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Episode: #862 - Visakan Veerasamy - An Ode To People Who Take Things Seriously

Author: Chris Williamson
Duration: 01:24:49

Episode Shownotes

Visakan Veerasamy is a writer and an entrepreneur. It's perhaps the biggest competitive advantage no one ever talks about because it's so obvious. But just 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 expectations of others, how to get better at being disliked, the relationship between seriousness and earnestness, ways to deal with procrastination more effectively and much more… Sponsors: See discounts for all the products I use and recommend: https://chriswillx.com/deals Get $350 off the Pod 4 Ultra at https://eightsleep.com/modernwisdom (use code MODERNWISDOM) Get a 20% discount & free shipping on yourThe Chairman™ Pro at https://manscaped.com/modernwisdom (use code MODERNWISDOM20) Get a Free Gift, 5 Free Travel Packs, Free Liquid Vitamin D and more from AG1 at https://drinkag1.com/modernwisdom (automatically applied at checkout) Extra Stuff: Get my free reading list of 100 books to read before you die: https://chriswillx.com/books Try my productivity energy drink Neutonic: https://neutonic.com/modernwisdom Episodes You Might Enjoy: #577 - David Goggins - This Is How To Master Your Life: https://tinyurl.com/43hv6y59 #712 - Dr Jordan Peterson - How To Destroy Your Negative Beliefs: https://tinyurl.com/2rtz7avf #700 - Dr Andrew Huberman - The Secret Tools To Hack Your Brain: https://tinyurl.com/3ccn5vkp - Get In Touch: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/modernwisdompodcast Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact - Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Summary

In episode #862, Chris Williamson and Visakan Veerasamy discuss the significance of seriousness in life, which is often misunderstood. They emphasize that seriousness is a form of love and curiosity that fosters deeper connections. The conversation explores societal challenges faced by those who are serious, including self-doubt and cynicism, as well as the importance of curating one’s information sources to combat negativity. They highlight the value of earnestness, emotional awareness, and the importance of having supportive relationships. Ultimately, the episode encourages listeners to embrace their seriousness as a pathway to personal growth and genuine engagement with life.

Go to PodExtra AI's episode page (#862 - Visakan Veerasamy - An Ode To People Who Take Things Seriously) to play and view complete AI-processed content: summary, mindmap, topics, takeaways, transcript, keywords and highlights.

Full Transcript

00:00:00 Speaker_02
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.

00:00:13 Speaker_02
But what does it mean to be a serious person? And if it's such a help, why is it so hard to find?

00:00:20 Speaker_02
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.

00:00:37 Speaker_02
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That's manscaped.com slash modernwisdom and modernwisdom20 at checkout. This episode is brought to you by AG1. Over the span of about a year, I tried pretty much every green string that I could find to try and work out which one was best.

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00:03:18 Speaker_02
Just go to the link in the description below or head to drinkag1.com slash modernwisdom. That's drinkag1.com slash modernwisdom. But now, ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Visakhan Virasamy. Why is being serious so important?

00:03:55 Speaker_00
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?

00:04:14 Speaker_00
And, you know, it's funny. It depends on who you talk to because there are people who kind of get very hung up on the kind of thing I just said. And you can kind of go too far with it.

00:04:25 Speaker_00
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.

00:04:33 Speaker_00
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.

00:04:47 Speaker_00
So if you read my essay, the conclusion is that seriousness is love and curiosity expressed earnestly over a long period of time.

00:04:55 Speaker_00
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

00:05:12 Speaker_00
having lived through the opposite, which is being around unserious people, going to school or other institutions where there's an unserious energy, where people are just not taking things seriously. And they might have their reasons.

00:05:28 Speaker_00
Maybe the job's not that important to them and they want to focus on something else, which is 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

00:05:42 Speaker_00
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.

00:05:54 Speaker_00
There's that je ne sais quoi, that excellence that, once you've tasted it, nothing else compares. And so I kind of

00:06:02 Speaker_00
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.

00:06:11 Speaker_00
So if 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.

00:06:22 Speaker_02
So I was at a bachelor party, a stag do, in the UK about two years ago, and we were playing shuffleboard. And we'd been going for maybe six hours or so, so people had kind of gravitated into whatever their normal social groups were.

00:06:36 Speaker_02
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.

00:06:42 Speaker_02
And I looked over at the other table of people, and 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.

00:06:53 Speaker_02
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.

00:07:06 Speaker_02
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.

00:07:16 Speaker_02
And it doesn't mean, I really appreciate you saying this isn't sort of solemn, tedious, rigid, stodgy.

00:07:26 Speaker_02
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 take yourself too seriously.

00:07:39 Speaker_02
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.

00:07:47 Speaker_02
And I saw a group of people that were, 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 found my tribe, so to speak.

00:07:59 Speaker_00
Very nice. 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.

00:08:14 Speaker_00
I used to play in a band when I was a teenager.

00:08:16 Speaker_00
And it's so funny that 10-15 years later, we find out that, oh, this person has ADHD, this person is bipolar, this person... It's all these people who were misfits and maladjusted in some way that were all just drawn to each other.

00:08:30 Speaker_00
And it's not like we signed up for who has 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.

00:08:43 Speaker_02
I love the idea of this. I also think 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

00:08:55 Speaker_02
It's an allowance for people who are serious to not feel embarrassed in their seriousness.

00:09:00 Speaker_02
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 fucking relax a little bit, dude.

00:09:14 Speaker_02
That person...

00:09:15 Speaker_02
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,

00:09:41 Speaker_02
probably some form of orderliness, conscientiousness, a couple of other, industriousness, maybe.

