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- [00:00]
A
What's happening people? Welcome back to the show. My guest today is Visakhan Virasamy. He's a writer and an entrepreneur. It's perhaps the biggest competitive advantage no one ever talks about because it's so obvious. But what does it mean to be a serious person? And if it's such a help, why is it so hard to find? Expect to learn why being serious is so important. How to deal with being too harsh on yourself and holding high standards for everybody else. How to get better at being disliked, the relationship between seriousness and earnestness Ways to deal with procrastination more effectively and much more Sleep isn't just about how long you rest, but how well your body stays in its optimal temperature range throughout the night, which is where Eight Sleep comes in. Simply add their brand new Pod 4 Ultra to your mattress like a fitted sheet and it will automatically cool down or warm up each side of your bed up to 20 degrees. ITS integrated sensors track your sleep time, your sleep phases, your HRV, your snoring and your heart rate with 99% accuracy. Plus their Autopilot Pilot feature makes smart temperature adjustments throughout the night, enhancing your deep and REM sleep in real time. Which is why eight Sleep has been clinically proven to give you up to one hour more of quality sleep every night. Best of all, they ship to the US, Canada, UK, Europe and Australia and they offer a 30 day sleep trial. Right now you can get $350 off the Pod 4 Ultra by going to the link in the description below or heading to eightsleep.com modernwisdom and using the code ModernWisdom at checkout. That's eightsleep.com ModernWisdom and Modern Wisdom at checkout. This episode is brought to you by Manscaped. If you're still using an old face shaver from three Christmases ago, please join us in the modern world. Manscaped's brand new Chairman Pro brings a professional shave directly to your home. It comes with two interchangeable skin safe blade heads, whether you want to go completely clean or leave some stubble. Plus, both heads are designed to help reduce razor burn and irritation so your skin feels smooth and comfortable after every shave. Best of all, it can run for up to 75 minutes on a single charge and it's waterproof so you can use it in the shower or if you've got a particularly hairy face. Right now you can get 20% off and free shipping worldwide by going to the link in the description below or heading to manscaped.commodernwisdom and using the code modernwisdom20 at checkout. That's manscaped.commodernwiry and modernwisdom20 at checkout. Look, you're probably not eating enough fruit and vegetables and you know it's. And this is going to help. AG1 makes the best daily foundational nutrition supplement that I've ever found. You might be skeptical, but I wouldn't have used it for over three years or have got my mom to take it, my dad to take it, and tons of my friends to take it if I wasn't 100% confident. I genuinely look forward to drinking it every single day and that's why I've used it for so long. And if I found something better, I would switch. But I haven't, which is why I still use it. And so does Tim Ferriss and Peter Attia and Dr. Andrew Huberman and Joe Rogan and Lex Friedman. Plus there is a 90 day money back guarantee so you can buy it and try it for 89 days and if you do not like it, they will give you your money back. Right now AG1 is running a special Black Friday offer for all of November. When you start your first subscription, you'll get a year's free supply. Vitamin D3K 2.5 free AG1 travel packs that 90 day money back guarantee plus a free bonus gift. Just go to the link in the description below or head to drinkag1.com modern wisdom that's drinkag1.com but now, ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Visakhan Virasamy. Why is being serious so important?
- [03:59]
B
Why is being serious so important? Well, you know, we have a limited life, right? We have limited resources and we get to live it however we want. I just think it is really tragic if we don't make the most of it, basically. Right? And you know, it's, it's funny, it depends on who you talk to because there are people who kind of get very like, who get very hung up on the kind of thing I just said and you can kind of go too far with it and then you get really stiff and grimaced about, oh, I got to make as much money as possible. Oh I got to acquire as much status as possible. And in my mind that actually isn't so. When I describe seriousness in my essay that is slightly unserious, it's kind of a fixation on a particular model of trying to make some number go up. So if you read my essay, the conclusion is that seriousness is love and curiosity expressed earnestly over a long period of Time and that. I just think, really, it's like life is a feast and you really want to sample everything you can and find the thing that's yours and really enjoy it. Yeah. And it's actually the way I would answer that question other than that is having lived through the opposite, which is, you know, being around unserious people, going to school or other institutions where there's like an unserious energy, where people are kind of, you know, just not taking things seriously. And they might have their reasons. Maybe the job's not that important to them and they want to focus on something else. Fine. But what I found is that when I reflect on my life and think about when are the moments when I've really had a great time, it's invariably when I'm serious about what I'm doing, which involves playfulness and so on, and I'm surrounded by other people who are also serious. And that just produces something. There's that je ne sais quoi, that excellence that is, once you've tasted it, it's such a. Nothing else compares. And so I talk about things like that in part, to my friend Kevin Kwok has this quote that's like tapping a tuning fork to see what else resonates, Right? So if, like, in a sea of people, you have a distribution of different kinds of seriousness, you want to find the kind of people who vibe with you. And, you know, like.
- [06:26]
A
So I was at a. I was at a bachelor party at stag do in the UK about two years ago, and we were playing shuffleboard, and there was sort of. We'd been going for maybe six hours or so, so people had kind of gravitated into whatever their normal social groups were. Some of us had priors, some of us had known people from before, but a lot of the people in each of the groups were new. And I looked over at the other table of people and they were. The guys were sort of like, flicking the little pucks, and they were sort of being playful and messing about, and no one was really keeping score. Meanwhile, on the table that I was on, we were whispering tactics to each other. We were talking about, oh, he's really weak when he has to come short, so blah, blah, blah. And I was like, dude, we're at a bachelor party. But we had separated ourselves out. We had literally triaged the group by seriousness. And I realized in that moment that I like to be around people that take things seriously. And it doesn't mean I really appreciate you saying this isn't sort of solemn, tedious, Rigid, stodgy. You use this term dynamic persistence, sort of a sense of humor being critical to that because it's difficult to persist for a long period of time if you're too, if you take yourself too seriously. So you become rigid and you become stiff and the opposite of being dynamic. And yeah, I just, I saw that thing, I saw that situation occur in front of us and I saw a group of people that were, they, they had resonated with the people that weren't taking things seriously. And I realized I was on the serious people table. No better, no worse, but just I'd. I'd found my tribe, so to speak, very nice.
- [08:03]
B
It's so fascinating to me how easily people tend to triage themselves that way. Like there's no, you know, like top down. It's just naturally people gravitate towards people who are similar and away from people who are not. And you know, I used to play in a band when I was a teenager and it's so funny that like 10, 15 years later we find out that, oh, this person has adhd, this person is bipolar, this person. Like it's all these people who were misfits and maladjusted in some way that we're all just drawn to each other. And it's not like we signed up for who has, you know, this, this issue. We didn't even know. We just knew that we were all very passionate about what we did and we just all found each other. It's so magical, actually, when you think about it.
- [08:47]
A
I love the idea of this. I also think I. I became quite frustrated and one of the reasons I really wanted to speak to you was reading your blog post was kind of like a. It's an allowance for people who are serious to not feel embarrassed in their seriousness, you know, because there is the person who doesn't seem to be taking things too seriously, who doesn't seem to be paying that much care or attention. They're kind of lackadaisical. They're chill, man, you know, just relax a little bit, dude. That person often comes across as sort of more fun, more cool. They're more vibey, right? The vibes are vibing. And I've always found myself as somebody who prefers to be on the serious table as opposed to the non serious table, and seeing that as a virtue, not in a virtue as in like some superiority complex of some guy in a stuffy fucking library somewhere, but genuinely just, this is a predisposition you have. It's some weird personality trait, probably orderly, some form of orderliness conscientiousness, a couple of other. Industriousness, maybe. But beyond that, it's an amalgamation of. You pay care and attention to the things that you do, and you think that there is utility in effort and there is utility in trying.
- [10:02]
B
Yeah. What you're describing reminds me of an anecdote from one of Michael B. Jordan's classmates. And she was saying he was such a weird kid. You know, he would come to school with his headshots and stuff like that. And it's just so striking to me that being serious when you're starting out is really difficult socially. Because, again, it's like. I think the general sentiment in most of the world is like, who do you think you are to take this thing so seriously? Like, why are you so. And, you know, like, another joke I liked was, imagine being Shakespeare's English teacher, right? Like, this annoying kid coming up with his own phrases and words and stuff like that. And I also have sympathy for people who, you know, like. So for the teacher, for example, who is just trying to teach a class, but there's a student who's like, nah, I'm going to do my own thing.
- [10:51]
A
And this is, oh, God damn it, William, not again.
