanted to like you know you were entrepreneurial you believed in the American dream you had you had to come to the u.s. there was no other country that was going to let you immigrate no other country that was going to adopt you as a chosen you know citizen accept you as an American and then let you create and produce but I think the u.s. is being bailouts and so because of that people now have a sense that the system is rigged the system is unfair and so now people are much more interested in how do we divide up the pie rather than how do we grow the pie so for example the average American doesn't get benefit out of immigration anymore they just get competition so they don't want anymore immigration and then on the other side you see people who are basically saying well the rich stole all of our money and all of our jobs and of course it doesn't work that way wealth creation is a positive sum game it's not a it's not a zero-sum game but ya know parts of it are rigged parts of it are unfair I totally agree that's not it's not a fair but by the way fair is fair it does doesn't exist in the world right if you're gonna obsess over fair you'll never get anywhere in life you just basically have to do the best you can with the cards retail but let's put that aside for a second the bankers definitely have stolen a lot of money to the bank bailouts there's no question about that and we've wasted a lot of money on Wars so the combination means that we are sort of broke we don't have the wrote that we used to although recently we have had three 4% growth has been looking a little bit better but even then people now are trying to figure out how to divide up the pie and I think that there are three very dangerous trends going on one is kind of just general xenophobia you know I'm not saying open borders or illegal immigration and but I think there's a place for skilled tested high-quality immigration with a pathway to citizenship you know the classic kind that the US has always had then secondly I would say that you know the second problem is or the u.s. used to be a melting pot or it still is but if you listen to much the media and you listen too much to Twitter now it's all identity politics it's all about how we're different rather than about how we're all the same you know we're 99.9 percent the same with 0.001 percent differences but not everybody wants to obsess about the differences and that's the kind of stuff that at least a civil war what made America great was that we melted into being American that I could come here as Indian and I could end up as American but now people are throwing away this idea of America and that that idea was really important and in the last piece is just kind of this whole envy driven reallocation of wealth 1% arguments you know there's macro economists who are really politicians like Piketty masquerading as data-driven scientists who are an Krugman who are laying the intellectual framework at the academic framework for essentially the long slow slippery slide into socialism and unfortunately I do think that is where the country is headed so I think smart individuals in the future will either not immigrate to the US because it's sort of a more of a declining Empire or you know and they'll stay in their home countries or they'll basically become global citizens but it's good for everybody it's good for everybody to be to realize at this point in human history that you are no longer just a citizen of your nation wherever you live whoever you are you have one foot in the Internet and the Internet is the real country right like you spend half your time on the Internet half your friends or in the internet you get your information from the internet you get your education from the Internet in the future you get your work from the internet there will come a day when you roll out of bed you get your alert on your phone with a new gig for you you sign up for it you get paid in crypto you do your work in VR you work when you want where you want how you want with who you want and then you get paid and then you move on to the next gig or you take a vacation for a while and a citizen like that a person like that essentially a digitally free person now they're physically not free because they still have to live in a real country and they have to have a family and a tribe and people that they love and that they associate with and even a culture but I think that digitally we're going to become a lot more free you know another example you know another exam well someone's saying isn't that true isn't that [ __ ] about the gig economy well today the gig economy is kind of a low end gig economy it's like delivering a driving for uber or delivering for post mates but I think we're gonna see a much higher end gig economy emerge but for that we still need better remote working communication tools but I will say there's a lot of that going on right now it's not digital slavery it's digital freedom to them to the peshwa Bowman is looking down and everything no man it's digital freedom you know it's tools like the Internet is a tool tools are there for you to use or not to use they're voluntary slay reason there's a collar around your neck and someone tells you what you can and can't do but you know freedom is when you can choose whether or not to you the tools tools or leverage we are living it we're to making creatures we're tool making monkeys and we're living in an age of incredible tools the smartphone that we're all communicating with is the greatest tool ever invented the computer programming that thing that's so powerful that's so much free leverage you should all be using it even if you're not an engineer you should know a little bit about code and you should be you should be good with computers faster with computers because it will give you a super power edge in any profession that you end up in because you'll just be better at using the greatest tool invented by humans books that you recommend this year this you know well this you just started but in the last year I actually spent a lot of it just reading philosophy because you know last year was my yoga meditation chill-out kind of year where I was taking a break from the brutal work schedules that I used to run and I just found myself naturally obsessing gravitating towards of philosophy phase you know some of the more interesting characters that are discovered for those of you who are into self-examination Anthony de Mello who wrote a great book called awareness another one was Rupert Spira he's got a bunch of videos up on YouTube I reread my Jed McKenna which had read a long time ago but a very provocative character Oh someone just said I just started fixie honest what's your favorite story fixie honest is a is a collection of short stories by jorge luis borges who are discovered in college decades ago and it was still my favorite literary sci-fi author of all time he's a very unique character born has is definitely worth meeting if you like highly dense science fiction ish stories with lots of literary allusions and poetry and all kinds of you know clever prose weaved in my favorite story of his is probably the library of Babel which is a classic if you haven't read that you like sci-fi I'm highly recommended it's one of my two favorite short stories of all time the other one is understand by Ted Chiang who is also a genius someone just said I'm 21 I come from a poor family I have an insane work ethic tell me how to get rich in a ball okay let's take let's do it so you know that's what I did my famous tweet storm about it's pinned on my profile you should go read it of course every one of those tweets can be extrapolated into you know an hour's worth of conversation but that's a good starting point you kind of want to absorb all the different pieces whatever you don't understand I can I can always extrapolate on much more but I would say you know the first thing that this person asked about how do I get rich they said I'm twenty-one evidence a work ethic it's not really work I think that matters you know unfortunately there are people who busted our butts 80 hours a week hundred 20 hours a week went insane numbers are and they don't get rich so it's not really about hard work right you can work in a restaurant you know 80 hours a week and you're not gonna get rich so it's about knowing what to do and knowing who to do it with and when to do it so it is much more about understanding than it is purely about hard work yes hard work matters and you can't skimp on it but it has to be directed in the right way and if you don't know yet what you you should be working on then that is the most important thing to figure out and you probably shouldn't be grinding at a lot of hard work until you figure out what you should be working on I would say that the most important skill to getting rich is becoming a perpetual learner okay you have to know how to learn anything you want to learn there should be no book in the library that scares you whether it's a math book or a physics book or an electrical engineering book or a sociology book or an economics book you should be able to take any book down off the shelf and read it and guess what a number of them are going to be too difficult for you that's okay read them anyway then go back and reread them and reread them when you have when you're reading a book and you're not understanding a lot of what it's saying and there's a lot of confusion in your mind about it that that confusion is similar to the pain the burn that you get in a gym when you're working out your but this time you're building mental muscles instead of building physical muscles so just learn how to learn and read the hard books and the problem with just giving advice saying just read is that there's so much junk out there right there's as many different kinds of authors as there are people so there are lots and lots of people who are going to write lots of junk so this is this is an unfortunate thing that I find I do have people in in my life that I consider to be very well-read who aren't very smart and the reason is because even though they're very well-read they sort of read the wrong things in the wrong order it's not even if they were the wrong things but they read them in the wrong order because if you if you start out reading a set of things that are false or they're not even false they're just weakly true at best then they form the axioms or the foundation for your worldview and then when new things come in you judge whether they're accurate or not based on that foundation that you've already built so that foundation is critical so when it comes to reading I would make sure that your foundation is very very high quality and the best way to have a high quality foundation is unfortunately you know may not love this answer but it's to stick to science and to stick to the basics it's better to be really great at arithmetic and geometry than to be like a deep into advanced mathematics you know your foundations are very important it's good to like microeconomics I would read microeconomics all day long Micro 101 I would throw macroeconomics away because it's trash people can't agree on so generally there's only a fool things you can read where people don't really disagree like very few people will disagree that two plus two is four right so that's serious knowledge that's knowledge everybody should have so mathematics is a place where you can rest their head it's a solid foundation similarly the hard sciences are solid