The Life-Changing Power Of Changing Your Perspective - Derek Sivers

what do you mean when you talk about useful not true oh diving right in um for years I write things that are sharing my point of view on something I share a point of view I find useful and I state it as a fact I say for example uh men and women are the same and I choose that belief for example uh to counterbalance my tendency to think of men and women as more different than they actually are so I would deliberately choose a belief that helps counteract my Tendencies right in the same way that somebody who has a tendency to be late to things might leave start leaving what seems unreasonably early which helps them get there on time right so there are many beliefs in life that I choose as a countermeasure but when I express this belief publicly there was often somebody saying but that's not true men and women are different I say I know it's not true true is not the point what the hell is true anyway I'm choosing this belief because it's useful to me not because it's true and this subject came up a few times even when I was writing a book about business I would say something like marketing is just another way of being considerate and there would always be somebody to say hm well that's not always true and say I know it's not true but this is a nicer way of thinking of marketing instead of thinking like how can I annoy people and spam them if you think of marketing as whatever you're doing to be considerate to help people remember you to help people find you uh it's a better way of thinking about it I find it more useful to think that way so I realized there was a theme underneath my previous four books which is that I choose beliefs because they're useful not because they're necessarily true I love this idea so you uh I think George Mack good friend of mine uh phenomenal writer got a copy of your book before maybe it even been announced or maybe early on and uh we'd been talking about something which is literally true but fun Al false for two years two and a half years uh or functionally true but literally false and I was like oh Derek's got it like he's nailed it this is the exact thing that we've been talking about for ages so I was super excited to be able to have this conversation because it's kind of a pet project of mine too um the best examples that I've got something which is uh functionally true but literally false porcupines can throw their quills no they can't they're not darts players they can't throw their quills but if you treat a porcupine as if it can throw its quills you're less likely to go away from it um walking under a ladder is bad luck no it's not I I I I am yet to see any evidence that people who have walked under a ladder result in worse luck over the next however many decades of their life but if you evade walking under ladders you are less likely to have paint cans and plant pots and humans dropped on your head uh pigs are morally dirty creatures and that means that you should never touch them or eat them not true as far as I'm aware the moral status of pigs is equivalent to that of cows and chickens and everything else but their flesh does carry a higher pathogen load on average so if you avoid eating it adaptively that's protective to you especially if you were perhaps let's say in the Middle East in a place which is quite warm and doesn't have great sanitary conditions and it's the Middle Ages uh and the reverse something which would be uh literally true but functionally false much harder to find at least in my opinion uh would be free will doesn't exist so a deterministic view of the world uh one which may laws of physics and a bit of philosophy kind of seems to say to people smarter than me that this might be the case uh but when you actually try and functionally use that or usefully use that in your life uh it kind of of results in a lot of people becoming nihilistic or fatalistic or apathetic or just a bit sad or something uh and I guess another one uh so like always treating the gun like it's loaded is is another sort of twist on this beautiful example uh so yes this is a a topic that uh me and you and a couple of my friends have been pointing at from different directions and I'm very glad that someone's finally come along and put it into a single piece of work thanks and then the hard part for me was to make it catchy I decided with this book I was aiming to be catchy because I wanted the little examples to stick in your head for years afterwards so my first drafts I was trying to dump everything I knew about this subject um because I didn't know a lot about the subject beforehand I went and read many books about pragmatism and skepticism and nihilism and then read uh every book I could about um uh what do you call that the the study of Religion theology uh I read the Bible cover to cover read every single page and uh read books about Islam and Judaism tried to read two books about Hinduism I still don't get it um and uh and only and and what you see in this little tiny 100 page book that you can read in 90 minutes or less uh is me trying to take everything I learned about this subject and compressing it into short memorable little fables I read it on a flight from Austin to Nashville which for the people that have taken it is not a long flight and and I was taking notes so yeah uh very parab I love memes I think that uh um Steven pressfield's books uh both of them are fantastic that format's great Oliver burkman's most recent one is very similar to yours I think that was zeroing in on a a new very concentrated uh type of so like purified version of of writing and I'm I'm here for it so kind of taking the the thesis of the book overall there's five sections I'm really excited to go through and I want to go through some of my favorite stories and and chapters and lessons and stuff like that but a lot of what we're talking about today is a kind of reframing in one form or another yeah why is reframing important reframing is everything reframing is not just a good way to feel better about things out of your control but reframing helps concrete strategy uh even just whether in business or just life and what you choose to do with your life and how you choose to approach anything reframing is it's what it's all about man I think reframing is what helps you look at any situation and understand that you've got a default instinctual reflective reaction to anything but that's not the only way to see it and it helps so much to detach from your first reaction and call it what it is it's just my first reaction it's not the only way to see this and to do good old-fashioned brainstorming techniques to say okay what are some other ways to look at this and not stop after the first two or three but push yourself into going to the edges and thinking of some radically different ways to look at this um and what you come out with is either a smarter strategy or a unique Insight uh a different approach that most people don't take and hadn't thought of because it doesn't come naturally it's not very intuitive um all of these I think all of the best stuff for me in life has happened from these moments where I think harder and think past my first reaction to something and find a a new approach to a business or new approach to where I'm living in the world or a new approach to Parenting or whatnot uh everything to me all the best stuff in life has come from the deliberate process of conscious reframing what would you say to the people who go well that's all well and good you positive mental attitude and such but it's wishful thinking you know that the the thing is the thing and this sort of version of trying to recapitulate it into some other uh perspective that doesn't fundamentally change the thing what's your what's your thoughts there I'm trying to think of more day-to-day examples actually I'm going to think of one from a friend that just came to me this morning uh Tim Ferris long ago said that when he's trying to figure out a book to read on a certain subject he wants to find a good book book on any given subject he'll go to Amazon and look at the well-rated books but he said the I look at other people's reviews but he said I don't look at the good reviews what I do is I find the top rated critical review he said because I don't want to hear praise for the book he said I want to hear criticism against the book and I went oh that's a nice technique look at the top rated critical review as they have them sorted into praise and critical um and another one from Tim that came to mind is when brainstorming a book he said I will hire a journalist to to push back he said journalists and lawyers are the the two that I've found are the best at pushing back on an idea and challenging an idea I have so when I'm thinking of a new book to write I don't want somebody to just tell me this is a great idea I want somebody to push back and say this is maybe a bad idea to be writing about and finding counter ideas to that so both of those uh just you know the morning an hour before we hit record I was looking for a book on Amazon and remembering Tim's technique of finding the critical reviews and thought see these are two very ex good examples of approaches that would not come instinctually but come after deeper thought and pushing harder to find a a way of reframing what you're really doing here am I looking for encouragement or am I looking for discour enagement so that I can push through so there anyway that's just one tiny example um but more examples come up all the time in uh something I'd like to talk about in a minute that's not in the book I'm just curious to hear your thoughts about is when we choose to think of something from scratch to kind of break it down to say okay wait hold on what's the real point of what I'm doing here forget the norms and what most people do uh what's the essence of what I'm trying to go for here and reframing can be a really good way to strip away the ceremony and the habits and the instincts and the norms and ask yourself what you're really doing and what's the real point the reason that I like reframing is largely in life things aren't what they are things are what we think they are yeah and we confuse the two we get confused we think that we have this precise accurate unbiased transparent perfectly recorded view of yeah of things that are happening have happened to us um and we see so well the fallibility in other people the the way that they convince themselves or are manipulated by others or swayed by their past experience uh meanwhile we assume that the way that we see the world upon First Impressions we have this sort of mass solipsism Mass individual solipsism more sort of ego like narcissist I that's for other people but me me my my first impressions about the world they're always correct uh my favorite I think example of this can you retell your car accident story yeah that was um yeah the past we tend to think of the past like it's a Concrete thing like you just said uh when I was 17 I was in in a car crash uh in my neighborhood in Hinsdale Illinois um I blew off a yield sign crashed into an oncoming car and just in the confusion in days afterwards somebody told me later that the woman in the oncoming car that I hit that uh I broke her spine and she will never walk again but this was about a month before I went off to University in Boston and so it's like I kind of left Hinsdale Illinois and didn't go back but I carried this burden with me that every now and then I just think man that is so [ __ ] up like there's some woman somewhere that will never walk again because I blew off that yield sign oh I just like just carried this burden with me you know you put it out of your head sometimes and it comes back sometimes and after 16 years or in my mid-30s I was back in Hinsdale Illinois and I thought I'm going to go find that woman that I hit so I went like found her name and the oldfashioned White Pages phone book and I just showed up at her door and knocked on the door and she answered and I said hi uh my name is Derek I'm the one that when I was a teenager I hit your car and and I like started crying it was like all this like pent up burden years of regret just like came out I started crying on her doorstep and she's like oh sweetie sweetie don't worry don't worry here come in and she walked me into her living room walked and it took me a second to put this together because I was you know upset I went wait what and she explained that yes she broke a vertebrae in that crash but she's been walking just fine uh and so it was misinformation that somebody told me that she'll never walk again and um she said you know I was I was a lot heavier then I was a compulsive eater and she said that's why I hit you is I was