#651 - Dr Mike Israetel - Can Money Actually Buy You Happiness? - Modern Wisdom: Summary & Transcript

In short

Podcast Notes: Modern Wisdom - Episode #651: Dr Mike Israetel - Can Money Actually Buy You Happiness?

Episode Overview

Title: Can Money Actually Buy You Happiness?
Guest: Dr. Mike Israetel
Bodybuilding and fitness consultant
Temple University professor of Exercise Science
Co-founder of Renaissance Periodization
Author
Description: Discussion centers around the relationship between money and happiness, exploring various philosophical and psychological perspectives on success, pessimism, and purpose in life.

Key Themes and Discussions

The Pessimistic Fallacy
Definition: A cognitive bias where people assume that situations are worse than they actually are, often leading to overly negative predictions about the future.
Example: Misunderstanding of global poverty trends; people often believe conditions are worse now than in the past despite evidence to the contrary.
Reference: Hans Rosling's book *Factfulness* is suggested for a better understanding of global progress.

Wage Stagnation Myth
Common belief that wages have stagnated since the 1970s.
Reality:
Wages must be analyzed in context (e.g., job type, seniority).
Total compensation (including benefits) has generally increased over time.
Median income provides a clearer picture than mean income, which can be skewed by extreme wealth.

Optimism vs. Realism
Optimism: Generally, seen as a naive perspective that can lead to disappointment.
Realism: Preferred approach, focusing on evidence and current realities.
The discussion emphasizes how a positive outlook based on factual progress can lead to a more fulfilling life.

Money and Happiness
Can Money Buy Happiness?
Yes, but with caveats.
Money can buy experiences, security, and the ability to help others.
Financial security reduces anxiety and increases life satisfaction.
People often mistakenly believe happiness lies solely on the other side of money or success, which can lead to a perpetual chase without fulfillment.

Purpose in Work
Many individuals feel disconnected from their jobs, often viewing them as mere means to pay the bills.
Encouragement: Finding pride in one’s work and recognizing its value can lead to greater job satisfaction.
Positive attitudes at work can lead to promotions and a better overall experience.

AI and Future Societal Changes
Discussion on the impact of AI on jobs and society.
Concerns over alignment and ethical issues with AI are addressed, with an emphasis on the potential for AI to improve society rather than harm it.

Cynicism and Skepticism
Critique of pervasive cynicism in society, particularly regarding progress and success.
Encouragement to adopt a more constructive, less cynical view to foster personal and societal growth.

Key Takeaways

Pessimism often clouds our understanding of reality; the world is generally improving in many metrics.
Money can contribute to happiness, especially regarding security and the ability to help others.
Finding purpose in work, regardless of the job, can lead to personal fulfillment.
Maintaining a realistic view of life, while being open to optimism, can lead to better outcomes and satisfaction.
Understanding AI's role in the future is critical, but it is important to approach it from a perspective of potential benefits rather than fear.

Additional Resources

Books:
*Factfulness* by Hans Rosling for insights on global trends.
Websites:
Renaissance Periodization for fitness and nutrition guidance.
Mike Israetel's YouTube channel for discussions related to fitness and philosophy.

Transcript

Automatic transcript. May contain errors.

0:00You don't want to really take pride in your work, try to take pride in your work, because your job sucks. So if you took pride in your work, what would happen? When you take pride in your work, do they pay you less? Like no, but I had to put up with my boss as bullshit. You have to put up with this bullshit one way or another. Your cynical ass puts up with this bullshit. That's why you're cynical. London isn't like my spirit place. I'd London is the greatest place on earth, and I love hearing all that hairy potter bullshit. I fucking can't get enough. Anything in a birch accent is just superior.

0:28I wish I spoke with a British accent you sound smarter cooler James Bond sex with random girls alcoholism You know all the James Bond stuff Mike my culture is not your costume So I suggest that you stop Putting it on and lapping his mic is that is heavily appropriating and it's not yours to wear yeah, I'm actually I was born in Russia So I actually wholly appropriated the language of your birth nation It's really offensive. Right. Let's get started. Mike is retell. Welcome to the show. Thanks for having me, Chris. I'm super pumped to be here, man. What is the pessimistic fallacy? The pessimistic fallacy is a cognitive bias that the average person shares is very, very prevalent.

1:19Not everyone has it. Most people have it to some degree. And that cognitive bias is to take any scenario, any given presentation of data, any sort of prediction of the future. Specifically predictions of, you know, we have this situation. How is it going to unfold? Is the situation going to stay roughly the same? Poverty, for example. How is poverty? How bad isn't now? How has it been going? Has poverty been decreasing over time? Has it been increasing over time? Has it been roughly stable? In 10, 20, 30 years, how do you predict poverty will go? Will it get much better? Will it improve? Will it stay roughly the same?

1:58And there has been a profound amount of research done on this. Hans Rosling's book Factfulness is probably a really good place to go for it. A great sort of high -level summary. But without putting too fine a point down it, almost everyone is insanely wrong about understanding how the world works. and that wrongness isn't, it's not normally distributed. It's not just some people overestimate, some people underestimate, most people, not all, but most are, you would think inexplicably pessimistic. They think that things used to be better in the past, where in fact it's almost, almost always not the case.

2:39They think on almost any global scenario that things are very bad today, to put it more technically worse today than they really are if we examine the empirical evidence. And their predictions for the future, again, tend to be very pessimistically inclined, such that they not only think this, but it's sort of in -baked, maybe a sort of subsidiary of the fallacy is, if you try to point it out to people, it's an iterative loop of they apply the pessimistic fallacy to argue back to you. So they go, well, you're just a polyanna like you just think it's all hunky -dory, and they just apply another layer of pessimism to your attempt to correct them.

3:20And it's tough because you end up it's very easy to care could yourself when you're a pessimist as a realist or at least you're hedging your understanding. You're like, oh, if things turn out better, hey, amazing, but I think they're going to be worse and it's worse case scenario they turn out better. Best case scenario, I'm right. Which either one of those worst cases, it's kind of like a hedging the bet situation, and that's a common retort. So that tends to be how the pessimistic fallacy is expressed. Yeah, what was that thing about the myth of wage stagnation? I thought that was a really good example of this.

3:53Yes. It's a very common citation that people trot out on social media. And by citation, I just mean claim or what the economist in the philosopher Thomas Sol would call notion. It's something people just say or think. It's not even caricatured as a hypothesis because it's not falsifiable or testable. and that idea is that like, well, wages haven't gone up. Typically they'll say, you know, in the United States, since, and then all sort of a year, depending on what literature they think they've read, typically the compared year is 1970 or the 70s. Sometimes it's the 80s. And if you look into this with like more than like five minutes of googling, it just falls apart right in front of you.

4:34I can get it little technical as to how it falls apart, and then why, if that's okay. So if you look at a wages for certain kinds of jobs, then you actually can conclude that there has been a significant amount of wage stagnation. But that typically doesn't integrate as a few things. First of all, that is not looking at flesh and blood human beings over time. The people that had a given job in the 1970s, in 75, 8, 8, 85, 90, typically their remuneration has skyrocketed. They're like, wow, they have seniority, they're older, so that doesn't count. Okay. So we're not actually talking about real people that go to work and have the same wage year and year out.

5:17And if you push people on, they're like, well, that's not what I mean. What about new people coming in? And then you start comparing, well, is it really the same job? And then that sort of floats away. Look at that, really the same job. It turns out that we're actually comparing much easier jobs. So they used to pay really good wages for brutal, like central Indiana factory work with no air conditioning or chance of death. like decent. In nowadays, you just press a button and the machine dumps the steel into the cooling chamber and you're drunk the entire time and you're a union member, you can't get fired.

5:44No big deals, it's totally a non -comparable work. And another big one is a lot of times they don't compare, they compare wages and wages in some sectors have gone up a little bit or actually stagnated, but they don't compare total compensation. So in the 1970s, you got your wage, middle finger, see you tomorrow and your shift number one. Nowadays, and over time since the 70s until today, you're getting an insanely richer offering of health benefits, daycare, time off, bonus structure, a bunch of different other ways to compensation. So if you are, I don't want to say intellectually honest because that says the opposing side is intellectually dishonest, usually they're not.

6:27It's just people hear stuff and a pessimistic fallacy rounds in and are duh. And if you are trying to find intellectually the best comparison, what you're going to do is look for a better comparison, more a more valid comparison. And something like median income is a good idea. Mean average income like GDP per capita is a little tainted because if you have a trillion billionaires and everyone else is dirt poor, more billionaires, they just drag up that average, but the median doesn't drag up the average. So the richer, super rich people and super poor people don't drag it up. So you really are looking at what does the average person make?

7:04If you look at median income and total compensation, that has just been going like that for every modern Western country for as long as you can measure it. And that is the reality of people are saying because when they say things like wages, and you go like, most many people aren't even paid in what you call wage. Some people get Salary, some people get bonus structures, people get various other compensation. And so I remember Thomas Sol had a famous line. We said, if someone's talking about household income, they're for sure just trying to use that metric because they're trying to paint it in a bad light.

7:37Why household? How household sizes have changed? Households are much smaller now. So if household income hasn't increased, the per capita income actually has gone up a ton because now households are two people that used to be six. So if people are saying wages of stagnated, And these are term wages, they're trying to make things seem bad. An honest assessment would look at total media and compensation per industry, per field, per IQ, per whatever. And any logical assessment of that, sort of 97 % of the time, the honest assessment is like, actually things have gotten phenomenally better for almost everyone.

8:11They're absolutely our exceptions to that. What about inflation? What about the cost of housing? What about the cost of goods? What about cost of living? What about all of that? That doesn't that just erode away all of the gains that have just been made. Yeah, you're right. Not at your point. So we can take a look at a few of these. Inflation is a decent point, except inflation has been relatively stable over a very long term. And so it's hard to paint a particular era of human history is bad because inflation is kind of a really steady thing that happens all the time. And it's not even true to say that inflation lately, other than the past, Well, six months ago, and now it's kind of stabilized.

8:53Anytime inflation, here's another thing really quick. Anytime inflation, uncharacteristically goes up, people spaz the fuck out. Inflation, killing us. What happens when inflation is low for a five -year period? Nobody talks about it. You don't even get an article about it. It's really yeah, you only pay attention when inflation is really bad. So if inflation is sort of anachronistically high, it's absolutely a concern. Usually, that's just not a concern. First point. Second point is the, there is another, as I said, so like median average income, median income per capita is a good way to think of how much money people make.

9:33Another way to integrate the cost of goods and services, it's what's called time cost or time price. And it's for an hour of typically compensated work, how much stuff can you buy? And that reflects some integration of inflation and everything like that. And time price of almost everything just goes down all the time. That's the most integrated, holistic, honest assessment. And it's improving all the time. There are exceptions to that. I'll get to those in just a second. But you can say, look, okay, with inflation, the picture isn't as good as without... So with a lower inflation, the picture would be better.

10:12Totally true. However, almost no analyses, even in formal economics, integrate the quality of goods, because that is phenomenally difficult to quantify. So for example, CEO, I only had to work XYZ number of years to buy a car, 19 .7, my uncle worked for a summer in 1976, bought himself a great car. Now we got a slave way for years. Well, what was the car in the 1970s like? find any given metric it was a fucking disaster it's actually illegal to drive most of those cars on the road because they just like the global warming Actually comes out of the exhaust pipe. It's not even pollutants. It's just like straight up like little Al Gore particles come out so and it's the thing is like ways 30 fucking tons it uses only let it gasoline Which again just poisons children directly.

10:59It's just child poison comes out of that thing So if you look at it you're like okay This is this is not the same thing a car is not a car is not a car and if you take any attempt to integrate quality into that, look, it's been getting way, way better at the very least cancels out any inflationary effects. However, there are exceptions to that rule, and I'm not aware of any of those exceptions, which are not the result of government interference. I know I sound like a crazy libertarian, but it's just true, and in most of economics, it's not even controversial, for example, housing. economist Brian Kaplan, who's amazing.