- [10:54]
B
Exactly. And at the same time, I think about all the kids everywhere who had that spark of something, but it was snuffed out because their social environment just didn't allow it. It's tempting to think that, oh, you know, I have it and I've made it so far, therefore I'm special. Which. Yeah, in some sense, yes. But we always, I think, underestimate the degree to which a kind word here, a supportive context there, just really, you know, you watch the right movie at the right time of your life and it just hit something for you. And someone else just random walking didn't get that. And it's like. It's like virtuous cycles of do things get better or not? And. Yeah, it's just. There's a lot to get into about how society is structured in a way that kind of. I can always see both sides of this. It's both good and bad. It's a kind of sorting algorithm in a way. Like, in the long run, the people who are most serious and kind of. There's this quote from this old French poet, writer, Baudelaire. Something like, the great man, in order to exist, has to overcome the resistance of millions of people from his family, his friends, his school, his society. So by the time he gets there, he's got this immense strength or however you want to frame it, you know, immense persistence, immense capability of like managing his psyche to get there. And in a way, because we live in a world where there's so much information, so many people doing so many things and you know, I used to work in startups and like you would hear from someone that their startup is going to be the next big thing and two years later they're gone. And so since there's competing demands on your attention, it's very normal and reasonable in fact to kind of dismiss most things. So most people assume that most people are not serious in this frame.
- [12:45]
A
Even the ones who say that they are being serious.
- [12:48]
B
Exactly, because everyone says they're serious. So the only way to demonstrate it is over time and you keep shipping another podcast episode, you keep writing, you keep showing up year after year after year. And I found that there's something magical about the seven year mark. Sometimes it's less, sometimes like three to five. But like once you've been around for like seven years is people's memories are not that long and so once you've been around that long it seems like you were there all along, like forever. And so it's, it's, it's just interesting, I guess.
- [13:17]
A
Explain to me the line between this people that larp seriously and people that are serious and the fact that what everyone is trying to do in some form or another is get all of the benefits of seriousness, I. E. Being taken legitimately whilst not necessarily having to pay the price of seriousness, which is consistency and hard work and all the rest of it. And also being able to seem chill and cool and like the vibes are vibing. What's the line between this sort of public world of seriousness and how it can cause cynicism and, and criticism among the general population.
- [13:51]
B
That's a good question, I think. And you know, the messy thing is that nobody has it all figured out at the start, right. I love to look up, you know, any, anybody who's like very successful now. I love to look up their earliest, like if you see like Obama's earlier speeches or like Jason Mraz's first concert, they look nervous, they don't look like they like they know what they're doing, you know, so in the earlier stages, I think if anybody has any like intellectual honesty, they are going to be like, well I think I got a shot, but I'm not completely sure but I'm going to try, right? And, and you know, so there will be self doubt and if someone tells them you're not serious, they might be like Am I? I think I am, but I'm not sure. There's that cluster of people and then, okay, there's also the cluster of. I imagine Kanye is probably an extreme end of just radically certain of themselves. And that group probably splits into those that don't crash and burn and those that make it. And then there's like out of survival bias you get, you hear from a lot of those who do make it. I'm drifting from your question.
- [14:55]
A
You were asking about how that causes cynicism. So basically the way that, the way that I see it is that the fact that so many people want to be seen as serious and so few are, and that you don't really have a way to expedite working out whether or not somebody is legitimate in their claims of seriousness beyond just waiting, which is the exact opposite of expediting, that causes cynicism to occur as a defense mechanism against sort of fraud and bullshit. And. And the trouble you say with cynicism as a defense mechanism is you can get so good at it that you inadvertently also defend yourself against anything good ever happening for you too.
- [15:39]
B
Tasks failed successfully. Yeah, I think it's especially difficult when you're starting out, which is why I tend to think about and focus on teenagers and like people in their early 20s a lot, because that's such a. I do think as you get older, if you've been somewhat rigorous, you have like some hygiene principles in how you examine things and who you talk to over time, you cultivate a social graph, a social network. That's the people in your life. If you have other serious people around you who are serious about figuring out who's for real and who's not, it gets easier a little bit. You might still make some errors here and there, but after a while, I think Steve Jobs has his quote about how. And he's talking about a company and running a team. Like when you hire A people and you put them in a context with other A people, it becomes self policing in only welcoming other A people and like pushing and like kind of not necessarily pushing away, but like they keep out the B people, I guess. But yeah. So if you are not rigorous about your information environment and who you allow to take up your time and energy and attention, cynicism becomes the natural response because you keep seeing failures and you keep seeing evidence of people bullshitting you. And if you look out into the world, there's always people bullshitting. Right. I have an essay I want to write. I haven't written yet. It's called Shit Watch. And it's like, it's already funny. It's like there's like the incentive. The social media algorithms incentivize high arousal emotions. And so there are people who, whether coordinated or not, end up. So the analogy I give is, imagine there's a group of people in your city who go around looking for like, the worst public toilets they can find. And then they look for the shit, and then they scoop up the shit and they present it to you. And he say, hey, hey, here, look at this shit. Smell it, taste it, I don't know. And you'll be like, that's disgusting. What's wrong with you? Right? But we do the equivalent with information and content and be like, oh, here's these people fighting, here's this. And it's like in a city of millions of people, there's going to be someone fighting somewhere. And if you can scroll through some feeds where it's like fight compilations and it's just, oh, my God, in five minutes of scrolling, you would think that the whole world is full of people fighting. But if you go out into a restaurant, everyone's just sitting around having lunch or dinner and it's. So there's that. With regards to cynicism, I think it's very much a function of how well you curate your information. And I think there's this unfortunate tendency for people, especially like intellectual types who want things to be objective and they are like. And I remember thinking this way as well. Like, I need to know all the bad things. I need to know the truth. I need to know the. So, like, you know that somewhere out there there is shit true. You don't need to be in denial of that. But you also don't need to go around sniffing it. You know what I mean? You don't need to immerse yourself in that. So my recommendation is always to do an audit of what you have been consuming, what you have been reading, who you're talking to. How does that make you feel? Does it inspire you towards action? Does it inspire you to, you know, make things better? If it doesn't, if it's making you feel more helpless, more angry, more, all of those things, then, like, what's the point? You know? And even just knowing that you can experience different realities by modifying what you allow in, I think that's like a huge, like, as a way of overcoming cynicism and, you know, like our ha. To be. To be fair, like, as a species, we are new to having smartphones. It's only. It's been like 15 years, 16, 17 years. And it takes time for like the collective to develop like antibodies and proper protocols. It's funny, you can read up about like when the telephone was invented, people didn't know how to use it and they would just call randomly at any hour of the day. They wouldn't say hello, they'll just to start talking. And they would have to write into magazines to complain about people crank callers and all that. And it took a while for healthy norms to develop. And I think we are still in the process of figuring out how to have healthy chaotic information environment, diets. But the scary thing is that AI and all these things are coming up. And so by the time we adapt to whatever is happening now, new stuff is going to happen faster. So it's, it's, it's a challenge.
- [20:02]
A
Given that longevity and doing things for a long period of time is so important to being serious that seriousness is smeared across time. What would be your advice to people who don't want to get seriousness Burnout? The people listening who go, wow, I feel seen by this. I have care and attention. I am bothered by details. I want to do things well. I want to leave the world better than I found it. But I find it a little bit exhausting sometimes being around people who aren't so serious, who don't support me in my seriousness. And I don't want to, I don't want to feel too rigid and sort of stodgy. I need to be dynamically persistent in that way.
- [20:43]
B
What.
- [20:43]
A
How can people be more sort of psychologically flexible or robust in managing their own motivation?
- [20:51]
B
You know what's coming up for me? Strangely enough, I know you've done podcasts with the Renaissance periodization guy. Israel. Israel, yes. Great.
- [21:00]
A
Yes.
