Transcript for:
Choosing Useful Beliefs Over Truth

What do you mean when you talk about useful, not true? Oh, diving right in. 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, men and women are the same. And I... I... choose that belief, for example, 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. 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'd 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...

Well... business. I would say something like, marketing is just another way of being considerate.

And there would always be somebody to say, hmm, 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. It's a better way of thinking about it. 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, I think George Mack, a good friend of mine, phenomenal writer, got a copy of your book before maybe it even been announced or maybe early on. We'd been talking about something which is literally true, but functionally false for two years, two and a half years, 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. The best examples that I've got, something which is 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. Walking under a ladder is bad luck. No, it's not. 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. 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. And the reverse, something which would be literally true but functionally false, much harder to find, at least in my opinion, would be free will doesn't exist.

So a deterministic view of the world, 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. But when you actually try and functionally use that or usefully use that in your life, it kind of results in a lot of people becoming nihilistic or fatalistic or apathetic or just a bit sad or something. And I guess another one, so like always treating the gun like it's loaded is another sort of twist on this. Beautiful example.

So yes, this is a topic that... 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 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 every book I could about, what do you call that, the study of religion, theology. I read the Bible cover to cover, read every single page, and read books about Islam and Judaism, tried to read two books about Hinduism, I still don't get it. And what you see in this is, little tiny hundred 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 i was taking notes so yeah uh very parably i love memes i think that uh um stephen pressfield's books Both of them are fantastic.

That format's great. Oliver Berkman's most recent one is very similar to yours. I think that we're zeroing in on a new, very concentrated type of purified version of writing, and I'm here for it. So kind of taking 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 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, 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 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. And what you come out with is either a smarter strategy or a unique insight, 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. 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 new approach to a business or a new approach to where I'm living in the world or a new approach to parenting or whatnot. 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, positive mental attitude and such, but it's wishful thinking. You know, the thing is the thing. And this sort of version of trying to recapitulate it into some other perspective that doesn't fundamentally change the thing.

What's your what's your thoughts? 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.

Tim Ferriss 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 on any given subject. He'll go to Amazon and look at the well-rated books. But he said, 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, ooh, that's a nice technique. Look at the top-rated critical review. have them sorted into praise and critical. And another one from Tim that came to mind is when brainstorming a book, he said, I will hire a journalist to push back. He said, journalists and lawyers are 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, just this 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 I thought, see, these are two very good examples of approaches that would not come instinctually, but come after. deeper thought and pushing harder to find a way of reframing what you're really doing here? Am I looking for encouragement or am I looking for discouragement so that I can push through?

So there, anyway, that's just one tiny example. But more examples come up all the time in 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.

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. And we confuse the two. We get confused. We think that we have this precise, accurate, unbiased, transparent, perfectly recorded view of things that are happening, have happened to us. And we see so well the fallibility in other people, the way that they...

convince themselves or are manipulated by others or are swayed by their past experience meanwhile we assume that the way that we see the world upon first impressions we have this sort of mass solipsism mass individual solipsism or sort of ego like narcissism 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, yeah, the past. We tend to think of the past like it's a concrete thing, like you just said. When I was 17, I was in a car crash in my neighborhood in Hinsdale, Illinois.

I blew off a yield sign, crashed into an oncoming car. And just in the confusion and days afterwards, somebody told me later. that the woman in the oncoming car that I hit, that 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. Every now and then I just think, man, that is so fucked up. Like there is some woman somewhere that will never walk again because I blew off that yield sign. Oh, I just like just carry this burden with me. You know, you put it out of your head sometimes and it comes back sometimes.

And after 16 years 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 into the old fashioned white pages phone book. And I just showed up at her door and knocked on the door.

And she answered and I said, hi, my name's Derek. I'm the one that when I was a teenager, I hit your car 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. And so it was misinformation that somebody told me that she'll never walk again. And she said, you know, 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 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 because I blew off the yield sheet.

And she said, no, sweetie, I hit you because I was eating. 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, yeah, it 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.

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. 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. All these stories we carry with us of people who have wronged us and people who are just bad and evil. 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 carrying around or the one that somebody else.

tells you is probably not the only version of that story. And then you can even zoom out and think about 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 thesis of that movie?

It is a... Cute romance movie from maybe 15 years ago. And the point is that the whole movie is basically a guy saying, yeah, this girl, 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 and down in the dumps.