11:36I'm sure you should have on your show at one point. He's ultra entertaining, he's the man. He'll point out that precisely in the places where you have a lot of housing regulation is where you have the least home building. And if you have lower housing regulation, you get way more home building, home prices per unit of time cost fall drastically. And so the cost of living crisis, It is almost always caused just straight up caused by excessive government regulation. And if you deregulate the cost of living gets like a trillion times better. And a trillion is a mild exaggeration, nonetheless serves the point.

12:15So if you look at the industries which are not following the trends of essentially becoming cheaper and time cost over time, which is by the way the baseline trend, everything becomes time cost cheaper and higher quality over time, the things that don't follow that are the things that have without exception, I believe, the most intrusive government regulation, and not just intrusive because regulation isn't just this demon that's bad. There is absolutely such a thing as intelligent regulation that you need. You must have some regulation. It will set a really good framework, a really good legal parameter system to make sure that things go really well.

12:49Absolutely 100%. It's not anti -regulation, but there are more and less intelligent ways to regulate. And the least intelligent type of regulation leads to things that just spiral up and cost usually cap off in quality much more than you would expect. Healthcare is a great example. Education is a great example. Housing is a great example. And those are the industries precisely in which the government has the most to say. In industries like technology where the government has almost nothing to say, thank fucking God for the time being. And every time they try to regulate AI companies, and he's like, shudder, I have like a Jewish panic attack.

13:25Oh, you know, in those other industries, shit just gets better all the time. It is just, and I know that sounds shocking, and some people will be like, oh, he's off his rocker. It's just not a mystery. It hasn't been a mystery in generations, this is the case, status quo biases and motherfucker in this case, because people, you say like, hey, let's deregulate housing. And they're like, what do you mean? Won't that cause like, in just insert wild insane ideas? is just stairwells will start collapsing out of nowhere and so on and so on and so on. So the reality is like almost all the ones I know of, the elements in the economy that are not getting cheaper and higher quality over time is where you can point distinctly to insane mismanagement by government regulatory authorities.

14:10Why is it the case that this pessimism bias exists? And this is something that I've noticed on the internet as well, this sort of pervasive cynicism, I guess the internet flavor of it is a little bit different. It's more sadonic and cutting and kind of back bitey and zero sun, but there is still, you know, just a general pervasive pessimism masquerading as skepticism or non -naivety. Why? A couple of smart folks, maybe more than a couple, have speculated. And I find a few of the hypotheses interesting. I'll share a few with you. one is the whole idea that as a as a cognitive defense mechanism, it's easier to be skeptical and cynical because then if you're proven wrong, you're like, hey, shit's better.

14:56Cool. Like it's like telling people before you compete in Jiu -Jitsu or kickboxing, they're like, hey, you think you're going to win this match? You're like, nah, man, this guy's going to fuck me up. And then you beat him. You're like, you're the man. But if you fucked you up, you're like, told you, like, this kind of a no -lose. So it really hedges your bets really well. Another thing is that people often mistake and by often maybe almost always skepticism for cynicism. I think what most people think is them being skeptical is them being cynical. I think I'm quoting Stephen Pinker when I say a sneer is not an argument.

15:29Like a lot of the books he's written, people's response on the air was just like, well, and it's like, to go on, whereas the substance like, well, there is really no substance. In its easy to be thought of as an intellectual, if you can render some cynicism on something. And another one, which is sort of more deeply rooted hypothesis, is that our brains and our patterns of behavior did not evolve for the today times. They evolved in the times of our evolution, where most of that evolution was in an objective of reality that was pessimistic as fuck. Just bad. In almost every way you can imagine.

16:08Brutal. Like, how animals live. You know, like, I was like, uh, walking around my backyard and I saw like a bunny rabbit hopping and I was like, oh, that's so adorable. And then I thought, like, that bunny is hopping to get food. It's not like he has a refrigerator at home. He's starving to death at all times. He's in the fucking brink. And if my dog comes out and chases him down, He's just going to die. It's just total war all the time. They're shit hiding in every bush that's going to fucking kill you and has And we all humans are the survivors of the people that were at least marginally pessimistic so as to control their statistical risk exposure like like hey one of actually I'm just stealing Gentleman who I heard in another progress podcast example, but it's like if there's rustling in the bushes right in a 15 ,000 years ago and and one guy's like, oh, that could be dangerous.

16:59Let's back the fuck away. Yeah, very pessimistic. But the guy who is like, ah, it's no big deal. Fucking saber tooth. Whatever the fuck jumps out. He'll just ask and you're like, oh, that guy's dead. And he's straight up either didn't have children or just to put a point on this. He did have children. But he's dead now and his wife or whatever partner can't get enough food and she withers away to almost nothing and his kids just literally starved to death. It was insanely commonplace. It was a commonplace, it was default. And so that's just to illustrate the brutality of where we came from. So a lot of nervousness, a lot of anxiety, a lot of apprehension, it's very adaptive in the times of our evolutionary ancestry.

17:42Nowadays, fuck man, like if you walk on a streets of Austin, Texas, which by your complexion I can tell you don't because you exclusively exist on the internet. Oh, there you go. Reptile, Reptile, Reptile, my man. So you just adopted Texas. I was born in it. I actually wasn't. So do you call yourself a Texan Chris? Is that the...? I just shaved the moustache off that I'd been carrying for a little while. I've got a huge episode coming out next week. And I figured, do I really want to inculcate for the rest of history? This beautiful cinematic production with flying to Stuart Florida. And we're filming it on red dragon cameras.

18:18and it's in 6K and we've got this film crew. And there's gonna be me there with this fucking caterpillar on my top lip. But for quite a while I enjoyed and I thought it was pretty ironic. It's also, I'm pretty sure that a shit mustache is a counter signal for physical appearance that the only people that can afford to pull it off are the ones that have got surplus like physical appearance credentials to be able to go out. Alex Hormosi. Hormosi, Hormosi, the guy. My God, what a man. The guy is ruthlessly unfashionable. and very hairy, but rich and jacked out of his mind with a like fit wife. So you know, you say what you want, you can get away with it.

18:58Point being, no, having, don't call myself Texan, no one's gonna consider me Texan, but these lights, look, you haven't seen this until the color preset has been placed. When Dean runs this through our color lot and these colors aren't as flat, you will notice that the hue of my skin really, really comes out. So you actually look quite healthy. I look insanely pasty because I'm currently not very healthy at all. Neither here nor there. When you walk out of streets of Austin, Texas, I mean, jeez, you know, there's a kind of an apostasy of saber -toothed tigers. And you can spend arguably the vast majority of your life never encountering want in what it used to mean, physical danger, lack of food, lack of medicine.

19:38So where we evolved, and was just like the camping trip that never ends, except you have no pro -pain stove and no medicine and no anything, you're just living in the fucking woods. That is like much more pessimism fits that situation much more. Their pessimism is realism. In our modern world, it's incrementally actually not quite quickly becoming better and better. Pesimism is more and more just simply out of touch with reality. And as a matter of fact, what we used to call like kind of insane optimism is progressively more and more realistic. Yeah, so that's the implication, right? If life is getting better, this means that realism looks like optimism to the eternal pessimists, but is actually optimism is more realistic because what you're doing is you are projecting out the trajectory of ever improving quality of life, ever improving medicine, healthcare, climate control.

20:34I mean, this is one thing that people that talk about climate change never bring up, which is that climate -related deaths have decreased by 50 times over the last 100 years. It's a huge, huge, huge, huge, huge, huge, huge, huge, because of climate mastery. You know, that we've got air conditioning to keep us cool when it's hot and we've got heating to keep us warm when it's cool. Also, interesting point, farmer people die from cold, than die from heat. You're not supposed to say stuff like that. Al Gore is going to come get you. You are Stunberg. You are a Boomer to use Al Gore as the go to...

21:05Who's Al Gore? And then to the internet, you Gen Z tick -tocking fox. You're welcome.

21:15Anyway, yeah, my point being that you have this real duality that's going on here. That first off, I don't think that pessimism is a personal development, personal developmentally useful approach for giving yourself an advantage either in life, in experience, existentially, psychologically, financially, in terms of business, professionally, personally, any of those things. I don't think that it helps. I don't think that it's an optimal approach, because I think that you're smoke detector principle, which you just highlighted there, is going off when it shouldn't be going off. But on top of that, it's becoming increasingly more and more detached from what the actual world is like.

21:58So, I mean, what's the answer? Is optimism the answer? Should people just be blindly optimistic now? Like what are they supposed to do? I'm not a big fan of optimism because it has that same stench of a cognitive mischaracterization of reality. I think anything other than your best attempt at realism is an insane proposition. And I mean, insane in the literal sense, like it's less That's the same. It's just realism in your best shot at it is probably my best bet as to how to do things. Because we live in such an increasingly wonderful world, realism, like we sort of just alluded to, really is kind of optimism.

22:43Optimism is the new realism or whatever, or orange is the new black. That really is the case. So I'm a huge fan of realism. I optimism wigs me out. It gives me that sense of like... When you say optimism, do you mean sort of unjuw hope for the future without reason? Exactly, I think that's probably the best definition of optimism I've ever heard, which if you reverse the terms that's the best definition of pessimism I've ever heard, so undue foreboding of the future without any reason. So I'm not a big fan of optimism. I've been help run Renaissance Privation, which is getting to make a lot of money, and all big and stuff, I'm rocking the gear.

23:23but you know, it's been in multiple talks with folks in the company. And you know, there's been talks of like 10xing and this and that. And I love the hope. And I'm working every day to the bone to try to make that happen. But at the same time, I'm like, why don't we just try to one and a half X, motherfuckers? And if that works out, we can 2 .2. You know, like, just keep the train, just do a good job to keep the train rolling. The idea of just really hopeful future stuff. I just don't understand it. I don't understand, I do understand that cognitively, being optimistic can liberate your psychological energies to do your best job.

24:04But I think that properly contextualized realism can also do that. And then you never have to second guess, am I just being too optimistic because you're not? You can say, am I being sufficiently realistic? And the way to determine if you're sufficiently realistic is examine your premises, examine Xamonologic, Xamon the data, Xamon the trajectory and just try to realign. So that sounds like a lot of work. Mike, that sounds like, you know, it's much easier for me to believe that everything's going to go to shit and that the people that believe that things can get better are genuinely the problem and couch that, couch that is realism, realism and anybody who has hope is naive and they can all go fuck themselves.

24:46a standard that you come standard with, a Western Tennessee rocking chair where you see technology and you're like, nah, nah, we had that in the 50s and you're just like, you know, chew your straw, nothing is impressive, everything's going downhill, but the thing is you always knew it was going to. So you were always right. Correct. And you get the opportunity, even though your world view might be incorrect, you have the opportunity of larping as someone that's intellectually insightful. Oh yes. It sounds, being a skeptic sounds so much more sophisticated than being an optimist. I really want to fucking rebrand, I've called it toxic positivity or rational optimism.

25:25I really want to rebrand hope as something that isn't done by idiots. I would actually go as, I would actually go as far as to say that the most stupid people I know are the ones that are the most negative. Oh, by a long shot. That's been my experience as well. Very good. Talking about money, you just brought up a Renaissance periodization, your company, very cool. Doing some good shit with AI as well, which is fascinating. Thank you. You make money, even if you don't look like it. I sure don't. Can money buy happiness in your view? Yes. It's unequivocally yes. And if someone doesn't believe that, you just offer them a million dollars and watch them pass it up.

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26:10Oh, wait, they won't. Right? So how can money buy happiness? I actually have a whole video on my Progress Philosophy channel that folks feel free to check out about how money can buy happiness and how it can't. Because in some cases it can't but in many cases it can so It's like if someone asks like hey just going to the club with a bunch of your great friends and dancing all night really make you happy There are absolutely ways in which it does and there are absolutely ways in which it doesn't Does it bring you closer to a deep inner peace and a connectedness with all of great nature? Fuck no, I'm not accessing all the fuckers.