00:09:46 Speaker_02
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.

00:09:58 Speaker_00
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.

00:10:10 Speaker_00
And it's just so striking to me that being serious when you're starting out is really difficult socially.

00:10:17 Speaker_00
Because again, it's like, I think the general sentiment in most of the world is like, who do you think you are, you know, to take this thing so seriously? Like, why are you so?

00:10:26 Speaker_00
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

00:10:41 Speaker_00
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. God damn it, William, not again. Exactly.

00:10:51 Speaker_00
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.

00:11:06 Speaker_00
Therefore, I'm special. Which, yeah, in some sense, yes.

00:11:09 Speaker_00
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 hits something for you.

00:11:20 Speaker_00
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.

00:11:32 Speaker_00
how society is structured in a way that kind of, you know, it's like, I can always see both sides of this. Like it's both good and bad.

00:11:42 Speaker_00
It's, 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,

00:11:54 Speaker_00
The great man, in order to exist, has to overcome the resistance of millions of people, his family, his friends, his school, his society.

00:12:02 Speaker_00
So by the time he gets there, he's got this immense strength, or however you want to frame it, immense persistence, immense capability of managing his psyche to get there. And

00:12:13 Speaker_00
In a way, because we live in a world where there's so much information, so many people doing so many things.

00:12:18 Speaker_00
I used to work in startups and 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

00:12:32 Speaker_00
demands on your attention, it's very normal and reasonable, in fact, to dismiss most things. So most people assume that most people are not serious in this frame. Even the ones who say that they are being serious. Exactly.

00:12:44 Speaker_00
Because everyone says they're serious. So the only way to demonstrate it It's over time and you just keep shipping another podcast episode, you keep writing, you keep showing up year after year after year.

00:12:54 Speaker_00
And I found that there's something magical about the 7-year mark. Sometimes it's less, sometimes it's like 3 to 5. But once you've been around for 7 years-ish, people's memories are not that long.

00:13:04 Speaker_00
And so once you've been around that long, it seems like you were there all along, like forever. And so it's just interesting.

00:13:12 Speaker_02
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.

00:13:26 Speaker_02
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.

00:13:38 Speaker_02
What's the line between this sort of public world of seriousness and how it can cause cynicism and criticism among the general population? That's a good question.

00:13:48 Speaker_00
I think, and you know, the messy thing is that Nobody has it all figured out at the start. I love to look up anybody who's very successful now. I love to look up their earliest.

00:14:00 Speaker_00
If you see Obama's earliest speeches or Jason Mraz's first concert, they look nervous. They don't look like they know what they're doing.

00:14:08 Speaker_00
So in the earlier stages, I think if anybody has any 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. And so there will be self-doubt and

00:14:22 Speaker_00
If someone tells them, you're not serious, they might be like, am I? I'm not. I'm not. I think I am, but I'm not sure. Right. Like this. There's that cluster of people.

00:14:30 Speaker_00
And then, OK, there's also the cluster of I imagine Kanye is probably an extreme and of just radically certain of themselves. And, you know, that group probably splits into those that don't crash and burn and those that make it.

00:14:43 Speaker_00
And then there's like out of survivor bias, you get a you hear from a lot of those who do make it. I'm drifting from your question. You were asking about... How that causes cynicism.

00:14:54 Speaker_02
So basically, 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,

00:15:15 Speaker_02
That causes cynicism to occur as a defense mechanism against sort of fraud and bullshit.

00:15:22 Speaker_02
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.

00:15:35 Speaker_00
Tasks failed successfully, yeah. I think it's especially difficult when you're starting out, which is why I tend to

00:15:41 Speaker_00
think about and focus on teenagers and 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 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.

00:15:58 Speaker_00
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,

00:16:10 Speaker_00
I think Steve Jobs has this 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, they become self-policing in only welcoming other A people and kind of, not necessarily pushing away, but they keep out the B people, I guess.

00:16:28 Speaker_00
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,

00:16:40 Speaker_00
Cynicism becomes a 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. I have an essay I want to write.

00:16:51 Speaker_00
I haven't written yet. It's called Shitwatch. And it's like... It's already funny. The social media algorithms incentivize high arousal emotions. So the analogy I give is, imagine there's a group of people in your city

00:17:10 Speaker_00
who go around looking for 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 you say, hey, hey, here, look at this shit, smell it, taste it, I don't know.

00:17:22 Speaker_00
And you'll be like, that's disgusting. What's wrong with you? But we do the equivalent with information and content and be like, oh, here's these people fighting. Here's this.

00:17:31 Speaker_00
And it's like, you know, in a city of millions of people, there's going to be someone fighting somewhere. And if you can scroll to some feeds where it's like fight compilations and it's just, oh my God,

00:17:40 Speaker_00
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.

00:17:52 Speaker_00
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 intellectual types, who want things to be objective.

00:18:08 Speaker_00
And I remember thinking this way as well. I need to know all of the bad things. I need to know the truth. 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.

00:18:25 Speaker_00
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?

00:18:39 Speaker_00
Does it inspire you to make things better? If it doesn't, if it's making you feel more helpless, more angry, more all of those things, then what's the point?

00:18:48 Speaker_00
And even just knowing that you can experience different realities by modifying what you allow in, I think that's a huge way of overcoming cynicism. And to be fair, as a species, we are new to having smartphones.

00:19:07 Speaker_00
It's only been like 15 years, 16, 17 years. And it takes time for the collective to develop antibodies and proper protocols. It's funny, you can read up about when the telephone was invented, people didn't know how to use it.