And why is 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 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, here's one I just heard yesterday. The new Medicaid budget of 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's wasteful 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 say 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 Romania, a place you've never been before, and the first person you encounter is 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, sorry, we didn't mention, maybe we should have said at the beginning, my definition of true is 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.

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 thing to write everybody up.

You've got this lovely idea about perspectives feel real, that one person's undeniable fact is another person's incorrect opinion, essentially. And I love the reality of that. People share perspectives, not facts. Nobody bonds over facts.

I looked at a study recently, you basically get about three times as much retention after 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, we're 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 that 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 man touching the elephant thing right yeah yeah but 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 their, whatever, social values stance is the correct one. What idiots. Look at them, like, spouting it as if it's the only way.

when I think that's stupid. 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 sob story about a breakup they had 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. 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, or the noble victim.

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 an okay little city in Wellington.

And I catch myself saying things like, well, this 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 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 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 going to do this. I'm going to 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? No, no, no. You tell me. 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 7-3 vote to have just one president. It's a reminder that the way things are is arbitrary and not the only way.

7-3 vote resulted in the most powerful, most influential country with the most humans on the planet. 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. 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. Rules. Yeah, thanks for that reminder.

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.

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. There's so many examples where, hopefully we all have examples from our own life, where you bypassed the rules and thrived because of it. 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 and the pork. 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 a red stoplight in the middle of nowhere at three 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 three in the morning. There's nobody here except the aliens. And there's some rules like that where, yeah, I've thrived in life by breaking some of these rules.

And isn't there a, I don't usually do exact quotes, but something like reasonable men and the world. depends on some people being unreasonable. Oh, I'm not familiar with that, but it sounds a lot like the people that I like to hang around with, the unreasonables.

It's one of those classic, like 200-year-old kind of quotes that said like all progress depends on the unreasonable man. Like society depends on people being reasonable, but all progress depends on the occasional person being unreasonable. Because you realize that rules are not...

etched in stone. They're ever-changing. And they're adapting in 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 slavery rules or apartheid rules that were a 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 uffizi gallery in Florence a couple of weeks ago, and there is a large line for the bathroom for the ladies, and there was no disabled people around. But there was 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, you know what I mean? So it's agency. It's playing with the rules when it's safe. to do so knowing the ones that are meant to be bent and sometimes the ones that are meant to be ignored and broken entirely and then also sticking to them too but 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 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 free-for-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.

But yeah, 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 two years. And in doing that, I came up with this insight. I went, oh, rules themselves are useful, not true. Rules, except, you know, the rules are not like a law of gravity.

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 if we understand 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 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 are them to somebody else, that from everybody else's point of view, you are the odd one. My two favorite little examples of this.

or 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, Adam, 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 another one is an American woman goes to Scotland for her first time, and she's just...

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. 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 pointed at yourself. Yeah. Yeah. Then we can get into, do you want to get into that stuff about the split brain patients and how we lie to ourselves? That would be great.

This was a mind blower. So we all believe our brain, but our brain makes up things. Confabulation. And this was 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 a pretty... surprisingly narrow connection in the middle.

If there's a problem, brain surgeons can disconnect that middle, sorry, I forget the Latin official term, the thing that connects your left and right halfs of 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 say, 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, 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 eye 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, 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. 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 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 ourself, and just judge things only through their actions. Well, I suppose that 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 us like a mental patient. We'd sound like somebody who needed to be sectioned. So there's 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 lawyer's 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 we're not the people. 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, 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 resentment 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 ridiculous explanation about it.

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 animals moving forward. And I think that, yeah, not getting too frustrated at the fact that we don't have it and realizing where it comes from, or at least my bro science theory about why I think it might come from, I think is at least a good place to start. You did just say bro science, did you?

Correct. It's the highest form of science. I enjoyed that.

I like it. 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.

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. Just to linger on that, that sounds like an unbelievable lifestyle right turn. to make?

I don't know. I think maybe I was already a very skeptical person. I haven't yet read Michel, is it Montaigne or Montaigne, the French philosopher that kind of wrote these diaries. But apparently, I read a book about him, but I haven't read the original source yet of his diaries, but essays, that's it.

He... coined the term essay as essay the french word for to try and so michelle montagna montaigne's essays um very apparently would very often end with a little uh but what do 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 I've decided to do what I'm doing or go where I'm going.

But what do I 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.