foundation microeconomics is a solid foundation the moment you start wandering out of these solid foundations you're in trouble because now you don't know what's true and what's false so I would focus as much as I could have a solid foundations another way to do this is to read the originals read the classics if you wanna learn evolution read Charles Darwin don't even read Richard Dawkins even though I think he's great read him later first read Charles Darwin you want to you want to learn macroeconomics first read Adam Smith read von Mises read Hayek you know start with the original start with the philosophers of the economy even if even if you're into communist or socialist ideals which I'm personally not but even if you are start by reading Karl Marx you know don't read the current interpretation of whatever someone is feeding you about how things should be done and run so if you start with the originals with the foundations then you will have enough of worldview and understanding that you will fear any book and then you can just learn and if you're a perpetual learning machine you will never be out of options on how to make money because you can always see what's coming up in society what the value is where the demand is and you can learn and come up to speed there's an old model of making money which is that the old model making money is like you go school you study for four years you get your degree and then you work in that profession for thirty years but things change too fast now so now you have to come up to speed a new profession within nine months and it's obsolete four years later but within those three years that you're productive in that profession you can get very wealthy so it's much more important that you be able to become an expert in a brand new field within nine to twelve months that is that you study the right thing a long time ago all you really care about having studied before are the foundations so that you're not scared of any book so if you go into a library and there's a book that you cannot read and you cannot understand then you have to dig down and say what is the foundation required for me to learn this and I better go brush up on those foundations foundations are super important you know I will bet you that I'm a little older now so my brain doesn't work as fast it used to but in my prime you know you could have come to me and you know we could have for example done math problems against each other and I would have lost to you on every calculus problem but it was a rare human being who could beat me terrific and basic arithmetic in numeracy is way more important to be able to do calculus in life similarly being able to convey yourself simply using ordinary English words is far more important than being able to write poetry or having a very extensive vocabulary or knowing you know seven different foreign languages knowing how to just be persuasive when speaking that sales skill is far more important than being an expert digital marketer and click optimizer on the internet so foundations are key it's just so much better to be in nine out of ten or a ten out of ten on foundations than to try and get super deep into things now you do need to be deep in something because otherwise you'll be a mile wide and an inch deep and you won't get what you want out of life but you can only achieve mastery in one or two things it's usually the things that you're obsessed about at that time and it's that and you have to sink a lot of time into it almost by definition so you can't have mastery and everything but if you if you have the foundations then you can pick what you want to be have mass per you as opposed to just wished it or just have gotten lucky that you stumbled into it at the right time in your life early on question is involved what is your meditation routine so we're gonna talk about meditation for a moment meditation is a tough set so if you could give you guys could just stop the questions for a bit I'm just gonna talk about meditations let's all be meditative here for a moment thank you I'm gonna ignore questions for a while until I'm done talking about meditation so I'm literally gonna stop looking at the screen let's talk about meditations they can stop typing for a little while okay meditation meditation is a very complicated thing it's every person you talk to who meditates will give you a different almost definition different observation different what it's good for different how you do it so what I'm telling you and some people like kapil who is kind of my coach guy hates it okay he hates the whole concept of meditation but I'm going to tell you my version I'm going to tell you what I learned that worked for me first I'm gonna back up a little bit but there's a meditation master here we're actually all meditation masters so my meditation is no better than yours I'm just telling you mine so but it's so let's think about how how your mind works okay when you're walking down the street your mind is usually associating it's in free association so it's basically saying oh this woman just crossed the street with a dog oh I used to have a dog just like that oh when I had a dog like that I lived in that apartment oh that apartment god that guy overcharged me oh I hated that guy so your mind is always just free associating and connecting things around you and having sort of this uncontrollable stream of thoughts that's like kind of like your default how your mind operates beyond that is contemplation contemplation is when you sit there and you direct your mind to one topic to one subject scientists are essentially in contemplation they're working on a specific problem a poet when they're like trying to figure out the right word for the poem you know they're in contemplation sometimes an author can be in contemplation when they're plotting up a narrative for their book next beyond that is concentration concentration is when your mind is focused on one thing and this can be you know you're surfing and you're riding a wave you're driving a car to high speed around a bend it could be you're having sex with somebody your mind is focused on that act so concentration is when your mind is single-pointed most meditation techniques are concentration methods and there are many many meditation techniques if you ever want to run through a bunch of them you can pick up a pick up a book called the book of secrets by Osho and know he's gotten a bad rap popularly recently but he was a pretty smart guy but there's a book called a book of secrets by Osho and it's actually a translation as a translation of an old I believe Sanskrit book that has something like a hundred and twenty different meditations in it and you can try each one you can just see which one works for you the one that works best for me is the fourth state of mind so concentration what you're trying to do either with a mantra or watching your breath is you're trying to bring your mind mind to what's called a single pointed state and then once it is focused on this one object that is concentrating on your mind is supposed to disappear it's supposed to basically drop the mantra or drop the breath watching on its own without effort and your mind is supposed to stop and then you have a chance to see what you really like underneath underneath this anxiety filled barrage of thoughts that you're always happening having so the last thing that you're trying to get to the last stage after Association contemplation and concentration is meditation meditation is the art of doing nothing you cannot do meditation by definition if you're doing something you're not in meditation meditation is a state you're in when you're not doing anything when you're not doing anything physically when you're doing anything mentally when you're not doing anything consciously you're just making no effort you're literally being completely still physically and mentally inside and out that is a state that you're trying to achieve but there is an oxymoron which is for true meditation you are not even there the thing that's trying to achieve the state of meditation cannot actually be there in full meditation so the this the method that I learned was basically that you just sit there and you close your eyes and for at least one hour a day you surrender to whatever happens you don't make any effort whatsoever you make no effort for something you make no effort against something if something travels through your mind then you let it go if there are thoughts that are running through your mind you let the thoughts run what's kind of going on is that your entire life things have been happening to you some good some bad most of which you processed and resolved but a few that's stuck with you and over time they stuck more and more with you and they almost became like these barnacles stuck to you and you lost your childhood you know you could only a childhood a sense of wonder and being present and being happy you lost your inner happiness because you build up this personality your unresolved pain and errors and fears and desires that have glommed onto you like a bunch of barnacles and now how do you get those barnacles off of you how do you strip them off of you well what happens in meditation is when you're sitting there and not resisting your mind these things will start bubbling up it's like a giant inbox of unanswered emails tens of thousands of emails going back to your childhood and they will come out one by one and you will be forced to deal with them you will be forced to resolve them and resolving them is doesn't take any work you just observe them but now that you're an adult now that you have some distance in time and space from previous events you can sort of just resolve them you can be much more objective about how you view them someone just mentioned peyote yes that psychedelics are a bit of a cheat code in this although I don't recommend drugs for anybody because I think you can do it all to the pure meditation if you wanted to accelerate ahead you know psychedelics are good for that there's a good book that Michael Pollan wrote recently called how to change your mind and I think that is a brilliant book that everybody should read in any case so with meditation over time you will resolve a lot of these deep-seated unresolved things that you have in your mind and it is different for everybody and once they're resolved there will come a day there will come a day when you sit down in the morning to meditate and I morning one hour a day because anything less is not enough time to really get deep into it but I would recommend if you really want to try meditation 260 days one hour a day the first thing in the morning and if you if you sit there do that after about 60 days you will sort of be tired of listening to your own mind you will have resolved a lot of your issues or you have to herd them enough that you will know you have kind of seen through those fears and those issues and what will happen is one morning you're gonna hit mental inbox zero okay if you know the inbox zero concepts when you open your email and there are no emails and it's zero email and that is a pretty amazing feeling that is a now I don't want to describe this because it's kind of nonsense to use these descriptors for other people but it's a state of some moving joy and bliss and peace and once you have that you don't want to give that up if you can get a free hour of bliss every morning just by sitting and closing your eyes that's worth its weight in gold that will change