00:19:21 Speaker_00
And they would just call randomly at any hour of the day. They wouldn't say hello. It took a while for healthy norms to develop and I think we're still in the process of figuring out how to have healthy, chaotic information environment diets.

00:19:47 Speaker_00
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 a challenge.

00:19:58 Speaker_02
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?

00:20:12 Speaker_02
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.

00:20:23 Speaker_02
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 feel too rigid and sort of stodgy. I need to be dynamically persistent in that way.

00:20:39 Speaker_02
How can people be more sort of psychologically flexible or robust in managing their own motivation?

00:20:47 Speaker_00
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. Yes.

00:20:56 Speaker_00
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.

00:21:10 Speaker_00
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.

00:21:17 Speaker_00
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 I had like years and years of cycles of this until I watched Dr. Mike.

00:21:32 Speaker_00
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.

00:21:43 Speaker_00
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,

00:21:49 Speaker_00
So the idea is basically keep doing the reps, maybe fewer reps, maybe fewer weight, but still show up, but 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.

00:22:05 Speaker_00
And I feel like there's a parallel here with seriousness in general, or just any kind of project management. Athletes need their downtime. Rest is a part of the recovery process.

00:22:17 Speaker_00
If you're serious about doing anything for a long period of time, you should consider how that break from the main thing allows you to return to the game with a healthy perspective.

00:22:34 Speaker_00
And I'm thinking also now of David Ogilvie, who was an excellent copywriter, excellent manager. He was just a great guy. You should read his book. It's fantastic. And he would work really, really hard for, I think, months on end.

00:22:46 Speaker_00
And then he would switch off completely and go into... I don't know where he would go. Just go on vacation, I guess. And he would... just let his mind lay fallow.

00:22:57 Speaker_00
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.

00:23:08 Speaker_00
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.

00:23:19 Speaker_00
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.

00:23:34 Speaker_00
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. I'm kind of going in circles a little bit because I don't want to be too prescriptive. take 7 days on and 2 days off.

00:23:46 Speaker_00
No, that's not necessary. Maybe that's correct for your thing. But you have to be sensitive to your own rhythms. And now I'm thinking of Christopher Alexander. He was a famous architecture thought leader, I guess you could say.

00:24:02 Speaker_00
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. It's really the feeling that dictates the action. You can't outsource this.

00:24:20 Speaker_00
You can't outsource your judgment and you can't outsource your feeling. These are things that It's just like all the way to the top, right?

00:24:26 Speaker_00
Even 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?

00:24:40 Speaker_00
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

00:24:48 Speaker_00
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 it's so funny to talk about it because I think people who hear it would be like, oh, yeah, of course, but you know, it's you really it's it's it's non-trivial.

00:25:04 Speaker_00
It's kind of tricky because I guess because you can get lost in the weeds so easily. So you kind of want to practice having time away from the thing.

00:25:14 Speaker_00
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've got to do that thing.

00:25:29 Speaker_00
And it challenged them to make things more robust. And life is like that, right? Whatever you're doing, things are going to surprise you and blindside you and so on. So, okay, if you're a person trying to be serious and overwhelmed.

00:25:44 Speaker_02
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, trying to avoid that. And then also, I suppose you can add into it, how do these people deal with the inevitable sort of friction that they feel with people around them?

00:25:56 Speaker_02
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.

00:26:04 Speaker_00
Yeah, that's very difficult. So this is why my first book is titled Friendly Ambitious Nerd because there are three variables. And so a lot of successful people tend to be ambitious nerds.

00:26:14 Speaker_00
And if they're not friendly, and when I say friendly, it's like sensitive to other people. 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,

00:26:29 Speaker_00
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

00:26:46 Speaker_00
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 are even interrupting their process.

00:26:58 Speaker_00
And I remember when I was a kid and I felt like an idiot and I felt like 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

00:27:15 Speaker_00
When I see someone struggling or I see someone lashing out or being whatever, can I at least say something that they might consider later on and be like, oh yeah, actually that guy was unreasonably nice to me. But I don't know if

00:27:34 Speaker_00
I've gone back and forth with regards to how much should I 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.

00:27:50 Speaker_00
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 not socially nice. They're not kissing the ring.

00:28:08 Speaker_00
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.

00:28:17 Speaker_00
They just spoke in very clinical terms about precisely what they were going to do. But I would say it's a tell for the rocket scientists and the people that are really serious about technical things and they want to make progress on things.

00:28:30 Speaker_00
They are thing-oriented people rather than people-oriented people. Often they're neurodivergent, autistic, something like that. Okay, here's what I think. Nobody needs to do everything by themselves.

00:28:50 Speaker_00
And it's a fool's errand to insist that your cutting-edge scientist should also be a very smooth political operator. It's not realistic to expect someone to be both.

00:29:03 Speaker_00
Although really exceptional people are, but 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.

00:29:15 Speaker_00
People are kind of indoctrinated by school to think that, oh, you've got to do standardized tests, you've got to get good grades at everything, that kind of super generalist perspective.

00:29:25 Speaker_00
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 just need a handler or a manager I would say my wife is smarter than me in terms of reading people.

00:29:43 Speaker_00
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 she married me, and so she gets to benefit from my social butterfly instincts or inclinations.

00:29:59 Speaker_00
And I get to benefit from her being analytical about budgets and schedules. There's a quote from Rocky, which is like, you know, we each have gaps, but together we have no gaps.

00:30:12 Speaker_00
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?

00:30:20 Speaker_00
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,

00:30:30 Speaker_00
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.

00:30:42 Speaker_00
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

00:30:53 Speaker_02
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 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 normal civilization

00:31:11 Speaker_00
That's true actually. I've described it as being like the bridge between worlds. I am a fan of Heimdallr from the Norse mythology. We need bridge people to bridge people.