- [21:00]
B
And so I used to have a problem with my lifting patterns where I would try to go as hard as I could and it would go pretty well for like three months, four months, and then I wouldn't realize it, but I'm getting kind of burnt out in some way. And then I would either experience a minor injury or thankfully nothing serious, but like a minor injury, or I'd start losing my appetite. And then, or you know, I. And then eventually I'd take like a week or two weeks entirely off and then my habit would fall off the rails and then everything just went bad. And like I had like years and years of cycles of this until I watched Dr. Mike and he was talking about deloading, right. And I think that's just such a. I can't believe I never encountered that concept until, I mean, I guess I may have encountered it in passing somewhere, but I didn't take it very seriously. But when I saw Mike speak about it, I was like, oh, this guy knows his stuff. And I gave it a shot, and it totally works. It's like, so the idea is basically keep doing the reps, maybe fewer reps, maybe fewer weight, but, like, you know, still show up, but, like, at a lesser intensity. And that kind of keeps you in the game, but not balls to the wall, kind of pushing yourself too hard. And I feel like there's a parallel here with, like, seriousness in general or just, you know, any kind of project management. Like, athletes need their downtime, right? Like, rest is a part of the recovery process. And so if you're serious about doing anything for a long period of time, you should consider how that break from the main thing keeps you, like, allows you to return to the game from a healthy perspective. And I'm thinking also now of David Ogilvy, who was an excellent copywriter, excellent manager. He was just a great guy. He should read his book. It's fantastic. And he would work really, really hard for, I think, months on end, and then he would switch off completely and go, like, into. I don't know where he would go. Like, just go on vacation, I guess, and he would just let his mind lay fallow. And I think the quote he gave was, like, he would receive telegrams from his subconscious, and the telegrams from his subconscious would inspire him and give him a new perspective and that kind of thing. Another person I'm thinking of now is Paula Sher, who is the designer of the Citibank logo. She runs this great design consultancy, and she's like, you know, I can't design anything if I'm not in a state of play. So what she does is she sketches while she's in taxi cabs. And, yeah, I think there are very few things that are interesting that don't involve some amount of playfulness, some amount of. You need to step away from the thing so you can see the big picture and not get lost in the weeds of the thing. So, yeah, like, you know, I'm kind of going in circles a little bit because I don't want to be too prescriptive. Like, if you say, oh, take seven days on and two days off, or, like, no, that is not necessary. Maybe. Maybe that's correct for your thing. But, like, you have to be sensitive to your own rhythms. And now I'm thinking of Christopher Alexander, who's like a. He's A. He used, he was a famous like architecture thought leader, I guess you could say. And one of his quotes that I keep coming back to is like this idea of improving patterns by tinkering with things and then seeing how you feel about it. And it's really the feeling that dictates the action. And there's no, you can't outsource this, you know, you can't outsource your judgment and you can outsource your feeling. Like, these are things that it's just like all the way to the top, right? Even like if you're like Beyonce or Taylor Swift and you have a whole team of people managing your operation, you still at the top have to judge. Do I want to have this pyrotechnics, Do I want to have this part of the show or whatever? Like, people offer you ideas, but you have to decide by your feeling what's right or wrong. There's no escaping that. And it's the same for rest and it's the same for if you've been doing things for some time and it's not working out. Like, you have to sit back and feel it. And it's so funny to talk about it because I think people who hear it will be like, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, of course. But it's non trivial. It's kind of tricky, I guess, because you could get lost in the weeds so easily. So you kind of want to practice having time away from the thing. And I think Netflix has, in their software department or something, they had this thing called Chaos Monkeys where they would basically program things to break randomly so that they would be like, oh no, if this breaks, we got to do that thing. And it, it challenged them to make things more robust. And yes, I mean, and life is like that, right? In like whatever you're doing, things are gonna surprise you and blindside you and so on. So, okay, if you're trying to be serious and overwhelmed.
- [25:48]
A
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Trying to avoid that. And then also I suppose you can add into it, how do, how do these people deal with the inevitable sort of friction that they feel with people around them? Because if you're somebody that is serious about things, you're going to become very disliked because you throw everybody else into quite harsh contrast.
- [26:08]
B
Yeah, that's very difficult. So this is why my first book is titled Friendly Ambitious Nerd, because there are three variables. And so successful people tend to be ambitious nerds. And if they're not friendly, and when I say friendly, you know, it's like sensitive to other people. And this is, this is tough because the people who are really at the absolute cutting edge, most exceptional, they tend to be uncompromising, they tend to be, you know, just very intense characters who, they see it as their point of view is correct because they, they have put in so much work into it. And so it's like they don't suffer fools, right? And yeah, so it's like, how much do you suffer fools? Is basically the question. Or like how do you do it in a way that is. Well, each person has to decide for themselves based on their values, how kind they want to be to people who can do nothing for them or you know, are even in like interrupting their process. And I'm, I'm kind of, you know, I remember when I was a kid and I felt like an idiot and I felt like, you know, no one was looking out for me and I had no mentors or no whatever and I really just needed someone to kind of show me around and help me out. So I'm kind of biased towards when I see someone struggling or I see someone lashing out or being whatever I try to, you know, like, can I at least, if I, can I at least say something that they might consider later on and be like, oh yeah, you know, actually that guy was unreasonably nice to me. But you know, I don't know if I've gone back and forth with regards to like how much should I like lecture people on that they should be nice to other people. I think this is one of those things where you may have some predisposition and it can vary a little bit slightly. And I'm reminded of when the Google co founders were looking for funding and I think one of the investors said something like, oh, these guys are so arrogant and they're so just not socially nice. They're not kissing the ring and they're not, they're just kind of saying, oh yeah, we want to organize the world's information and it's going to be great. And I'm paraphrasing what they said. I don't think they said it's going to be great. It's like they just, they just spoke in very clinical terms about precisely what they were going to do, which is like, I would say it's a tell for like, you know, the rocket scientists and the people that are really serious about technical things and they want to make progress on things. Like they, they are thing oriented people rather than people oriented people. So they don't, you know, they're like, often they're like neurodiversion, autistic, like that. And so, you know, and I think, okay, here's what I think. You don't. Nobody needs to do everything by themselves, you know, and it's a, it's a. It's a fool's errand to insist that your cutting edge scientist should also be a very smooth, like, political operator, right? It's not realistic to expect someone to be both. Although, like, really exceptional people are. But, like, realistically, most people are going to specialize at the thing that they're good at. But the cool thing is life is a multiplayer game, right? People are kind of indoctrinated by school to think that, oh, you got to do standardized tests, you got to get good grades at everything. And that kind of super generalist perspective. Whereas there's a lot of things where actually you just need a friend. You just need one friend who can cover you for that. You know, you just need like a handler or a manager. And, you know, so like my wife, she's. I would say my wife is smarter than me in terms of, like, reading people and in terms of. There's a bunch of ways in which my wife is smarter than me, but she doesn't like talking to people that much. But, like, so she married me and so she gets to benefit from, like, my social butterfly instincts or inclinations, and I get to benefit from her being, you know, kind of like analytical about, you know, budgets and schedules. And so, like, there's a quote from Rocky which is like, you know, we each have gaps, but together we have no gaps. So, yeah, I think the good news is we can trade, like, so we can make friends. So you need. So you have to make at least one friend, right? And ideally, every, like, antisocial, you know, like, not. They're not trying to be antisocial, but the kind of person who isn't very good with people should have one person in their corner who's like their representative or their advocate or someone who can look out for them and kind of translate their perspective to other people. And again, it's like the zero to one part of this is the hardest. Like, when you don't have anyone, that's when it's really tough. But I think even just knowing that it's possible that if you can find someone who's like a nerd whisperer, right? And so I consider myself basically that, like, I'm kind of a nerd whisperer. I'm nerdy in general, but I'm not like, all the way intense to the point where I'm like tinkering with stuff.
- [31:05]
A
So you're able, you're able to translate for the ones who are too far down the autist ladder to be able to communicate. You're like the gateway drug to civilization, basically.
- [31:16]
B
That's true, actually. So, yeah, I've described it as like being like the bridge between worlds. Right. So I am a fan of like Heimdall from like the Norse mythology and yeah, we need bridge people to bridge people.
- [31:31]
A
Well, so you said before about you had this sort of sense that you as a kid was yearning for role models for somebody to give you an encouraging word in your ear. And I think I was very similar. I came up with this idea of the reverse role model. Because you've heard of food deserts in America. Yes, I think I was in the equivalent of a role model desert in the uk. Classic working class town. Not many people like the person I wanted to be like. And I realized that I think most success from life doesn't necessarily come from expediting success, but from avoiding tragedy and failure. Like, if you multiply by zero, you're completely out of the game. So at least there is much more downside to be had than potential upside. So what I found was people who were very much like the sort of person I didn't want to be. So I don't want his relationship with gambling and I don't want the way that he cheats on his wife all the time. And I don't want the fact that this person never really seems to be able to speak their mind and so on and so forth and their way markers in the ground. You sort of place these different way markers of stuff that you don't want to be like. And I think that's reassuring to anybody that feels like they haven't yet found a role model or an encouraging word in your ear. Because if you haven't had a single one of those, the likelihood is that you haven't just been sort of moving through some really boring gray middle zone. What you've been exposed to is the opposite end of the bell curve. Lots of people like the person you don't want to be like. And it was just a. I thought that was an interesting and nice way for me to rationalize, alchemize the situation that I'd been in. And it's for the people who don't have that many role models around them. I'm sort of here for it.
- [33:17]
B
Yeah, I respect that so much. You know, to decide to do that kind of alchemy is, is A profound. Actually, I'm curious, like, did you, did you read anything? Did you, would you point at anything that kind of set you off on that or do you feel like it was really just within, it was intuition?