your life in terms of how to sit still for an hour by the way meditation isn't hard all you have to do is sit there and do nothing just sit down close your eyes and say I'm just gonna give myself a break for an hour this is my hour off from life this is the hour I'm not going to do anything yes if thoughts come thoughts will come I'm not gonna fight them I'm not gonna embrace them I'm not gonna think harder about them I'm not gonna reject them I'm just gonna sit here for an hour with my eyes closed and I'm going to do nothing how hard is that why can you not do anything for an hour what's so hard about that just give yourself an hour break that's it the book I mention was Michael Pollan pol LAN he's famous for being the New York Times I think he was a New York Times journalist and he wrote in defense of food and The Omnivore's Dilemma and this is his most recent book I actually don't recommend the apps I love what the headspace and calm guys are doing and I'm a big fan of them but for what I just described that method will not work with an app because the app will clutter your mind with the instructions from the app no music no noise no sound just sit and acquire dark place put your back against something if it's the first thing in the morning you're not gonna fall back asleep so it's okay to lean you don't need any fancy postures or poses you just need to sit down such a way that you're comfortable so put pillows underneath your knees you know put big cushions underneath your butt whatever it takes get super comfy because you don't want to move for the next hour you just want to relax completely and do nothing all you're doing is giving yourself one hour off I think the apps are great training wheels but you know at some point you got to learn how to ride the bike someone asked can you talk about going through and resolving those thoughts the thoughts resolved themselves I know that sounds hard to believe but you just kind of to sit there with them that's all the reason they won't get resolved is because you're running away from them because you're fighting them if you sit there with something long enough it will get resolved I mean listen all day long there are things that bother us and those things sit in front of us and annoy us until ten minutes later they're gone and the next thing is bothering us so when you sit with something long enough it does go away it's not like it stays there forever but some things just take more time but there's nothing to do other than just to let it be just let it let it come up just watch it let it be how do you know you've hit inbox zero oh you'll know it's not subtle when you get inbox zero then meditation arrives and the meditation arrives is as a whole different beast my drug of choice honestly these days is meditation somebody asked me my drug of choices I like red wine I want my and you know living in California we've all tried cannabis here and there but meditation is it that's that's my main drug of choice that's the one that I get high on every day what is the noise behind you it's a fireplace someone asked a seeking inbox zero defeat the point of it yeah I mean in some very deep sense yes like for true true meditation you can't have an objective you can't be seeking anything but I assume I'm talking to a general audience here not too advanced practitioners for a super advanced practitioner you don't want to seek anything but it is kind of contradictory it's like well then why sit down to meditate in the first place you can sound really clever by saying you know there's no point to it they're not supposed to do anything and there's no reason to do it nor should you seek it but then you actually wouldn't do it so it would defeat itself if you defeat yourself at the starting line did I read 12 rules for life what was my take I started to I couldn't get to do it to be honest I feel like it was very basic it was meant for perhaps a younger person who was still looking for their moral foundation in the world do you do I think you should avoid salary and work let me switch gears for a second if people can stop asking questions for a moment and let's talk about let's talk about different kinds of work okay let's talk about how you make money in different kinds of work and you know very few of us are like are lucky enough to start out with anything other than salaried work we all start with salaried work you know my first job was kind of an illegal catering company in the back of a van delivering Indian food when I was you know 15 that was my first like organized job I had been in job before that I had paper routes you know I I washed dishes in the cafeterias so I've done them all I've done I've done all those jobs right so I've done salaried jobs and you have to start with shitty salary jobs you got to work your way up what helped me work my way up was I just hated these jobs so I wanted to do something better I want to do something more intellectual so I kind of earned my way up into better and better and bigger jobs but it was only when I got to Silicon Valley that I got you know educated on the kind of value of owning the business and getting out of a solid job right and so that is super important like everybody should aspire to that so let me let me see if I can come up with a good a good example right let's talk about the real estate business for a moment it's like it's like a very real tangible business right so the worst kind of job is you know you're someone who's like repairing a house you like a construction worker right so you know maybe you get paid ten bucks fifteen bucks twenty dollars an hour and you have to go to people's houses need to go there at a specific time you have to show up at 8:00 a.m. your boss demands that you're there and you'll kind of just repair little pieces of the house right so here you have zero leverage because it's just whatever you're doing with your own hands you have you know you have some accountability but not really your accountability is to your boss it's not to the ultimate client it's not to the owner of the house and you you don't have any real specific knowledge the things that you're doing are you know bare labor that almost anybody can do so you're just not going to get paid a lot you're getting paid minimum wage plus a little bit for your skill and your time and depending on where you are and that's kind of it the next level up might be the contractor right the general contractor who's working on the house for the owner that person may be getting paid let's call it fifty thousand dollars to do the whole thing and then they're paying the laborer fifteen dollars an hour and they're keeping the difference okay so that's obviously a better place to be but how do we measure that how do we know that's better well we know it's better because this person has some accountability right they have some accountability because they're responsible for the outcome so they have to sweat at night if things aren't working right and then they also have some leverage and they have not a great formal leverage but they have people working for them that's the labor and they have a little bit more specific knowledge and that knowledge is how to organize a team and make people show on time and how to deal with city regulations and those kinds of things right well the next level up from that people might be a developer right now a developer is someone who is going to actually go and buy a crappy house and then they're gonna hire a bunch of contractors and they're going to build that house and they probably got to get a loan to buy the house the probably might have the money themselves to go to investors they raise the money then they buy the shell of a bad house they tear down that house they rebuild it and they sell it now a good developer could make instead of $50,000 like the general contractor $15 an hour like the laborer the developer might be able to take a million dollars or half a million dollars in profit when they sell the house for more than they bought it for including the expense in the construction but now notice what the what's required from developer very high level of accountability right so by the way someone just asked me and I've already get taxed actually no very simple answer to that is people like me are highly globally mobile we leave you know so what what taxing capital does is it causes capital for taxing entrepreneurs reduces entrepreneurs you know the United States loss is somebody else's gift so I'm not worried about me I'm worried about that my kids I'm worried about the next generation who wants the American anyway going back to our example you know the developer takes on more risk more accountability has more leverage and needs to have more specific knowledge they need to understand fundraising they need to understand the ins and outs of city regulations they need to understand where the real estate market is headed and whether they should take that risk on or not so you know that's it that's a difficult one and then the next level up from that might be someone who's running a fund on real estate and that person has an enormous amount of capital leverage and they're dealing with lots and lots of developers and maybe they're buying huge amounts of houses in inventory one level above that might be a company like open door that's writing code to buy inventory and carrying a massive book of houses so you see each level how increasing leverage increasing accountability increasing specific knowledge adding in money based leverage on top of labor based leverage adding in code based leverage on top of money and labor allows you to actually create something bigger and bigger and get closer and closer to owning all the upside and not just being paid a salary so generally when you're working in life yes you start as a salaried employee but you essentially want to work your way up this stack that I just talked about to try and get to higher and higher leverage accountability and specific knowledge and the combination of those over a long enough period of time with the magic of compound interest will make you wealthy in this podcast go on you to the periscope you know some people actually turn them into YouTube videos and put them on YouTube so feel free to do that I don't have the time or the inclination how do you work your way up I mean I hate to say it but you just do really good work for a long time and it is thankless until people recognize you it's the nature of these things that nobody recognizes you for a long time and then everybody recognizes you all at once like all the opportunities hit you at once someone mentioned Joe Rogan's podcast yeah I mean I would do children's podcast at this point yeah he reached out to me and then I sent him a bunch of links and then he went dark so I assume I'm just low on his priority list because I'm not first of all I'm not hustling to give the Joe Rogan podcast it doesn't matter that much to me it's only because my cousin wants me on there and he reached out so now my egos a little bit like well why doesn't he want me now in the Joe Rogan podcast but the reality is like I could care less I'm here talking to the people who want to listen I don't have my own little media empire if I want it it's the easiest thing in the world to do I could just start tweeting again you know I cut down on my tweeting heavily but I can just start tweeting heavily again I could do a couple of blog posts I have a book in me I have another huge tweet storm that I've been putting