eating and not paying attention to the road I was eating while driving and she said that accident really um turned me around because I realized what a compulsive eater I was that I actually you know hit some poor innocent teenager because I was eating and I said wait you didn't hit me I hit you cuz I blew off the yel CH she said no sweetie I hit you cuz I was eating I said and she goes wait all these years you thought that you hit me and then she started crying and she goes so stupid these stories and and uh yeah was just this moment where we realized like we had both been holding on to this story of what happened and both feeling guilty about it for 18 years so what do you take away from that what's the lesson every story anybody tells you about their past here's what happened my ex jumped me with no warning uh this person wronged me this person said they were going to do something and then ran away with the money and didn't do what they said they were going to do uh all these stories we carry with us of people who have wronged us and people who are just bad and evil uh it's a great reminder that there's always another perspective there's always another version of that story and the one that you've been carry around or the one that somebody else tells you is probably not the only version of that story and uh then you can even zoom out and think about um all the history that we learn in school and the tales of what happened in World War II and all of these things have many different perspectives I never watched 500 Days of Summer but I think you convinced me that I maybe should go back and watch it for the people who haven't seen it what's the what's the thesis of that movie is a cute Romance movie from uh maybe 15 years ago and uh the point is that the whole movie is basically a guy saying yeah this girl we were we were in love we were together we'd been together for a few months everything was great I found the love of my life and then just one day out of the blue she just dumped me for no reason and he spends most of the movie being feeling sorry for himself self and down in the dumps and why does this true love not why did she dump me out of the blue and it's not until his little sister near the end of the movie says you know next time you look back I think you should look again and then what I love is the movie does something wonderful is it replays for you those same scenes it showed you earlier in the movie but now the camera lingers just a little bit longer and you see that like when earlier we saw him like we saw her look up and smile at him now the camera stays a little longer and you realize it was one of these Smiles that like lasts for one second and then completely drops when he's not looking and you see them holding hands you see them like this moment where they hold hands but now the camera lingers a little longer and you see that he reaches out to hold her hand and then she kind of pulls away and now you realize through the art of film editing that she never she was never into him but our mind does the same thing as movies our mind picks single moments and finds tiny little moments where somebody that was otherwise nice did something bad or somebody that was otherwise bad did something nice and focuses in on the moments that we want to extract to tell the story that we want to tell ourselves or others and we start ignoring all the other moments and so this is true also with any perspective anybody tells you about the world I love this idea that the facts might be true but the perspective is not somebody can say uh here's one I just heard yesterday the the new Medicaid budget at the government is going to cost American taxpayers $380 billion look how wasteful that is and that might be a true fact that it's going to cost $380 billion the fact that they're ignoring is that the current plan costs $490 billion and so they're choosing a perspective that wasteful by by selecting only this one specific fact and ignoring the other facts and we all do this in life when you say you encounter a mean person or somebody being mean yeah let's even that I just said a mean person as if that's a character trait but no it might just be a person who was being unkind in that moment that you encounter and especially let's say if you're traveling you're on a holiday to uh Romania a place you've never been before and the first person you encounter is uh unkind to you say people in Romania are mean and people here are bad and we make these perspectives like the economy is going to hell or AI is stealing everyone's jobs you do this by selecting tiny little facts and using that to support an entire perspective and what I love realizing and this is the whole long answer to your question about the movie 500 Days of Summer and him focusing in on the little moments where she smiled at him and the little moments where they held hands he's using those select moments to say she loved me and we use these select moments to say things are getting worse because look at this fact but you only choose that perspective when you ignore all the other facts so you have to realize that there's a big difference between facts and perspective that the facts can be true but their perspective is never true because I sorry we didn't mention maybe we should have said at the beginning my definition of true is like absolutely necessarily objectively empirically true any creature or machine could observe it and agree and only in that case would I call something true because whatever you consider true is closed no further questioning it's a fact and that's that so I think it's important to be careful with that word true and Define it as narrowly as possible because everything that's true is not up for negotiation there's no other way to see it squares have four sides that's that um everything else there can be different ways of looking at it so it's nice to remind yourself what few things are actually true and that everything else is up for reframing I think going into November this is probably quite an important uh thing to remind everybody of um you've got this lovely idea about uh perspectives feel real that one person's undeniable fact is another person's incorrect opinion essentially and uh I I love the reality of that people share perspectives not facts nobody bonds over facts I I looked at a study recently you basically get about three times as much retention after uh 24 hours from telling somebody a story than telling somebody a fact about the same story so you know humans grew up in an environment that wasn't rich in facts but was pretty rich in stories perhaps unsurprisingly were adapted to be able to hold on to the stories so these perspectives especially if it's got a compelling narrative behind it feels real it feels more real than the fact that we might actually be underlying that or might even be contradicting it because the story the the the way that you are brought into this the framing of the landscape of this discussion is so much more compelling and uh yeah the fact that one person's undeniable fact is another person's incorrect opinion I think is um it just shows how it's the blind men touching the elephant thing right yeah yeah well the way that I structure the book is the way that I would do it in conversation with somebody too is to first point out other people's faults because it's so easy to look at those people those stupid people that think that their politician is the good one those stupid people that think that they uh whatever social values stance is the correct one uh what idiots look at them like spouting it as if it's the only way when I think that's stupid uh that's so much easier to see other people being wrong and we can point at their faults and even somebody who tells you a soab story about a breakup they had uh with somebody that wronged them it's easier to look at that friend and say you know that might not be the only way of looking at this maybe you were in the wrong um it's easier to do that and it is so hard to then turn that back at yourself and say wait a minute maybe all of my social values and political opinions are really stupid maybe all of my perspectives on things that happened in the past are just me making myself the hero of a fictional story um or this the the noble victim um maybe everything every opinion I hold as fact is just not true it's just one way of seeing it and even though I've been completely focused on this subject for the last couple years writing this book I still would catch myself in these moments like I live in Wellington New Zealand which is like a it's like an okay little city in Wellington uh and I catch myself saying things like well is a bad place to do such and such and I catch myself going whoa wait a second I'm stating that like a fact that's not a fact that's not true that's just one way of looking at it whoa how else could I look at it and the important thing is maybe the where we need to go with this point next is when you have a variety of opinions that you could adopt you have to just notice in yourself which way of looking at it works for you whether that makes you take smarter actions or whether that just helps you feel at peace with things that are out of your control none of these perspectives are necessarily right or wrong the real judge is your own actions what does it do for you how will you act if you adopt this perspective how will you act if you adopt that perspective let's just say if you decide that there are no good jobs out there that there's uh nobody's making any money nobody has any money and there's no good work okay if you choose to adopt that perspectives what action does that create in you if that makes you just sit on your couch eating chips and watching TV and giving up maybe that's not working for you maybe you should try another perspective maybe for some people that idea that nobody's got any money there are no good jobs out there for somebody that perspective makes them go yeah so I'm going to start my own thing I'm GNA do this like I'm gonna fight against all the odds you know I've got my back against the ropes I'm like the boxer in the 18th round or whatever who's going to come back at this thing fighting it all depends on how you respond to that perspective that you're going to choose and then choose the perspective based on how it's making you respond so given that the fact almost nothing people say is true what is the relationship between that and rules that we have in society I don't know you tell me what you taught me the most interesting one of the most interesting things that I've learned especially again going into November when the founding fathers of the United States of America were drafting the Constitution it was assumed that this new country would have three six or 12 presidents when someone proposed having only one president most delegates were against it since they had just left a kingdom and wanted nothing like a king the issue was debated for weeks before finally agreeing by a 7 to3 vote to have just one president it's a reminder that the way things are is arbitrary and not the only way seven to three vote resulted in the in like the most powerful most influential country with the most humans on the planet the fundamentally being changed that's so that's so what I didn't know that the constitution had assumed that there would be this sort of I don't know like Council of presidents yeah would have been a very different situation huh wildly um thanks for that reminder yeah that actually came from AJ Jacobs his new newest book is called I think living constitutionally or something like that he's the one that revealed that fact for me so thanks AJ Jacobs um rules yeah thanks for that reminder it um once you realize how arbitrary the world is you can also see rules through this lens even just day-to-day rules a business saying you can't do this uh no you must go to this booth first and get your number and then you must wait in line and this is how this system works uh there's so many examples uh where hopefully we all have examples from our own life where you bypassed the rules and thrived because of it that you you can understand why they're there in the same way I thought it was beautiful the way that you started this conversation with the examples of the ladder uh and the pork that there are okay we can understand there are reasons why people came up with these rules it makes the system work better if everybody follows the rules but if you understand that that's just most of the time that there are some situations where it just makes sense for everything considered and nobody's going to be harmed by not following this rule in this moment classic example is uh a red stoplight in the middle of nowhere at 3: in the morning where