- [33:35]
A
I think mostly that I just, I didn't fit in. I didn't, I didn't resonate with the people around me in the way that they resonated with the people around them. And, you know, you find little glimpses every so often of someone that you can sort of get on with. And much of this is your problem, right? Much of this is a you thing that you don't really fully know how to present yourself in the most legible way. Like, yeah, how is it that's best for me to be understood by people? It's not compromising, it's not changing yourself. It's not being a shape shifting, like sort of social climber, but it's putting your best, easy to understand foot forward. You know, you don't need to talk to people about your rampant flatulence or erectile dysfunction on the first date. You know, save that for further down the line. And yeah, the sort of social mores and graces and how you sort of slowly acclimatize people to you is a skill. It's a real skill. And it's a skill specifically for people who are serious and who care about things and yeah, who want to have deep and interesting relationships, but they're terrified that if they bring that up too early on, people are going to think that they're some sort of a nerd or they're not fun, they're not playful, they're going to be a buzzkill. God, don't bring Visa. Like he's just going to talk about feelings again, you know what I mean? Like that you don't want to be that guy, especially when you're young. And I really think that the point you made before about how when you're first starting out, you have no legitimacy. Why, why on earth do you, person at the same level as everybody else, that is zero novice beginner starter, think that you have the right to be able to be this serious about anything? Why? On, it's so fucking patronizing in a way that you believe. It's solipsistic, it's egotistical, it's narcissistic to think that you deserve this level of like, rigor. But then when you look back, like, you need to have some of that, that spark needs to be there or else you're never going to take it sufficiently seriously to actually be able to become good at it.
- [35:43]
B
Yeah, I actually. So, yeah, I've thought about this a lot and I've encountered it myself back then and even now sometimes. And I find that what myself, what I find myself often saying is that, you know, so there are assumptions buried in culture that people just internalize from their upbringing, from wider society or whatever. And the idea of deserving is very, it's very tricky stuff. You know, it's very. It's like, you know, I think there's this implicit sense that. So it's like status hierarchies and concepts of like, royalty even, like. And it goes back all the way to like our founding, like our earliest myths, mythology and you know, like, if you, if you go back and, you know, you can actually look at like Disney movies and even superhero movies or whatever, and it's like, oh, you have to be a prince or a princess to be able to have agency, right? And like, and that's like bestowed from. It's implied. It's like, you're the chosen one, you're the divine, whatever. So everyone else is just. You're meant to be a peasant, basically. And like this, these intuitions still remain in modernity, right? And the way I put it is like, I'm not special that I get to be serious. Anyone can do it. It's there for the taking, right? And it's just, I guess maybe there might have been some validity to those old heuristics in ancient times. But, you know, and like, one analogy I would use is like, it used to be that if you wanted to have your own TV show or a podcast or whatever, you basically had to go through the gatekeepers of traditional media. And back then, producing video was very expensive thing to do. And so it was highly resource intensive. And like, whoever had the cameras back then or like, you know, that whole operation, like, they. You would need to justify things to them. You would need to, oh, I'm going to do a show, it's going to make this much money or it's going to grow this much audience or whatever. And now with like YouTube and iPhones or whatever, like, even like the cheapest phones anyone can record anything and upload it for basically free anytime. But that has been true for like a decade at least. And yet people still think we always use our old intuitions. So the present reality that we live in culturally is always like 30 to.
- [38:05]
A
50 years behind or maybe even more, as you say, this medieval serfdom environment where, well, you've got to work for the baron and the Baron's not going to let you do this thing. Yeah, this odds, you need to have agency bestowed on you. You're right. So there was a time, freed this up.
- [38:24]
B
There was a time where as a parent, if your son is trying to, let's say, wear fancy clothes, you would be protecting him by telling him, don't do that. The Baron has a temper. He doesn't like to see anyone other than royals dress up. He's going to kill you. And so they're protecting you by saying those things. But, like, that's no longer true. But, you know, it just, it's like that story of like the five monkeys, like beating each other because they used to get electrocuted. So, yeah, like, culture evolves very slowly relative to, like, technology.
- [38:55]
A
I had a great conversation with this guy that researched the history of humans discovering their own ability to destroy themselves. So a history of existential risk. And he's got this great term that is apparently in the literature called conceptual inertia. And let's say that we have a Copernican revolution. We go to learn that the universe is perhaps constructed in a different way to the one that we believed. And first off, people will deny that it's true. And you will continue to need to push with evidence and data and so on and so forth, observation. And then after a while, maybe some of the elites will begin to accept that it's true, that maybe some of the normal people will begin to accept that it's true, but they still don't behave as if it is. And that's conceptual inertia. It's the archetypes, it's the stories that we tell ourselves. It's the way that we see the world. And this just lags behind this lumbering behemoth that we need to drag along. And the other thing, just, just to kind of round out that the social element, because I do, I. I do get the sense that that's a really important, seriousness, derogating element, that the social incentives will align for you to go back to the mean with anything, whatever it is that you do, even if it's aggression, you will be socialized to be less aggressive. If it's funniness, like, if you're too much of a comedian at all, it's like, dude, come on, we're trying to be. It's a, It's a fucking funeral. Let's be serious here. But. And I always wanted, especially because I was very sort of lonely as a kid, I always wanted to work out how to make people like me, I wanted to be accepted. I wanted to have friends, I wanted to have a support system. And it took probably until about a year ago for me to realize that. I always thought that people wanted to be around charismatic individuals, other people around them, to be charismatic, to have some sort of, you know, gravitational sense, some sort of pull. And then I reflected on the friends that I like to spend my time around. And it wasn't the people who were the most interesting, it was the people who made me feel like I was the most interesting. So I came up with this idea of inverse charisma, which is what you want to be trying to cultivate is not necessarily a sense of everybody going, God, I'm so glad Visa's coming. He's going to tell us all these amazing stories. He's going to be like, regale us with a dance. You know, he's going to do the limbo thing again. We don't want that. What we want is be is going to come fuck. Like I, I love. He always brings the best out of me. I always feel good when I'm around him. And none of the feel good when you're around this person has got anything really to do with them other than their love, their kindness, their curiosity smeared across time. And yeah, I think it's just for the fellow charisma unenthused out there, the people who maybe don't think, well, I'm, I'm not, you know, full of confidence and charm and wit and whimsy. It kind of doesn't matter. You can actually be one of the best liked people in the room to whatever regard you care about, simply by being interested in other people, not necessarily by just being interesting.
- [42:16]
B
Yeah, I think, I think there's a kind of a selection bias effect or a garishness effect. I call a version of this the Times Square problem. Where like people like, imagine thinking that the only thing in New York is Times Square, which is like all the ads and all the garish lights and everything, which is, you know, it's, it's interesting to check out. But like, similarly, like, you know, some people think, oh, the only people on YouTube are like Mr. Beast and whoever. It's like, it's when there's like so much interestingness just like two streets down, three streets down. You can I follow this? Like published, some, just some guy running a really old printing press kind of thing. It's fascinating and it's. Yeah, it's like that kind of, it's not exactly the same thing, but like his love for his craft really shines, and everyone in his domain loves to be around that. It's just so nice to see someone lovingly tending to the thing that they care about. And it doesn't need to be showy or flashy or loud. That's just, you know, if you filter that out, suddenly you look at the rest of the landscape and it's like, oh, there's so much interestingness everywhere.
- [43:23]
A
Talk to me about the relationship between seriousness and earnestness.
- [43:29]
B
Hmm. Well, I feel like earnestness is at the heart of, like, you can't really be serious and not be earnest. Right. I guess. I guess you can choose how much of it you want to show. I'm not entirely sure why I've used two different phrases in two different essays, but it's just. It just felt natural to me, I guess. So I think my earnestness essay says there's nothing edgier than being earnest. So I got around to talking about earnestness by talking about edginess. And I guess I like the alliteration. That's probably how I ended up doing that. Because you could also say there's nothing edgier than seriousness. But it's nice to have alliteration. But yeah. So basically, the interesting thing about. So some people want to be. They don't want to go with the social hurt. They don't want to just say what everyone else is saying. They don't want to think what everyone else is thinking. And so they begin with that and then they think, well, I should contradict what is being said, which can be a little bit of a public service. And I think it was more of a public service in the past when we didn't have Twitter and comments in your social friend group. If five. If you're in a group of six guys and five guys always saying the same thing, the sixth guy who says the other thing is providing the group with like a useful service, right? In a sense. But if it's something like, you know, so you upload something online and some, like, inevitably, you know, some guy is going to present the critical contrary perspective. So each additional contrary perspective doesn't add very much. And again, this is one of those things where people are not yet good at acting in large groups, they still. No snowflake feels responsible for the avalanche. Right. But the cool thing is. No, sorry, I didn't finish that thought. If you are going to try to be edgy by reacting to what the consensus is, you're always going to be lagging behind the consensus. So the consensus is there. Then you analyze it, you compute your response, and you're always going to follow the consensus. And in fact, so, like, if you're like a rigid heterodoxist, like, you're being the opposite of what's the orthodoxy, you can, like, map it out almost mathematically. People, you're still following the herd.