together so I have no doubt that get all the reach that I want and you know why share that with Joe Rogan when I just build it under my own media brand what what is interesting about these podcasts though is that it's conversational it gives you someone else to talk to it would be nice to have someone else intelligent and wide-ranging to talk to so there's obviously value in that I think one problem with me going to the Rogan podcast is that when someone like a Joe Rogan advertised this podcast you know it's for like a specific thing like someone like Elon Musk you know but someone else you'll say oh this is a professor of psychology who's studying blah blah blah this is a person who's really into nutrition this is like an MMA champion right so people have these very precise very specific brands and I don't have a precise specific brand I don't want a precise specific brand I'm a human like the rest of you I want to be able to think about anything and talk about anything and thinker and is a shitty brand because everyone's a thinker so it's just like another guy with opinions so I can understand what Joe Rogan doesn't care about me in the podcast cuz he doesn't know to talk about I don't even know what to talk about with me my thoughts of why California is able to charge such a high tax rate Oh interesting thing to note about California is California has a monopoly on all of the warm and dry coastline in the United States which is the largest richest country in the world so that right there gives it enormous in is built in natural resources and before people start running around saying Florida I said warm and dry show me warm dry coastline in the United States it's all in California a hundred percent it's like why Saudi Arabia's government so messed up but they saw match to get by because they're sitting on all this oil why did Venezuela manage to survive for this long being dis messed up because it's got the largest oil reserves in the world Natural Resources right it's so the same natural resource powers California except in California's get some warm dry coastline and if you look at the politics of California the politics of California basically boiled down to the residents of California all saying we got here first newcomers stay out so all the policies are designed to keep new people out but everybody wants to go there because of the warm and dry coastline and there's no need to create a tweet campaign to get me in Rogen I don't want to harass him first I think it'll backfire because if I were him and someone's you know fans started like tweeting at me all the time incessantly I would just get annoyed so I think it was just backfire I think I'll get on Rogen when I no longer get any value out of being on Rogen I've kind of found that's how the universe works so the day that I am truly indifferent about being on Rogen and I'm like it's like a 50-50 that's when he'll call I'm pretty sure of that I've just seen that that's just how the universe works over and over and I can't prove it but it's just a hunch how do you regulate media consumption so it does not consume you it's a great question and I struggle with it I you know one of the big problems that I have right now that I'm facing is I have a serious Twitter addiction I only broke it for two weeks in July when I disappeared off Twitter but other than that I have a serious Twitter addiction and it's definitely costing me I think I spend more time these days tweeting about reading than actually reading real books and that's because I'm just ready to Twitter that's it I've actually unfollowed a lot of the people I used to follow on Twitter I unfollowed a lot of tech industry Twitter I've on vanilla cryptid Twitter I've unfollowed a lot of definitely outraged Twitter political Twitter and I'm down to have even unfollowed people who are smart and thoughtful but just have too much noise and they're fiends so my Twitter follow people that have followed even like the 500 or something to Twitter accounts that follow a good number of them are muted there and many of them have their retweets turned off so I am trying to focus on following either science or philosophy or nutrition or something that has you know value to me in my life I'd to unfollow people who have outraged you get emotional who get triggered and then a lot of people who reply to me my comments honestly I've walked a lot of people these days that block at the drop of a hat I'm not like Nassim Taleb but you know I'm probably blocking two or three people a day if someone says something stupid like outrageously stupid or insulting then I just block them I mute a lot of people people say something dumb but it was like it was not ill intention but it was just like a very little quality and sort of just waste of time I mute him and this actually allows me to go through all my mentions but I thought you squander you know 30 minutes a day going through all my mentions that's a lot of time I do need to learn how to back off at Twitter or more I need to get back more into books it is a problem that I am facing as well you know humans are not designed to have the entire world's news thrown at them all the time even as a reader as a bookworm I'm not meant to live inside the library rights Andrea it's too much so you know one has to it's it's it's another one of those modern struggles right we all have to learn how to get over video games with to learn how to get over you know TV luckily that's one that I kicked a decade ago I haven't watched a TV show in a year even then it was just Game of Thrones with my wife and Rick and Morty of course that's that's the exception because so intelligent but I don't I don't watch movies and having for a long time video games I go in and out but mostly out it's very rare that I play a video game these days only socially with friends and never alone and twitter twitter is a big remaining addiction it's hard we live in a culture of massive abundance someone said I would love to see a conversation we in Kapil Gupta and Sadhguru I've actually met both of them and I don't think they would get along they're very very different people someone asked about weed cannabis it's hard if you're addicted to cannabis you know and you want to get off of it and I would suggest getting off of it because I think I think like cannabis is probably the most harmless of the drugs out there and you know it can help lessen anxiety and there are some good medical benefits but it's not a free lunch there's no free lunches in life you know with cannabis I remember researching it a little bit a while back and if you find any old paper on cannabis old scientific paper and we're talking like you know 1950s 60s 70s 80s they're all incredibly negative like it's the worst drug ever invented blah blah blah and then you get to the 90s and the 2000s and they're kind of like you know positive and after 2000 they're all incredibly positive no one can say anything negative about cannabis but cannabis is sort of this you know in the cannabis that is being sold today at least in the states where it's legal is not the cannabis that you know you might have grown up on this is not 3 4 5 percent THC it's 25% THC so it can be the unintended consequences of this stuff I don't think we quite know yet at the very least I guarantee you that if your regular cannabis smoker it will rob you of your motivation you're just too happy life is just too easy if I had discovered cannabis when I was 16 you know I probably would not have had a good wealth or career outcome and I may not have gotten some of the other things that I would that I want life exactly so I said why do you think they call it dope yeah it's dope because it makes you dopey so you kind of do want to get off of it and I actually think meditation is a great way to get off of it [Music] once you get to a good place in meditation it's better than what you get out of cannabis and without many of the downside so that is the way that I would used to get out but it's not easy it'll take you like I said at least 60 hours of an hour a day every morning that's the minimum what is the purpose of life of all you know everyone has to have their own answer to this question so my my answer it doesn't it's not Leslie correct it's just valid for me it's not valid for you so what's interesting is more to explore the question than to you know try and come up with an answer to the question you know I Kapil Gupta and I've talked quite a bit about this and the conclusion that I've sort of come to for myself is I'm not answering a question directly and ask for a little indirectly is when I've had to think about what I want to do these days with my life and and I'll be the first to admit that I have a luxury that the rest of you don't or many of you don't which is I have money so I have a lot more options open to me but I'd like to think that I would have still thought this way even if I don't have money which is when I think about what I should do with my life I kind of realize that none of it is going to matter in the end in fact one good mental construct if I could start the questions for a sec one good mental construct is that I think that everything I do in my life is going to be a failure everything I do is going to be a failure and and I'm being deliberately provocative because I'm trying to catch your attention to deeply think about this the reason everything I do is going to be a failure is one is on the material level on the physical level I'm going to die and when I die I won't care I've been under the general anaesthesia I you know there was life before what was life like before I was born I just didn't care in those situations you don't care so when you die you don't care about anything anymore so in that sense everything you're accomplished you don't take anything with you it's a failure there's a second sense in which it's all guaranteed to fail which is even if you believe in ideas and memes and progeny and legacy well eventually the earth will fade fade away and after that the solar system will fade away and after that the galaxy will fade away and then the universe will end so nothing is forever nothing is permanent so everything goes to zero eventually so there's that sense of failure and there's a third way of realizing that everything you do is destined to fail which is just look at your own experience every time you do anything and you succeed you're really happy about it and then a year later you're back to where you started sometimes even a day later but best case a year later you're mentally back to where you started the same way if you fail to do something or something goes poorly for you you're miserable and unhappy but within a few months or a year you're back to your previous state mentally so even when you succeed you Bank that success right away and you essentially fail so everything I do in my life is guaranteed to fail so now what should I do with my life and the answer is only what I really want to do for its own sake and that's a definition of art so whether it's business whether it's exercise whether it's romance whether it's friendship whatever you're doing I think the meaning of life is to do it for its own sake if to just do it because you love living it there is no meaning beyond that and ironically when you do things for their own sake that's when you create your best work that's when it's art that's when it's you know that's when you create your but that's when you're gonna that's when you're gonna do your finest work and so