you can just clearly see that there's nobody coming in any direction it doesn't make logical sense to sit there and wait for a whole minute for the light to turn green you understand why it's there but come on it's 3 in the morning there's nobody here um except the aliens uh and um there's some rules like that where yeah I've I've thrived in life by breaking some of these rules and isn't there a um I don't usually do exact quotes but something like uh reasonable men and the world depends on some people being unreasonable oh I'm not familiar I'm not familiar with that but it sounds a lot like uh the people that I like to hang around with the the unreasonableness ress depends on the the occasional person being unreasonable because you realize that rules are not etched in stone they're ever changing and they're adapting and that if everybody only ever follows the rules then nothing ever progresses sometimes you need somebody to break the rules or point out that that rule is immoral and let's look at say like Rosa Parks or uh slavery rules or apartheid rules uh that were good thing that somebody started breaking those rules and pointed out that those rules are no longer um we should no longer follow those yeah it's very useful to have a set of rules that are unwaveringly followed because it gives most people a largely uh Pitfall avoiding rubric for how they can go about life right like you you might not expedite success but you'll kind of avoid catastrophe for the most right perfect example I was at the uh uh uii Gallery in uh Florence a couple of weeks ago and there is a large line for the bathroom uh for the ladies and there was no disabled people around but there as a disabled stall that was being unused by both men and women so one of the women skipped out of the queue went down went into the disabled thing and I thought well there is a rule that disabled people should be the people to use the disabled toilet but if there's no disabled people around and if the queue for the ladies is so long that it's holding up other people who might actually be old or something or needs to get to the bathroom more quickly than you do then that seems kind of almost like The Virtuous thing to do I guess The Virtuous thing would have been to have got one of the older women and put them in the disabled toilet but that's kind of a little bit weird so um you know what I mean so it's it's agency it's it's it's playing playing with the rules when it's safe to do so so knowing the ones that are meant to be bent and sometimes the ones that are meant to be ignored and broken entirely uh and then also sticking to them too but I I think the you know the reason that we have this it's a coordination uh problem it's trying to get Society to work it wouldn't do for us to say to it the reason that rules are there is so that you don't need to from first principles work out what you're supposed to do each time it's not a freefor all Royal Rumble to see who gets the bathroom stall first you have person that arrives first stands first and then second stands second and then third and so on and so forth uh but yeah that I I saw that happen only a couple of weeks ago and I immediately thought of this sort of idea of rule followers and Rule Benders in the same scenario yeah one of my favorite things about writing a book is when you discover new insights in the writing so it's not just sitting down to tell you what I already know it's me sitting down to dive into this subject for you know 12 hours a day for 2 years and in doing that I came up with this Insight I went rules themselves are useful not true that rules except you know the rules are not like a law of gravity it's they're not laws of nature they are useful guidelines to keep Society Running well they're useful and it really helps you to see it from the system's point of view to see like you just did why is this rule useful this rule is useful because if somebody comes up in a wheelchair and needs the bathroom they shouldn't have to wait in this long queue with everybody else but if you look around nobody's in a wheelchair and if you're going to be quick then we if we understand the the purpose of that rule and nobody is harmed by us breaking that rule then it can actually be both logical and even moral to ignore that rule right now not harming the system not harming anybody yeah okay so if we've convinced uh most people that what other people say almost nothing of what other people say is true how do we take them to the next step which is that their thoughts their own thoughts are also not true well first just realize that you are them that you that you are them to somebody else that from everybody else's point of view you are the the odd one um my two favorite little examples of this are an old joke of a man is traveling through the countryside and comes to a river he can't figure out how to cross there's a woman on the other side of the river and he says excuse me Madam how do I get to the other side of the river and she goes you are on the other side of the river I was like well from her point of view and uh and another one is an American woman goes to Scotland for her first time and she's just be in a bar full of people and she's talking to these guys and she goes I just love your all accent and they go we don't have an accent you do it's like oh right all of us have an accent we all think that our the way we speak is the normal one and it's the other people that have an accent but no I am speaking with an American accent right now uh it's a nice reminder so yeah you are the other to everyone else so you are them so all of the rules that you've just happily taken on board to identify how illogical and irrational and flawed and biased everybody else is needs to be turned around and point it at yourself yeah uh yeah then we can get into if do you want to get into that stuff about the the split brain patience and how we lie to ourselves that would be great this was a mindblower so we all believe our brain but our brain makes up things confabulation uh and this was r revealed very clearly in tests with split brain patients people who have had some kind of problem with their brain so that the left and right hemispheres that are connected through uh a pretty surprisingly narrow uh connection in the middle um if there's a problem uh brain surgeons can uh disconnect that middle uh sorry I forget the the Latin official term the thing that connects your left and right half to your brain and surprisingly once that's severed the people can live surprisingly normal lives and they're just like you and me except they psychologists use them for studies to see okay well hey you're one of the rare people on Earth whose right and left hemispheres of your brain are not communicating with each other directly can I ask you a question and so they would show a message to one eye saying uh please get up and close the door and the person would get up and close the door and then they'd show a question to the other eyes saying why did you close the door and the person would say oh I just sorry it just seemed like we needed more privacy in here and they would put a message into headphones in just their right ear saying uh you know please walk around the room to the other one why did you walk around the room oh I just needed to stretch my legs what's amazing is these people weren't lying they completely like all of us believed that that is why they did what they did their brain told them this is why you did it because the brain never says I don't know anything you ask it why it will come up with a reason but this is hard to prove for most of us but in this very controlled situation of left and right hemispheres it was revealed that this is something that all of us do all the time anytime you've ever told yourself why you did something it's very likely not the real reason you might have just been making that up and when you when you then now replay your choices in life your choice of career spouse meal everything uh why did you do this you realize the only wise answer is I don't know I have no idea why I do anything and so you stop asking why and you just look at your actions you say well this is what I did why I don't know why would I know I don't know my own brain my brain lies to me I I will never know the real reasons why I did something who knows what subliminal subconscious motivations drove me to do that the reason we call them subconscious is because they're not conscious there's no way of knowing them otherwise they'd be conscious so I don't know and then you realize anybody else telling you why they did something also doesn't know but they think they know so we can just ignore the reasons that anybody gives us ignore the reasons in oursel and just judge things only through their actions well I suppose that we need to we need to at least be able to believe that we know why we did the things that we did because if we didn't we would sound to all of the humans around around us like a mental patient we'd sound like somebody who needed to be sectioned so there's a a theory around Consciousness I think one of the reasons that it's potentially put forward is that social groups are very important to humans it's one of the reasons that our brains grew so quickly so that we can deal with larger group and tribe sizes as that grows I need to know Derek but I also need to know Tim and I need to know the strength of their friendship I need to know that Tim did that thing and Derek got angry but that was a few weeks ago and it seems like they're a little bit better and basically in order for me to be able to model what you're thinking I need to be able to think so theory of mind is it allows us to project how you and everybody else may get on together now one of the problems is that if we saw our motivations and our actions and the beliefs that we have about the world not being facts just being these kind of cobbled together lawyers attorney justification for why we did a thing that's kind of pulled out of nowhere that would sound to a lot of the people around us very unpredictable we would sound like an unreliable Ally to a lot of people because what what was the reason that Derek went and lit that fire over there I don't know I asked him and he came back and he just sort of said like woo I don't know I was just a little you know he said exactly what it was which is this totally unsatisfying answer that isn't drawn into a single coherent narrative about someone that isn't wrapped into their personality and all the rest of it so I think it's important to see the fact that we don't have full transparency about our motivations the fact that we don't understand why we do the things that we do fully and that we never can as an Adaptive mechanism we can feel um uh resentment or or frustration at the fact that we don't have this level of self-insight that we think might be useful but it's actually not that useful to have it like that because it wouldn't be adaptive for the way that we need to show up for everybody else if every time anybody asked us why we did a thing we just said I don't know or gave some like you know ridiculous explanation about it that wouldn't that would make them very uncomfortable because that's not the way that humans are supposed to be we need to be able to be predictable consistent uh animals moving forward and I think that yeah uh not getting too frustrated at the fact that we don't have it and realizing where it comes from or at least my bro signs theory about why I think it might come from um I think it's at least a good place to start you did just say Bro Science did you correct okay it's the highest form of science I that um well for what it's worth you're catching me off guard I haven't I hadn't heard this idea that we need to have reasons why and I'm not fully convinced that I it's been over a year since I've asked anybody why anything and it's been over a year or two since I've told anybody why anything um just to linger on that that sounds like an unbelievable uh lifestyle right turn to make I don't know I think maybe I was already a very skeptical person I haven't yet read uh Michelle is it Montaine or Mont the French uh philosopher that uh kind of wrote These Diaries um but apparently I've read a book about him but I haven't read the original Source yet of his Diaries but essays that's it he he coined the term essay Essa the French word for to try and so Michelle Mont Mon's essays um very apparently would very often end with a little uh but what do I I know like he would kind of stay his point of view and here's how I see it and this is what I think and therefore this and that and at the very end but what do I know who knows maybe it's all wrong I think I've been operating in that mindset for