I think I've already been in that mindset for years. And... Yeah, so 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 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. 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, necessarily, objectively, observably, empirically, 100% true. The idea that an alien from outer space and an octopus underwater could both observe this thing and agree. That's what I call true.

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 it's bad to kill, 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 in Otago 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 in the southern South Island of New Zealand, there's just thousands of bunnies that are not native to this environment.

And so they have no predators. It's kind of like the 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 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 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, it seems to imply that there's... something else going on, that this is triggering some other underlying emotions, or it has some extra meaning to them. that their value system that they strongly believe, 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 say, 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. 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 emotional persuasion.

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, how they present to the world, how they think things should be. 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 their statement about whatever it is. Well put. I think there's an equivalent, another bro science rule, which is any field which has got the word science in it is not a real science. It's not called chemistry science or physics science or biology science, but it is called social science.

So, yeah, this odd sense that. the more emotional somebody is getting about something, it tends to be things that can be contested. And the reason that the emotion is there is to act as an 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?

No one's fighting like that for gravity. Right. Right.

Fighting. Yeah. Yeah, by the way, thanks for remembering the outside of space and time.

I'd never heard it put like that, but you're right. I forgot that my definition of true includes for everyone, everywhere, always. And if it's not true for everyone, everywhere, always, then it's not necessarily true. It's true for you for now. You open up.

talking about what time is it now as a question. There's a great book by Carlo Rovelli. It's called The Order of Time.

It's a real small thing, not as small as yours. Yours is particularly small. The audio book is read by Benedict Cumberbatch, Doctor Strange from the Marvel series.

So it's awesome. It's really Sherlock Holmes to me. Correct. Really cool little listen. And in it, he talks about light cones.

So 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.

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. So it moves like... this. It doesn't move out.

It's not flat like that. It takes time to build out. And as you were talking earlier on, there's a couple of physics references that have come up 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 from sort of the social world or the psychological world get reflected, even if it's pulling on the tethers a little bit tenuously.

in a different field. So yeah, I was thinking about social relativity there before as well. I love that. We live in a very subjective, social...

psychological world. There are some of us, maybe, that are working in laboratories right now that are living in a world of just 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 things that are useful but not true. I spoke to Eric Weinstein a couple of weeks ago, and he has 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. Not all the time. That would make for a pretty poor expert.

But 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 missed 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 think that he's true. There's an odd sense that people should only ever speak about their area of absolute expertise, that there is not very much that can be contributed to by people outside of some odd formal training, plus apprenticeship, plus time spent within an area in an age where credentialism is actually quite highly criticized.

So these two things are existing in time and space at the same time. But yes, 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, what do we call it, cancel culture, where somebody who's made 20 years of great movies. 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 Allen has made some great movies.

Maybe what Woody Allen's, is it son or daughter? I don't remember. I think there are allegations against Woody Allen. that Woody Allen has, uh, there's 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 somebody can write a really useful book about psychology. 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, fuck 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?

I'm going to discard everything inside 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 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 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 deciding that I am a person who is against this social, I am against abuse. And therefore, if somebody's 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... 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 a massive disadvantage. if the only people that you can learn from are people that you usually agree with. Well put.

Huge disadvantage. This is the main problem with tribalism for anybody that is into personal growth. You are going to struggle to find anybody that is sufficiently pure, 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. So I actually wrote something on the plane that was inspired by what you were talking about. I went to 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'd quoted in your book. We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.

Kurt Vonnegut. Yes. That Kurt Vonnegut, I misremembered that Kurt Vonnegut quote for many years.

And I just remembered it as 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 wonderful. Thank you.

That was really wonderful. You beautifully said what I was trying to say. Way more words, though.

That would have taken up six pages of your book. Your book's like 90 pages. So, hey, listeners, 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 took the time.

I did the work. I made it as short as it could be. It is a lean being.

It's stage ready for the Mr. Olympia competition. So, my previous book. called How to Live, was a deliberate exercise in contradicting myself. Every chapter contradicted every other chapter.

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, 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.

But the most visual one, or 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. You use instruments for their purposes.

You bring in the clarinets when you want the clarinets, and you bring in the trumpets for that effect, and you hit the timpanis for that effect. And sometimes you combine them. Sometimes you have the cello and the oboe 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. 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. 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 oboe and a cello at the same time. 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 that neither 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...

Just to really drill it 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 bower 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 are you living now?

Austin, Texas. Okay, thought so. Where did you grow up?