even if you're trying to make money you actually be the most successful the year in which I sort of generated the most wealth for myself even though it hasn't paid out yet I can tell just in terms of like I accomplished the most I created the most value on an economic basis was actually also the year in which I worked at least hard but it was the year in which I cared the least about the future it's where I was mostly just doing things for the sheer fun of it where I was basically telling people I'm retired I'm not working and then I had the time to put into whatever was highest value in front of me and by doing it for its own sake I did it at its best so I don't have that answer to questions about meeting a life but that is one way in which I think about there are other frames that I used is probably about ten different frames that I'm using at all times to think about my life and but that is a recent and powerful one what's your best parenting advice I have a recent parent I do not I I don't read the parenting books although there's one that I do recommend it's called summer Anthony de Mello recommends it it's kind of a mind-blower it's about what happens when you treat kids who are you know supposedly damaged as if they're adults i-i'll give a couple off-the-cuff thoughts about parenting these are in the armchair academics section of of what I'm gonna say because many of you have far more experience parenting than I do but I'll make a few observations one is I think schools are not for the smart kids right schools are for the average kids schools are all about averages we live in an industrial education system where it's you're trying to get the your your moving at the pace of the average and mob's just aren't very smart groups to start very smart and it's fine we need schools we need daycare we need to educate the average person but if you want to raise a really smart child school is no place for us to raise a smart child what schools do and this was a tweet somebody put out my to in my Twitter feed and I did retweet it I just forget who it was they said schools replace curiosity with compliance five words I love that because it's so short just five words schools replace curiosity with compliance and I think that is so right when I think back to my own education so much of it was sit down shut up raise your hand we need to go to the bathroom no you must memorize this even though it doesn't make sense to you right now etc so I think with children you just have to feed their curiosity all the really smart kids that I know are essentially autodidact their self learners and you cannot force a child to be a self learner all you can do is you know feed their curiosity so if they for example want to you know if your kid wants to pick up the guitar get him a guitar if they put it down let them put it down if they want to go to soccer class setup to saga class if they don't want to play soccer don't force him to play soccer but if someone just said I blocked them today Twitter yeah sorry I mean look I keep in mind I'm looking at 500 mentions day so many of them are about like you know raging attacking stupidity he some of them are very serious and I have to get through these in a timely basis and if I don't block people who are sort of snarky or outraged then I wouldn't even make it through my mentions because I just have too many of those so I do block at a whim I don't have time to go and investigate every single detail but you know I'll try to go back in unblock you I got I got to go back in and dig in and figure it out but no promise is unfortunately it's just it's just the nature of Twitter twitter is not conducive to high quality good conversation right it's and I get what it's good for Twitter is great for discovery it is a it was a beautiful platform for discovering people and then having very short communication with them but there's no nuance in Twitter who was it that I blocked Ben Cohen tdv okay I'll try to remember sorry Ben I have a kid with ADHD do you believe in drugs I don't know I'm not a medical professional but it just seems weird to me that everybody supposedly has ADHD now and they didn't have it a few decades ago and you know I'm pretty sure I would have been diagnosed with ADHD if that had been that diagnosis I've been a thing when I was a kid I just think the bar for drugging your child should be really really really high if they can sit in front of a video game for example and play a video game uninterrupted for two hours they don't have ADHD they're just bored of the other thing be very careful you know drugging someone on a regular basis especially when their brain is forming do I believe almost nobody should be an antidepressants that's a really tough question I don't know honestly you know what is someone smoking dope isn't that an antidepressant maybe if I'm meditating isn't that an antidepressant look if there was a free lunch antidepressant where there was absolutely no downside I would say go do it but I think they all have some down sites so it's always better to go our natural if you can but if it's something that you need in the short-term to as a bridge that's fine nobody's perfect you can use it as a bridge but maybe think about it bridge rather than as a way of life I think what you want to stay away from is sort of this permanent victimhood mentality we're like oh I'm broken my brain is broken I have a chemical imbalance and I just need any depressants all the time yeah you might be that rare individual but if you're not then you know for example if you read Michael Pollan's how to change your mind he pretty convincingly shows that one or two mushroom trips are way better for you than a lifetime of antidepressants and we'll get you the same results one of the downsides of meditation is an antidepressant the downsides of meditation are a takes a lot of time B it's really hard you know at first even though you're supposed to do nothing doing nothing is hard for us because we're such a productivity driven culture and species another downside is meditation can rob you of some of your classic motivation but it won't be robbing you it'll be more because you'll see through your previous motivations you'll sort of understand that others were not genuine those were envy driven reserves were mimicked those were not intrinsic to me also you know meditation like anything else can become its own little game with levels and ranks and you know spiritual badges and trophies and leveling up real meditation does not have to be taught it does not have to be learned because it is the birthright of every living creature it's already there with you all the time you're actually in deep meditation all the time it's just covered up by all the noise and all the thoughts and all the unresolved issues and all the emotions that are running through you if you can just turn off that monkey mind then what remains is meditation it's always there underneath the parenting book that I mentioned it's not really a parenting book it's more it's more a story about a school a real school in 1930s in England where these to send very troubled children and their kind of how they used to turn them around the book of called is called summer hill why did I retweet Mike Pence I thought you don't do politics yeah I try not to do politics but there there are two things that I'm very passionate about and I would summarize that as free minds and free markets so when people get into censorship and freedom of speech issues I do get pretty passionate because I don't like people telling me how to think because I like being a free person and then also about free markets when people sort of attack markets and sort of you know socialism for example is when I get fired up reason i retweeted mike pence was because I think what's happened in Venezuela is an absolute tragedy you know it's really sad like the human cost what's going on there so I was happy to see the United States supporting you know moving Maduro aside yeah look I'm not an enlightened person if I was enlightened I probably wouldn't care and you'll know the day I stopped tweeting and you think about that stuff then I'm there but until then forgive me my little indulgences you can always turn off my retweets you know somebody told me today they unfollowed me because I retweeted some political stuff I would say that look first it's a lot less than most people second is I'm still a human animal so even when I tweet about how politics are awful a lot of that was just reminding myself that politics are awful and I the easiest way to get out of that is just turn off the retweets because I don't directly talk about politics as retweet stuff did your motivation to earn money drop when you hit financial independence yes and no it did in the sense that the desperation was gone but if anything it's now more art you know my art is I create businesses too I can create a new business within three months and raise the money and assemble a team and get it launched and it's fun for me it's it's really cool to see what can I put together and it makes money as a side effect because that's the game that I became good at so it's just my motivation has shifted from being a goal-oriented to being artistic so ironically I think I'm much better at it now what was your figure where you thought now I'm financially safe you know the problem is that this is money is not the root of all evil there's nothing evil about it but the lust for money is bad and it's not bad in a social sense it's not bad in the sense of like you're a bad person to others for lusting for money it's bad for you and the reason is bad for you is because the bottomless pit it will always occupy your mind so to make money you have to love money and if you love money and you make it there there's never enough there is never enough because that desire when is turned on doesn't turn off at some number it's a fallacy to think that it turns off at some number and so it's punishment the punishment for the other love of money is delivered at the same time as the money as you make the money you just want even more and you become paranoid and fearful of what you're losing what you do have so there's no free lunch you know you make money to solve your money and material problems and I think the best way to stay away from this constant love of money is to not upgrade your lifestyle as you make money so it's very easy to easily you know keep upgrading your lifestyle as you as you make money but if you can hold your lifestyle fixed and hopefully make your money in giant lump sums as opposed to you know a trickle at a time you won't have time to upgrade your lifestyle and then you may get so far ahead that you may actually be financially free another thing that helps us you know for me I value freedom above everything else and it's all kinds of freedom freedom to do what I want freedom from not wanting to do what I don't want to do so freedom yeah and and freedom from my own reactions and emotions and and things that may disturb my peace so for me freedom is my number one value which overrides even money so to the extent that money buys me freedom that's great but to the extent that it makes me less free which it definitely does do at some levels as well I don't like it his Jeff Bezos a superhuman primate I would guess he's doing human growth hormone or testosterone replacement therapy or something at his age you don't lean out and bulk up like that for free I hope he knows what he's doing that's just a guess someone