years of hey I'll say a thing now I'll say that this is why uh I'm I've decided to do what I'm doing or go where I'm going but what do I know know maybe it's wrong I don't know maybe there's some other reason that I said no to this or some other reason I said yes to this that I'm unaware of I don't know uh I think I've already been in that mindset for years uh and um yeah so I I it's been years since I've bothered to ask anybody why anything I think it is very possible to just judge people by their their actions it seems like you're still functioning yeah for now yeah yeah what do you mean when you talk about the more emotional the belief the less likely it's true oh that's an interesting one uh all right well we have to just rewind one second to remind anybody still listening that that definition of true that when I say true it really means absolutely necessary necessarily objectively observ empirically 100% true the idea that that an alien from outer space and an octopus underwater could both observe this thing and agree that's what I call true uh things of the Mind are never true because there can be another way of looking at it if it's a thing of the mind even that's moral statements like uh it's bad to kill uh there is another way of looking at that there are some situations where it can be good to kill like there are way too many bunnies here in New Zealand that shouldn't be here every Easter the kids and otago uh go out to kill as many bunnies as they can you're kidding me no serious because it's like completely overrun if you just drive through the countryside of otago um in the southern uh South Island of New Zealand uh there's just thousands of bunnies that are not native to this environment and so they have no Predators kind of like the uh cane toads in Australia that whoever brought that first one or maybe two in should not have done that because now there's just an overrun of cane toads in Australia it's uh pythons in the Everglades and axis deer in Maui as well all doing the same thing so there are some situations where it is good to kill so any moral uh or value statement basically anything of the mind we can't say it's necessarily objectively absolutely true because there could be another way of looking at it so you have to realize that all those things in the mind are just one perspective and that other perspectives exist so when you notice that somebody's getting very emotional about their point of view uh it seems to imply that there's something else going on that this is triggering some other underlying emotions or there it has some extra meaning to them uh that their value system that they they strongly believe uh even if somebody has to say I believe the reason they have to say I believe is because they're communicating what's inside their mind to you you don't you don't say uh I believe I am holding glasses in my hand right now you just say well that's just a fact I'm holding glasses in my hand right now that's not a belief we don't have to say I believe because it's just a fact uh which means that there's also for the things that are truly just a fact there's no need to get all emotional about it there you go that's a fact and that's that there's no no emotional persuasion uh it's just there it is and so it seems to me to be an indicator that the more emotional somebody is getting about something the more this ties into their sense of self identity um how they present to the world how they think things should be uh it's usually just things of the mind and of the emotion that are not just objective facts so yeah the more emotional somebody gets about something the less likely it seems to be true high emotionality is like putting the caveat I believe before then making that statement about whatever it is well put there is a um I think there's an equivalent another Bro Science rule which is uh any field which has got the word science in it is not a science that it's it's not called chemistry science or physics science or biology science um but it is called social science um so yeah uh this odd sense that the more emotional somebody is getting about something it it tends to be things that can be contested and the reason that the emotion is there is to act as a um additional form of evidence on the side of the person that's trying to convince you of their point of view but if it was true especially something which was absolutely self-evidently objectively outside of space and time true well how much more evidence does this need yeah no one's fighting like that for Gravity right right fighting yeah yeah by the way thanks for remembering the um outside of space and time uh I'd never heard it put like that but you're right I forgot that my definition of true includes for everyone everywhere always yes and if it's not true for everyone everywhere always then it's not necessarily true well we can't true for you for now you open up uh talking about what time is it now as a question there's a great book by Carlo relli it's called the order of time it's real small thing not as small as yours yours is particularly small uh it's the audio book is read by Benedict Cumberbatch Doctor Strange from the Marvel uh Series so it's awesome it's really Sherlock Holmes to me correct really cool cool little listen and in it he talks about light cones so um asking what is happening right now is a pointless question actually technically a pointless question even between me and you if I say what is happening right now there is a short brief window that it takes for the electrical current to go from here at the speed of light whiz through my modem and then down to you and then comes back to me and all the rest of it uh but especially when you start talking about slightly bigger distances he actually draws what's called a light cone which is the now of now it moves like this it doesn't move out it's not flat like that it takes time to build out and um as you were talking earlier on there's a couple of physics references that have come up uh talking about perspectives and you were saying accent for instance so what is normal to one person is abnormal to someone else and it made me think about kind of social relativity so moving at relativistic speeds to everybody inside of the spaceship that's moving at 99.9% the speed of light they're just walking around and going about their business as they normally would but to somebody looking from outside of the spaceship at the way that they're moving they're moving incredibly strangely well why because their frame of reference and your frame of reference are two superbly different things and it's always fun to see something uh from sort of the social world or the psychological World get reflected even if it's uh pulling on the tethers a little bit uh tenuously um in a different field so yeah I was thinking about social relativity there before as well I love that it we live in a very subjective social psychological world that there are some of us maybe that are working in Laboratories right now that are living in a world of just uh empirical science but most of us aren't but yet we act like we are we act like our perspectives and how we see the world is true I liked the idea of judging the contents not the box when it comes to uh things that are useful but not true I spoke to Eric Weinstein a couple of weeks ago and he has this uh this concept of an accuracy budget and his accuracy budget is basically that people that are playing with ideas in public should be allowed to get things wrong uh not all the time that would make for a pretty poor uh expert but um an accuracy budget means that it makes you less scared about playing with ideas and pushing the edges of things for fear of one misstep coloring all of your body of work well you see he wasn't right on such and such the meteorological the Vietnamese weather tomorrow or whatever it was or you know he Mis he misquoted that guy that explained about how men that are unreasonable move the world forward that means that his entire body of work can't be trusted uh and I I think that he's true there's an odd an odd sense that people should only ever speak about that area of absolute expertise that there is not very much that can be contributed to by people outside of some like odd formal training plus apprenticeship plus time spent within an area uh in an age where credentialism is actually kind of quite highly criticized so these two things are existing in in uh time and space at the same time uh but yes uh experts only and this idea of an accuracy budget I think is similar to your idea of judging the contents not the Box yeah this was one of the original inspirations for writing the useful not true book is how I saw um what do we call it cancel culture where somebody who's made 20 years of great movies uh I I'll pick Woody Allen for example Woody Allen has made some objectively empirically observably great movies it's just a fact outside of space and time for everyone everywhere always Woody Ellen has made some great movies uh maybe uh what Woody Allen's uh is it son or daughter I don't remember I think there there are allegations against Woody Allen that Woody Allen has uh there's a a chance that Woody Allen has done something bad in his private life um let's say probably true um but then people use that to say uh remove all his movies ban them from the store they must never be shown nobody should be able to see these movies anymore I will never certainly never watch these movies ever again because of those allegations okay so that's an extreme example but sometimes it even comes to little examples where like somebody can write a really useful book about psychology uh and if you read this book and if you applied what it said to your life you would live a better life by your own standards you would benefit from reading this book oh but I heard that author on a podcast and he has a social view I disagree with therefore [ __ ] that book I'm never reading that book I can see how it's useful for people to discard somebody because if you say that 600 page book I know it might benefit me but I don't like something that author said therefore I'm not going to read it well lucky lucky you one last thing to do in life now you can just stay in happy proud ignorance that I'm not even going to look at that book because I don't like something that that person said uh that to me is judging the Box not the contents you're taking this um package of a person an author or a public figure a media uh figure and saying well that person is not perfect therefore everything inside their box is bad that whole container is now bad and what did you say disreputable um uh I'm going to discard everything in time that entire container I think that's doing a huge disservice to yourself for one it's just stupid and by stupid my definition of stupid is avoiding [Music] thinking stupid isn't an inherent trait it's something that you do you are being stupid when you avoid thinking and to take an entire container of a person and just decide that that entire everything inside that container is bad is being stupid it's avoiding thinking that the individual ideas inside that container might be worth adopting but we tend to get this like identity politics kind of um deciding that I am a person who is against uh this social I am against abuse and therefore if somebody's uh accused this person of abuse I need to show that I am against abuse by showing that I will never again look the direction of that person that was accused of abuse and it's understandable and it's maybe even even righteous and maybe even admirable but it's doing a disservice to yourself to refuse to think further or think about the complexities or just pick the individual ideas from somebody's body of work without needing that to be an endorsement of the total package you are at a massive disadvantage if the only people that you can learn from a people that you usually agree with well put huge disadvantage you know this is the main problem with uh tribalism for anybody that is into personal growth you you are going to struggle to find anybody that is sufficiently pure uh that they have met all of the criteria for you if you're very sensitive with this to be able to accept them on board uh so I actually wrote something on the plane uh that was inspired by uh uh what you were talking about um I went through a retreat in California last year during it I met a business owner whose YouTube content I used to watch a long time ago when I asked him why he stopped making videos he said I started feeling like I had to live up to in private the things which I was saying in public and I've come to think about this all the time I've also come to realize that there's two sides to fake it until you make it one is positing an