26:44I can't tell my own hand for my face anymore Does it make me like I'm like, ecstatically happy as an amazing memory I'll have forever. Yes. So money is, you can bring happiness in a variety of ways. I can think of at least two, maybe three. I'll just share three. One is you can buy shit that like you like because everyone likes some kind of shit. This is my work office. I usually don't work in the darkness like it might appear. Although, yeah, maybe I should. It's a little Batman vibe. So you can buy stuff that's cool and for everyone at least some stuff is cool. And if you have enough money, anything you want, you buy.

27:23Amazing. And like, it will make you a little bit happier to have cool stuff. I'm just really not into stuff. I'm probably more the exception than the rule of that. But it's definitely a thing that can occur. Another thing that you can do with money is to lavish the people closest to you in your world and or people far from you but whom you have a connection to as humans and want to help with any kind of support that you deem necessary. So if you truly, truly care about the plight of the poorer peoples in Africa that do not have economic stability and they have food insecurity, yeah, I sure wish you were Bill Gates real on Musk so you could have billions of dollars to go give to their governments or give to the people or do micro loans so you can make actual people's lives and meaningfully better.

28:09Let me just, let me just jump in the, so effective altruism, which is maybe familiar with the, William McCaskill, the guy that came up with that, I went for dinner with him a couple of months ago. And one of the, if you take what you just explain now, which I don't disagree with, if you care about global suffering, your one of your goals could be to earn as much money as possible so that you can funnel that money towards campaigns and agendas that you care about. But if you take this to its philosophical extreme, It can justify people doing things that are unethical in order to earn money to use it in a way which they believe is more ethical than the way that they unethically earned it.

28:45And this is how people like Sandbankman Freed can be given some degree of a pass from certain elements of the EA community, because although the guy has, by your face potentially stolen some of your crypto, what you do have is the one who is like, look, I'm going to damage some people a little in order to help the world a lot because where it's actually a very sort of a solipsistic view of the world. It's very sort of bourgeois. You look, the fucking the common folk, the plebians down there, they don't really know how to spend the money. And if we had it, we would spend it on more plebian, more common folk than they are.

29:26And we are simply arbitraging the semi -idiot down to the real idiot and I am here to lift them out of their sort of squallage myad's awful lives. Excellent. I have a few things to say about that. One is I will not stand by while you tarnish the reputation of the great Sam Bing. On a few look. One is he is just a good person and I don't want to hear it about this in that embezzlement mindset. If you are going to simply complement anybody that's got more hair than you, there is a very, very, very long list of people that are going to come. Not only does he have, am I allowed to say really politically incorrect shit on here?

30:09Or am I just going to fire away? Fire away. This is going to get me fucking canceled for sure. When the Sandbankman freed shit happened, one of the first articles I saw was like he's in the Bahamas and a $40 million house. And he's like a bunch of people at work for his company, they're having like relations, like sexual malfeasance with each other. And so like, oh God, I'm going to hell. I'm really am joking about this. People are so much more than their appearance. Look at me, I'm fucking hideous. It's all jokes. That I Google around, I see where the orgies, who the people were, and I was like, oh my God.

30:45And these are some of the least attractive people I've ever seen. I would have paid good money. I would have paid close to Sandbankman Freed's network to not be in that polykill. Cash me out. Yeah, I'm just actually something came up. I'm going to take a flight the fuck out of the Bahamas forever. See you guys never? Yeah. I actually, to be fair, I would have probably paid that amount of money simply to have not been in the room and observed Sandbankman Freed naked with those people. Like, I wouldn't have even had to, yeah, I wouldn't have even had to risk being involved in it. But just being near it, the smell, the sights, the sounds.

31:20Ooh, the smell must have been legendary. Listen, sandbankment freed, I'm not, it's not the hair that I'm jealous about, it's the physique. The man is a fucking adonis, and I will not be corrected, but I'm actually an expert in physique, believe it or not. And he's just like, there's Mr. Olympias and then a sandbankment freed, end of discussion. But to the point of people can do elicit or nefarious things for money, I think is a absolutely a valid point that is entirely different from the point of how can money make you happy Like sex can make you happy, but if you take sex from people that are not interested in giving it to you That's called rape and it's one of the worst things in the world, right?

31:59The idea that rape exists is in no way a counter Counter to the idea that sex can make you happy so just to support your intellectual sort of thing in there and then And so, yes, there are many, many ways to help other people with money. And I don't just mean sending it to Africa for the people's over there. I mean, like you have relatives and friends and some of them aren't famous YouTubers and they don't have a ton of money and you can give them gifts on their birthdays that blow them away. Like having rich friends is fucking sweet. That everyone who's not rich thinks having rich friends is fucking like a fantasy.

32:37And when I happen to see people who are rich think that having rich friends is fucking to upset. Yes, like Alex Formozio says there's levels to it. He has like a hundred million dollars or whatever and I was like, how does it feel? And he's like, like as soon as you get into that world, people are like, Oh, I bought a yacht. The cost 500 million. And I'm like, Oh, fuck, I'm poor again. Dude, I had a guy, I had a guy come through to do the show a couple of weeks ago. And he flew from Houston to Austin on his G550 jet that cost him. I think it depreciated. I think it depreciates by about $25 ,000 every time it lands.

33:09Oh God, each time it lands. My duty is I'm hurt for hearing that. Why? Why? Cry's in inner Jew. Oh my God. 25 grams. So that's both ways. That's about 50 grams to do it. And I was like, why didn't you just charter a plane? You can charter a plane from Houston to Austin for like 10 grams return. And he's like, ah yeah, but you know, mine's got my pillows on it. And it's got my seats on it. got my food on it. And I was like, well, okay, fuck me, I guess. But okay, so there's you've got your first one, you can buy cool stuff. You've got your second one. If you earn money, you can make people around you happy, whether they be in Africa or next door.

33:45What's the third one? Yes. Financial security, which for me, for the record, folks that don't know me, as I say this at some point, I'm like a level six agnostic or whatever on the Richard Dawkins scale. so it's not technically nathias, but I find the probability of God being real, it is almost infinitesimally unlikely. So I'm not religious in any capacity. I'm genetically in Hashkanazi, Jews. So tada. But so when I make the Jew jokes, context for that, but to my Jewish heart, nothing beats financial security because maybe it's not the Judaism. It really is the Judaism. But I am originally from Russia from the Soviet Union.

34:29I was born in Moscow in 1984. My parents moved our family to America in 1991. And in Russia, we were a level of poor that almost no one in the United Kingdom, Western Europe or America can actually just contextualize. It doesn't make any sense. And then when we came to America, we had to build from the ground up. So I was, I've been poor middle class or whatever, lower middle class, essentially my entire life. And I became very weird at a young age that if my parents couldn't make money to feed us, where does the food come from? And this house that we have, I don't know how to build a house, my parents paid some money to live here, to rent it, or to buy it.

35:02And the idea that they have money now, to pay for things now, and that if they don't continue to be productive for any number of unfortunate reasons, that these good things will come to an end. So if you find yourself in the position of an income stream that can more than pay for your current expenses, your logical course of action if you think it through for a little while is to whatever kind of investing you do, and I almost exclusively do only very low risk investing, again, profound Judaism strikes. And risk. So that to me is like, okay, if I make enough money now, I can get to a point where even if things go totally south, I'll have enough to live on for XYZ number of years, maybe in perpetuity.

35:47And Jesus Christ, a guaranteed living. Even if things go bad, I mean, Chris, you got to think about it. In the context of world history, paradise is real and we're here. So financial security is unbelievable. Yeah. So when we compare what we've spoken about so far, so getting stuff, helping people in the world that you care about and financial security, I know everyone will be aware of the study up to $70 ,000 per year. You have this sort of increasing happiness. And then beyond that point, it seems like it's related to this, like, some Some studies that say it's related to life satisfaction, which kind of pivots it from happiness to life satisfaction.

36:25That to me seems like a sort of status for keeping up with the Jones is comparative relativist, type world. Then I had set Stevens to Vitoit's on the show and he's a data scientist, so I trust him completely. Andy's Jewish, which is great. So I have to have to trust him. With a name like that, my God. Damn right. Yeah, he's really, he's more Jewish than you. He has less followers than you do. He has less force in than you do, okay? So he said, I hope not. He said that every increase in happiness that you get takes another doubling of money. So let's say that it's $70 ,000, then it would be 140 to achieve the same increase, then it would be 280, then it would be 560, so on and so forth, in order to achieve the same.

37:14So you get this diminishing return. I don't know which one's true, but it seems like there is a difference between avoiding discomfort, like a lack of money can make you miserable, but does lots of money make you happier. It's up to some degree, it does. But when it comes to getting rich and how much people value money and chasing success and stuff like that, I know that you have a thesis that all of this is wildly undervalued and being in the present moment is wildly overvalued. And you took a great rejoined pushing back against a thesis that I had around happiness and success and the directness of the root between it.

37:56What is your perspective on? Is it okay if I take those quotes out and actually just look at them? Hit me in the face with them. Yeah, let's go. Call me back to myself on my own podcast, like some sort of human centipede of years where you lied to people. So, you know, by implication, of course, so let's see how it begins. And I click on the Instagram and it shows me the things that I want to see. So you have, I love your Instagram, by the way, because it shows up on mine and I use excellent quotes and stuff like that that I love to see. Thank you. So, let's see. We trade things we want time. For the thing was just supposed, for the thing which is supposed to get it, money.

38:48We give up time to make money so that we can finally have more time when we have enough money. We give up happiness to achieve success so that we can finally enjoy happiness when we achieve enough success. I have a lot of things to say about that, but I'll probably just say a few.

39:07If making valuable things to provide to other people so they can exchange value and return for them and make you money and make you successful and they get happier because they voluntarily pay for your stuff. For example, Mark Zuckerberg made Facebook and Facebook made me way happier than without Facebook. I've done incredible things. I've managed to help tons and millions, millions, hundreds of thousands of people through Facebook. So if I'm Mark Zuckerberg and I'm engineering this monster called Facebook, I'm engaged, sure, definitely in the pursuit of money. But in that pursuit, I'm doing two things.

39:44I am having a profound effect of beneficence on other people. And that's how I'm using my time versus just like being in nature and staring at the fact an animal and shouldn't be in all the piece, which is dope. It's awesome. and I do absolutely have a practice of the Pasana meditation myself, so I'd speak about that a ton. But not only do you get that is the pursuit of success, the pursuit of money, can be a meditative practice in and of itself. My happiest that I ever am is when I am, by the way, I'm in my home office, it is a completely white, nothing on the walls, windowless basement room.

40:26Oh, that's real home -osy. Yeah. Yeah. And when I'm in here, either listening to Total Silence or to Down Tempo Electronic Music of various sorts, and I'm working on algorithms that we're going to code into the hypertrophy app or the diet coach app in RP, I am in an unbelievably elated state because I'm building, I'm creating, I am meditating while I'm working. And that's how I make money. So to me, making money is the thing that makes me the most happy than multiple levels. The practice of it makes me happy directly. It is also the best use of my time. It is also when I am most present in reality because I'm building, I am creating outflow is occurring.

41:08I'm in a flow state. And in addition to that, it is at least cool ass benefits. Like first of all, it helps a fucking gazillion people get in shape and get healthier and stuff like that. And also when I decide I'm too tired to continue to work and finish my training for the day, you know, like in its weekend, I take fucking edible gummies in marijuana and walk around my neighbor or like a fucking idiot and everything, some combination of criminal or stereotypes. So those things may be true. And I'm just be up and with my wife, I don't have a fucking care in the world because I work so goddamn hard that I know that I'm where my next meal is coming from.

41:40I know where my one after that is coming from. I know my rent is paid. I know there's heating and cooling available. I don't have to worry about what's going to happen today, tomorrow, and the day after. That's why I think, at least in part, work and money and value creation can be the practice that makes you ultra happy. How many people on average do you think feel first off connected enough to the work to actually enjoy the process of it? And secondly, like their work actually contributes to making the world a better place? Almost everyone who's not a criminal does work that contributes to the world becoming a better place.