Stockton-on-Tees in the northeast of the UK. Northeast. I didn't. Okay, well, very different mindsets in these two places. Slightly, yeah.

Did you live other places in between? Newcastle, northeast. Small summers in Thailand, in Bali, in Ibiza, 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-y? Vacation-y. Okay.

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 your investments in tech stocks, maybe, and some in commodities and some in international real estate. 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'm in the S&P 500. That's all I do. I'm Morgan Housel-pilled. So yes, I guess I've 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 at something that is uncorrelated with another way of looking at something and have them both. So that if one of those worldviews collapses, then the other one can see up 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. 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 diversified away from that part of my portfolio?

And I was thinking, well, what places has America labeled as enemies? 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 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 worldviews that are as different from the one as I grew up with as possible. One of my favorite moments of last year in 2023 was 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.

And hearing his worldview and his family history going back 1800 years, he knows his family history 1800 years in the past because they keep good records. And we were talking about his family's past over the last 1800 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 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 adopting them, or at least 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 knows his family history 1,800 years back. Or I can step into the mindset of the 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 now that's really like my main pursuit in life, is to really try to learn, deeply learn and adopt. very different worldviews that I can keep altogether. 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 a different way of seeing the world. Isn't that interesting? Oh, isn't it so interesting?

Isn't that amazing? Whoa, hold on. Explain to me, how do you see this? Wait, having eight kids is easy? Wait, hold on.

Explain this. By the way, he had a great explanation. He said, yeah, man, he said, having eight kids, he said, 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, man, they just do their own thing. I outsource the entertainment of the children to the children. He said, they don't need me at all. He said, man, having one kid is hard.

Eight kids, that's easy. Well, 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, yeah, from an efficiency standpoint, it can be dialed back. But here's another.

Wait, sorry, Chris, did you just come up with that right now on the spot, the factory? Yeah. That was really good. Thank you. You should remember that.

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, first off, let's find out about this person's perspective. Secondly, wow, that perspective is really different to mine.

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 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 contents that are different, not boxes that are the same, I think is a... 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, 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 separate document that's my thoughts on China so that every time I'm like, hmm, having some more thoughts about China, I just flip open that document and I start typing my current thoughts that I'm having, 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 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 successful by your own definition. Maybe you don't need to challenge that one. Don't mess with it.

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 that we'd be good to challenge. We'd benefit from doing the good old fashioned 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.

I'm sure that, imagine a poet long ago who was used to paying people to read his poems. 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. And now the poet has made a good living because people like paying money to read his poems.

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, 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 kind of like type one and type two thinking, we have type one and type two reactions as well. So 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 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 driving a car or playing pickleball or doing whatever. But I also think about this sort of in terms of 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 suggest that people look at changing their perspective. Yeah. Yeah, you're right. Reaction.

Reactions as well, which might come from communication, meaning, say, if somebody texts you a question, Hey, Chris, 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 your 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 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 Then even for your own thoughts, yes. 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 again, 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.

What are your thoughts on this? I've got a question for you. 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, you know, putting a rubber duck on top of your computer monitor and asking the rubber duck. Whatever works for you. Shit, ask, I mean, the new LLM AI tools are wonderful.

If you open... claude.ai or chatgpt.com and you say, what are some other ways of thinking of this? It's a great way to get started on this process because it's used to coming up with different ways of looking at things.

It can be a great tool for that. My favorite 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 they're 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, if I was milliseconds faster, I could have been the gold medalist. Whereas the bronze medalist is sitting there happy because 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 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 won an Olympic medal. The fact that it's bronze, whatever, that's great.

I made it. Whereas the silver medalist has the toughest spot. I really love that because it shows just, 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 people who don't as much.

And there's a degree of jealousy, or at least I used to have this a lot. And I think in my less gracious moments, I still sort of do. You know, it's this weird kind of narcissism where you think, oh, you know, the depth of my consciousness, it just causes me to suffer, man. And you go, well, if you were that smart, you'd figure it out. It's the Naval thing.

If you're so smart, why aren't you happy? But looking at that scenario there, 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. The person that's feeling worse got a quicker time. Objectively, they performed better compared to the person who is so grateful that they just slipped.

in and managed to get themselves on the podium and uh yeah i think about like quite a lot um trying to george mack 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 middle sorry okay so Imagine you've got an IQ distribution, Belkoff. 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 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, and he obviously comes up with the most ascended answer.