ideal or better version of yourself which you are motivated to live up to due to the need for social consistency but this stake in the ground acts as much like a tether as it does a Finish Line If you commit yourself to a worldview or life philosophy what happens if you stop agreeing with it sure you might want to change but everyone around you has grown accustomed to the previous version of you whether it's Lifestyle Changes like your dietary approach or training methodology worldview changes like religious belief or political affiliation or personality changes like commitments to personal growth going sober or changing friend groups social consistency bias is a double-edged sword a while ago some of the leading influences in the ex paleo diet movement then the carnivore diet movement started to add fruit into their food the aptly called meat and fruit diet caused uproar not because of the evidence that the diet is based on but because new proponents had ardently stated a different belief in the past and the change caused people around them to feel uncomfortable this is the danger the social incentives align for you to not change in public even if you grow out of your beliefs in private stupid people see someone changing their mind as an indication of unsophistication because they don't understand that updating your worldview when you grow is a sign of intelligence not fickleness and that an unwavering commitment to a narrow worldview is not cleverness but a substitute for it which unfortunately means that changing your mind in public often results in you being attacked by large numbers of mostly stupid people and the more public you are about it the harder it is to reverse and this is what I thought you quoted in your book we are what we pretend to be so we must be careful about what we pretend to be Kurt vonet yes that Kurt vonet I'm misremembered that Kurt vaget quote for many years uh and I just remembered it as um you are whatever you pretend to be and when I found the original quote I went I like my version better because by the way Chris I got to say I love what you just read there that was one wonderful thank you that was really wonderful it's you beautifully said what I was trying to say way more words though that would have taken up six pages of your book your your book's like 90 Pages not so hey listeners the uh if you haven't read useful not true yet the average chapter length is 21 sentences that was a lot I did the work you know the old quote like forgive me for the long letter if I had more time I would have written a shorter one I I took the time I did the work I made it as short as it could be um it is a lean Bean it's stage ready for the Mr Olympia competition yeah yeah so um the my previous book called How To Live was a deliberate exercise in contradicting myself every chapter contradicted every other chapter uh each chap there were 27 chapters and each one was completely convinced that it had the answer on how you should live your life and therefore every chapter disagreed with every other chapter and it was such a fun format because of the thing that you just read it was a way of saying uh I am not picking just one thing and saying this is the answer I am stating up front that I believe in opposites I believe in contradiction for a few reasons uh but the most visual one where I should say audible one is an orchestra the book ends with an image of an orchestra seating chart with 27 different types of instruments to match for the 27 chapters and the idea is if you are a composer or a conductor nobody would say hey composer what is the best instrument you'd say well for when for what it's there is no correct answer uh you use instruments for their purposes you bring in the clarinet when you want the clarinet and you bring in the trumpets for that effect and you hit the tonies for that effect and sometimes you combine them sometimes you have the cello and the OBO playing at the same time and what you like is the combination so of course you know this is the modern wisdom podcast you know where I'm going with this the this is what philosophies are to us philosophies are not an argument about which is the correct way to see the world that's like asking the composer what is the best instrument philosophies are tools that we use for purposes and at different times in our life you know music is time uh you bring them in at different times you use stoicism sometimes not always you use skepticism sometimes maybe you have like stoicism and skepticism combined like an like an OBO and a cello at the same time and you and you use them and then maybe you put them to bed before you go to sleep at night and you flip to a different philosophy that helps you sleep at night and a different philosophy helps you get up in the morning and a different philosophy helps you succeed in business and a different philosophy helps you focus on your family that there is no one right answer these are tools that we use and same thing with worldviews I mean the conservatives versus the Liberals well it's a either one is the right answer they have their different purposes and you can approach all of these as an and not an or you also you know just to really drill at home you are so on the back foot if you only learn from people that you always agree with and also if I know one of your perspectives and from it I can accurately predict everything else that you believe you're probably not a serious thinker because you shouldn't be taking your entire worldview wholesale you shouldn't be putting it on like a onesie right it should be an incredibly eclectic New Orleans you've got this crazy feather bow and this hat and a cane and a pair of high heels you know that's what we all are we're all idiosyncratic we've all got very sort of unique life experiences that have brought us to this point and it shouldn't be I mean there are some people that whose worldviews and beliefs will fall slap bang into the middle of the normal distribution of normal but that's not it's far fewer people actually than it should be it should be a very flat sort of Hill that everything is going over so getting wait wait Chris I want to take this astray here for a minute feel free where where are you living now Austin Texas okay thought so where did you grow up new uh Stockton on teas in the northeast of the UK Northeast I didn't okay well uh very different mindsets in these two places slightly yeah did you live other places in between Newcastle Northeast uh small summers in Thailand in Bali and ABA stuff like that little bits okay did you spend enough time in Thailand and Bali to kind of get to know the worldview or did you kind of just stay vacation vacationy okay um do you have investments into stocks or ETFs yes okay so you've heard that the big idea with investing is to not put all your eggs in one basket but you should have a diversified portfolio right so you should have some of investments in tech stocks maybe and some in Commodities and some in international real estate uh the big idea being that if any one sector of the world economy goes up or crashes that you won't be too hurt because you've got a broad Diversified Investment Portfolio right you've heard this I mean the S&P 500 that's all I do I'm Morgan howel pilled so yes I I guess I've I've uh uh tried to spread risk as much as possible so I started thinking about this in terms of what you were just saying our thought portfolio that we should have a well Diversified thought portfolio yes that ideally thought patterns that are uncorrelated so I can have a certain way of looking something at something that is uncorrelated with another way of looking something and have them both so that if one of those worldviews collapses that the other one can see up uh and vice versa so I actually nerded out on this thinking well I grew up in America and yes I've been living outside America for 15 years and that's helped a bit but I still at my core tend to think in a pretty American Way um let's say maybe specifically California American way so which ways of seeing the world are most uncorrelated with the California point of view what's the most uh Diversified away from that part of my portfolio and I was thinking well what places has America labeled as enemies uh Russia Iran Venezuela it's like okay well then maybe the reason that these places got labeled as enemies is because they had conflicting worldviews shouldn't that be a good sign to me that uh these are places with a very different worldview that clashes with the one I grew up in and I am really enjoying getting to know World Views that are as different from the one as I grew up with as possible one of my favorite moments of last year in 2023 uh was the the two days I spent in the company of a really sweet emirati man in United Arab Emirates whose grandfather built the first building in Dubai um and hearing his worldview and his family history going back 1800 years he knows his family history 1,800 years in the past because they keep good records and we were talking about his family's paths over the last 18800 years and then flying directly from Dubai to Israel where I spent a week last September just a few weeks before the October 7th Gaza attacks I spent a week in Israel talking to uh a bunch of people in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv and I just love getting to know these worldviews that are as different from mine as possible and ideally fully uh adopting them or at least uh inhabiting them so that I can step into those shoes and think in that way and use it in my Diversified thought portfolio so when it comes to my thinking on any given subject I can adopt the way of thinking of my friend Muhammad who's who knows his family history 1800 years back or I can step into the mindset of the uh Evangelical man I met in Jerusalem with eight kids or I can step into the mindset of my friend from Nairobi Kenya that sees the world in a very different way and and now that's really like my main pursuit in life is to really try to learn learn deeply learn and and adopt very different worldviews that I can keep all together it shows how much of a competitive Advantage you have from depersonalizing yourself from learning things that it's not an alternate point of view is not some sort of attack on you and your point of view it's just it's a different way of seeing the world isn't that interesting oh isn't it so interesting isn't that amazing who hold on explain to me how do you see this wait Having Eight Kids is easy wait hold on explain this uh by the way he had a great explanation he said he said yeah man he said Having Eight Kids he said you know what's having you know what's hard having one kid he said man I just spent the day with a friend who has only one kid he said that guy doesn't get any rest his kid needs him for everything he said in my house like I've got eight kids he said their own I Outsource the entertainment of the children to the children said they don't need me at all uh he said man having one kid is Hard Eight kids that's easy well I'm I'm an only child and it does feel a little bit like you constructed an entire Factory just to produce one version of a product and then shut it down so uh yeah yeah from an efficiency standpoint it can be it can be dialed back but here's another you know wait sorry Chris did you just come up with that right now on the spot the factory yeah that was really good that was you should remember that um so one other thing that's kind of interesting you know from a meta perspective stepping outside of yourself is to ask another question which would be uh first off let's find out about this person's perspective secondly wow that perspective is really different to mine that's that's very interesting but thirdly and probably most insightfully why am I having the response that I am having to this worldview that's being proposed to me what is it about what I'm hearing from this person that's different to the way that I see the world that's causing this thing to happen and why am I why am I threatened by it am I afraid of it do I not want to be wrong am I holding on to a worldview that I actually don't fully truly believe in and I'm worried that this might tempt me away in some form or another so I think asking yourself why you have the reaction that you do when you're faced with um contents that are different not boxes that are the same uh I think is uh uh really useful opportunity for growth I love that getting practical moving forward into how people can actually reframe and find better perspectives how do you advise people to do that oh um well the how is quite basic the how is to just put aside the time to think whether that's talking with a friend or just laying in a hammock staring at the sky thinking