just mentioned Richard Hamming you and your research beautiful essay I highly recommend reading it it's ostensibly written for people who are in scientific research but I think it applies across the board it's just a this is a great old-timer essay on you know how to do great work it reminds me of a lot of stuff that Richard Fineman used to say although I think Richard Hamming put it more eloquently than almost anywhere else I've seen does everyone need to learn how to code I think I don't think you need to learn how to code and be good at it I think that you just need to learn enough so that you're not scared of computers so that you don't and you know if you said proto computer and open a terminal bin window or some program crashes you're not you know like wow this is some mysterious black box object I don't quite understand how it works it's good to understand how it works because then you can just use it better and as I mentioned at the beginning of this conversation you know it's the most powerful tool ever invented by humanity so knowing how to use it will give you leverage like nothing else even if even if you never need to use a computer in your job let's say that you're you know you let's just say you're in some other profession eventually you want to get the word out you want to talk to people so whether you want to use periscope or Twitter knowing computers will actually teach you and let you know even how to spread your message you'll be a better user of periscope you'll be a better user or Twitter yeah by the way my incompetence with the microphones notwithstanding believe it or not I am actually pretty good with computers to what extent is Silicon Valley in bed with big government are you spying on all of us I actually don't think Silicon Valley is in bed with big government I think we have two different surveillance systems in this country and we're about to add a third the first surveillance system is the NSA who in violation of I believe is the Fourth Amendment is listening to everybody so that's terrible that's panopticon headed towards a police state all its it's just one tyrant away from a complete slide into a dictatorship so it's awful the second surveillance state that we live in is Facebook Twitter Google Amazon etc and a zillion little tech startups they're all gathering data on you all so this is less malicious in the sense that they're not they're not gonna like burst down in your door at night with you know a death squad and execute you as governments can do but they still have way too much data on you and they're bad at storing it so I have no doubt that the NSA is getting access to most of their data so that's the unfortunate part because these guys are gathering huge amounts of data and then maybe the NSA or maybe even the Chinese you know Secret Service or North Korean hackers or who knows it just kind of creates these honey pots for people to attack and then they also deliberately introduce bugs in our software which makes it insecure which makes us more vulnerable at hacker so there's all kinds of issues and then yes in the Facebook's of the world are using it to add target you but you know I use ad blockers and I use brave so I don't care as much the third kind of surveillance that we're gonna have to worry about is social surveillance and that's sous surveillance sousveillance s/o us the French word I think it means us like a surveillance surveillance and sousveillance may actually be the worst kind if you look on Twitter what's going on today it's social surveillance every word you say is being watched by a small number of highly easily offended outraged people who are waiting to get triggered about something you say and then attack you spam you troll you D platform you threaten you stalks you what have you that's just gonna get worse and one place where that's gonna get worse you have a court of public opinion the mall the witch hunts the place where that's gonna get worse is in physical reality full facial recognition is coming the facial recognition software has gotten really really really good the only reason it's not out there in mass right now in the United States is just because a few little things haven't come together but I would be surprised if it doesn't happen in the next two years in a big way where you will basically have the tools at your disposal to track and recognize everybody walking down the street and get their backgrounds and histories and all that stuff and then you're not just being spied on like you are today on Twitter you're being spied on everywhere and yes it's happening in China government-run but we're gonna have our own you know democratic at best mob based at worst version someone asked about Howard Schultz he doesn't have a chance he's in the lead candidate we're only talking you know nationalist versus socialist from here on out but no more elites lambda school model I think it's great I think there should be lambda schools for every discipline I love what they're doing I wish I'd invested I didn't know them as an investor type I just read about him how concerned am I about the danger of a u.s. civil war in the next decade it's not as far-fetched as people think I don't think it's a full-blown Civil War but I think we'll see secession movements you know it's it's getting ugly out there the same Tellez model of the most intolerant minority controlling the discourse is correct unfortunately and the extremists are controlling the discourse right now what I'm kind of surprised about is how you know the coastal elites and the left-wing kind of want to pick a fight with the other half of the country that's armed at the teeth if I was the unarmed half I you know I'd be a little quieter Trump is not an elite if you think Trump is an elite then you don't understand what Trump is I was just keeping an open mind about it and really researching his positions and policies and how he talks you know there's a reason why he was feeding people fast food and you know at least don't feed people fast food at least looked down a fast food and elite yeah it's it's hard just this finally properly I don't even think that's a good question though one should have a regular definition rather than throwing words around but I would generally say it's white-collar of college educated you know relatively well-off kinds of people who read The New Yorker the New York Times you know they look down on blue-collar people they looked down at anyone who doesn't have a college degree from like a high-end university I think the easiest dividing line between elites and non elites as degrees from known universe high quality universities if you had a magic wand how would you go about depolarizing our current political climate I would just reinforce the Bill of Rights I have you know freedom of speech freedom of association I would crack down on identity politics I would probably try and make certain changes that I don't you know what sorry I take that all back I don't talk politics is awful I hate politics don't get me pulled into politics it's terrible I could already feel my brain starting to work in ten different directions when I started talking politics not none of them could is coding the blue-collar job of 21st century no coding will never be a blue-collar job there's a common misconception amongst non-technical people and even a few technical people who make this mistake but real coders don't coding will never be automated the day that coding is automated the artificial general intelligence has arrived terminator is here and life on this planet as we know it is over coding is just thinking it's thinking in a logical and structured way that you then used to program a robot or a computer and so just as some people are good at thinking and some people are not or some people are better thinking certain kinds of thoughts and others there will always be massive variation between coders all that can happen is we can build tools to make coding easier and let the coders then move up to the next level of the stack with better tool sets rather than stay at lower levels of stack coding we'll never be able to so called blue-collar job I don't love the blue collar white collar distinction like I said that's mostly about college education and actually some of the best coders I know are self-taught in fact many of the best coders I know are self-taught they didn't go to college for it so it's not necessarily a blue collar where's the white collar thing but you cannot go wrong having coding knowledge it will increase your value in every major endeavor in your life where does comedy go from here I think comedy is our best defense against people who are trying to control speech comedians are you know first the firing line and they shot even back in medieval courts right the Jester was around because the gesture was the one person who could tell the truth comedians are the ones who can say what everybody else is thinking but it's too afraid to say so if you you know when they start shooting the comedian's you know they're serious who is my favorite living thinker that's tough one you know I did I don't I don't try not to have favorites you know take what you can from here and there one person that does come to mind is Nassim Taleb I know that he's very acerbic he's very hard to you know kind of swallow sometimes but he is brilliant he knows his stuff inside out he thinks very nonlinearly pardon the pun he's made original significant contributions I think people will be poring over his word for hundreds of years he's also got great books of aphorisms he's funny he is rude he's tough you know he really does put skin in the game I wouldn't want to tangle with him but he's definitely up there nick szabo is also another polymath kind of genius that I like like reading listening to radios the principles I think it was I think it was really good but then after about 10 pages I lost the plot he should just write the shorter version I'd love to see the version that would have been written by Ray Dalio or the popper rather than drain dolly at the billionaire is Elon Musk the real deal I think so but I don't have insider information but I think so look at the very least every time one of those rockets launches and a whole bunch of kids watch it they get inspired or doing something big you know it's it's children need that I really respect that he's actually trying to save the world I mean well you know I must is the one guy I look at and I'm like maybe I'm not doing enough of my life thoughts and universal basic income I actually don't think it's a great idea I think in the slippery slide the socialism once the bottom 51% finds out they can vote themselves everything's on top 49% then you kind of just end up with everybody being poor I think ubi is bad I think it's better to create meaningful jobs for people give them unlimited education give them healthcare you know give them benefits but straight up cash transfers I think you're robbing people of meaning and motivation and then you're really setting up a zero-sum game where everyone gets focused and dividing up the pie I would rather take the same exact amount of money and figure out how to help people you know do meaningful work and create meaningful businesses and get meaningful education well Amazon be dreamed a monopoly and broken out you know it's interesting Ben Thompson has written a lot about the new aggregators which are essentially these modern demand-driven monopolies as opposed to supply-side monopolies the old