00:31:27 Speaker_02
risk. 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.

00:31:40 Speaker_02
I came up with this idea of the reverse role model because you've heard of food deserts in America.

00:31:45 Speaker_01
Yes. Yes.

00:31:46 Speaker_02
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.

00:31:55 Speaker_02
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.

00:32:07 Speaker_02
So at least there is much more downside to be had than potential upside. So what I found was

00:32:15 Speaker_02
people who are 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.

00:32:31 Speaker_02
they're 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.

00:32:44 Speaker_02
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.

00:32:54 Speaker_02
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.

00:33:08 Speaker_02
And it's for the people who don't have that many role models around them, I'm sort of here for it.

00:33:13 Speaker_00
Yeah, I respect that so much. To decide to do that kind of alchemy is a profound... Actually, I'm curious. Did you read anything? Would you point at anything that kind of set you off on that? Or do you feel like it was really just within?

00:33:29 Speaker_02
It was intuition, I think, mostly. I didn't fit in. I didn't resonate with the people around me in the way that they resonated with the people around them. you know, you find little glimpses every so often of someone that you can sort of get on with.

00:33:49 Speaker_02
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. How is it that's best for me to be understood by people?

00:34:01 Speaker_02
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.

00:34:10 Speaker_02
You don't need to talk to people about your rampant flatulence or erectile dysfunction on the first date. You can save that for further down the line. The social mores and graces and how you slowly acclimatize people to you is a skill.

00:34:25 Speaker_02
It's a real skill, and it's a skill specifically for people who are serious and who care about things.

00:34:31 Speaker_02
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.

00:34:48 Speaker_02
God, don't bring Visa, like he's just going to talk about feelings again. You know what I mean? You don't want to be that guy, especially when you're young.

00:34:54 Speaker_02
And I really think that the point you made before about how when you're first starting out, you have no... legitimacy. Why on earth do you, person at the same level as everybody else, i.e.

00:35:07 Speaker_02
zero, novice, beginner, starter, think that you have the right to be able to be this serious about anything?

00:35:15 Speaker_02
It's so fucking patronizing, in a way, that it's solipsistic, it's egotistical, it's narcissistic, to think that you deserve this level of rigor

00:35:27 Speaker_02
But then, when you look back, 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.

00:35:39 Speaker_00
Yeah, I've thought about this a lot and I've encountered it myself back then and even now sometimes.

00:35:46 Speaker_00
And I find that what I find myself often saying is that 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 tricky stuff.

00:36:03 Speaker_00
I think there's this implicit sense that So it's like status hierarchies and concepts of royalty, even. And it goes back all the way to our founding, our earliest myths, mythology.

00:36:21 Speaker_00
And you can actually look at 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. And

00:36:34 Speaker_00
And that's like bestowed from, it's implied, it's like you're the chosen one, you're the divine, whatever. And so everyone else is just, you're meant to be a peasant, basically. And these intuitions still remain in modernity.

00:36:48 Speaker_00
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. And it's just, I guess, maybe there might have been some validity to those old heuristics in ancient times.

00:37:07 Speaker_00
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.

00:37:19 Speaker_00
And back then, producing video was a 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, You would need to justify things to them.

00:37:31 Speaker_00
You would need to, Oh, I'm going to do a show. It's going to make this much money. It's going to grow this much audience or whatever.

00:37:36 Speaker_00
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

00:37:52 Speaker_00
We always use our old intuitions. So the present reality that we live in, culturally, is always like 30 to 50 years behind.

00:38:02 Speaker_02
Or maybe even more. As you say, you know, 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 odd... You need to have agency bestowed on you. But you're right.

00:38:17 Speaker_00
So the gazetarianism has freed this up. 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.

00:38:31 Speaker_00
He doesn't like to see anyone other than royals dress up. He's going to kill you. And so they are protecting you by saying those things. But that's no longer true.

00:38:41 Speaker_00
It's like that story of the five monkeys beating each other because they used to get electrocuted. So yeah, culture evolves very slowly relative to technology.

00:38:51 Speaker_02
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.

00:39:01 Speaker_02
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 believe.

00:39:16 Speaker_02
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.

00:39:28 Speaker_02
Then 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.

00:39:39 Speaker_02
And this just lags behind this lumbering behemoth that we need to fucking drag along. And the other thing, just to kind of round out the social element, because I do get the sense that that's a really important

00:39:54 Speaker_02
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.

00:40:10 Speaker_02
If it's funniness, like if you're too much of a comedian, it's like, dude, come on, we're trying to be, it's a fucking funeral. Let's be serious here.

00:40:18 Speaker_02
Um, 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.

00:40:34 Speaker_02
And it took probably until about a year ago for me to realize that.

00:40:44 Speaker_02
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.

00:40:54 Speaker_02
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.

00:41:08 Speaker_02
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.

00:41:20 Speaker_02
He's going to regale us with a dance. He's going to do the limbo thing again. We don't want that. What we want is Visa's going to come. Fuck. He always brings the best out of me.

00:41:31 Speaker_02
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.

00:41:43 Speaker_02
And yeah, I think it's just for the fellow charisma unenthused out there, the people who maybe don't think, well, I'm not full of confidence and charm and wit and whimsy. it kind of doesn't matter.

00:42:00 Speaker_02
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.

00:42:12 Speaker_00
Yeah, 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.

00:42:23 Speaker_00
Imagine thinking that the only thing in New York is Times Square, which is all the ads and all the garish lights and everything, which is interesting to check out.