of different points of view or in my case I like to journal I spend most of my waking hours with my fingers on Keys typing whether I'm typing emails or I'm typing code or I'm writing a book or very often I just flip over to my diary whether it's my daily diary or I have a thoughts Journal like on certain subjects like if I keep coming back to certain subjects like I don't know China I've got a a separate document that's my thoughts on China so that every time I'm like H having some more thoughts about China I just flip open that document and I start typing my current thoughts that I have which might just be a sentence or it might be like I've got some unresolved stuff in there that I need to work out but either way the question that I that helps to keep asking yourself is what's another way to look at this so especially if it's a disempowering belief let's say if you have a certain belief that's really working well for you that makes you very happy that makes you very productive or uh Successful by your own definition maybe you don't need to challenge that one so much working don't mess with it it's working it's fine but I'm sure we all have a number of perspectives and beliefs and thought habits habits that we'd be good to challenge um we'd benefit from doing the good old-fashion brainstorming technique of asking yourself okay well what's another way of looking at it well now I've got three that I've written down here let me come up with five more even if it seems like I can't let me just push harder even if it becomes silly ones um I'm sure that imagine a poet long ago who who uh was used to uh paying people to read his poems and and was feeling very upset by he was spending so much money paying people to read his poems and a certain point he had the radical crazy idea of like wait a minute what if people paid me to read my poems oh my God what a weird idea um and now the poet has made a good living because people like paying money to read his poems uh all of us have a version of this of something that can be inverted and taken to a weird extreme that you never would have considered uh that only comes from that brainstorming process of pushing past the first few obvious answers pushing past the next few ones that took a little effort and then going far into the ones that you only get to if you really spend the time to think harder and push a little more extreme you say that to change you need to reach past what comes naturally and I've had this in my head for a little while that um kind of like type one and type two thinking we have type one and type two reactions as well so uh type one being automatic this is your habitual way that you go about things type two is more effortful it's deliberate you need to kind of get in there and and Tinker with it and be very very sort of conscious and focused and then the goal over time is that the type two becomes the type one that through deliberate practice you can then anybody that's ever got better at anything knows this playing an instrument or or or driving a car or playing pickle ball or doing whatever um but I also think about this sort of in terms of uh reactions which I guess is still the same but it's a much quicker version of that if you get yourself into the habit of not reacting quite so quickly that the type two reaction is the one that gives you that space to breathe and actually type two reacting gives type two thinking the opportunity to step in and actually go through it so I think that the skill that people need to learn a lot of the time isn't just type one and type two thinking but it's type one and type two reactions because that then sort of unlocks the next level but yeah reaching past what comes naturally that's how you uh suggest that people look at changing their perspective yeah yeah you're right reaction reactions as well which might come from communication meaning uh say if somebody texts you a question hey Chris uh need an answer what do you think about this you might have to get in the habit of saying let me think about that I'll get back to you in the next few days even though it's a text which we think of as urgent it's communicating that you're not just going to give you a quick impulsive response to this just because somebody's texting and making that a habit um insisting on a little more time as a habit uh say reading the terms and conditions of something before agreeing to it so you you know maybe not every little app that you download but uh what about not jumping to a conclusion when you ask yourself why you did a thing well there you're jumping to now that's the more advanced stuff the for your then even for your own thoughts yes to to challenge yourself to not just jump to that conclusion but to give yourself a little longer ideally if you make a habit of journaling so you're used to I'm sorry I say journaling but you know again it could be it could mean you call a friend maybe you've got a best friend that you talk about everything with and every time you're confused with a decision you just call up your friend and you say hey hey what are your thoughts on this I've got a question for you what how am I thinking about this wrong you know it doesn't have to be journaling that works for me but whatever works for you talking with friends staring at the sky uh you know putting a rubber duck on top of your computer monitor and asking the rubber duck um whatever works for you [ __ ] ask I mean uh the new llm AI tools are Wonder for this if you open um claw. or chat pt.com and you say what are some other ways of thinking of this it's a it's a great way to get started on this process uh because it's used to coming up with different ways of looking at things uh it can be a great tool for that my favorite uh different perspective or reframing is your example of the different perspective of a silver medalist versus a bronze medalist can you just explain what that is what they're thinking while that stood on the podium yeah I didn't come up with this I don't remember where I heard it but the idea is that the gold medalist is happy yes but the silver medalist is the most unhappy because the silver medalist can't help but think oh if I was milliseconds faster I could have been the gold medalist whereas the bronze medalist is sitting there happy cuz it's like whoa I just made it if I was milliseconds slower I would have got nothing at all but look at me I'm standing on the podium in front of the the whole Olympics I did it I'm the I'm one of the I'm a whatever bronze medalist I'm a I'm a finalist I did it I I won an Olympic medal the fact that it's bronze whatever that's great I made it uh whereas the Civil silver medalist has the toughest spot I really love that because it shows just I I think so much of our experience is mediated by the thoughts that we have about it and there's this sort of I think there is for people that are thoughtful or a bit introspective or they ruminate a lot they can kind of look at um people who don't as much and there's a degree of jealousy or at least I I I used to have this a lot and I think in my less gracious moments I still sort of do you know it's it's this weird kind of narcissism where you think oh you know the depth of my Consciousness is just causes me to suffer man and you go well if you were that smart you'd figure it out like it's the nval thing if you're so smart why aren't you happy um but you know looking at that scenario there uh look at how close I was to winning I'm so despondent look at how close I was to not getting a medal I'm so happy uh like the person that's feeling worse got a quicker time objectively they performed better uh compared with the person who is stud so grateful that they just slipped in and managed to get themselves on the podium and uh yeah I think about quite a lot um trying to George Mac often talks about the midwit meme and he says there's no way that you can be the guy on the right which is the guy that's the sage the super smart guy all you can ever become is the guy on the left so my entire life now is me trying to be the simple guy on the left not the smart guy on the right do you know the meme I'm talking about the mid Sor okay so imagine you've got an IQ Distribution bve on the left hand side you have a guy that looks like it's a meme he looks like a neanderthal he's got a heavy brow kind of like me and uh he he's sort of he always comes up with a simple answer on the right you have a sage that looks a little bit like a Jedi with a hood up uh and he obviously comes up with the most ascended answer and then the middle at the top of the IQ Bal curve is the midwit and the midwit is this sort of raging screaming lib type person and the joke is that the guy in the left and the guy in the right always come up with the same answer and the guy in the middle is the one that over complicates everything so if it was for gaining muscle the guy on the left would say lift weights eat protein the guy on the right would say lift weights eat protein and the guy in the middle would say I must ensure that my predigested enzymes are consumed within 30 minutes of performing an anerobic scientifically back you know overthinking it lift weight protein uh and almost all of the time I think uh when we get too confused is we're trying to be the guy in the right as opposed to dude I'm stood on the podium that's amazing the guy on the left would think wow I'm stood on a Podium the guy in the middle would think if only I'd optimized my sleep a little bit better and the red light glasses at night and melatone in release with cortisol and blah blah oh my God I'm stood on a Podium uh right it's and if you you were Naval gazing enough to to realize this about yourself as I imagine almost anybody that listens this far into a podcast called modern wisdom uh is then you can realize which perspective helps you feel better or act better and just decide to adopt it that this is the way I'm going to choose to look at things uh so this comes up a lot with for me with um money that Morgan howel and Mark Manson were in a conversation that I heard where they were saying on Mark's podcast I think that um they saying you know it's just human nature we can't help but constantly try to strive for more we just you know you can't help it you have 1 million you want 10 million you have 10 million you want 50 million you have 50 you want 100 you can't help it and I was just thinking yeah you can because you just realize that that's a recipe for disaster and so you choose to not do that how easily have you found being able to put aside the desire for more more more uh one 100% completely I have no desire for more more more I think of it like a fraction and let's remember a fraction is anything with a you know what you a numerator and a divisor denominator uh that uh it's funny when somebody says something like you know it's just a there's just a fraction of people it's like well a fraction can be over one you know it's a it doesn't fraction doesn't mean small fraction but you have the number on top which is what you have and then you have the number on bottom which is what you need and I've never really had a care for that top number past you know the first few years where I just had to have something in that top number I put some amount of money in that top number and I've put all of my attention on the denominator about what it's divided by so I've always just reduced and reduced and reduced my needs even like going to Great Lengths to see how little I can live on and challenging myself to um I'll just give a real concrete example that's going on right now in my life I'm building my Dreamhouse uh I bought a piece of land in 2020 when I moved back to New Zealand and uh I've been thinking for a couple years about what would be my ideal home and in just a few months it should be there uh it's a 4x8 meter prefab cabin with no kitchen and no bathroom that is my ideal home uh because I've just constantly pushed myself to see how little I can live on and and sometimes the answer you know you find what things you truly do want or need or what would I truly be unhappy without and then you notice which things you're so happy to not need and uh so to me I've never pushed for more more and more I've always been pushing for less less less cuz I'm just focused on that bottom number of that fraction how scalable do you think it is that other people can do that too and how much do you think is a like uh a particularly naturally strong powerlifter that's stronger than most guys in the gym the first time he picks the barbell up how much of that do you think is a quirk of the idiosyncrasies of of your particular psychology no I think anybody can think this way I of course am a product of my past and and for many years uh from the age of 18 