monopolies used in monopolized supply so Rockefeller had all the oil Carnegie had all the steel and so they could charge high prices but that's not how the new monopolies work the new monopolies are aggregators they actually get all the demand so all the users go to Amazon all the users go to Facebook all the users go to Twitter and then they squeeze the suppliers in the backend and they deliver very low prices or zero prices to consumers so where's the harm there's no high prices the harm is in the supplier side the harm is and there's less competition the harm isn't a single voice controlling all voices so these modern monopolies are much much harder to identify it let alone to regulate so I I just don't know how you would break up in Amazon you could separate AWS from their core business but that doesn't affect any familias have two monopolies maybe on the Facebook and Twitter side you can force them to open up data sharing graph or protocol or api's Amazon I just don't see how you can break it up without destroying all the consumer consumed can be you were literally destroyed you know tons of value in any case these these companies are not going to be destroyed by the US government although the Elizabeth Warren's of the world coming into power may be a different story I think she's very Pro regulation of tech companies and so as a Oh see there have you Pro regular Pro regulators they'll probably be the most fearsome enemies attack companies have faced in a while but the bigger issue is gonna come from the Europeans it's gonna come from startups and maybe someday from blockchain based decentralization blockchain decentralization is still far off though outside of California where would you live I like on Austin I think Austin Texas is a great town New York was my hometown of Akron a little bit you know like I said California is monopoly and all the warm dry coastline in the United States so they've just got you know they've got the natural resources and everything else follows from there I've never been to Nashville to the person who mentioned Nashville I should check it out do I think India is a good place to start a tech company probably I'm not on the ground India so I don't know what the local regulations are like but the talent pool is definitely there there english-speaking so that's a huge bonus you've got a large market so that's another huge bonus the problem is of course is the country's poor the telecommunications infrastructure is not great and the government you know tends to be very controlling but you know if the cards line up India could be the next China or even bigger again because because India's english-speaking and because the democracy unlike China is not gonna wallets lalafell at rest of the world both in language or in internet so you know it properly run managed growing India modernizing will probably have a much bigger impact in the world and even China did and will do great things for the environment because the environment India is terrible and you know once Indians get rich and they started caring about their environment then it'll be a different story have to sell everything you own it by one asset and hold for twenty years what is it you buy okay this is not investment advice but I would buy a Bitcoin if I could only hold one asset that would be too I should follow my own advice how is your diet these days I wish it was better I'm on the failure diet you know paleo but I feel a lot I try a little bit of intermittent fasting also I should do more of that today I just had dinner I didn't have breakfast for lunch I do own Bitcoin but it's through funds and it's not enough the problem is I'm too high-profile to hold my own Bitcoin so historically have gone through funds but in the future I think I'm gonna start buying some and storing with Anchorage which still company invested or that I think as rock-solid custody and they just launched so also the prices are lower these days don't buy Bitcoin just for this and so please you'll probably lose like money what's my motivation to do this periscope I'm bored same as you why are you here how do you practically go by destroying the self that would be three hours of conversation in minimum I thought this in a couple Gupta or read but he's writing Eve he has one path towards it it's his path but it's very inspirational to see him on and I think his path is via negativa right sort of removing everything the disenchantment with the world realization seeing understanding of the world with nothing to offer that's his path to destroying herself ramanamma is she you know did it through who I am I there are people who have done it by you know asking what is true they're people who have done it because their life has just been so terrible if they've had no choice but I think there are probably as many paths as there are people do I still have my inner voice thank you it's here it's right here unfortunately unfortunately I mean you need it it's manageable it's part of you but it's just shouldn't it shouldn't run the show do I think intelligent people should have more kids I think everybody should have kids kids are great kids are you're you know you're here because an unbroken chain of your ancestors from tadpoles all the way till now replicate are you gonna be the first one to miss that branch I mean don't do it your genes will hate you advice from people in their 20s the 20s are fabulous you have energy you have independence you know the world is kind of your oyster I read I read this really good piece of advice on Twitter that stuck with me and frankly this is why I stay on Twitter to learn things like this that I can easily remember which said you know pick three hobbies one that makes you money one that keeps you fit and one that keeps you creative the beauty of that is if these are hobbies then you'll kind of hit these major things in your life and you'll do them without what while loving all the moments that you're doing it and you can substitute those three of whatever you want so it doesn't have to be about money it doesn't have to be about physical fitness it doesn't have to be a creativity although that I think those be good starting ones let's just have the original 20 this phrase but if you want to if there's something in your life that is non-negotiable that you want to be you want it to be true with you for the rest of your life then find a hobby that will get you there my creative hobby it's funny you ask that actually Twitter advice for people in their 40s yeah that's that that's actually a better question you know everyone has advice only to 20s so that let's explore that question for a second why do we have advice for people in their 20s but not for people in their 40s I think it's because we assume somewhat rightly that people in their 40s have a you know are fixed they can't change they they are incapable of change and part of that is physical part of that substantial so my advice to people in their 40s would mean to try and to figure out how to change your life so that advice for their twenties applies to you basically what that means is you have to get physically fit enough that you still see the future you know if you can still make changes and do things and that you keep learning and like a young person's your brain says actually you're not afraid of pain in new disciplines easier said than done I know of course in your forties your many responsibilities but in some in some way you know some of that is mental so at least the part that's mental learn how to get rid of it what is that noise it's a fun way I believe it's a fireplace if everyone will wait one minute I'm gonna go turn it off and see if there's all right hopefully it's better a certain value actually full of wolves Psychopaths and sociopaths as the media says no it's not I mean it's easy to pick on people I would say the Silicon Valley is no more full of Psychopaths and sociopaths in the media second it's just the in-group out-group thing what's actually going on is you know I'm not offering an opinion on this but the media is dying that the mass media is dying the classic mass media is dying and it's time for a number of reasons you know the first reason it was dying has nothing to do with you know the current social media companies it was it was Craigslist Craig this blew up the classified advertising model for newspapers then CNN blew up the nightly news and you know once you had CNN you didn't tune in to NBC anymore and now you needed 24-hour news networks and 24-hour news networks need to generate content 24 hours at a time to the switch to being these opinion networks and analysis networks at that point they lost their credibility because of lost objectivity not that media was ever fully objective but at least it was like made a pretense at objectivity they tried to show both sides but now I think we have you know media getting blown up by Craigslist by you know kind of this opinion cycle that they've gotten into code 24-hour news and then the last piece is the Internet itself with you know the way the internet puts all news in competition with each other all at once and then of course social media where everyone's a reporter everyone's a journalist so the media's business model is going away and they're they hate it obviously no it's an entire industries being eliminated and yeah there will be some survivors there'll be you know New York Times and anyone who can aggregate a lot of users which is just a few outlets and there'll be a few they're like very partisan and emotionally driven but but essentially the media is dying and they're currently going through the blame game and the current one to blame is Silicon Valley so they're attacking Silicon Valley they everything Silicon Valley does but hey you know Silicon Valley also disrupted Hollywood also will disrupt Wall Street and its tech it's not even something values Tech so the media is not happy about that I understand what the noise is people are saying there's a noise I don't hear a noise so I'm sorry if it's a noise our banks dying two banks would be dead already if they weren't protected by regulations but the same financial regulations that supposedly keep the banks in check keep the startups out that's the problem with regulations every time we demand regulations what we actually do is we freeze the incumbents in place it's like look at the scooter companies right when the scooter business first started out everyone said well these are gonna be great businesses because there's a barrier to entry in that you know we have these exclusive scooters that turned out not to be the case China just dumped scooters on every provider so then it was like oh the barrier to entry is we have the charger and network in the mechanics well that's not a barrier not everyone is chargers and mechanics so now what they're hoping for is that the barrier to entry will be regulations that they'll have a small number of licenses that nobody else has so regulators although they come in to prevent the the excess is and the bad behavior of the current companies they prevent new companies from coming in and they freeze the industry place so banks survive because of regulators that's the irony now the noise is gone so maybe it was the fireplace that's weird it wasn't that noisy to me here sorry about that will I be doing this live regularly you know it's a I run out of material I'm just gonna be repeating myself it's like that Farnam Street podcast that I did in 2017 that one went super viral and people