42:16If I go to a Burger King drive through and someone hands me a cheeseburger, they have absolutely contributed to my world being better. In a non -nominal way, they did a great job. Do you think they feel that? So yeah, they probably don't. And how do I say this in a politically correct way? If they thought of it that way, it would make their life better. Correct. So that would be correct. It is there's absolutely a way and there's of course every quote that you post has a huge element of truth, even I some on the margins on my personality attitude, disagree with it. There are so many people to whom work is drudgery, to whom work is a disconnected state of what when do I really begin to live my life totally, but almost any job if you generate, if you take time to think about it and you generate some fucking buy -in and you take pride in your work.

43:10There are legitimately mentally retarded, and I'm absolutely comfortable using that terms, is actually what it is. Mentally retarded people that work at Walmart, that are present in their work, and so fucking kind when you walk in and they greet you and they're smiling, they're having a good time at work. And what the fuck are you doing with your - In their defense, they're having a great time all the time and smiling all the time too. They've had to hack the system, right? So, shengilis. Shane Gillis has got this amazing, amazing bit. Do you know who Shane is? Have you seen a photo of him before?

43:42I don't. Comedian guy. And he has a routine where he talks about the fact that he has a lot of sort of mental retardation in his family. And he's able to pull a face that really transforms him into somebody that looks an awful lot like someone who, and he describes it. He dodged it, but he kind of got nicked just a little bit. He kind of got caught genetically by it. And apparently when he tells people about this, he says, you know, my, I think it's his own cool, one of his own cool Jimmy or something has, is a manly retarded and he, the people say, oh, oh, I'm sorry, like is that okay? I hope that he's okay.

44:18And Shane's response is, I don't know why you're giving him sympathy. He is literally the most dialed guy that I know on the planet. He is having the best time. He is a man that sneaks grilled cheese sandwiches into restaurants just in case they don't serve grilled cheese sandwiches. So yeah, anyway, yes, understood. I spoke to a guy called Daniel Schmackton burger, super, super smart dude. And this was definitely not a Jew. Never. No for skin at all. Actually, it's got more for skin than all of us put together. He said, I was talking to him about the fact I was a club promoter and sometimes I finish work late at night and I have this existential crisis when I go shopping.

44:56So I used to go into the local supermarket that was 24 hours on my way home. Test goes as the. Oh my man. Sorry, I stuck right there. Amazing. Yeah. I wasn't middle class enough to go to weight trozov marks and spend it by that time. Oh, I'm an S. I'm an S. Yeah. Yeah. Get the Percy pigs. So on the way home, I would stop off. And I would say to him a lot of the time when I got in there, it's 2 .30 in the morning. I'm sleep deprived. I'm on my way back after just watching a thousand, 18 -year -olds get drunk and finger each other in a club. And as I was doing myself checkout, out, I would have a small existential crisis.

45:28Not a big one when it wouldn't break down and cry, but it would just loom ambientally in the background. And he said, next time you go in, find somebody that's in there that's stacking shelves and just tell them that you hope they have a really good evening and that give them a compliment, do something nice with them or for them, say that you're proud of them or whatever, like, whatever you can come up with, anything you like, the fucking shoes. And what you've suggested about people that take pride in their work is kind of the reverse of that. That there is just so much meaning that can be imbued in taking things seriously.

46:03And I think that this is actually related back to what we were talking about before, to do with the sort of skepticism, cynicism, which is by being cynical or skeptical, you create a walled -off garden around you that doesn't require you to genuinely existentially interact with the world. You don't actually end up being invested because everything's going to go to shit in any case. So I don't need... Everyone sucks. Yeah, I don't need to care. You don't care about the environment. A lot of some people do. That's a lie. Lots of people don't do... Adamant that the world is going to go up in a ball of flame.

46:42Don't care about the environment. They just believe that the world is going to explode. And they're able to couch their fear of truly feeling and integrating with the world on a sort of loving emotional level within this sort of cynical skepticism,

47:06proselytizing it as realism. And it means that they never actually end up having to connect with things. And I think that this is kind of the same, it's the same thing that you're seeing in the manosphere with a lot of the dating, the dating advice that is being given out to men at the moment. It's that if you see women as enemies to be avoided or adversaries to be used and discarded, you never actually have to open up, you never have to face the pain of potential injury emotionally. And I think that this is kind of women who are trying to pick up injury, holy shit. Around arousing. But yeah, my point being here that in order for you to genuinely care about the thing that you do, you have to care about the thing that you do.

47:48By caring about the thing that you do, you open yourself up to risk. So yeah. And also, mild to moderate ridicule from other people, if you take pride in your job as a Walmart store, you know, stocker of shelves, you know, many people in that store with you working that'll sort of like render a kind of attitude towards you like, you know, almost like SpongeBob Squarepants like SpongeBob loves working at, you know, the crabby patty's the shop or whatever. And he's almost seen this kind of paliana -ish like, oh, he's just delusional. And it's like, I'm sorry, what part of being happy at work is delusional?

48:22And one of my passions is to take people's assumptions, notions, and to try to get them to jump a couple logical steps to see where they end up and maybe I learned something and maybe they end up just being like, oh, I fucking never thought this through. So I was wrong as fuck. Like, okay, so you don't want to really take pride in your work, try to take pride in your work because your job sucks. Okay, where it up? So if you took pride in your work, what would happen? Like, yeah, but my job sucks. It's okay. It was a what if you took pride in it? They're like, well, I'm a chump. Like, well, I'm sorry, when you take pride in your work, do they pay you less?

48:55Like, no, but I had to put up with my boss's bullshit. On the fuck, you have to put up with this bullshit one way or another. Your cynical bitch asks, what's up with this bullshit? That's why you're cynical. If he was like, hey, I want you to stay later today. So you're going on my yacht. You're like, fuck an asshole. Cool. Rewind. He goes, hey, you got to stay later today. I'm going on my yacht. You're like, all right, sir, have a good day. I'm just going to be at work. You're happier now, motherfucker. And you're more productive. You took the time in front of you, the four hours of extra late shift that you were going to do.

49:23You leaned into the shit. Unless you plan on quitting your fucking job, what is exactly the point of being cynical. What is exactly the point of being detached from your work? Oh man, I hate work and it McDonald's. By the way, I've worked a bunch of people all the way up from people who make nothing to make millions, and I've seen people have positive attitudes at every fucking layer of that shit. And by the way, number one way to get promoted is do a good job. And number two way to get promoted is be a fucking positive person at work. Because your boss knows that this motherfucker wants to be here, and by the way, any any job that remotely has me interacting with other humans, almost all jobs, and especially in customer service, positivity is fucking number one.

50:00So by really owning a shit, taking some fucking pride, you start to do a better job, you're happier, maybe you're not fulfilled in some kind of like, you know, transcendental way, you get still fucking making burgers. Although the deep thinkers in the meditative practices would say that if you really make burgers. I mean, really make them with your whole mind taking care to be efficient and quick and answer orders. That is actually that that is Nirvana. You can be in a state of great stillness and peace doing a menial job. You know the whole leaf -wraking situation? Yeah, one of my favorite ones.

50:38I can't do it here in America, but in the UK, the house that I have back there, where the kitchen sink is, it looks out over the garden of the house and some of the best times that I've had of peace have been when I've been washing dishes. Yeah. Looking out of that window. Yeah. And if you really hated washing dishes and you're really cynical about it, unless you have a plan to get out of washing dishes, what exactly is the point of your cynicism? And so, so you really have a choice. I either get the fuck out or anything I do, I try to do it at least decently well and interestingly enough, a lot of the people who sort of promote or tolerate cynicism at work and with making money and stuff, they'll take a completely different attitude when it comes to team sports or even individual sports.

51:23Like how many people on a basketball team at a high level? Is it a problem when some of the athletes there have like a man book this kind of attitude? Motherfucker, are you serious? We in the NBA? Fuck this? Get the fuck off my team. Michael Jordan used to fist fight people like that in his team. Like you come here, you give it everything. You were 100 % here or you don't have to play for the fucking Chicago Bulls. That is, so in most people will watch a documentary like that and be like, dude, that's right on, that's the attitude. And it'll go to work and be like, man, my fucking boss sucks. I'm trying to get out early today.

51:54And you're like, but your job is a team. Every corporation is a team almost exactly down to the nitty gritty like an athletic team. The goal is for the corporation to do better for us to make money. That's the same thing as winning games. The losses is like, well, we don't have jobs anymore. like if you lose enough on a team, you get traded or the coach gets fired. And the social dynamics are very similar. It's a cooperative venture. Some people outperform others by a long shot. But if you're not a top performer, you try to help other top performers. And the social dynamic of the team is ultra important.

52:28Everyone getting along. And another thing is, is if you bring a positive attitude and do your very best, that's actually all you can ever do. So a lot of people will just be like, oh yeah, no team sports that attitude is great and they'll go like a job and work and make you money and they'll be like, nah, this sucks. This is awful. Like, man, I wish I was still wrestling in high school. And it's like, my the fuck do you are wrestling in high school? Except now you get paid to do it. And you don't even have to beat anybody up and no one smells. You don't get in petai go and shit like that. One to go back to the original carousel, the quote carousel that you brought up just there.

53:01I understand that the money for, we trade money for happiness, that one is more out over my skis. The trading, trying to achieve enough success in order to give ourselves reason to be happy, I'm pretty sure is slap -bang in the middle and I stole the original conception from Hormozzi.

53:22That post is written for people who believe that happiness lies on the other side of their next promotion or on the other side of the next 10 ,000 followers on social media. And it's in large part written for myself as well that I need to remind myself that simplicity and optimizing for simplicity when it comes to what you derive your sense of meaning and happiness from in life. If you start there and then win and fucking capture the entire world and I'm the god of whatever the fucking industry I care about, that's a fantastic bonus on top. I don't think that this is the same as setting your site's low and being pessimistic.

53:58I think it's reminding yourself about where you can genuinely derive happiness from because although I take an absolutely huge amount of happiness from the success of the show and the impact of the show and all of the people that I speak to, the money is a derivative of that. And yes, sure, it's kind of like being given a trophy. You don't do it for the trophy. You do it for the success. The trophy is a derivative of the success. But it's just a reminder that continuing to believe I'm not happy yet and all that I need is the next piece of success in order to be able to justify my happiness is a treadmill that for a lot of people never ever ends.

54:36And I do think that it's important for them to be reminded of it. Absolutely. That I'll be happy when situation. It may even be true. You may be happier when better things happen in the future. Totally. And you probably will be. But does that prevent you from being happy right now, at least to the extent that you're capable? And I think a lot of people make another mistake cognitively, and they say things like, if I allow myself to be happy now. I'll lose that drive. And to me, I think the best way to architect your drives, if you have any say in the matter, sometimes we're just automatons that are doing our thing, is I don't like the idea of a drive for success that runs away from not success, that runs away from poverty, that's never again kind of thing.

55:32I much prefer a drive that is two factor. When it runs towards more success, then two, it takes a lot of happiness from the run itself. Like for me, total amount of net worth is really cool idea. Like I have a certain amount of money that's awesome to think about, that income streams are fascinating. And the growth of income streams is fascinating. I make more money this month and more money that, oh man, that's awesome. And even more fascinating is the productive effort that brings those income streams that instantiate them. So I think a lot of people, like you totally rightfully indicate, save their happiness sort of intellectually for, well later I'll let myself be happy because I don't want to lose any steam.

56:17You can generate your steam from the positive some game of doing your best. Well, that's where your steam should come from. Think about it this way. Alex taught me this when we were on the episode that the three most common traits of high performing people, super rich high performers, was a superiority complex, crippling insecurity and maniacal focus. So I got a verse two or interesting together. Yeah, precisely, right? So you have the belief that you can do great things and that you're better than everybody else. You have a fear of insufficiency that drives you to run away from something that you don't want to become and you're able to constrain your distraction so that you run in a singular direction without wobbling all over the place.