until No god let's go back further okay come on this is modern wisdom podcast to me the appeal of stoicism was the core idea of toughen yourself before I ever heard of stoic I didn't hear about the word stoicism till I was 41 that's the first time I I heard stoicism but I had been living according to that approach to life since I was a teenager because I wanted to be a successful musician and I knew that this is something that millions of people want but only one out of a million is going to get and damn it I'm going to be the one to get it so I wanted to toughen myself to be able to withstand any adversity withstand any uh circumstances out of my control uh this was my Approach constantly was to toughen myself which later I read a book about stoicism I went whoa this is the way I've been living since I was a teenager but it was because I wanted to be a successful musician and then when I was 18 I joined a circus they were looking for a musician so from the age of 18 to 29 I was in this circus where everybody in the circus was living basically hand to mouth even my boss had a uh a habit of never buying a car for more than $1,000 he would only get the cheapest car he could ever find uh and run it into the ground and then buy another car for $1,000 and run run it into the ground uh and I was surrounded by jugglers face painters magicians musicians these were my peers nobody had any money so when I saved up $10,000 my friends were like whoa dude you are set for life when I got when I started CD Baby and I got like $100,000 I'm like whoa now I basically can retire so this idea that um if it's all who you surround yourself with you know the they say that you are the average of The Five People You spend the most time with I disagree with that I think it's about who are you trying to emulate and I knew and know some rich people that are miserable cuz I see that they're on this constant drive to get more and more and more and it just took one look at them to see like that's a path of misery I'm going to keep challenging myself as I've stoically started doing already as a teenager challenge myself to see how how tough can I be how strong can I be how resilient can I be how capable of weathering any change can I be the less I'm dependent on the tougher I am the more I'm able to withstand whatever the world throws at me so this is is clearly the right path to go on so maybe I'm just a product of my upbringing but it seems clear to me the better path well the best part of a decade spent in a circus playing music is a perhaps a non-typical uh uh upbringing for many people to draw their Philosophy from but yeah I mean this is a conversation I've had so much on the show over the last few years especially as my you know since the last time that we spoke of change in my life um although was kind of on the way I guess when we first sat down to speak and um working out what it means to to um have more than you need and to then you're left with this really bizarre decision where you start you have to choose whether or not you're going to sacrifice your quality of life in order to achieve more success because you already have more success than you need so you're now making a judgment to let go of a thing that almost everybody almost universally says is their number one priority you know I just want to be happy or I just want to not do things I don't want to do or whatever uh and then you when you start to dig about where does this motivation come from like what is it that I'm doing what am I motivated to do and why am I doing it is it success is it money is it scarcity is it fear of falling off is it a desire for validation is it a need to be recognized by people that I think are impressive you know it's just the whole way down and um yeah it's it's admirable to to you know see what you did with CD Baby to even the way I I've always admired I seem to remember hearing a story God forever ago maybe even before I started the podcast about the way that you coded and host your website is that still the same now probably I mean it's like capsule for the future that'll kind of never never die it's the most future proofed way that you could come up with it is that is that right uh that's one way of looking at it that's uh the let's just say my minimalism runs deep and iode oh deep into I mean almost more into code than other aspects of my life I hand code every line myself I don't use any anything that ever generates any code for me I only every character myself Shopify oh God no I mean I mean sorry I mean so sorry look quick aside Toby who started Shopify is the one that taught me Ruby on Rails I paid him a 100 bucks he taught me Ruby on Rails and he said hey I'm starting this e-commerce company I said ah sorry man I can't help um that was Shopify anyway so sorry that was I I so admire what Toby's done um but I'm saying I don't use anything that generates code every character I type myself I type every Open Bracket every HTML tag I don't even use markdown that converts it into HTML I want to type those things myself because I want the friction of that so that there is no line of code that doesn't absolutely need to be there and it and I would not be typing it by hand if it didn't need to be there and I want that because I don't want to create digital pollution because you know we we all agree that if somebody walked down the street throwing trash on the road everywhere they walked you'd say hey Jerk you can't do that that's pollution but yet why do we do this digitally somebody has 140 character tweet which really could be done in uh what is that 280 bytes but yet to see that 280 bytes you have to download like a 15 million byte message through Twitter which is just this digital pollution shoved down the wire at us to get this tiny little thing and I just I feel that pollution everywhere and I just object and so in my own code I uh ruthlessly get rid of every single character that doesn't need to be there um I don't know that's sorry I know I I probably just sound insane we're talking about this hey I remember I I don't know the first time I heard you might have been you and Tim talking about it uh I that's something I've recalled for you know best part of a decade now in one form or another so it stuck with me so it's a you know anything that's a lesson that's that impactful I think is worth doing but I just have to before I let this go I just have to say it's I understand that it's just aesthetic in the same way that somebody lays out their living room or their bedroom in a way that makes them go yeah that's the way I like it I like these red curtains and this blue sofa and this furry carpet or whatever it is that people like to do with their living spaces my website and my code is kind of my living space this is the way that I reach out to the world from this island in the Pacific Ocean that I live on um this is my connection with the whole world and I want to feel proud of that connection I want to feel that it reflects my self identity so I'm not saying other people should do what I done but yeah my code is extremely paired down as essential as can be and like I I look at it and it makes me go yeah I did I like that this makes me happy I am proud of this I have some I have a similar kind of setup uh audio visually with the show as well so I I know what what it is to have that craft when it comes to uh adopting what works for you now this is something else that I've been playing with a little bit recently which is cool that you zeroed in on something similar as well um realizing that your choices are only for you and only for now stops you from having to justify them to the world and it removes the pressure of them potentially being a little bit imprecise because you can just cause correct in future you don't have to justify it to other people which means that you only have to do it for you and it's not going to be forever it's just for the next period maybe even it's just a starting block maybe it'll change tomorrow which allows you to be imperfect with your decision making and those two things I think really for me when I think about um I I have a bias uh when it comes to decision- making that it needs to be perfect the first time uh and it needs to be very very right if it comes to uh hiring or firing uh a member of Staff if it comes to making a decision around around branding especially if it's new if it's something I've done before I can just kind of keep on going and iterating but that first step especially if it feels like a new piece of territory uh I often um get caught up thinking that this is something which is going to be like this forever I'm like no it's not you don't even train the same way that you did a year ago or five years ago or 10 years ago you don't eat the same diet you don't sleep in the same bed you don't even believe the same things about sleep about what you're supposed to do before sleep so so um yeah realizing that your choices are only for you and only for now I think is it makes me go ah right okay let's just move forward let's put our best foot forward and and we can adjust from that yeah H we just put two ideas back to back when I talked about my self-introduction to stoicism I said all I was really trying to do was toughen myself it's very future focused even my minimalism the whole core idea underlying all of it is I'm expecting the future to be really tough to be really bad I'm expecting things I'm expecting adversity and so I want to prepare now so that when huge adversity comes it doesn't bow me over because I've stealing yourself ready for it yeah and that's very future focused so it's dude okay so speaking of uh physical and lifting things uh I have been for 12 years doing classic barbell exercise um right next to me right the king where I'm talking right here there's a squat wreck just you know a meter to my left of my left hand here uh that's where I keep my squat rack my barbell so as I'm working I a couple times a day would you know put the heavy bar on my back and do five sets of five or even just like one set of five just to stand up and and get a little break and I've always wondered like H I would like to live nomadically I would like to be able to instantly be at home anywhere I go this squat wreck H this is going to be a bit of a problem it's a burden uh I was like well you know I've got some money saved up maybe I'll just say that wherever I'm going to spend a few months I'll just buy a squat rck as as soon as I arrive um or just try to stay somewhere right near a gym that I like that's open at all hours and I was I was always kind of fitting this into my worldview like hm okay well this thing has become uh a dependency of mine and then 6 weeks ago as I was hiking in the forest suddenly my left knee went ah what the hell and it turns out I've had a meniscal tear in the ligaments in my left knee and I can't squat right now uh haven't been able to for six weeks um even just to you know squat naturally and just to squat down to the ground and stand back up just hurds like hell so I've started seeing a physical therapist that got me doing body weight uh stuff and I found this book that he recommended called convict conditioning and the do you know it no oh okay but it's written by God spent like 18 years oh yeah very memorable name Wonderful Name spent 18 years in prison uh coaching uh convicts on how they can keep fit just in their jail cell and uh it's amazing body weight exercise and the guy that wrote it he does onehanded push-ups I sorry no no not just push-ups handstands uh so the it's like the ultimate you know the finish line of going through this book is you could learn to do a hand stand on one hand and then do this you know 10 times same thing with one leg spots all these things and you just realize like oh man body weight exercises can be hard as hell here I thought I was strong cuz I could squat 12 kilograms but oh man this [ __ ] is tough and so as soon as I checked out this book and I got into it I went oh this works for my future if I really get good at this stuff I can do this anywhere I can do this in a tiny hotel room in Pakistan I can do this while on the road in Argentina um oh my God this would be a great thing to get great at because it's future focused so we we so we just put these two ideas back to back that you can make decisions now that will make a better future for yourself and that like maybe like you said like trying to not mess up when hiring somebody um might be a really good way to think about it say like yeah when hiring somebody that's almost like a mini version of getting married that's this is a big damn decision you should not be choosing the just for now version of getting married a you seem all right today sure let's get married um it is a future