- [45:50]
A
You're just a black sheep is still a sheep, Right?
- [45:54]
B
Yeah. And on the other hand, the interesting thing is if you go inwards, right, you follow your own heart, you follow your own interestingness, you do what you deeply care about. Because each individual is socialized, like kind of on the outside. Layers of socialization begin a little. Like, the way to talk about this is like young children when they first start writing poetry, they write excellent poetry because they haven't learned how ordinary people speak. And so they have all these very fresh uses of phrasing that seems surprising and almost like ethereal. Like, they'll just say very cool things until they get to, like, I don't know, like 13, 14, and they start caring about their peers. And so, yeah, kids like toddlers, like 3 to 7, they are excellent freaks, you know. And I think several artists have quotes that's like, the challenge is to remain childlike and not let the world whatever. Which is difficult. But, yeah. So if you. If you go inwards and express what's really true for you and what you feel, you know, like what you'd like, daydream about, what you dream about, literally. So, like, that stuff and you express that, you end up being more, quote, unquote, contrarian. You end up being away from the herd. Right. Like, so, like. And I think this is the other thing where people who make predictions within a group, they tend to. It's like they're playing the prices right, sort of, you know, they all kind of calibrate their guesses in relation to everybody else's guesses. And so there's like a bell curve of what all the people guess. And sometimes the answer is way out in the field, far away from the bell curve. Right. It's like a thousand times more, 10,000 times more than in whatever direction. And the person who figures that out is the person who wasn't listening to everybody else. And the way that. Yeah, so the person who isn't listening will from time to time be more radically edgy than the person who's trying to be ag. Which is. It's kind of a trip. You think about it for a while and it's like, whoa, you know. Yeah, just following your own rhythm gets you somewhere Else, you have this great.
- [47:59]
A
Line in that essay where you say, as a general principle, if your position on things can be picked out very easily, predictably, it's probably worth being suspicious of it because you're basically running a simple script. And if nothing else, maybe consider that you might soon be easily replaced by a ChatGPT bot. Coming to your Twitter timeline near you, I talked earlier about how earnestness gets suppressed sometimes. A person who has lost the ability to focus on what they actually want can become superficially motivated by the social activity of attacking other people for the imperfection in their utterances. It's a fairly hollow form of nourishment. But hungry people without any good food will eat anything they get.
- [48:37]
B
Yeah, man, I sound better in writing than when I speak.
- [48:40]
A
It's the British accent. It's the British accent.
- [48:42]
B
Yeah. It's very. I should get you the right to speak my audiobooks. Yeah, that's true. You know, it's. It's. What is that to say about that? It's really. Well, when I hear that, you know, I find myself feeling some empathy for, you know, people who don't know how to be better than a hater. You know, it's like nobody, you know, like, some people say they want to be haters, but, you know, I kind of believe that if you could know how. If you could figure out how to be adored for your idiosyncratic personal flavor and style and essence, like, you wouldn't want to go around disturbing, like, annoying people for engagement.
- [49:25]
A
Right?
- [49:25]
B
Like, you just, like, again, we live one short life and, like, you want to look back and be like, oh, yeah, I really, you know, critiqued. Well, yeah, there's some contexts in which that's true, but if you're doing it compulsively, you wake up in the morning, you scroll your feet, and you look for someone to be mean to. You can do better than that. That's my thing. Yeah.
- [49:45]
A
Yeah. What's your. You start the essay with this really lovely quote from Ted Hughes saying that's how we measure out our real respect for people by the degree of feeling that they can register. What's that make you think of?
- [49:57]
B
This actually ties back to what we were talking about earlier, about when I was bringing up Christopher Alexander and stuff. Like, you have to feel. Like feeling is. Feeling is the highest bandwidth thing that a person is capable of. I think, like, there is. You know, I love this. There's this book called the User Illusion by Thor Noritranders. He's a Danish physicist. It's not A very popular book because it was written in Danish originally. But he has all these brilliant bits about consciousness. And one of the things he says is that the bandwidth of feeling is more than the bandwidth of knowledge. I'm paraphrasing. I don't know what exactly he said now. And the bandwidth of knowledge is more than the bandwidth of communication. So we feel more than we know and we know more than we can say. Right? And we like. And thinking is somewhere in the know to say aspect. So what that if you sit with that and you really feel it, what you realize is that you feel more than you can say. You feel more than you like what you think about something and what you feel about something. The feeling is much more nuanced. The feeling is much more. And think about, you know, intuition, right? Like, so one of the ways I think about intuition is that it's like you have a felt understanding of all of the ecology of relationships, of things around you. One of my favorite stories is, I think in one of Malcolm Gladwell's books, he talks about a fireman who goes to a fire. And like, a senior fireman. And like, all the firemen are trying to work on the fire. And he's just standing there and he's like, something's not right. We gotta get out. Like, it's weird. We gotta get out. And then he gets everyone out. And like, a second later, the whole house collapses. He didn't think, what's going on? He felt it. And what he felt was, it turns out he felt that the fire is not going away the way it should. There's not enough smoke for this level of heat. There must be. And turns out that the fire was in the basement. So it's way hotter than what they were used to. And like, but that's something he felt. He didn't think it. Right. And I feel that similar to that kind of intuition. And that kind of intuition requires domain familiarity and expertise. So it's not the lackadaisical. I feel like the world should be more like this. Or I feel like, I mean, having an ice cream. If you want to have an ice cream, go ahead. But it's like, I feel that that person is bad vibes. Okay? Those things are kind of. It varies from context to context. But what I'm getting at is there is so going back to the Tet Hughes quote, the amount of feeling that we are able to experience and surf the waves off because our education systems and civilization as a whole right to minimize inconvenience to people because we Are all smooshed together in very cramped environments. Civilization is, I call it iterative potty training. At the most fundamental level, please don't shit in the street. Don't shit in front of your friends. Like shit in the toilet, right? And shit on. Like, try to do it at appropriate times, you know, so like potty training is good. Like you want people maybe if you live in a barbarian in the wild, you can shit wherever you want whenever you want. Doesn't bother anybody else. But like it's a public health issue if people are shitting everywhere. So people need to be potty trained. Right? And what that means is you need to be like emotionally regular. Like you need to regulate your feelings. You think you want to go now? No, you got to hold it in and go somewhere else. But okay, so that's potty training. And then you go on to. I'm angry. No, you shouldn't be angry. Like you're saying you get socialized to be less aggressive. Right. Like we need to find ways to express our feelings in healthy ways and in good containers that don't hurt other people excessively or unnecessarily or whatever. But so from civilization's point of view, that's a little bit more complicated and complex than it can manage. So what it does is it tells people to suppress themselves and it enforces this through culture and institutions and everything else. And so you have all these people who are suppressed all the time, time. And they feel like shit and they don't really know why, and then they take drugs and then all of those things. But it is possible, once you awaken to this reality, to realize that you have the capacity to re regulate yourself in a way that is optimal for you. Right. So the thing is, civilizations mechanisms are optimal for civilization and we all enjoy the benefits of civilization. So I'm not like anti civilization or anti capitalist or anti whatever. It's just we inherit the circumstances that we're in. It's on us to take it and double it and give it to the next person.
- [54:20]
A
No, I've got the idea in my mind of being over civilized.
- [54:24]
B
Yeah.
- [54:24]
A
There is a degree of being over civilized and undercivilized.
- [54:28]
B
The bureaucratic. Imagine how to a barbarian civilized is an insult. Like you people need contracts to do things together. You don't trust each other. You put people in boxes, in jails. It's a different value system. Right.
- [54:43]
A
It's certainly something that I've had to get over. I did therapy twice a week for around about the last year or so. And in that you're basically inviting somebody into a very intimate part of your home and they're pointing at all of the weird stuff that you've got and they're like, why is that single spike on the floor over there? And what's that disused train set about? And what's this thing and what's that thing? And I notice that you keep on walking over to the sink backward as opposed to forward or whatever, whatever. And one of the things that I realized is that I have a people pleasing tendency. I see other people's emotions as my responsibility, that their well being emotionally is on me and that it's, it, it's partly my problem. And what the. One of the issues that you come across with that is it's very difficult to advocate for your own needs or your own wants or to learn to forcibly say no because you know that invariably this is going to cause some sort of imposition or discomfort to somebody else. And if your concern is ever making anybody else ever feel uncomfortable, it's very unlikely that if you will subjugate your own desires in place of their well being, even if you're in the right, even if you as a person, that is, you should advocate for you. So that's been a sort of a really interesting way of literally trying to uncivilize myself in some regards, I guess.