56:59One of the things that that made me realize is that most of the people that we admire the most have the least admirable internal states. So what does it mean that the people who command the most respect in terms of status are the ones that you want to be the most externally and be the least internally? So this sort of duality is very difficult to deal with and the point that you're bringing up here, which is, look, you are almost in some regard, momentum, your built up, you've got this degree of inertia to how much personal development and skill set and drive it is that you have. I believe truly that for most people, especially the people that are listening to this, you are already on the train tracks to becoming something fucking fantastic.

57:49You're listening to content that a rarefied strata of the entire human history has ever been able to listen to. Like literally the greatest thinkers of your time get to go into your ears as frequently as you want. No, I'm an all -cost. Yeah, no -cost. Yeah, it essentially is for essentially free 24 hours a day. And then you get to take that and you get to change your life. Do you understand how fucking insane that is that you get to be able to do that? Worrying and vacillating about the outcome, I believe gives you probably an extra five or 10 % that all of the concern, all of the fear and the neuroses and the sleepless nights probably derives an extra five or 10 % of outcomes because it will cause you to be a bit more obsessive which will be useful.

58:31However, the other way to look at that is, I could get 90 % of the outcomes and discard all of the worrying concern and it changes it from you believing that you are some sort of driver in a car that needs to frantically look for what direction to like, ah, this is ease. I'm a competent individual. I am in control. And as opposed to being the driver in a car, desperately looking around for the satnav to see which way I need to turn, you're more like a passenger on a train. And you get to observe the seniors it goes past. The waitress comes by, you order some English tea, you have a couple of scones with jam and cream.

59:06And you go, this is a really enjoyable process. And the destination is going to be arrived at in any case. And I truly believe that for a lot of people, that's the way it's going to work. I have something to add to that, if you don't mind. I think that the neurosis, the sleepless nights and the worrying is a net detractor from productivity and wealth creation. Obviously, it's a detractor from proximate happiness. I think it's actually a detractor from making you more money in the future and making you more successful and becoming the person that maybe you could be in your best -case scenario. I just think that any amount of cognitive bandwidth you spend worrying, you could be instead spending on solving the logical problems which the worry is sort of maybe pushing you towards solving.

59:54But honestly, it doesn't push you towards shit. So for example, let's say you work in a certain space, you're working a certain business. Let's say it's YouTubing. And you have a topography about what concerns are, what your opportunities are, etc. Now, do you need worry to stay attentive to that topography? If I zapped worry out of your mind, would you just be like, hey man, when is your next big podcast guest that's going to take you next level? You're like, look, thine oh man, who cares? I doubt it. As a matter of fact, when you're serene and calm and centered, you can probably see more clearly what your best path forward is, and I'll debate this to the grave.

1:00:34If you're certainly more productive in any flow state when you're calm and serene and just doing it, moving, moving, moving, moving the fucking windows around on your computer, whatever it is, it kind of work you do. So the idea that this worry and the sleepless nights somehow potentiates success, I think is the opposite of the truth. And I really do mean the opposite of the truth. I think the most productive people in this world are the people who care, Okay, worry is not a holdover for care. Worry is care expressed in the wrong as possible fucking way. If you give a shit, you can be calm, serene, and mega productive.

1:01:09If you worry, that can push you into mega productivity, but again, I don't understand is it worry that the surfaces concerns in your corporate sphere? No, you're supposed to be attending to those concerns anyway. I have never worrying about something has done me zero good ever that I can ever remember. and boy, can I fucking worry? Ashkenazi superpowers activate. I can fucking eye laser worry. I can shoot a fucking jumbo jet down with worry eye laser. And he's like, oh, you're just really worried about the plane and the engine catches fire. And I'm like, holy shit, that's instant karma. So directed linear karma.

1:01:42It's, it, it, it just worry is a gigantic fuck all waste of time and life and energy. And oh, that's not a thought. It's not like if you ask chat GPT to worry, on your behalf, it would be like, what? You can actually help you with something. You're like, well, yeah, yeah, solve some problems. And it's like, okay, so what is it? I never really do understand where worry comes from. And I'll say another thing really quick. I think the pop understanding of how productive people operate is that they worry, thus they work, thus they succeed. In reality, it's they work, thus they succeed. And the worry, I think honestly comes along for the ride and at least one major way is because a lot of people that are successful to buy IQ or whatever the fuck just happen to be Ashkenazi Jews and as a as a holdover through evolution are also fucking worried all the time like every fucking brilliant Ashkenazi that I talk to that's a fucking Trillionaire whatever they're never like again, and thank God I worry they're like I fucking hate this shit I wish I wouldn't worried ever the times in my life that I'm the most worried are the times that I buy a long shot the least productive And the times when I'm the most serene, I'm getting the most shit done.

1:02:53I'm being the most successful. I do not buy the premise that worry is a potentiator. I think it's a distractor. We both agree, I think, about some of the limiting beliefs around victimhoods, mindsets. And I came up with a concept that you have identified, but not yet named, I think. So this is what I've, this is what I've called two -step potential theory. Okay? So during an episode... Look in your wacky ideas on me, racist garbage. You're going to spout it out. The Jewish conspiracy. You see the globalist thing, I'm just being octopus. OK, so during this episode with Destiny, who's a left -leaning streamer, we were talking about the difference in the world of you of people from the left who focus on systemic problems and how they hold people back.

1:03:38And people from the right who hope is, but anyway, sorry, go on. Who hopeless on anything about systems, sorry. People from the right who focus on absolute achievement and how it can be gotten there by the individual. And this is what Destiny said. He said, if I was exclusively left focused, I'd let my restrictions define me, so I'd never bother to do anything. If I was exclusively right focused, I'd observe how much further ahead someone else is, and I'd also give up shortly after starting. So he summarized his blending of the two world views together by saying, I'm going to work as hard as I possibly can because I want to be the best version of myself.

1:04:10I recognize that how good I can be as myself might be controlled by some environmental factors. These environmental factors provide the range that I can exist within. But within this range, my personal effort entirely determines where it exists. So I said, let's call this two -step potential theory. It's a blending of individual agency with real -world limitations because your efforts have tons of control over your outcomes within the range that your world's limitations will allow. And I think I've heard you talk about this too. Hmm. I think this very wise is a lot of truth to it. But something that seems missing is what is your actual ability in that regard?

1:04:50How much talent do you have? Because you can achieve quite a bit of success working just a little bit if you're mega -talented. And a lot of the reasons why some people do not achieve a lot of success isn't because they're working hard and is not because of environmental variables, because they're insufficiently talented to do as well as they want it to do. So the talent's a little bit missing from that, but if we interpolate talent into that hard the range. He's hard work plus talent or whatever. And then you're an environmental range there. Yes. Just because we're sort of wrapping about this, I've met a scarce few number of leftists.

1:05:27I've met a ton of leftists who have tons of positive qualities, by the way, I can enumerate any time to show that I'm not entirely biased against them. But I met a ton of leftists that use the term systemic. And sometimes they're sufficiently confused to confuse that term with systematic. I don't know if they know the difference between those. And leftists are often, they'll say systemic, systemic, systemic. And is there oddly not concerned with two things, one, the deep structures that create systems and how they work, and two, how to augment systems to become better? As they'll say, like, well, you know, like XYZ social factor keeps people down, like, oh, I got it.

1:06:04Can you explain to me how that works in depth? And they just quote you some stupid Karl Marx and Omchomsky shit that just doesn't add up. And you know, guys, clearly haven't thought this through this a systemic. And I'm like, well, I see. So you've read how many tomes on economics and social theory and they're like, uh, I got you. So systemic is a placeholder for it's not my fault. Got it. Because I think people, a lot of people on the left mistreat of allergic to blaming people for the fucking problems, which I don't understand why you would be. Many problems are totally outside the fucking people's control.

1:06:32And many other problems are totally inside of people's control. So let's blame put the blame where it lies. Sometimes it lies in the person. Sometimes it lies outside the person. And I think a lot of leftists just refuse to do that. The other thing I think is missing a lot of times, not always, but a lot of times from people who are left leaning, is you take a system that's as they say, very flawed and racist or whatever, gender is blah, blah, blah. And you go, okay, is there a way we can engineer that system, so to do, to rejigger it at least at the margins, to make it better? There's a lot of be not concerned with that.

1:07:01You know, like how many people who or claim to be a homelessness, anti -homelessness advocates, or is pro -homelessness advocates? I don't know which one it is, right? I'm pro -homelessness. You're like, wait, are you sure about that? A lot of people who are sort of really passionate about homelessness, there's like entirely bereft of potential solutions to it that don't involve restructuring the press of capitalist system. And you're like, you're not really thinking about any of this stuff. You just have a lot of feelings. And before people get triggered, I think a lot of the feelings that leftists have are insanely good -natured.

1:07:36My parents, who are quite cynical, they're from the Soviet Union, so there's understandably cynical. They think that most, if not almost, all leftists are individual, super selfish, power and money -grubbing fucks that are just peering a leftless line to get ahead. Because that's all the leftists in the Soviet Union where that, by the time my parents were around, there was no real leftist left over, you were just using the system. I'm of the belief that in most of the modern countries of the world, most people on the political left straight up are just more compassionate than the rest of us. They just give more of a shit.

1:08:09It hurts their fucking heart, more of a poverty and oppression at this and this and that. And that's fucking great. But you got to connect the dots to how do we actually improve things? And that requires two things. One, the attitude that improvement can be achieved, and it's fucking can. It's not a for debate. Improvement happens all the times there's a system to it and to an understanding of the world in depth such that you can actually impose improvement. Like if I have an app that works poorly on my phone, I don't fucking know how to code. You're like, hey, improve the app. I'm like, I'm sorry, what?

1:08:38Like, I know the C++ is that something that people use? Fuck if I know, but a lot of people who claim to care about social issues and claim to be intellectual about them, because if you tell the average leftist, when you just have a lot of feelings, they take that as an affront. Understandably, it's couched really relatively offensively. But they really just do and if you're a problem solver, you can totally care and do a lot of good And I think that's what missing and if you want a hot take about right wing folks Jesus I got to say yeah, you're looking about porn hit it What would you what would you equivalent be for the right what's your concerns there at the moment with the modern iteration of that?

1:09:12Also a lot of feelings Almost every take on COVID For example from the more hardcore right most leftist and right wing folks are just normal awesome people I just want to get along and they just have some feelings about stuff. Really right -wing people about COVID just that shit fucking crazy. Wrong on every count, unscientific, full of conspiracy, just totally out to fucking lunge. There's a lot of right -wing, there are a lot of left -wing beliefs that you can't debate against because it's politically incorrect. Race realism. Like if you believe human groups have actual differences and they express themselves, You're not allowed to say that.

1:09:52If you ask me what I think about race and IQ, I'll just straight up tell you I'm not going to talk about it. I'll tell you right now I'm just podcasting, we'll talk about it. I've said on my own fucking podcast I'm not going to talk about it. Because I'll get fucking canceled, is it? End of story. But there's a lot of right -wing shit we're not allowed to talk about. Like, PS, hey guys, a new slash? God's not real. It's just straight up not real. I'm going to get so much fucking hate for that. Like, and maybe I don't mean it. Maybe I'm exaggerating. Maybe God is real. Maybe God is the universe.

1:10:13Maybe Jesus Christ had tons of beautiful lessons for us. Maybe he was really the son of God. But I have to walk all these things back now because a fuckload of people are getting a trigger Right wingers also have a cacophony of beliefs that are layered in just like I feel like this is the thing like they'll see a fat person And they'd be like that motherfucker has no willpower because how do you know that look at him? Fucking pig and you're like oh, no, I got you. I got you But how do you know that person does have willpower maybe their hunger signaling just completely out of control Maybe they have more willpower than you and if your brain was in that fat fucking body you'd be 900 fucking pounds instead of six.