00:42:33 Speaker_00
Similarly, some people think, oh, the only people on YouTube are like Mr. Beast and whoever. It's when there's so much interestingness just two streets down, three streets down. I follow this guy running a really old printing press kind of thing.

00:42:51 Speaker_00
It's fascinating. It's not exactly the same thing, but 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.

00:43:09 Speaker_00
And it doesn't need to be showy or flashy or loud. 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.

00:43:19 Speaker_02
Talk to me about the relationship between seriousness and earnestness.

00:43:26 Speaker_00
Well, I feel like earnestness is at the heart of... You can't really be serious and not be earnest, right? I guess you can choose how much of it you want to show.

00:43:40 Speaker_00
I'm not entirely sure why I've used two different phrases in two different essays, but it just felt natural to me, I guess. So I think my earnestness essay says, there's nothing edgier than being earnest.

00:43:57 Speaker_00
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.

00:44:04 Speaker_00
Because you could also say there's nothing edgier than seriousness, but it's nice to have alliteration. So some people want to be they don't want to go with the social herd. They don't want to just say what everyone else is saying.

00:44:20 Speaker_00
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.

00:44:30 Speaker_00
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.

00:44:40 Speaker_00
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 a useful service, in a sense. But if it's something like you upload something online and

00:44:56 Speaker_00
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.

00:45:10 Speaker_00
No snowflake feels responsible for the avalanche, right? But the cool thing is... No, sorry, I didn't finish that thought. If you're going to try to be edgy by reacting to what the consensus is, you're always going to be lagging behind the consensus.

00:45:26 Speaker_00
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, if you're a rigid heterodoxist, you're being the opposite of what's orthodoxy,

00:45:40 Speaker_00
You can map it out almost mathematically. You're still following the herd. A black sheep is still a sheep, right? Yeah.

00:45:51 Speaker_00
And on the other hand, the interesting thing is, if you go inwards, you follow your own heart, you follow your own interestingness, you do what you deeply care about,

00:46:02 Speaker_00
Because each individual is socialized on the outside, the layers of socialization begin... 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.

00:46:20 Speaker_00
And so they have all these very fresh uses of phrasing that seem surprising and almost ethereal. 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.

00:46:34 Speaker_00
And so yeah, kids like toddlers, like three to seven, they are excellent freaks. 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.

00:46:48 Speaker_00
But yeah, so 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,

00:47:00 Speaker_00
And you express that, you end up being more quote-unquote contrarian. You end up being away from the herd. I think this is another thing where people who make predictions within a group It's like they're playing the Price is Right, sort of.

00:47:17 Speaker_00
They all calibrate their guesses in relation to everybody else's guesses. And so there's 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.

00:47:28 Speaker_00
It's like 1,000 times more, 10,000 times more, in whatever direction. And the person who figures that out is the person who wasn't listening to everybody else. And the person who isn't listening

00:47:40 Speaker_00
will from time to time be more radically edgy than the person who's trying to be edgy which is it's kind of a trip you think about it for a while and it's like whoa Just following your own rhythm gets you somewhere else.

00:47:54 Speaker_02
You have this great 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 chat GPT bot coming to your Twitter timeline near you.

00:48:13 Speaker_02
I talked earlier about how earnestness gets suppressed.

00:48:16 Speaker_02
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.

00:48:27 Speaker_02
It's a fairly hollow form of nourishment, but hungry people without any good food will eat anything they get.

00:48:33 Speaker_00
Yeah, man, I sound better in writing than when I speak. It's the British accent. I should get you to speak my audiobooks. Yeah, that's true. What is there to say about that? It's really

00:48:50 Speaker_00
When I hear that, I find myself feeling some empathy for people who don't know how to be better than a hater. Some people say they want to be haters, but I kind of believe that.

00:49:06 Speaker_00
If you could figure out how to be adored for your idiosyncratic personal flavor and style and essence, you wouldn't want to go around disturbing, annoying people for engagement.

00:49:22 Speaker_00
Again, we live one short life and you want to look back and be like, oh yeah, I really, you know, critiqued well.

00:49:28 Speaker_00
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 feed and you look for someone to be mean to, you can do better than that. That's my thing.

00:49:42 Speaker_02
You start that 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?

00:49:53 Speaker_00
This actually ties back to what we were talking about earlier about when I was bringing up Christopher Alexander and stuff. You have to feel. Feeling is the highest bandwidth thing that a person is capable of, I think. I love this.

00:50:06 Speaker_00
There's this book called The User Illusion by Thor Nore-Tranders. 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.

00:50:19 Speaker_00
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.

00:50:32 Speaker_00
So we feel more than we know, and we know more than we can say. 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.

00:50:51 Speaker_00
What you think about something and what you feel about something, the feeling is much more nuanced. Think about intuition. One of the ways I think about intuition is that you have a felt

00:51:04 Speaker_00
understanding of all of the ecology of relationships of things around you.

00:51:08 Speaker_00
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, like a senior fireman, and all the firemen are trying to work on the fire and he's just standing there and he's like,

00:51:21 Speaker_00
Something's not right. We gotta get out. 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.

00:51:30 Speaker_00
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.

00:51:39 Speaker_00
there must be... And it turns out that the fire was in the basement, so it's way hotter than what they were used to. But that's something he felt, he didn't think it.

00:51:47 Speaker_00
And I feel that similar to that kind of intuition, and that kind of intuition requires domain familiarity and expertise.

00:51:55 Speaker_00
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 has bad vibes.

00:52:08 Speaker_00
Okay, those things are kind of It varies from context to context, but what I'm getting at is, going back to the Ted Hughes quote, the amount of feeling that we are able to experience and surf the waves of.