- [56:02]
B
And the curse of the people pleaser is that people can tell or like, you know, discerning people can tell if you are like stiff in a way that's like, oh, you, I need to put your needs first. And then subconsciously or consciously, if they've thought about these things, they know that they can't entirely trust you to take care of your needs. And so then they don't, they're not pleased. Right. Like they, and then they don't trust you and then it's like, oh, you want to make them feel better and they're like, I don't trust you. You know, like.
- [56:28]
A
Well, you said it. You say in the seriousness essay that it's like this sort of odd, roundabout, uncomfortable truth of life that the more you don't care about what other people think about you, the more they seem to like you.
- [56:44]
B
Yeah, it's crazy. It's such a, you know, I'm writing about all of this from a new angle now where I talk about like a blessedness spiral upwards and a wretchedness spiral downwards. And like it's so tragic because the more blessed you are, the more blessings you receive and the more wretched you.
- [57:00]
A
Are, the more Matthew Principle all the.
- [57:01]
B
Way up and all the way down. Exactly that. Yeah. And it's, it's so harsh, actually. You know, it's like every time you cross a threshold, suddenly everything's just better. And I think people know this instinctively, which is what part of what drives the desire for like wealth and like social climbing is that, you know, that at the next level some things are less bad. And like, you know, I remember once, my wife and I, I think it was during COVID or something, there's a discount on like the fanciest hotel in town. And so we decided to go and so it was wonderful. And then we had breakfast the next morning with all these people who are very obviously wealthier than us, like a whole tax bracket or two tax brackets higher. And I. It was such a lovely environment. Everyone, like people are playing with their children, everyone is speaking politely. And I found myself getting kind of angry. Like, man, rich people have it good. And not just that they have consumer surplus or consumer surplus, not that they have spending power. Right. It's not that they have fancy things. It's that in the nice neighborhood, it's peaceful, it's. You know, I'm sure there's problems that I'm not aware of. Like, there's more pressure, you know, like, there's more like, they seem to have a lot of like family squabbles about inheritance and stuff. So like every context has its own upside and downsides. But in that moment I was like, whoa, like I am underestimating how much I would actually appreciate like having the access to those kinds of spaces, which is.
- [58:28]
A
Well, think about how much less stress there would be on you. You know, there's this sort of poverty, this odd poverty trap, which is.
- [58:36]
B
Poverty is expensive. Yeah.
- [58:37]
A
Yes, poverty is very expensive. If you're constantly having to get credit lines extended, if you're having to work two jobs, which means that you can't improve your education or your qualifications to get a better paying job, you're kind of stuck. And then you. Some people get to escape velocity in one regard or another. And some people, you know, the Elon's of the world, the Bezos of the world, have this sort of, I don't know, like infinite money glitch, or at least it seems like that to everybody else. And then you think what sort of quality of life comes along with that? And yeah, it's a weird thought to consider the advantages, that wretchedness spiral and that sort of ascendancy spiral as well.
- [59:19]
B
Yeah, yeah. It's just such a. And you know, it's almost too much to think about sometimes I think. I think again, like, everyone is living in the immediacy of their reality, right? So it's like, you have what's on your to do list for next week. You know what's on your. You gotta ship this thing for work. You gotta deal with changing the oil on the something, and there's all these nitty gritty things. And it's challenging to step back and really see the big picture and have, like, a long view of what do I really want my life circumstances to be. And, you know, it's. Yeah, it's a lot. It's. It's your.
- [59:55]
A
What's your advice for people to sort of continue struggling cheerfully when things aren't going quite as they'd hoped?
- [60:04]
B
Man, I have been in that state for the past couple of years. Ish. It's funny because when I was. It's like. So I have struggled differently at different stages of my life, and currently it's the best stage. When I was a teenager, I was struggling with. My family didn't believe me when I said I want to be an author. And my friends, you know, not don't, like, didn't like that. I'm. I struggled to get people to take me seriously. And, like, those struggles were in some ways harder, but in some ways also, I guess, more freeing. So this goes back to. Every stage is different and has its pros and cons. But so in my current stage, like, I've. I've written two books that I'm happy with and my readers love them, but, like, instead of directing my energy towards, like, doing marketing for them and selling more books and whatever, I feel like I gotta move on to the next project and, like, do the third thing. And that has been a struggle for me because, I mean, I guess any. Any interesting work creatively is going to be a struggle because you're trying to birth something that doesn't already exist. And so you have to find new perspectives and you have to. You want to say something and it hasn't quite been said before, and you don't know how people are going to receive it. And, you know, it's just. It's just a lot. And I have woken up very often and be like, oh, my God, what am I doing with my life? What am I. What am I. How am I going to do this thing? Why is progress so slow? You know, like, there's all these unpleasant thoughts and I have to. It takes effort to contextualize things for myself. Like, I Have to actively remind myself when I go for a walk or something and be like, visa, do you know you're living your dream, your teenage self's dream? Like if I could talk to my 17 year old self and be like, oh yeah, you know, I don't have a job, I just write and I talk to people. I just do whatever I like. I just, you know, he'll be like, what? How is that possible? Like how like you succeeded, like you've made it, man. I'm like, yeah. I just feel like, you know, it's. There's this quote from Steve Jobs again where he says when you haven't succeeded yet, when you, when you're like a nobody, right? It's fun to fantasize about all the riches and all the things that, about dreams, like grand dreams. But once you have some means, once you have some money, you have some authority, some influence or whatever, now the chance of your dreams coming true is not zero. It's not one either. It's like in between. And you have responsibility for me to make that happen. And it's a burdensome responsibility, I feel. And like, you know, I always feel survivor's guilt as a creative, you know, why me? Why not? I know that there are people who are surely more talented than me, more intelligent, more articulate, whatever, but you know, maybe their mom is sick and so they've never had a, like they've had to work extra hours and so they haven't had time to write, right. And I always feel like I got to make it for that guy, you know, because he by that's maybe my. I feel like it's a little bit similar to your people pleasing stuff maybe, I'm not sure. But like, anyway, you were asking about how do I help people who want to struggle creatively or struggle cheerfully. Right? There's layers to this. But I think Mark Manson has a quote about like, whatever you do, you're going to have to eat shit. I don't know why I'm saying shit so much in this call, whatever you're going to do, you don't have to eat shit. So find the flavor of shit sandwich that you like, right? Like find the thing.
- [63:25]
A
Orient yourself toward the pains rather than the pleasures.
- [63:28]
B
Yeah. Like, what pain can you endure? And like what? So imagine you struggle at a thing for the rest of your life and on your deathbed, you know, maybe you had like some minor success, but it never really fully paid off. But you imagine yourself. So imagine you could, like this is a great, great exercise by the way. A thought experiment of visualize your old self and visualize your young self and just have a conversation with them. So I imagine like a 90 or 100 year old visa, and I imagine a few different versions of them, but one of them is like, Visa, I've been working my butt off for 50, 60 years, writing every day, and I have not achieved any great success. And then. But like, I'm like, but did you, did you love it? And he's like, yeah, I loved it. I love writing. I love playing with words. I made friends with other authors. You know, we discussed things that were interesting and, you know, it was a good life. Like, I can visualize that if you told me something like, well, imagine Visa, you know, being a software engineer and like, never really, like, you know, I could, I know I could do it if I wanted to. I don't want to, though. It's not, you know, so find the struggle that you enjoy for its own sake and you don't mind not succeeding at. And then you can, like, you have the energy to keep going and I guess define for yourself small victories that are victories to you, even if it's not victories to other people. And I found, you know, I've been writing for a long time. There were things that I wrote like 10 years ago or like many years ago where nobody in my life then cared about my writing, but I thought it was good. And then now, 10 plus years later, when I do have an audience, I can share that old stuff with my audience and they're like, whoa, this is really good. I'm like, yeah, I know, right? So it's like if you are a success to yourself and no one else sees it, but you have to see it, right? And there's a quote for, I think from Les Brown, like, if no one else will see it for you, you have to see it for yourself. You have to be honest about what you think is good work, what you think is this was worth doing. I think this is worth doing. I think this is worth struggling at. And if no one else sees it, I'm just, I will see it for myself. And then you try and find one other person who can see it, and then another person and then another person, right? And then in that kind of mindset, I think you can try to be cheerful about it. There's all these other, like, project management, nitty gritty stuff. So, like, don't attempt extremely large projects that might sink your ship if you fail. I think Neetji said something like, write a hundred outlines of essays or Drafts or something. The saddest thing I see from time to time is an author who spent or a startup founder or an author who spends several years of their life and a lot of their money and their resources and whatever working on a project that turned. That they had like this kind of white whale idea, like, oh, when my novel is done, everyone's going to be amazing. Yeah. And then you do this really big thing and then you talk to people about it for the first time and they're not interested. And then that's just so depressing and so disheartening. Whereas what you want to do, and this is part of, like, being cheerful and whatever you want to do, little sketches, little outlines, little drafts, and then share them with people and then, like, see how they respond. And if you just talk to people every couple of days, even just a regular conversation, you may notice at some point you make someone laugh or at some point, like, their eyes light up and those are the moments that you want to, like, collect and pay attention to and like, you do more of that.