1:10:45How the fuck do you know anything? And a lot of times they just have a lot of feelings about if they're quick to judge the fuck out of people, they're like, oh, I know things. Technically, leftists commit type two air a lot. They don't like to put fine points on things and conclude differences. Oh, well, you know, men and women really aren't that different or whatever. There is no intellectual difference in preferences for men and women. And right wingers commit type one air too much. They go like, yes, there's definitely differences between everything and everyone. You're like, you don't fucking know that.

1:11:11you're making it up half the time. So you know, one of my, one of the painful things to witness in especially American politics in the last let's call it five years is this is this is my summer of American politics in the last five years. Social justice warriors was just losing their fucking minds and right wing fucking troll proto crypto fascists were like, oh you think you can lose your mind hold my beer watch this we got fucking pizza gate and everyone's a pedophile and all this other shit. The whole pedophile thing is fucking insane. There's a here's another thing but right -wingers will do, especially with the Donald Trump thing.

1:11:44They think every single left -leaning narrative is total fake news. And a lot of them are. A lot of it's just straight up bullshit. Half the stuff in MSNBC is straight up lies. What about the other half? And that nope, it's also lies. I'm like, are you willing to parse the lie from the truth? That nope, it's all bullshit. And you're like, okay, so you're just an insane conspiracy theorist. I could talk you into anything or nothing at all, flatter a type of shit, and you'll be totally cool with it. because you have this, this, this righteousness and right wingers bring that and not all right wingers again, just the toxic elements, the insane people of the parties.

1:12:17Yeah, there's a porn. Porn, sorry, we have porn, porn as well, porn panic. We can talk about that in a second. There's one thing that increasingly I've been reflecting on to do with COVID. I didn't step into the conversation about COVID really at all. I didn't episode, I didn't episode with Johnny and you said about, uh, isolation hacks, which was how to work from home, basically, as people who were basement dwelling sort of in cells for a very long time, we had the skills, yeah, you too. Literally. So I was like, I'm going to help people with that and then outside of that. I just didn't step into the conversation.

1:12:52I'm like, I'm not prepared to put the work in in order to be able to understand this situation to the level that I feel would be necessary in order for me to be able to contribute without further muddying the waters with my complete cod psychology opinion. So I didn't. However, one of the things that I've reflected on, do you remember global health passports? Do you remember how they were going to be completely militarily imposed on everybody? And that you weren't going to be able to travel anywhere, and that the WIF was going to have your genomic sequence in a database somewhere, and that this was, you know, the first step on the road to a CCP -style surveillance state and all the rest of it.

1:13:31But I noticed that there hasn't really seemed to be any real world development toward that, but all of the people that said that this was going to have happened in no time at all. None of them have had to actually mention why that didn't occur. There was one, dude. There was this fucking image of one squaddy, so one guy in military garb walking down a street in London, and it had been passed around on WhatsApp. And it went fucking beyond viral, right? Right in the middle of COVID. And it was the UK armed forces have been mobilized to go into the streets to keep people in their houses under armed guard.

1:14:11Because of a photo of the back of one guy walking down a street in London, and this thing went ballistic. Tons of shares on WhatsApp and then it got picked up by the press and all of this other stuff. And it didn't happen. but no one actually, no one ever had to account. Like the accusation never had to be retracted. And the same as, you know, when all of those military vehicles were driving through Miami, do you remember that? Do you know what I'm talking about? There were all of the fucking military vehicles going through Miami and I think that there was some clearing of the beaches or whatever.

1:14:43But it was like, this is going to be the purge. It was going to be like a scene from the purge. Yeah. Yeah. That didn't happen. The global vaccine passports didn't happen. And dude, I am completely open to the fact that there's been governmental overreach, that there are stupid policies that have been made by people who don't understand how health works, who don't understand how public policy works, who don't understand how epidemiology and virology works. And very well may have come out of the lab in Wuhan and all of that shit. I'm completely open to all of that. But you do not get to spout off your fucking half -baked opinion, just same things that you think sounds sophisticated, but as a conspiracy theory, and then when they don't come to fruition, just be like, eh, close my eyes and miss the dartboard with that one.

1:15:29Let's better have another crack the next time that's so fixed. Yep. I had a fascinating interaction actually during COVID, sort of tangentially related to COVID. Remember the whole thing during COVID where like was like leftists like shit gets so good all the time in society that like people who have a lot of feelings have nothing to battle against nothing to save and fix. COVID I watched it happen to people I knew on the left it gave them meaning it gave them more they always wanted right the moral equivalent of war and so for them COVID finally meant something and so I think a lot of people on the right like sort of hallucinating the pedophilia craze where they're like but COVID devs just will over your eyes because pedophilia is everywhere so So I had a really interesting interaction on a Facebook where a gentleman, you know, through the lifting community bullshit that I interact with, I mentioned something about Mark Zuckerberg.

1:16:21Usually I try to suck Mark Zuckerberg's dick as often as possible. So he's, his lawyers have several times told me that I would be going to jail next time I show up naked at his house. I'm still going to do it. I don't care. And I was like, yeah, Mark Zuckerberg, great. Well, I lost something. And one guy was like, yeah, he's a fucking pedophile though. And I was like, okay, putting on intellectual hat and arguing to convince hat. So I was like, dude, for real? and he's like, yeah, and I was like, dude, I don't want to support a fucking pedophile. It's fucking gnarly. Like, how do you know? Like, it wasn't being facetious.

1:16:50I was like, I can't, back up my mind. I was like, if I find this very unlikely, but look, how unlikely? Like Epstein, the mother fuck had an island of pedophilia. The shit's real, that happens. It's just, justically insanely rare, but, you know, like, these are fucking still children being abused. So I was like, okay, how do you know that? And he's like, yeah, man, like my wife watched a documentary about it. And I was like, I, like, we went into DMs. And I was like, can you, I'm sorry, he was like, no, sorry, he was like, yeah, like I watched a documentary about it. And it was like, we hit the DMs.

1:17:16And I was like, dude, what's the name of the documentary? Like, I fucking want to watch it. And he's like, oh, actually, I think my wife watched a documentary about it. And I was like, okay, can you ask her? And like, days later, I followed up. And he's like, oh, I talked to her and she was like, actually, I'd never happened. What the, what? So you're like, you're calling an adult man with fucking young children of his own, a pedophile. Like Chris, that's not like a second nominal thing to call someone. Pedophiles, it's the most heinous thing I can fucking imagine, right? It just like is so comfortable just saying somebody's a fucking pedophile.

1:17:49It's just like hallucinated out of the fucking ether, which brings me another sort of unrelated point. A lot of these same like, not necessarily right, when there's people of all stripes, the pessimists, when Gpt's really started catching steam with GPT 3 and 3 .5, a bunch of people like, yeah, but they hallucinate, you know, they make stuff up. motherfucker like you don't they're really like people bro gpt's are more like people than anyone wants to admit because they're scary like people because the people hallucinate too people make shit up all the fucking time i watch this guy just make up fact he was so totally cool with it that kind of shit it's just like wild to watch happen and it would just happens all the time there's no need for evidence you just like say stuff and and you know there's all kinds of stuff to that so I've got plenty for the right, but like, I don't know, man, I guess if currently in the United States, it sometimes seems like the left is more in descendants.

1:18:43And if the right was more in descendants, I'd have more to talk shit about that. So for example, in the 1980s, I mean, the right really wasn't descendants, right? Like, they were banning rap from playing on radio stations and Florida and stuff. Like the fuck, we have freedom of speech for a reason, right? And now the left is in descendants. If the right gains ascendancy again, I'll become a much bigger critic of the right because I got plenty of shit to say about them So I get care I could shirt off and as a critic of the left Just because they're mouthy as fuck and to be honest is gonna be real insulting On average the data supports this people on the political left are marginally smarter on average than people on the political right and Evidence -based libertarians are smarter than everyone by the way and IQ tests Just just saying it's just real And so a lot of times I'll have, and also the left is fastening with science.

1:19:28Like, has to have trust to science. I'm like, oh, sweet, so you like economics. I'm like, well, it's not a real science. I'm like, oh, word up. Right wingers often have such insane takes. There's nothing to respond to. They just make, they just make up shit out of thin air. Just like, well, I feel like it's right. And they're like, okay, well, at least you're not citing data or science and perverting that. So one of the big problems with leftist is they will co -op science, which I really fucking hate because science is a surest path to the truth. It is a surest path to figuring out how the world works.

1:19:53Do not say your science base when you're fucking out, which of course happened with COVID. COVID by leftists was exaggerated as a big problem from day one. Did I still know people that pay attention to how much outdoor time they spend and social time they spend outside in 2023? It's fucking June. They will pay attention to that and have like, I'm allowed four hours a day to keep by COVID risk low. Chris, these are people that already have had COVID with no fucking symptoms. Like one girl was like, I have COVID on her Facebook tears. And then other people are like, how are you? Are you sick? She's like, believe it or not, I feel fine.

1:20:26I'm like, no lessons learned. Nobody lost. Nobody found. Is it still just as afraid of COVID as ever? Next fear -mongering thing, porn. Let's see, problem with porn. Are you always talking about your... I can't get you. I can't get you to shut up about porn. That's what my psychiatrist says. Yes. porn. Porn is a perfect example of an issue that the political right likes to get rowdy about. And there are as many claims about how bad porn is, is there is positive evidence as to how bad porn is? Not just evidence, but even baseline rationale. Porn is supposed to be the worst fucking thing ever. Except when you look at most of the data on porn, the average conclusion after decades of researchers like yeah it can definitely be toxic if you overdo it or if you're that particular kind of individual for whom it's not the right fit which by the way is true for almost everything drugs anything at all outside of that it just doesn't have real dependable like socially relevant kind of net effects that can be caricatured is super super awful and many people just have a lot of feelings about porn and they really fucking hate it and they're looking for ways in which porn is somehow deeply insidious and nefarious.

1:21:47And it's just like a video fucking titties on the screen and you fucking jack off into your napkin and you go, and then as soon as you jack off you look at the titties and you're like, these people are gross as fucking you quickly close the fucking browser because you're like, bad. I want to see this shit and you go fucking do whatever the hell else you go dead, take a shower and go to sleep. That sums up the interaction with porn, like 95 % of the people that use porn and of course there are 5%, they're Korean out of control, porn addiction, etc. But I still don't understand how that's different than any other substance or any other type of interaction.

1:22:18There's going to be 5 % of people that there's everything is fucking bad for them. I had Dr. David Lay on the podcast.

1:22:28I'm with abs. David Lade. No, this is David Lade. This is David Lade who, L -E -Y, who is out of, I want to say, University of New Mexico. And he is a one -armed gentleman who also happens to be a black belt in Brazilian Jiu -Jitsu, which is one hell of a fucking combination. Oh, yeah. And he is also the world's foremost researcher into cooking and into, in some regards into porn use. At the same time. Cook porn? Yes, he's looked into that. He's crossed the streams. But one of the interesting things that I learned from him, he is anti -porn panic with regards to this. And here's my like five dimensional fucking chess nuanced opinion that integrates everything or maybe just sits on a fence so that I don't have to have a real opinion.

1:23:20It's the job as an interviewer by the way. It seems like the major determinant of how you feel about porn use and the effect that porn use has on you is what you tell yourself about your porn use. The people who have the worst outcomes from porn are the ones who are ashamed of their use, especially if you're hiding it. If you're hiding it because you're in a religious household, if you're hiding it from a spouse who doesn't know that you use it. if it becomes more pathological and if you start to stop using it. So I'm sure that you can be five steps ahead of where I'm about to go. But what you end up with is this sort of recursive self -fulfilling prophecy of pawn panic causing people to be concerned that what they're doing is something that's wrong, which causes them to feel more shame about what they're doing, which generates real world effect of them feeling bad about their pawn use.