00:52:26 Speaker_00
Because our education systems and civilization as a whole, to minimize inconvenience to people because we are all smooshed together in very cramped environments. Civilization is like an iterative potty training.

00:52:42 Speaker_00
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. Try to do it at appropriate times. So potty training is good. You want

00:52:54 Speaker_00
Maybe if you're a barbarian in the wild, you can shit wherever you want, whenever you want. It doesn't bother anybody else. But it's a public health issue if people are shitting everywhere. So people need to be potty trained.

00:53:02 Speaker_00
And what that means is you need to be emotionally... You need to regulate your feelings. You think you want to go now? No, you've 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.

00:53:15 Speaker_00
No, you shouldn't be angry. You're saying you get socialized to be less aggressive. 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.

00:53:29 Speaker_00
But 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.

00:53:40 Speaker_00
And so you have all these people who are suppressed all the time and they feel like shit and they don't really know why. And then they take drugs and then all of those things.

00:53:49 Speaker_00
It is possible, once you are awakened to this reality, to realize that you have the capacity to re-regulate yourself in a way that is optimal for you. The thing is, civilizations' mechanisms are optimal for civilization.

00:54:02 Speaker_00
And we all enjoy the benefits of civilization. I'm not 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.

00:54:17 Speaker_02
I've got the idea in my mind of being over-civilized. There is a degree of being over-civilized and under-civilized.

00:54:25 Speaker_00
Imagine how, to a barbarian, civilized is an insult. 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?

00:54:39 Speaker_02
It's certainly something that I've had to get over.

00:54:41 Speaker_02
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.

00:55:05 Speaker_02
And one of the things that I realized was 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 partly my problem.

00:55:19 Speaker_02
And 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.

00:55:33 Speaker_02
And if your concern is ever making anybody else ever feel uncomfortable, it's very unlikely that you will subjugate your own desires in place of their well-being.

00:55:45 Speaker_02
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.

00:55:58 Speaker_00
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, I need to put your needs first.

00:56:09 Speaker_00
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? And then they don't trust you.

00:56:20 Speaker_00
And then it's like, oh, you want to make them feel better. And they're like, I don't trust you.

00:56:23 Speaker_02
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.

00:56:40 Speaker_00
It's crazy. I'm writing about all of this from a new angle now, where I talk about a blessedness spiral upwards and a wretchedness spiral downwards. And it's so tragic because the more blessed you are, the more blessings you receive.

00:56:55 Speaker_00
And the more wretched you are, the more wretched you get. Matthew's principle all the way up and all the way down. Exactly that, yeah. And it's so harsh, actually. Every time you cross a threshold, suddenly everything is just better.

00:57:05 Speaker_00
And I think people know this instinctively, which is what Part of what drives the desire for wealth and social climbing is that you know that at the next level, some things are less bad.

00:57:18 Speaker_00
I remember once my wife and I, I think it was during COVID or something, there was a discount on the fanciest hotel in town and so we decided to go. And so it was wonderful.

00:57:29 Speaker_00
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 it was such a lovely environment. People were playing with their children.

00:57:41 Speaker_00
Everyone was speaking politely. And I found myself getting kind of angry. Like, man, Rich people have it good. And not just that they have spending power. It's not that they have fancy things. It's that in the nice neighborhood, it's peaceful. It's

00:58:01 Speaker_00
I'm sure there's problems that I'm not aware of. There's more pressure. They seem to have a lot of family squabbles about inheritance and stuff. So every context has its own upsides and downsides.

00:58:12 Speaker_00
But in that moment, I was like, whoa, I am underestimating how much I would actually appreciate having access to those kinds of spaces, which is

00:58:24 Speaker_02
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 expensive.

00:58:32 Speaker_00
Yeah.

00:58:33 Speaker_02
Yes. Poverty is very expensive. If, 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.

00:58:45 Speaker_02
And then you, some people get. to escape velocity in one regard or another.

00:58:50 Speaker_02
And some people, you know, the Elons 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.

00:58:59 Speaker_02
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.

00:59:15 Speaker_00
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?

00:59:29 Speaker_00
You know, what's on your... You gotta ship this thing for work. You gotta deal with changing the oil on the something. You know, there's all these nitty-gritty things.

00:59:36 Speaker_00
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 it's a lot.

00:59:51 Speaker_02
What's your advice for people to continue struggling cheerfully when things aren't going quite as they'd hoped?

01:00:01 Speaker_00
I have been in that state for the past couple of years-ish. It's funny because 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

01:00:20 Speaker_00
My family didn't believe me when I said I want to be an author. And my friends didn't like that. I struggled to get people to take me seriously. Those struggles were in some ways harder, but in some ways also, I guess, more freeing.

01:00:36 Speaker_00
So this goes back to every stage is different and has its pros and cons. But in my current stage, I've written two books that I'm happy with and my readers love them.

01:00:47 Speaker_00
But instead of directing my energy towards doing marketing for them and selling more books, I feel like I gotta move on to the next project and do the third thing.

01:00:58 Speaker_00
And that has been a struggle for me because I guess any interesting work creatively is going to be a struggle because you're trying to birth something that doesn't already exist.

01:01:08 Speaker_00
And so you have to find new perspectives and 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 it's just a lot.

01:01:20 Speaker_00
And I have woken up very often and been like, oh my God, what am I doing with my life? What am I? How am I going to do this thing? Why is progress so slow? There's all these unpleasant thoughts.

01:01:32 Speaker_00
And I have to, it takes effort to contextualize things for myself. 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?