liked it a lot I'm not a hundred percent sure why I have some theories but I'm not really sure and I've been back since even the Shane was kind of to invite me because that's a hard act to follow it's better to go at the top it's it's the Matrix Reloaded problem you know they should have stopped the Matrix trilogy after the first movie but because they had to make two more went from great to terrible our software engineers underpaid in general no but the problem is because software engineering is such a creative task it is highly nonlinear output a not very good engineer is worthless compared to a great engineer who's worth maybe a hundred other engineers so when you pay on the average the problem is by definition most are overpaid and if you are underpaid but you can't tell which ones but I think in general like the industry is catching up I mean today in Silicon Valley if you're a you know a fresh graduate even and you're going to a Google or a Facebook and engineering you're probably making I would guess this is a guess but I'd guess you're making about three to five hundred thousand dollars per year once your total package with benefits and everything and equity is taken into account now that may sound insane Lehigh but keep in mind Silicon Valley is also the most expensive place to live in North America thoughts of attending college yeah just learn something that you can't learn on your own like for example you know a biology lab or in your computer science or mathematics those things are hard to pick up on your own but when I got into college I was I originally you know I wanted to be at physics physics was really hard my math wasn't good enough then I switched to English in history but I was doing great I was getting straight floros and it was easy and you know it was easy straight but I realized like that was something I could have done my own there's no need to get an Ivy League education just for you know English and history so I switched to computer science and economics at least the computer science part would have been harder to learn outside of college economics was my college for that so I would say if you're if you're going to college if you're spending the money or spending the time you know that's a very high opportunity cost and so learn something that you would not on your own and that will be foundational in the rest of your life example it's better to do math and never go into a math related career that is to for example say do history and not go into a history related career because the foundation math is helpful in so many other ways in your life where it's like history may not apply as brought thee I don't mean to pick on history in particular I just mean like when you get a mismatch between what you studied in school and what you end up doing in life the consequences that mismatch are much greater outside of the STEM fields am I on a construction site no I'm a commercial kitchen god there must be the earpods I don't know what else could be it must be the air pods there's no chair I'm sitting on the floor I'm gonna cushion on the floor okay I'm gonna I'm gonna hop out I guess the audio is so bad that it's not worth continuing mm-hmm let me let me try something else in the audio give me the give me the soundcheck now how's the sound oh so I guess the air pods were the problem that's weird this is just a normal iPhone nothing special well okay anyway we've been going for quite a while so we're gonna we're gonna hop off I think we're done people want to keep going I'm getting tired too we get five more minutes let's see if we can get one more rant going and then then we'll drop out okay we'll go for five more minutes you know what I would love I would love an app where I could just pick one person who has a question and then I could just press the button and bring them in via audio and then we could just chat together we could actually have a conversation because what I'd love to be able to do is I think there are two topics that I can share that I think people want to know about or most people want to know about one is obviously how to make money how to how to create wealth and hopefully a positive some ethical way and the second is just how to learn how to be more happy and more peaceful and more content in life and I I used to be poor and miserable and now you know I'm pretty peaceful and I'm pretty well-off and so I would love to share those with people but it's a little weird doing it in the abstract right when you go on Twitter and you send out these tweets you're forced to compress huge amounts of what you think you know into very few words and it gets misinterpreted and and people don't understand it it's not it doesn't feel real it just it's inspirational which is great but even to me it feels like it just feels that fortune cookie advice so what I'd love to be able to do is to actually pick specific people and just talk to them about what their issues are and that's all no one needs to pay me it's just for fun yeah I couldn't do that an Instagram live except I never want to open Instagram this the idea of a community around photo sharing that's not not who I am I like Twitter because ideas I don't I don't want to live in a world of photos Instagram seems like a big world of look at me you know in Envy inducing if you want to talk Rene Girard and mimetic theory you know that's all on display on on Instagram do I have a view on someone spending a hundred million dollars in a boat yeah they spent it so I went to the boat makers and the people working in the boat yards and those people spend it on food and yeah money gets spent on all kinds of things we spent trillions of dollars and blowing people up and I'm aircraft and aircraft carriers and submarines and nuclear weapons I mean most money gets wasted most of the time that's just the nature of the beast but you have to let that process play out the moment you inject your finger in that process and you destroy the market that exists there then you then all you replace with its power and when you come in with power and force you you stop creativity you you scare off the makers the history of the human civilization a lot of it is just this this battle between kind of producers and parasites and there's always more parasites and producers and the beauty of a country like the United States where there's free markets and rule of law is that the producers actually get to have a play for a while and if you open the door and two people sort of seizing you know what they're creating you're gonna then force the way the producers gonna create a parasite economy it's not good so somebody wants to blow one hundred million dollars in a yacht let them what they actually did was they got rid of one hundred million dollars that went into the pockets of all will hopefully spend it more wisely if you want to make money sell things to rich people what do I spend money on it's a good question not a lot I mean I don't really even own a big house we lived in a very small place for a while and now we're renting a larger place but we don't you know I don't believe in real estate I fly business class that's probably about it I like traveling business class that's my vice now that way I can sleep on the plane but everything else electronics I buy the latest Apple products all the time that's about it I don't own any jewelry I don't buy my wife any jewelry no art those are all stupid things I mean sure if you love them go for it no there's no yachts there's no planes none of that since we have a Tesla so I guess we own a car one car even that honestly I could probably do without I mean in other of the luxuries I take a lot of lubbers uber X's why don't I believe in real estate I don't think it's a very good investment unless you are a pro at real estate which I'm not I'd rather stick to my knitting and it ties you down I think just the mobility constraint that it puts on you alone costs you far more in the real estate did also in San Francisco is this a bad deal I don't believe in real estate as an investment asset class for non professionals if you're a real estate professional by all means go for it if you're not a real estate professional I don't think it's a good way to make money thoughts on dating yeah you should date I mean tinder makes it so easy right the tools now are incredible for meeting people it's just that you're biologically hardwired to not like rejection because we evolved in much smaller groups but now that we live in these giant cities and we have access to millions of people via tinder you kind of just have to get over your fear of rejection and you know the more the more you see ya the better decision you'll make when it comes time for you to get married that said I think one regret that I do have in life was spending too much time in relationships after I knew they should have ended it was just a waste of time for everybody especially the women how do you tell your future kid that you met their mom and tinder I don't know it's just get over yourself get over it technology's not good or evil to the tool it's like you know you met her at a Starbucks what's the difference do I have - issues like We Need to Talk you know there's an old saying that no man is a prophet in his own land P ro Phe T no man is a prophet in his own land that's unfortunately true you know you guys want to hear me talk in periscope my wife is sick of me she's great though she puts up with me I run very independently do you know many founders who are able to keep fitness goals while starting a company yeah you know the hard thing is like you're supposed to be a tech founder and you're supposed to meditate and you're supposed to workout and you're supposed to eat right bla bla bla very hard what walking meetings helps a lot I think just keep walking and don't eat too much fitness isn't as much about exercise as it is or at least weight loss is not as much about exercise or intense exercise as it is about just walking a lot and eating less if you walk a lot and you don't eat too much you'll be pretty fit you'll be fit enough with running for miles every other day is when you reach your 40s you will realize that your knees will give out and it's just not worth it so running is you know fun and beautiful but boy the toll of your knees is a vicious so if you're gonna run do it on trails or grass or you know use vibrance or just find a way it's not gonna destroy your knees too many people I know who are runners or have you know just have injuries and these are these are not temporary injury these are lifelong chronic sort of injuries pewdiepie I have no idea what that controversy is about I just think it's really fun to see like a young boy on YouTube taking down the entire media it's like David and Goliath and I'm just automatically built to root for David all right I think we're running out here so advice for sleeping I've used this one before but try meditating in bed either you fall asleep or you meditate either way it's a win but really the reason you're having trouble sleeping is because your mind is running and your mind is running and because it's full of unresolved junk and that's exactly what meditation does it helps you sort out that unresolved general all right I'm gonna hop off thank you everyone have a great night thanks for joining be well

Channel: TruthQuest AI

Views: 34,257

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Id: _jvQkBFg4oQ

Length: 112min 55sec (6775 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 28 2019