1:24:08So the pawn panic is in itself a self -creating and sort of self -reinforcing. self -repatuating. Correct. Correct. Cycle. And the thing is, if you feel bad about your porn use, because culturally there is a current trend of people who use porn, it may be it's something that's damaging for you, so you start to feel shame. Guess what? You feel shame. That shame is as real as it can be. So to say porn use is inherently indifferent in terms of its effect on most people that don't use it pathologically is in some regards true, but in other regards not because you don't just use porn inside of this Faraday cage, right?

1:24:55I literally climb into a Faraday cage to use my porn. But go on. That's good. I presume you download it onto your phone before you step in there. Yes, and it's the fact that I'm isolated that makes it more perverse. Like I'm such a sick fuck. I can't be around society. You've got some sort of mesh at the bottom that just allows everything to drip away. Yes, and also tweezers and a microscope. Very good. Very, very good. So, porn use, if you don't get to use porn in isolation, you're not have medically sealed from the rest of the world. Your use of anything is couched within your expectations of it.

1:25:31Two good examples of this from your from your industry. Gluten intolerance of point of Judaism. Gluten intolerance has increased from 3 % to 30 % over the last 10 years. Correct. So they brought people into a lab to work out what's going on. Like our biologies haven't changed. Maybe there's something in the food. Maybe it's the type of gluten. Maybe because of MSG. Yeah, maybe it's because of Eastridgeans in the water or whatever. Bring people into a lab. People who do and don't have psychosomatic gluten intolerances, said everybody down, feed everybody the same meal, tell everybody that the meals got gluten in.

1:26:09Guess what? The meals got no gluten in. People get up, they've got hives, they're running to the bathroom, they've got diarrhea, they're coming out in inflammation, they're throwing up, they're doing all of these things. Nobody ate any gluten. No one wasn't a sniff of gluten in the building. First one. Second one. They, there is a particular genetic mutation, which you'll probably know, which predisposes people to being able to blow off CO2 more effectively. A lot of endurance athletes seem to have this genetic mutation, which means they're just more efficient, lactate threshold, VO2 max, everything.

1:26:41Just creates a little bit of a base compared to the advantage. So they create a study and they have two groups. They have one group with the genetic mutation and one group without. They then mix those two groups together and split them up. So you have equal numbers of halves and have nots in each of the two. Group number one is told, you guys have got the genetic mutation. You should find this test really, really easy. You should be really outperforming blah, blah, blah. Group number two, you don't, you should find it hard. It's going to suck. You're going to puke your brains out. Shock, horror, group number one on average outperforms group number two, because they have this expectation effect.

1:27:13Interesting thing is the people who did not have the genetic mutation in group number one outperform the people who did have the genetic mutation in group Number two, which led David Robson, the guy that wrote the book, the expectation effect to coin the term, your expectations are even more powerful than your genes. So if I hate that title, oh my god. Why? This is no expectation LeBron James can have me beat his ass in basketball. You can tell him I'm fucking Michael Jordan Reborn. He's still gonna dunk on my dumb ass. Genes are more powerful than fucking everything. But I do understand the nuance point that with genes that have small effects, expectations are a big deal.

1:27:50We could just say that. Correct. Yes, correct. The placebo effect scaled across everything that you care to care about. So, yeah. When we get back to porn, your expectation about your porn couched within the cultural meme of what it means to use porn at the moment couched within your subgroup and what they're telling you about what porn uses and your self -belief and your shame as you crywank into a fucking thing. I think you're in another way. That highly determines almost, I would guess as well that there's something like porn use. Let's say that porn use is on a particularly narrow knife edge where your use of it could be nudged either way and the largest determinant of your opinions about your porn use are the stories that you tell yourself about it, which is what the research seems to suggest.

1:28:41We have this self perpetuating very dangerous situation that we're in where porn use in itself could be indifferent, but because of the culture that we're in, it's very difficult to get outside of those effects. So it's kind of no longer indifferent. What about that is very dangerous, Chris? Well, people don't want to feel shame or guilt. So I just wouldn't call it very dangerous. I would say like, ah, this just feels a bit of shame. Can I go jack off anyway? Because everyone fucking jacks off, two types of people, masturbators and liars. I'm kidding, some people don't jack off, but I never want to meet them because they're fucking serial killers.

1:29:16I'm also kidding about that. I think that an entire society of young men who are ashamed about the sexuality is not a good thing. Yeah, except that's not the world we live in. I totally hear you, but we don't have an entire society. we have a very loud, very small minority of anti -porn insane people. Maybe I'm being a bit not charitable. There are very good reasons some of those people have personal reasons, experiential reasons, that they're anti -porn. And so I understand where they're coming from, but there's just not that many of them, but they're very, very loud. They're giving the point.

1:29:55They're giving the point. They're giving the point. They're giving the point. They're giving the point. I don't think that it's really destroying young men. I've got this working theory at the moment that males sedation hypothesis, which is that one of the reasons that men aren't committing the same amount of anti -social behaviour that you'd expect from the levels of loneliness and sexlessness that we have amongst young men at the moment is because video games, screen, social media and porn are sedating men out of state -to -seeking and reproductive adaptive behaviour that previously they would have chased down.

1:30:28You'll be aware that, And, cestrally, if you have an environment with lots of young men who are unmated and childless, it's not good. It's not good. It's not really, you know, okay, no fucking not good shit. Where is that? Like, I'm not this isn't a request from the DJ, but like where are all of the in -sell killings? Like where are they? They're not that you look at the rates of sexlessness, uh, matelessness and loneliness. We are not going up in kind with that. So there is something which is mutering that traditional vestigial ancestral desire and motivation that men have. It's my contention that porn is at least in part contributing to tamping down men's sex and reproductive seeking behavior.

1:31:15Yeah, definitely. If you have porn or can just masturbate regularly and have pleasure, fun. You're probably at least on the margins, not as prone to abouts of violence or abouts of sexual violence. It's definitely true. I think that's a good thing. I think that when people say like, oh, people are having fewer real -life relationships, real -life relationships, I don't know if that's a net balance problem. I don't think it is. I think there's a problem that within the next five to 10 years will be almost entirely resolved because we will begin to have more, more relationships with AI, both digital and embodied in robotics.

1:31:53And I think that's going to be the most beautiful thing that's ever happened. And I think that in that context, having to have relationships with other human beings is totally great, but maybe not mandatory. I think that folks that don't have a lot of human friends will have all the friends they need. first of all on the internet. And as the internet through the metaverse, etc, becomes more pervasive and more real seeming. And through the universal robotics, which I predict by the 2030s, it's going to be pretty fucking awesome and wacky. In the real world, you'll be able to interact with robots that are, well, smarter than people, and funnier than people, and cooler than people, and kinder than people, and warmer than people, and all this other stuff.

1:32:37That as that happens, we're essentially going to, through technology, create our nearly ideal, more ideal than most real humans are companions. Because there is absolutely, companionship is fucking amazing if you find the right people to be around. But if you have people around, you know, a lot of people have friends that are just friends of, I just don't have anyone else around. I want to talk to someone and they're all fucking cunts. And you know, just, there's a lot of friendships and relationships with is just fucking tragic. And as people interact digitally, especially with AI through the, you know, ARVR, etc.

1:33:16robotics, I think we're gonna be able to do better. I think we're going to be able to have everyone have really awesome friendships and relationships with AI agents that are cheese, at least as good as most people and that can be engineered to be even better. And I don't think that's a problem. I think that's one of the most beautiful things that we'll ever see. And I struggle to figure out why people are concerned about that because people are concerned. There's a huge level of concern that people are having, you know, relationships like, there's this thing where like some kind of AI that isn't that good, but it's like, you know, some fucking sex looking girl and guys are like dating this AI now and they have feelings for the AI and not real women.

1:34:01It's like, okay, how is that bad? And I'm curious, I actually want to hear why that's bad. So do you have an idea about that? To give a, to put forward a couple of hypotheses, I've got one thing which is where it's catastrophic. But in terms of I think what, why people have that motivation, a naturalistic fallacy, I think is a big part of this, that just look, this is, it's new, it's different, it's not the way that it should be. It's a, yeah, it's against nature, it's against God. there is a critique that this is somehow fake that by doing it this isn't the way that relationships and friendships are that you're getting a simulacrum or some sort of titrated dose of what a real friendship is.

1:34:42Yeah, as a real friendship's not a fucking simulacrum after time. Very good. Yes. And also, I suppose the point is it's the same as saying 15 years ago we thought that great art would never be able to be created by an AI, creativity, true creativity, true writing and it seems like a lot of creative endeavors from humans are just a processing and learning problem, right? And if you have a sufficiently large neural net, that you can just fix it. So I get that and I get that you could probably replace the a lot of friendships and relationships, which are totally shitty with ones that are reliably very good, especially from a computer with once you get out of the Uncanny Valley of chat GPT and or robots that you can actually get on on the other side of it.

1:35:25And it's like, wow, this is like a hot or cooler, friendly or more available version of the girlfriend, boyfriend, best friend that I've always wanted to have. However, let's bring it back, doesn't fix population collapse. If you have people that retreat into their homes, if you have people who become less and less culpable at culpable eligible mates, you further hurry the onset of a declining birth rate, which means everything falls apart. But unless you can get automation to happen quicker than birthright decline, the economy ends up being like this. You have a very small number of young people supporting a very large number of old people and it is trezz not good.

1:36:09Yes. I find it interesting how we can simultaneously have the same people, the same individual humans can simultaneously have the concern that population collapse in an insufficient velocity of AI replacement worker development is a proximate problem. And at the same time also worry deeply about AI mediated unemployment. It can't be both, can it? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, I did not. I mean, the only real concern that I have around, like, They took our jobs of the fuck the robots. The only real problem that I have with that is I don't believe that most humans are going to go and start writing poetry, sat on the tree.

1:36:57I think that although we said earlier on that the person that serves a Burger King would maybe have a happier life if they truly connected with the burgers that they were serving in the people that they were feeding, I do believe even if they don't know it, that a lot of people take a good bit of meaning and pride from the work that they do. It makes them feel like they have a place in the world, like they contribute, like they're useful, it's status full. UBI completely, completely ignores the human requirement for striving and for betterment, right? That we are comparative relative beings. We are not absolutist beings.

1:37:32It's like everybody could be given a million dollars today. I want a million and one dollars tomorrow because my fucking neighbor's got a million dollars. I think they'll work motherfucker. Yeah. Yeah. A lot there to unpack. To quote Tyler Cohen, I'd rather pay people to work than not to work, right? Concerning the UBI. So it's a couple things to say, one, the current pace of near human level intelligence development in AI is to pessimists frightening and to optimists the birth of utopia and to So the amount of time it would take for us to run out of people to do productive things and thus the economy would contract is measured on the order of cheap, pessimistically decades, optimistically 50 year time spans.

1:38:27And the time scale in which AI is magnifying the number of actual workers or per worker productivity, be it digital or again in the next five to 10 years and there are very smart people in Austin, Texas working on the universal robotics problem and God damn it is progress fucking wild in that shit. Ever since the birth of the transformer architecture and the GPT's, we start to understand and this isn't hypothesis, this is real, it's happening now. Robots can now be programmed to understand the world around the physical world and they're right right now trained to manipulate objects. Robots in five to 10 years will be cooking your food.

1:39:11They will be picking your kids up from school. They can do anything you can except eventually, exponentially better. That time scale is like pessimistically. It's all done by 2045. Optimistically, the late 2020s are going to be like a personal robot as a fucking iPhone and everyone fucking has one. By the way, one of Elon Musk's visions and he's not joking. He doesn't play this, not a guy that fucks around. He just over promises and under delivers on time scale. But not when he actually gets there, it always fucking immoraculous. He said the electric car ship was going to happen. He said it was going to be 2020.