decision but yeah then there are there are other things that really are just for now and the tough part about being human I guess is trying to figure out which situation this is just revisiting that uh molested version of Kurt vet's quote that you came up with dude could you use another adjective please you molested Kurt vonet no uh you are what you pretend to be yeah what does that mean to you if you pretend to be kind you are being kind if you pretend to be a good parent say um my real world situation is there were times when my kid was little that he'd say like Dad play horse and like my authentic response was like I don't want to get down on the ground and crawl around but it just took a second of thinking wait a minute this matters to him this is all about our connection and our bond I want want to give him a great childhood I will get down on my hands and knees and be a horse right now and I get down on my hands and knees and I pretend that I'm into it and you know what I get into it and in zoomed out I pretend to be a good dad for him I do the actions he needs me to do or wants me to do and by pretending to be a good dad I become a good dad and this this matters with bravery uh being social I'm inherently uh antisocial uh introvert whatever you want to call it and when I have to go into a social situation with a bunch of people in a room going talking like my first thought is oh [ __ ] me but I'm like you know what I know how it's like okay I've read some books on social skills I consciously know what I should be doing here we go and so I can just pretend for one hour to be social and I can walk into that room and I can walk up to people and say hi I'm D you know what are you do where you from no really no way you come from there wow cool tell me now why did you do that uh H see I just asked somebody why um but uh I can pretend to be social for 1 hour and then leave exhausted but by pretending to be social I was being social so I really like this idea of you are whatever you pretend to to be so therefore you don't have to be that in your core and your self-identity you can just turn it on and just pretend to be that and that's enough because by pretending to be that you are being that yeah I think the more that I judge myself on the actions that I take as opposed to the intentions that I had or the thoughts that I had around the thing the better I feel and I understand why I'm playing with this idea that's not even quarter baked it's not even been rolled up into dough ready to be put into the oven yet but I've got this this sort of belief that people who are more action focused or type a uh or overw workers uh people will Give a Little Bit of Sympathy to them but really they know that the downstream benefits that those type A type people have uh are significantly better better the outcomes they're going to get in life on average tend to be significantly better by most objective standards than the person that has a type B problem right the person that can't be gotten up off the couch that struggles to hold a job that turns up late that does all the rest of it is because of the outcomes that they try they tend to get in life more worthy or seen as more worthy of sympathy than the person who is overly anxious and turns up half an hour before and has this calendar that's packed back to back and always overworks themselves and does all of the rest of it um but I kind of get the sense that the judging yourself on your action the actions that you took not the thoughts that you had uh you are what you pretend to be is a a nice way for the type a person to take back a little bit of that control and to sort of own it because they're the sort of person I think who is likely to have taken action and then overthought themselves out of feeling like they were good and worthy for praise for having done that thing the type B person would actually and this is the reason that we say to people you know your intentions your intentions matter an awful lot you know I know that you didn't get the X Y or Zed done but you really meant to do well uh that feels like a compassionate thing to do because it raises up the person who needs more encouragement to go and do a thing but we don't talk about the person that is really really hardcore going after doing the thing and still doesn't feel good enough despite the fact that they did it so you going to the party having the conversations I'm not a social person God this is going to be tough and then you you know put on the the performance once you've done it uh and then you go back home and you go oh well you know there's me another non- introvert or another non- extrovert out for the night I that didn't go very well but if you actually look what was the thing that I did to everybody else by every observable measurable objective standard I did the social thing I just did it I just did in front of me so I need to judge myself more on the actions that I took not on the thoughts that I had around the actions that I took I love this subject I hope you do dive into it more and if you do call me I will I promise I will let's I all let's rever this reverse this where we have a conversation where I nerd out with you about your subject um because authenticity is overrated I don't really know know how everybody defines authenticity but to me it seems to be this idea of doing what you actually feel like doing correct uh being true to yourself being true to your emotions which you can imagine where I'm going to go with that it's just [ __ ] you don't know your own emotions or why you're having a thought and being true to a thought that your brain is lying to yourself and telling you that you're having this and now you're going to act in accordance with that subconscious [ __ ] that and that you being authentic and who knows where you even got this self identity in the first place it's because your third grade teacher told you that this is what kind of person you are so now at the age of 33 you're trying to be uh true to that thing because your teacher said it to you when you formed your self-identity based on that it's such [ __ ] that I think we should just toss all of it away in fact I think it's very Christian to care what our intentions are I think it was like Christianity that brought this idea of what matters is what's in your heart and I think we can put that aside for a minute and just say forget what's in your heart forget your intentions forget what you're thinking judge yourself only by your actual actions because all that other stuff is just [ __ ] maybe I'm just too skeptical I don't believe any my head is telling me and I don't think you should either so just put it all aside CU it's all [ __ ] and only look at your actions but maybe that's why I've also never had impostor syndrome I've had so many conversations with friends about impostor syndrome and I just don't get it I've never felt it I don't understand why they do I don't understand the thought process that lead leads to somebody feeling impostor syndrome to me it's just like well you just show up and you do the thing you were just an object in everybody else's world you are not the subject you're just the object every to everybody else they are the subject you are the object you were just the object that came and did the thing that gave the presentation that turned in the report that whatever nobody cares how you feel about yourself and it doesn't matter so how can you feel like an imposter you showed up and you did the thing um but I think it's probably related to what you're talking about I've got to give you another one so this is two from the same newsletter uh output is all that matters value doesn't come from the effort you put in I'm sorry it doesn't it doesn't come from struggle or your sweat or your tears it doesn't come from your experiences doesn't come from how many hours you worked at or how many years you took to learn to do it those things may help you to put a price tag on what you need to compensate you but that's not the same thing at all you can dig holes and fill them in all day long but all that effort isn't going to result in anything valuable it comes purely and only from the demand anyone else has for it which is often just something very subjective and irrational which you have no control over someone dying in a desert values that bottle of water far more than the Mona Lisa and that was a and Sans uh basically saying that I think it's an important redress uh that you're talking about here for the type of people that listen to this show type A anxious overachievers the sort of neurotic overthinking ruminating type person that's really trying to optimize their life and uh so much of the time you're judging yourself on the thoughts you had you're judging yourself on how you felt about the thing that you did uh you're giving too much Credence to your thoughts and if you actually were to just look at look at all of the stuff that you've done all of these things you you spinning five plates at once and not none of them falling and maybe one got a little crack in it but you kept everything going and uh yeah I think thinking about output focusing on output rather than input focusing on what did I get done as opposed to how did I feel about it as opposed to how much time did it take me either long or short I got the thing done that was mattered and uh yeah I think Andy grobes says there are so many people working so hard and achieving so little and uh I I always think about that when I whine about having a a hard day or or I look at a day ahead that's going to be difficult or whatever and I'm like look there just a list of things that need to get done how you get there is totally up to you and the experience you have of getting there is even more so up to you because it's the story that you tell yourself useful not true one of the fun ideas in it was to after disproving something as not true not necessarily true to then still see how it's useful so MH the stuff that you just said all that matters is the output it doesn't matter your intention it doesn't matter your background it doesn't matter the hours okay that's true but uh it can be or let's just say yeah that other stuff isn't necessarily true but it can be useful for the sake of communication to give people a story stories are useful even though they're not true you can tell a great story of how much effort you put into this or you can tell a great story of like oh this poet this this poet is a an old 80-year-old woman that's been through so much hardship in her life she survived this and that and this war and this thing and out of it came this poem now you read this poem it's like whoa okay I'm going to read this poem with so much more attention and uh giving it so much more value than I would if somebody said oh one of my third graders in my in my class wrote this poem here read it you might read it go yeah yeah yeah okay cute all right whatever um but we give more weight to things that we've been told a story about that how much effort or wisdom or suffering went into this thing we now as social and psychological creatures value this thing more so both can be both can be true both can be false both can be useful it can be useful for you to think all that matters is the output [ __ ] [ __ ] my thoughts [ __ ] my background [ __ ] my effort just do the output that can be a useful belief for you to have when creating it but now when communicating it you might need to reverse that well again it's for now and it doesn't need to be justified to anyone oo touche Derek civas ladies and gentlemen Derek it's been four long years since we got to catch up I really love this new book I think the uh the format that you've put it in is fantastic where should people go they're going to want to keep up to date with all of the things that you're doing you know me just my website I don't really do social media even that book won't be on Amazon for a year [ __ ] Amazon oh God [ __ ] everybody nothing for Amazon uh go to my website go to c.com s i v rs.com is my store where you can get my book now and go to my website the best thing okay so you know my my only ask is that I really like when people email me it's one of my favorite hours of the day is the hour I spend in my email inbox connecting with people from the world so anybody that listened to this go send me an email go to my website si. RS my email address is right there uh it says contact go click that say hello ask me anything I actually really like connecting with people from around the world thank yeah Derek I appreciate you thank you thanks Chris if you enjoyed that episode you will love a selection of the best clips from the podcast over the last couple of months and it's available right here go on give them a watch