01:01:45 Speaker_00
If I could talk to my 17-year-old self, And be like, oh yeah, I don't have a job. I just write and I talk to people. I just do whatever I like. He'll be like, what? How is that possible? You've succeeded. You've made it, man.

01:02:03 Speaker_00
quote from Steve Jobs again where he says, when you haven't succeeded yet, when you're like a nobody, right? It's fun to fantasize about all the riches and all the things about dreams, like grand dreams.

01:02:15 Speaker_00
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 in between. And you have responsibility to make that happen.

01:02:28 Speaker_00
And it's a burdensome responsibility, I feel. And I always feel survivor's guilt as a creative. Why me? Why not? I know that there are people who are surely more talented than me, more intelligent, more articulate, whatever. But maybe their mom is sick.

01:02:43 Speaker_00
And so they've had to work extra hours. And so they haven't had time to write. And I always feel like, I got to make it for that guy. I feel like it's a little bit similar to your people pleasing stuff. Maybe, I'm not sure.

01:02:58 Speaker_00
But anyway, you were asking about how do I help people who want to struggle creatively or struggle cheerfully. There's layers to this. I think Mark Manson has a quote about like, whatever you do, you're going to have to eat shit.

01:03:14 Speaker_00
I don't know why I'm saying shit so much in this call. Whatever you're going to do, you're going to have to eat shit. So find the flavor of shit sandwich that you like, right? Like find the thing.

01:03:21 Speaker_02
Orient yourself toward the pains rather than the pleasures.

01:03:25 Speaker_00
What pain can you endure? Imagine you struggle at a thing for the rest of your life and on your deathbed, maybe you had some minor success but it never really fully paid off.

01:03:38 Speaker_00
This is a great exercise by the way, a thought experiment of visualizing your old self and visualizing your young self and just having a conversation with them. So I imagine a 90 or 100-year-old VISA. And I imagine a few different versions of them.

01:03:54 Speaker_00
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. But I'm like, but did you love it? And he's like, yeah, I loved it. I love writing. I love playing with words.

01:04:12 Speaker_00
I made friends with other authors. We discussed things that were interesting. And it was a good life. I can visualize that.

01:04:19 Speaker_00
If you told me something like, well, imagine Visa being a software engineer and never really... I know I could do it if I wanted to. I don't want to though. So find the struggle that you enjoy for its own sake and you don't mind not succeeding at.

01:04:36 Speaker_00
And then 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've been writing for a long time.

01:04:49 Speaker_00
There were things that I wrote like 10 years ago or many years ago where nobody in my life then cared about my writing, but I thought it was good.

01:04:58 Speaker_00
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. And I'm like, yeah, I know, right?

01:05:07 Speaker_00
It's like if you are a success to yourself and no one else sees it, but you have to see it. There's a quote from Les Brown, if no one else will see it for you, you have to see it for yourself.

01:05:18 Speaker_00
You have to be honest about what you think is good work, what you think is worth doing. I think this is worth doing. I think this is worth struggling at. And if no one else sees it, I will see it for myself."

01:05:30 Speaker_00
And then you try and find one other person who can see it, and then another person, and then another person. And then in that kind of mindset, I think you can try to be cheerful about it. There's all this other project management nitty-gritty stuff.

01:05:44 Speaker_00
So don't attempt extremely large projects that might sink your ship if you fail. I think Nidji said something like, write a hundred outlines of essays or drafts or something.

01:06:00 Speaker_00
The saddest thing I see from time to time is 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 they had this kind of white whale idea, like, oh, when my novel is done, everyone's going to love it.

01:06:18 Speaker_00
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.

01:06:27 Speaker_00
Whereas what you want to do, and this is part of being cheerful and whatever, you want to do little sketches, little outlines, little drafts, and then share them with people, and then see how they respond.

01:06:36 Speaker_00
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 their eyes light up. And those are the moments that you want to collect and pay attention to.

01:06:48 Speaker_00
And you do more of that.

01:06:50 Speaker_02
I love the idea of the challenges that the person who's not yet successful, but not a total noob, is encountering.

01:07:00 Speaker_02
And the fact that sympathy for successful people is very unpopular, but there is certainly a new skill set that everybody needs to learn. Like, just imagine that you get toward where you want to be.

01:07:14 Speaker_02
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?

01:07:25 Speaker_02
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.

01:07:38 Speaker_02
As opposed to before, 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.

01:07:52 Speaker_02
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.

01:08:00 Speaker_02
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.

01:08:14 Speaker_02
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.

01:08:20 Speaker_02
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." Yeah, man.

01:08:30 Speaker_01
Dude.

01:08:31 Speaker_02
Fucking unbelievable, that sense of support from yourself from the past. I'm proud of you for doing what you did.

01:08:39 Speaker_00
Yeah, I have my moments. When I hear this, it doesn't feel like me. I can recognize that it's me, but it's kind of a peak steak me. Day to day, I don't feel like my best self or I don't feel like my best writer self, but I got to keep

01:09:01 Speaker_00
doing stuff and then it just comes by in flow.

01:09:04 Speaker_00
Elizabeth Gilbert has a great TED talk about this, where she talks about the myth of the creative genius, 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

01:09:23 Speaker_00
worthwhile? 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? So yeah.

01:09:34 Speaker_00
And so she looked up the history of how people thought about these things. And I think in the Roman times or antiquity, people are like, OK, people get possessed by genius from time to time. So if you do good work, you don't get full credit.

01:09:48 Speaker_00
And if you do bad work, you don't get full blame. It's like the creative sometimes just creativity happens and we are vessels for that. But with regards to the scarcity sprite, it's really

01:10:01 Speaker_00
I think maybe I indoctrinated myself a little bit with video games, motivational stuff, but I feel it to be true. I really just want to have my own back.