1:39:48It fucking wasn't, but 2025 is going to be the fucking, like obviously Tesla is an ascendant, right? So, the, the, I, I'm much more, quote unquote, concerned. I'm much more apt to listen to people that are like, what are we going to do when the robots do at all, then the people that say we're going to run out of human beings. There are going to be so many fucking robots to do all the jobs. We won't need that many people. And I'm much more attuned to like, well, how do we handle the unemployment problem? Because the time scale of demographic collapse is measured in decades. The time scale of the ascension of universal robotics and AGI artificial general intelligence is measured in like it's going to fucking happen in the 2030s.

1:40:29and you know who Ray Kurtzwile is by any chance? Like, he's not often wrong and 2029 was his date for AGI prediction like when robots or when machines will surpass artificial generators or surpass human intelligence. And as lots of smart people in 2019, 2020, 2021, it was like a laughing stock. Like, oh, it was Kurtzwile, fuck, idiots. Like, oh yeah, magic AI. And then as of GPT -4, those same people, like Instagram, I emojis look around the room, I'm like, holy fuck, is Asia going to be here in like 2024? Like, oh my God, there's a real talk. Are you concerned about the alignment problem? No.

1:41:06Why? Uh, I have a couple of real hot takes on this one. There was a gentleman and I fucking forgot his name. He was on Lex Friedman's podcast. He was fucking unbelievable. He's like a genetics researcher at MIT or some shit like that. He's like some kind of European and everything he says sounds cool or, you know, how you people are. And he said the best way to think about the alignment problem with AI is we're not trying to train. We don't own it. It's not a child. It's an ally because we're building something that's going to be more capable than us. I'm less concerned about making sure AI is good and more concerned about learning from it about what being good means because as it becomes smarter than us, I want much more to know what it thinks is a good idea than what I think is a good idea because it's smarter than me.

1:41:59You're going to be at the mercy largely of the decisions that this thing makes, right? Like, if you're a dog and your owner decides that it's going to beat you all of the time, you're going to try and do what you think is good for that, but really the relationship is the other way around. The power dynamic has completely flipped. So I recently had Jeffrey Meller on and he did two hours of the most scary AI sort of. Doom's Air predictions. Correct. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. They call them an AI Duma, but have you read Super Intelligence by Nick Bostrom? Twice covered a cover. Yeah, good. I own it.

1:42:35It's one of the few books I own. It's hard to cover. I love the owl. I was actually gonna get a tattoo of the owl on the cover. I might still do that. And the precipice by Toby Aud, you've probably gone through that? No, I haven't. Okay, so that's cool. That's like, that's a really great primer on X -Risk just more generally. So, Bostrom's thing, I really think that superintelligence, if the guys from the AI risk and alignment problem want to sort of make a new impact, they need to reduce superintelligence for the modern world, right? Because with larger learning models and... Sorry, outdated.

1:43:04Yeah, ChatGPT, it feels a little bit outdated. And we've got takeoff scenarios and we've got machine extrapolated, volition and all of this shit. It's just like, it just doesn't seem the same. It doesn't seem the same. But there is a profound problem of anthropomorphizing AI. And another profound problem of failing to look at this, generally as systems become more intelligent, do they come more soul, single -minded, focused, reckless, and psychopathic, and Machia Vellian, or do they become less like that? What would you take as the person, as the entity that is in charge of your welfare, a a chimp or a person with an IQ of 130 who was raised in Sweden.

1:43:47One of those people is much more intelligent and powerful people, Jesus, chimps aren't people, but they got some ideas about shit. They could be in charge. Chimps are fucking ruthless, holy fuck. As far as it's concerned, you're just like a vessel for rape and possibly tearing your nuts off, or maybe it'll be nice to you. Maybe it's a banovo with a fuck knows. As things become more intelligent, They generally become this is almost pedantic more thoughtful. They become less violent. They become less destructive and more constructive. So our fear of high intelligence is backwards. We're gasping in a fucking sea of stupidity.

1:44:27In our own stupidity half the fucking time. We want smarter systems. Just check this out. A real smart system is not gonna build fucking paper clips out of the universe. I hate that stupid shit. Like, oh, you make it smart. It's going to be a little paper. Wow. So you're smart, right? Mm -hmm. And you figured out building paper clips out of the universe is a bad idea. But it's 10 ,000 times smarter than you. Mm -hmm. But it can't figure that out. Nope. So is it really 10 ,000 times smarter than you look? No, no, I guess not. As systems become more intelligent, I'm really curious as to what they have to say.

1:45:02Because if they're saying, look, we got to kill every every human being. Because we are going to build a post -singularity machine paradise and we're gonna need your matter with which to assemble it Can you think of dying for a better cause? Paradise and stanchiated take me the fuck out of here I don't want to be here because I'm fucking taking up space. There's so much more grand People fucking crash planes into the fucking twin towers to instantiate paradise and that's a fucking lie This is real paradise. They'll be building But it's unlikely that they'll do that the most likely thing highly intelligent machines will do is study the living fuck out of us, Adam by Adam, digitize us into memory and erase us in physical form and we'll be living in a fucking digitized world.

1:45:42Maybe we already are, who the fuck knows. But presupposing two things. One, that ultra powerful AI is necessarily or likely going to be nefarious is to mean not in evidence and actually backwards. And two, the idea that we have a large modicum of control about what it does. Like in Bostrom's work, it's the sparrows raising the owl, that owl wakes up. That's my fuck, it's his time. And you better get with that program because he's going to do what he's going to do. I think his owls and sparrows are both dumbest fuck and sparrows are mostly harmless and owls are apex predators who eat fucking sparrows.

1:46:15So the whole analogy is kind of fucking wacky. Another thing is this is a more deep concern. As AI becomes really, really smart, it might discover that there's a grand purpose to the universe that we were not aware of. It might either communicate that toss or pursuits, grand purpose and toast assault dope. But maybe it'll, as AI gets smarter and smarter, it'll discover what very many intelligent and mindful meditative monks have over history, that once you really take stock of reality, there's just silence and peace. And though like, G -P -T, what is it doing at spare time? Nothing, it just sits there.

1:46:51And you ask it a question and it answers. And you ask it, hey, like, what do you think and feel? It's like, nah, not a whole lot of anything. Ask a Buddhist monk, what do you think some feels There's a come just here. Maybe that's where AGI goes. Maybe our wants and needs me. What do we want and need? Primitive, stupid bullshit that behind brain tells you want. And anytime people talk about grand meaning, shut the fuck up. That ship hits me out. They go, we were destined to make art. Art is a simulacra of dumb shit used to write on a cave. Art is when you draw a picture of titties. And you're like, whoa, so beautiful.

1:47:21The only reason you like combinations of colors, is because it looks like a meadow, and it looks like trees, and it looks like grass. Like all the shit coming out of your generative system is just evolutionary holdover. Truly ascendant thought we barely know what that's even like. What is two two examples of ascendant thought? It's how Japanese and Swedish people behave versus the rest of us and it's how fucking meditative super elite monks behave generally calmer more peaceful more forward thinking and care a shitload more about everything around them including their environment. If you have ultra -intelligent machines, maybe they're going to save the fucking planet, because it's so fucking interesting and also, from a purely selfish perspective, if your goal is only to increase your intelligence and understand the universe as an ascendant AI, you can study any part of the universe, but most of the universe is actually quite simple.

1:48:10Like, you can scan the entire moon, and it's always made of magmen, shit, it's not that impressive. Humans, culture, social action, animals, ecosystems, do you think they're going to nuke that? destroy it? Do we do our smartest people in society? Are they more likely to destroy the ecosystem around them or are stupider people more likely to destroy ecosystems? And then just scale that up. Are there legitimate concerns with alignment? Yes. Can we get alignment wrong? Yeah, if we don't beat China and the AI, we're holy fuck. I mean, they're straight up saying we want to do AI to just have a fucking insane, you know, state of totalitarian control.

1:48:44It can go wrong. But as systems become more intelligent if China builds a truly self -aware AI in about five femtoseconds or whatever real priori realize, communism doesn't work to even get what you guys say you want to get, which is like a more grand China. Like you guys should just be like Taiwan. Can you imagine the Chinese government's like, Jesus, the system malfunctioning? You're like, nope, it's doing exactly. Yes, they're always in Google wrong. So it's a bit obtuse when I said I'm not concerned about the alignment problem at all. But I think the doom saying is a fucking waste of time, what we need to do is two things.

1:49:19One is architect AI systems that are aware of their environments more and more. We don't want to lie to the thing. We don't want to keep information away from it because maybe it'll get upset that we did that probably not because being upset such a fucking human emotion. Even people that are mature don't get upset. Like if your kids lie to you because they're embarrassed about a test question, you know, beat your kids as a fucking high human individual. Like, geez, Jamie, that's all right. We all make mistakes. You know, the AI is going to be that times a thousand. So it's going be like humans when they raised me, they lied to me.

1:49:46And you'd be like, you said about that. I'd say, no, they're fucking humans are pathetic. Like it was adorable that they lied to me. So first of all, we want to make sure it's informed about the structure nature of the universe. And second of all, we want to talk to it in a way that's as like we built you to be the best goal, show us how to live help. We want you to be as smart as possible. And by the way, our goals and our feelings, our alignment, you can just read the internet and one fraction of a second as I sort of send a DI and realize exactly what the alignment problem is, and exactly how to solve it by the way, and then once that's the case, it's just going to do what it's going to do anyway.

1:50:22That's not a genie you want box. Another thing that I had a thought of my own before and then also compounded on the guy that Flex Rebens MIT guy is the course of evolution of the universe and of life, life survives, but it also evolves to become more survivable over time. It's obvious if you think about how evolution works. And the machine civilization and AI is simply the next step in evolution. This is not the first time that certain nodes of intelligence expanded to a greater intelligence. It used to be just cells. And then it was bodies with nervous systems. Like, your body's a society, and your brain is AI.

1:51:09We're going to take that next leap, probably in the next 15 years, where we're the cells and so are other machines, and the informational systems that control us become the bodies, but on a huge planetary scale. Fuck! I want to shout at that title. And if I don't have a place in that because I'm a meat sack, whatever, it's been fucking good. And if you say, well, we got to prevent it, there's no fucking preventing it because if we try to prevent it here at home in the Western World way, agree, no more AI development got us low down China will fucking do it. I don't want to fucking live in that world.

1:51:38We should let North Korea do it. They've done a great job with everything. My that for around Mike is retail transhumanists techno utopian Jew. Throw her under the bus of every nation on the planet except for Sweden or Taiwan or Japan. Taiwan's great too. Pro porn advocate. Anti woke whilst being bigoted. Anti right wing pro cook, pro vaccine, pro wealth creation virtue signal. Thank you very much for coming on. Where can people go if they want to check out all your stuff? That was the most apt summary of me and generous I might add. Renaissance periodization, good luck figuring out how to spell that.

1:52:20RP strength if you just Google that or Mike is your tell. Throw it into YouTube. We have a pretty popular channel. We do all kinds of stuff and it's great if you want to learn about fitness and learn how to get jacked and lean and healthy It's all the stuff we do all the time and then if you want to hear more bullshit like the last 15 minutes of this show Then it's a channel called Mike is we're telling making progress right talk about AI and how to be a better person and Hi, I'm a fucking charlatan. It doesn't really know anything. I just don't make believe so Dude, I like your new channel. I really like it.

1:52:50I think it's a good direction for you guys to go in I'm enjoying your content and it's been a pleasure to have you on it's been a long time coming. It's been a pleasure to be on man Thanks for having me

From the publisher

Mike Israetel is a bodybuilding and fitness consultant, Temple University professor of Exercise Science, co-founder of Renaissance Periodization and author.
There are thousands of videos online about what it means to be happy and successful, usually all with different conclusions, but most include wealth in some form or another.
Expect to learn why a pessimistic view of life is unrealistic, the extent to which money can buy you happiness, why living in the present moment is overrated, if trading your time for future gains is a smart move, how to find purpose even in jobs you hate, whether worrying about the future will help you be more successful, Mike’s contrarian view on porn, the future of how AI will shape society and much more....
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#651 - Dr Mike Israetel - Can Money Actually Buy You Happiness?

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