And in the middle, at the top of the IQ, Belkoff is the midwit, and the midwit is this sort of raging, screaming, lib-type person. And the joke... is that the guy on the left and the guy on the right always come up with the same answer.

And the guy in the middle is the one that overcomplicates 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 pre-digested enzymes are consumed within 30 minutes of performing an anaerobic scientifically back, you know, overthinking it, lift weights, eat protein. And almost all of the time, I think. uh when we get too confused is we're trying to be the guy on 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 melatonin released with cortisol and blah blah oh my god i'm stood on a podium uh right it's and if you were navel-gazing enough to realize this about yourself, as I imagine almost anybody that listens this far into a podcast called Modern Wisdom 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.

So this comes up a lot with, for me, with money, that Morgan Housel and Mark Manson were in a conversation that I heard where they were saying on Mark's podcast, I think, that they're 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 one 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? 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 do you call it, a numerator and a divisor? Denominator. Denominator. 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 is 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, I'll just give a real concrete example that's going on right now in my life. I'm building my dream house. I bought a piece of land in 2020 when I moved back to New Zealand. And I've been thinking for a couple of years about what would be my ideal home.

And in just a few months, it should be there. It's a four by eight meter prefab cabin with no kitchen and no bathroom. That is my ideal home because I've just constantly pushed myself to see how little I can live on.

And... Sometimes, you know, you find what things you truly do want or need. What would I truly be unhappy without? And then you notice which things you're so happy to not need.

And so to me, I've never pushed for more, more, more. I've always been pushing for less, less, less, because 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 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 your particular psychology? No, I think anybody can think this way. I, of course, am a product of my past.

And for many years, 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 stoicism, I didn't hear about the word stoicism until I was 41. That's the first time 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 circumstances out of my control. 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. 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 habit of never buying a car for more than $1,000. He would only get the cheapest car he could ever find and run it into the ground and then buy another car for $1,000 and run it into the ground. 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 started CD Baby and I got like $100,000, I'm like, whoa, now I basically can retire.

So this idea that it's all who you surround yourself with. You know, 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 because 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 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 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 perhaps a non-typical 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, a lot of change in my life, although it was kind of on the way, I guess, when we first sat down to speak. and working out what it means to have more than you need. And then you're left with this really bizarre decision where 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. And then 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 yeah, it's admirable to see what you did with CD Baby to even the way 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 a time capsule for the future that will kind of never. never die. It's the most future-proofed way that you could come up with it.

Is that right? That's one way of looking at it. Let's just say my minimalism runs deep.

Even into code. Oh, deep into code. I mean, almost more into code than other aspects of my life. I hand code every line myself. I don't use anything that ever generates any.

code for me. I only type every character myself. No Word, Word, Word, no Shopify. Oh God, no. I mean, sorry.

I mean, sorry, look, quick aside. Toby, who started Shopify, is the one that taught me Ruby on Rails. I paid him a hundred 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.

That was Shopify. Anyway, so sorry. I so admire what Toby's done.

He's a beast. 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 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 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 a 140 character tweet, which really could be done in, what is that, 280 bytes. But yet, to see that 280 bytes, you have to download like a 15 million. bite message through twitter.com, which is just this digital pollution shoved down the wire 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 ruthlessly. get rid of every single character that doesn't need to be there um i don't know that's right i know i probably just sound insane when talking about this but hey i remember 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 you know anything that's a lesson that's at That impactful, I think, is worth doing. But I just have to, before I let this go, I just have to say, 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, Ah, 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. 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've done. But yeah, my code is extremely pared down as essential as can be. And like, I look at it, and it makes me go, yeah.

I like that. This makes me happy. I am proud of this.

I have a similar kind of setup audio visually with the show as well. So I know what it is to have that craft. When it comes to 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.

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 course 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 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, I have a bias when it comes to decision making that it needs to be perfect the first time. And it needs to be very, very right if it comes to hiring or firing a member of staff, if it comes to making a decision 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. I often 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 yeah, realizing that your choices are only for you and only for now, I think it makes me go, ah. Right, okay, let's just move forward. Let's put our best foot forward and we can adjust from that.

Yeah. Hmm. 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 bowl me over because I'm-Stealing yourself ready for it.

Yeah. And that's very future focused. So it's-Dude, okay. So speaking of- Physical and lifting things.

I have been for 12 years doing classic barbell exercise. Right next to me, right? The king.