- [66:54]
A
I love the idea of sort of the challenges that the person who's not yet successful but not a total noob is encountering and the fact that sympathy for successful people is very unpopular. But there is, There is certainly a new skill set that everybody needs to learn. Like, just imagine that you get toward where you want to be. Not even where you want to be. Just imagine you get toward where you want to be. What fears are going to come into your life that you don't have right now? Well, what about the fear of losing something?
- [67:28]
B
Right?
- [67:29]
A
You've got something to fucking lose now that climbing higher simply gives you further to fall. You've got the onus on you to continue doing the thing, because if you don't, you've actually risked something now as opposed to before. You know, if you haven't made any, if no one reads your blog, if nobody cares about your T shirt designs, if no one's supporting your sports team or you're buying your products or whatever, what does it matter if you quit? It doesn't care. It's all on you. It's just a passion project. But that's not the case anymore. And you've got this beautiful idea of the scarcity sprite. And it really sort of spoke to me. You say this particular ghoul looks to me like a scarcity sprite, a grabby, anxious being terrified of coming across as ungrateful, out of touch and selfish, terrified of losing or squandering the opportunity that Fortune has granted us. It's a sort of emotional flashback of some sort. And that's something I expect I'll have to sit with and meditate on. As I revisit this, a small part of me shyly raises his hand like a kid in a classroom and says, it's okay if you lose everything. I'll still be your friend.
- [68:33]
B
Yeah, man.
- [68:34]
A
Dude. Fucking unbelievable, that sense of support from yourself, from the past. I'm proud of you for doing what you did.
- [68:43]
B
Yeah, that's. I have my moments, huh? Yeah. You know, it's a. When I write, you know, when I hear this, right. It doesn't feel like me. You know, I can recognize that it's me, but it's my. It's kind of a peak stick me. Or like when I'm in the writing thing, right, it's day to day. I don't feel like my best self or I don't feel like my best writer self, but like, I gotta keep doing stuff. And then it just comes by in flow. Elizabeth Gilbert has a great TED talk about this where she talks about the myth of the genius, of the creative genius. Like in a sense, where it's like she goes back to. Because she was a successful author of Eat Pray Love. And she described how when she was a struggling author, people were like, how are you going to feel never making anything worthwhile? Like, what if you're never going to make it? And then immediately after she made it, immediately people are like, oh, aren't you afraid you're never going to match up to that success? And she's like, what the fuck, man? Like, you know, it's really so. Yeah. And so she looked up like the history of how people thought about these things. And like, I think in the Roman times or like antiquity, people are like, okay, people get possessed by genius from time to time. So if you do good work, it's not. You don't get the, you don't get full credit. And if you do bad work, you don't get full blame. You know, it's like the creative. Sometimes just creativity happens and we are, we are vessels for that. Right. And. But yeah, with regards to Disgusty Sprite, it's really. I don't know, I think maybe, maybe I like indoctrinated myself a little bit with like video games, motivational stuff, but I feel it to be true, you know, Like, I really just want to have my own back. I really just. I think there's a quote from Montaigne where he says, you know, you can try to Be clever and fancy with all your words and stuff, but on your deathbed, you're going to really confront the barest truths about yourself. Like, did you live up to what you wanted? Do you forgive yourself for whatever? Do you? And like those very basal things. Yeah, I think about that a lot. I'm like, how can I be a better friend to myself so that I can be a better friend to other people? And I say, it's funny. It's funny that I'm so quick to go from that first sentence to the next. It's like, you know, like self love or self care, therefore that I can help other people. Right.
- [70:55]
A
It's yeah, this subjugating of desires. I must put other people first. Who am I to ask for the attention even from myself? My attention should be paid onto other people. No, dude, I'm balls deep in that challenge at the moment. Speaking of the tactical stuff, we can talk Mark Manson quotes all day. You spent a good bit of time looking at procrastination.
- [71:18]
B
Oh yeah.
- [71:19]
A
What, what is the TLDR30,000 foot view as somebody that needs to write lots of words and do things self powered every year? What's the TLDR of procrastination? Yeah.
- [71:30]
B
So you know what's funny? I spent like years reading everything I could about it, analyzing it, psychoanalyzing myself and everything. And these days I don't even use the term anymore. I don't, I don't. You know, it's. I think one of the most major things I've learned is that you, you really have to focus on the outcomes that you want and not the outcomes that you don't want. And even describing things in terms of procrastination, somehow I feel it tends to like reinforce the procrastination, you know, I don't know. This is a slightly radical view. I can try and answer the question directly, but like my meta view is that you don't even need to use that term. You know, like think about what you want, ask yourself what's in the way of getting to what you want. And the problem is, you know, very often procrastination is like trying to protect you. It's trying to protect you from doing something that you don't actually want. You know, like my wife and I have been procrastinating on renovating our house for years and years and I eventually realized, oh, I don't want to live in this neighborhood. And I am not being honest with myself about that. And like, but my subconscious protects me from making a costly Financial decision, like a very costly financial decision by just putting it off, like, no, no, let's just keep looking less, whatever. And the moment I realized that, oh, I actually want to be in a better neighborhood, then, like, it's so easy to fall into. I'm going to go see an agent, I'm going to go look at houses. And, like, everything is just flows from there. So, yeah, I think a lot of times procrastination is, you know, maybe you don't actually want to do the thing. And I think people struggle with, like, well, but I need to pay the bill, so I have to have a job, so I have to. Which is fair, right? Everyone, everyone, most people go through that. But I think a lot of things boils down to, like, the story you're telling yourself about why you need to do what you're doing. I have been helping some friends with these issues recently, and one pattern I keep noticing is people have, like, this task master inside their head that's like beating them up over and over again. Like, you should be doing this thing. Why are you not doing it? Like, you're so lazy. You're so whatever. And it's. It doesn't get to the truth of why you should or should not be doing it. What you are, what you care about, what you're afraid of. And yeah, so when I was talking to my friend, he was trying to spend less time on Twitter, and I'm like, why? And he's like, oh, because I spend so much time on Twitter and Instagram and whatever, and I don't get any work done and so I should spend less time on those things. And I'm like, I don't think that's actually true. Somewhere out there, there's someone else who spends twice as much time on the socials as you, but they're happy because they're achieving their goals. Right. So why is it that you're focusing on lowering the thing that you think you don't want instead of increasing the thing that you actually do want? And then we talked about that for almost an hour and we got around to, well, he wants to be doing some research stuff, but he hasn't made a study plan. He hasn't. And his initial plan was, oh, I'm going to read this whole textbook in a week, and that's not possible. It's a thick, dense textbook. So you got to partition the thing. So it's so interesting when you lay it all out, it turns out that this guy has a thing he wants to do. And if you Split him into two people. Imagine that there's the client and the worker. No, this client is not the right word where like split him into two people, one person asking the other person to do a job, right? Like the manager and the worker. The manager is giving these really vague, you know, requests with like unreasonable timelines, not unclear what needs to be done, what needs to be shipped or whatever, just get work done. And the worker is like, fuck this shit, you know, like I'm just going to goof off and watch, play video games or whatever because there's. The gradient of work to be done is just so out of whack that they're not going to do it. So you have to respect that there's some part of you within you that will not accept shitty management, right? So people are shitty bosses of themselves. And guess some funny territory here where people might be like, oh yeah, bad workplace environments are horrible. My boss sucks my this whatever. And like, how are you managing your own home, your own head in your own whatever. And people inherit the talk from their parents, from their teachers, from their whatever. And it's like, you got to work harder, you got to do more, you got to like. And it's very, it's nebulous, vague. And so I always ask people, and I ask my friends, what are you really trying to accomplish? Why? What is the most like sensible, reasonable, interesting, exciting way to do it? And like, if you really want the thing and the path to getting there makes sense and you can see your progress towards the thing. And video games do this really well, which is why video games are so fun to play. You have some mission, you have some objective, and you know how much XP you're going to get from each monster you kill. You get the gold, you get the skill points. It's very clear the game has done the hard work of project managing your tasks for you. So you go in there and you have a good manager in the game and it's shiny and colorful and whatever, but you can do the same in your own life with your own projects, you know, so it's like if you're practicing guitar or whatever, like how much are you practicing? What specific thing are you trying to do? What progress? What's the reward? Like what song do you want to be able to play? And when you make that progress, progress feels good. And what's interesting is that I think people don't even feel that they deserve the right to feel good. Making progress on their work, that's the real painful thing. They feel that work should be Miserable and difficult.