Where I'm talking right here, there's a squat rack just a meter to my left of my left hand here. That's where I keep my squat rack, my barbell. So as I'm working, I a couple times a day would 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 get a little break.

And I've always wondered, like, hmm, I would like to live nomadically. I would like to be able to instantly be at home anywhere I go. This squat rack, hmm, this is going to be a bit of a problem. It's a burden. 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 rack as soon as I arrive. Or just try to stay somewhere right near a gym that I like that's open at all hours. And I was always kind of fitting this into my worldview.

Like, hmm, okay, well, this thing has become... Ah. a dependency of mine.

And then six weeks ago, as I was hiking in the forest, suddenly my left knee went, what the hell? And it turns out I've had a meniscal tear in the ligaments of my left knee. And I can't squat right now.

I haven't been able to for six weeks, even just to squat naturally, just to squat down to the ground and stand back up just hurts like hell. So I've started seeing a physical therapist that got me doing body weight 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 a guy that spent like 18 years. Oh, yeah.

Very memorable name. Wonderful name. Spent 18 years in prison coaching convicts on how they can keep fit just in their jail cell.

And... uh it's amazing bodyweight exercise and the guy that wrote it he does one-handed push-ups i'm sorry 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 handstand on one hand and then do this you know 10 times the same thing with one leg squats all these things and you just realize like oh man bodyweight exercises can be hard as hell you Here I thought I was strong because I could squat 120 kilograms. But oh man, this shit 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.

Oh my God, this... would be a great thing to get great at because it's future focused. 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 might be a really good way to think about it. To say like, yeah, when hiring somebody, that's almost like a mini version of getting married. That's a big damn decision.

You should not be choosing the just for now version of getting married. You seem all right today. Sure, let's get married. It is a future decision.

But yeah, then 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 molested version of Kurt Vonnegut's quote that you. came up with dude could you use another adjective please you molested kurt vonnegut 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 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 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 matters with bravery, being social.

I'm inherently... Uh... anti-social 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, fuck me. But I'm like, you know what?

I know. I was like, OK, 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, you know, what do you do? Are you from?

No, really? No way. You come from there? Wow. Cool.

Tell me. Now, why did you do that? See, I just asked somebody why. But I can pretend to be social for one 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 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 or over-workers, 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 are significantly 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. 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 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.

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, you are what you pretend to be, is 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 Z done, but you really meant to do well. 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 put on the performance once you've done it. And then you go back home and you go, oh, well, there's me, another non-introvert or another non-extrovert out for the night. 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 it 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 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 how everybody defines authenticity, but to me it seems to be this idea of doing what you actually feel like doing. Correct.

Being true to yourself, being true to your emotions, which you can imagine where I'm going to go with that. It's just bullshit. 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 bullshit that... And that's 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 true to that thing because your teacher said it to you and you formed your self-identity based on that.

It's such bullshit 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 bullshit. Maybe I'm just too skeptical.

I don't believe anything my head is telling me. And I don't think you should either. So just put it all aside because it's all bullshit and only look at your actions. Maybe that's why I've also never had imposter syndrome. I've had so many conversations with friends about imposter 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 leads to somebody feeling imposter 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 were not the subject.

You're just the object. 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.

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. 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.

It 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 Shannon Sands, basically saying that I think it's an important redress 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 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. You're giving too much credence to your thoughts. And if you actually were to just look at all of the stuff that you've done, all of these things, even if 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 what mattered and uh yeah i think uh andy groves says there are so many people working so hard and achieving so little And I always think about that when I whine about having a hard day or I look at a day ahead that's going to be difficult or whatever. And I'm like, look, there's 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 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 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 poet is 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 giving it so much more value than I would if somebody said, oh, one of my third graders in my class wrote this poem. Here, read it.

You might read it and go, yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, cute. All right, whatever.

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 true.

Both can be false. Both can be useful. It can be useful for you to think all that matters is the output.

Fuck my thoughts. Fuck my background. Fuck 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. Ooh, touche.

Derek Sivers, 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 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.

Fuck Amazon. I cared nothing for Amazon. Go to my website, go to Sivers.com, S-I-V-E-R-S.com.

is my store where you can get my book now and go to my website. The best thing, okay, so you know, 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 around the world. So anybody that listened to this, go send me an email. Go to my website, sive.rs.

My email address is right there. It says contact. Go click that. Say hello. Ask me anything.

I actually really like. connecting with people from around the world. Heck 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.