- [77:01]
A
Puritan work ethic.
- [77:03]
B
Yes. And that's what really. And they have that. Which is like, imagine a boss saying, oh, you're going to have to grind, grind every weekend, every night. And the employee's like, yeah, sure, you know, and then they just. Their heart's not in it. And then. So then you get this conf. This. This. Just this dive. This. The person becomes unintegrated. They get split selves. And you have these phrases like revenge, bedtime, procrastination, where basically like your. You know. And so it's your prefrontal cortex that's making all the plans. It's like the manager is a shitty guy. It's like, you know, in Lord of the Rings, there's King Theoden and then there's the worm tongue whispering poison in his ear. It's like a lot of people's prefrontal cortex is worm tongue. And it's like, you know, you. You gotta do more this. You gotta. This. Not okay. That kind of thing. And it's. It's when you see it as that, and then you're like. And I have this whole analogy with Gandalf is a friend who sees what's best in you and encourages you to grasp your sword of agency and do what you actually want to do. And. Yeah, so when people's like. And when you get tired, like, your prefrontal cortex shuts down. It's like the boss leaves the office. And then what people are going to do, they're going to goof off. They're like, we've been grinding on this thing. That doesn't make any sense. But let's just. We need to have fun too. So we're going to. And at that point, you feel like you're burnt out, you're tired, and you feel you have no choice but to, like, go along with the thing. And next thing you know, you're on a bender. It's 3am You've been playing like. And then. And then you feel bad about that, and then you feel bad about that. And then. And you justify. I should be harsher on myself. And then it's a. It's a.
- [78:36]
A
The only solution, the only solution is to grip things more tightly. Yeah, I. I wrote this essay yesterday and I actually spoke it at a live show last night. So this. This might be interesting to you. I wrote, I think type A people have a Type B problem, and type B people have a type A problem. Insecure overachievers need to learn how to chill out and relax and lazy People need to learn how to work harder and be disciplined. Given you subscribe to me, I'm going to guess that you're probably type A, some version of a walking anxiety disorder harnessed for productivity, as Andrew Wilkinson says.
- [79:09]
B
Yeah, I have a tweet like that and it's goo for my prickly friends and prickles for my gooey friends. And there's a whole bunch of things like that, which is like, yeah, everybody overextends the mode that they are good at. And again, it's like coping mechanisms, right? And it's like in like D and D and video games is this concept of a glass cannon, which is like a character who can do a lot of damage but like dies very easily. And you think, oh, why is he like that? And it's like, oh, he's. Because he dies very easily. He has learned to do a lot of damage. And so he takes pride in that and that his identity becomes tied up in that. And it's just, you know, it's that. Yeah, yeah, it's. It's a lot. And I, you know, if. So you asked for the tldr and I went on this long, rambly circular rant. But I would say at the heart of everything, you have to really step back and observe the patterns non judgmentally. Right. Like you, because. And you know, you have to ask, I recommend really abstract questions like how might this look if it's easy? Or how might it look if it's done skillfully and beautifully without anger, without, you know, like one of my favorite things in the book, Easy Way to Quit Smoking by Alan Carr. They insist that you keep smoking as you read the book. And it's like, why would they do that? Right? It's because part of the cycle of addiction. And this is true for all addictions. So. And procrastination can be a kind of addiction. Part of what happens with the smoker who wants to. Who kind of wants to quit but is struggling to. And then he tries to quit, but he's like half hearted about it. And then eventually he lights up again and then he feels guilty and shamed that he did that. And that is a high arousal emotion. He gets stressed and he wants to smoke more. So there's that loop and then there's like the meta loop that keeps the loop going harder. And when the book says I want you to keep smoking, you're like, am I being punked? Right? Because you assume that you're supposed to not. And that just creates this tension that makes it difficult to mess with the process. So same with like budgeting software or even diets and this, the good ones say, don't change your spending, just track it. Don't change your like food habits. This the first month, just track it. Just see what you're doing and like, don't judge, just observe. And like when people are able to comfortably just observe what is happening, there are all this breathing room that opens up and you're like, oh, maybe I don't have to play video games until 3am in the morning. And so yeah, and I had an issue with like schedules as a child. Like with school timetables and stuff. Like I found it very like stressful and traumatic. And the idea of even using opening up Google Calendar and putting I'm gonna do this work today, this work, at this point, whatever. I hated that. And because I felt like I was always dishonest and when I put whatever, I would get excited and fill in with lots of stuff and then I would miss it and then I feel bad and then the cycle continues. And what someone suggested that really worked for me was only schedule the fun stuff. Which again, it sounds immoral. It sounds like, oh gasp, it violates the puritanical thing. What do you mean schedule the fun stuff? But if you say I'm going to play one hour of video games every evening, you no longer feel this anxious grabby, I might not get to play tomorrow, so I better play three hours tonight. And then you don't sleep and then, you know, your sleep gets fucked and then everything spirals worse and worse. So if you begin with the premise that to do your best work you have to be emotionally, well, morale has to be good again, which like people don't, don't want to admit until it gets so bad that it's horrific. And then they don't even get to enjoy. Then the only rest they get is that they fall sick. And then it's like, what kind of leisure or recreation is that? Like you're just lying in bed, you don't get to go and see things. You don't get to hang out with your friends, right? So you schedule the good stuff and then you will get, you know, like nobody wants to be on a beach vacation for like years. You know, like people feel, I would like to sit at the beach for a year. No, you wouldn't. Like three weeks, maybe two or three months is about as long as anyone would really enjoy a beach vacation. Most people, I guess, before you start to go, ah, you know, what am I doing? Same for like, you know, there's only like if you were tasked with eating as much chocolate cake as you could, you'd probably eat, I don't know, somewhere between half a cake to one cake or something, whatever your number is, but you would eat. So the people who, when tasked to have pleasure, they tend to contain it reasonably, but when they've been suppressed away from pleasure, that's when they eat three cakes and then they feel like horrible and they want to throw up and then, and then next morning they're like, I'm never going to eat cakes again. Like, you know, it's, it's yo yo extremes and it's just chaos, it's just bad. So you want to dampen that extreme yo yo stuff. You want to like schedule the fun and the pleasure. And I remember so clearly when I was working and I was like 25 and I felt I don't have the right to have fun. I have like overdue work. I don't have the right to. One of the saddest days of my life was, I think 2015 or 2016, the New Year's Day. My wife was like in. Both me and my wife were at home and I was anxiously trying to get work done because I had gotten myself into such a spiral of self loathing and whatever that I'm not doing enough work, that my poor wife was sitting in the living room by herself while I was working and I can't even tell you what I was working on. I don't remember. You know, it's how So I was like, never again, you know, like, like prioritize what's important to you. You are a human being who deserves love and space and, and it's not even, even, even if you don't think you deserve it. Like that's what good performance requires. You know, I hope you get to the point where you feel that you deserve it. But you know, even, you know, like, and sometimes I say like Lebron James slept like 12 hours a night and like freaking God Almighty took a day off on Sunday. Right? So, you know, schedule your breaks and like, yeah. Then cultures, like historic cultures have like the Sabbath and it's supposed to respect the Sabbath because that's how you decompress. Yeah.
- [85:08]
A
Well, it's wild. I think about sometimes me and my friends reinvent shit that was literally with us from the beginning of time. Like, you know, you know what I've really enjoyed doing? Really enjoyed taking like one, two days a week and just not, you know, like, not working quite so hard. You go, hey guy, that's called a weekend like it's fucking baked into your calendar. Look, Visa, dude, I appreciate the hell out of you. I love your work. I love your writing. Where should people go? They want to keep up to date with all of the stuff that you're doing.
- [85:38]
B
The most interesting stuff that's happening for me right now is on my substack. So if you go to visaganv.substack.com okay, most people like my Twitter, but, like, I feel like my action is moving to substack. But follow both. I guess you can just Google me. V I S A K A N V. You get my personal website that has links to my YouTube channel and everything else.
- [85:58]
A
Dude, I appreciate you. Thank you.
- [86:00]
B
Thank you so much for having me. This is great.