01:10:13 Speaker_00
I think there's a quote from Montaigne where he says, 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 I think about that a lot.

01:10:26 Speaker_00
How can I be a better friend to myself so that I can be a better friend to other people? It's funny that I'm so quick to go from that first sentence to the next. It's like self-love or self-care, therefore that I can help other people, right?

01:10:51 Speaker_02
Yeah, the 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 on to other people. No, dude, I'm balls deep in that challenge at the moment.

01:11:06 Speaker_02
Speaking of the tactical stuff, we can talk Mark Manson quotes all day. You spent a good bit of time looking at procrastination. What is the TLDR 30,000 foot view as somebody that needs to write lots of words and do things self-powered every year?

01:11:24 Speaker_02
What's the TLDR of procrastination?

01:11:26 Speaker_00
So you know what's funny? I spent years reading everything I could about it, analysing it, psychoanalysing myself and everything. And these days, I don't even use the term anymore.

01:11:36 Speaker_00
I think one of the most major things I've learned is that 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

01:11:54 Speaker_00
reinforce the procrastination. I don't know if this is a slightly radical view. I can try and answer the question directly. But my meta view is that you don't even need to use that term. Think about what you want.

01:12:05 Speaker_00
Ask yourself what's in the way of getting to what you want. And the problem is, very often, procrastination is trying to protect you. It's trying to protect you from doing something that you don't actually want.

01:12:17 Speaker_00
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'm not being honest with myself about that.

01:12:28 Speaker_00
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, let's whatever.

01:12:39 Speaker_00
And the moment I realized that, oh, I actually want to be in a better neighborhood, then it's so easy to fall into, I'm going to go see an agent, I'm going to go look at houses, and everything just flows from there.

01:12:52 Speaker_00
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 bills, so I have to have a job, so I have to, which is fair, right?

01:13:02 Speaker_00
Everyone, most people go through that. But I think a lot of things boils down to the story you're telling yourself about why you need to do what you're doing.

01:13:14 Speaker_00
I have been helping some friends with these issues recently and one pattern I keep noticing is people have like this taskmaster 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

01:13:28 Speaker_00
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?

01:13:43 Speaker_00
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. I don't think that's actually true.

01:13:52 Speaker_00
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. Why is it that you're focusing on lowering the

01:14:05 Speaker_00
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.

01:14:19 Speaker_00
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've got to partition the thing. So it's so interesting when you lay it all out. It turns out that this guy

01:14:32 Speaker_00
has a thing he wants to do. requests, unreasonable timelines, 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. I'm just going to goof off and play video games or whatever.

01:15:05 Speaker_00
Because 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 except shitty management. People are shitty bosses of themselves.

01:15:23 Speaker_00
I guess there's some funny territory here where people might be like, oh yeah, bad workplace environments are horrible, my boss sucks, my this, whatever. How are you managing your own home, your own head? And people inherit

01:15:39 Speaker_00
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.

01:15:46 Speaker_00
And so I always ask people and ask my friends, what are you really trying to accomplish? Why? What is the most sensible, reasonable, interesting, exciting way to do it?

01:15:59 Speaker_00
And 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.

01:16:13 Speaker_00
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.

01:16:21 Speaker_00
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.

01:16:32 Speaker_00
So if you're practicing guitar or whatever, how much are you practicing? What specific thing are you trying to do? What's the reward? What song do you want to be able to play? And when you make that progress, progress feels good.

01:16:45 Speaker_00
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. Puritan work ethic. Yes.

01:16:59 Speaker_00
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 employees are like, yeah, sure. You know, and then they just, the heart's not in it.

01:17:12 Speaker_00
And then, so then you get this conflict, this, this, um, The person becomes unintegrated. They get split selves.

01:17:19 Speaker_00
And you have these phrases like revenge, bedtime, procrastination, where basically, it's your prefrontal cortex that's making all the plans. It's like the manager is a shitty guy.

01:17:29 Speaker_00
It's like, you know, in Lord of the Rings, there's King Theoden, and then there's the Wormtongue whispering poison in his ear. It's like a lot of people's prefrontal cortex is Wormtongue. And it's like, you know, you got to do more of this.

01:17:41 Speaker_00
You got to do this. It's not okay. That kind of thing. When you see it as that, and I have this whole analogy where 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.

01:17:57 Speaker_00
And when you get tired, 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.

01:18:10 Speaker_00
We need to have fun too. And at that point, you feel like you're burnt out, you're tired, and you feel you have no choice but to go along with the thing. And next thing you know, you're on a bender, it's 3 a.m., you've been playing video games.

01:18:25 Speaker_00
And then you feel bad about that, and then you feel bad about that, and you justify, I should be harsher on myself.

01:18:33 Speaker_02
The only solution is to grip things more tightly. I wrote this essay yesterday, and I actually spoke it at a live show last night. So this might be interesting to you.

01:18:43 Speaker_02
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.

01:18:56 Speaker_02
Given that you subscribe to me, I'm gonna guess that you're probably type A. Some version of a walking anxiety disorder harnessed for productivity, as Andrew Wilkinson says.

01:19:05 Speaker_00
I have a tweet like that and it's, um, 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 over extends the mode that they are good at.

01:19:19 Speaker_00
And again, it's like coping mechanisms. Right. And it's like, um, in like D and D and video games, it's this concept of a glass cannon, which is like a character who can do a lot of damage, but like,

01:19:29 Speaker_00
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 huh the yeah it's it's a lot and i you know if so you ask 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

01:19:58 Speaker_00
and observe the patterns non-judgmentally. I recommend really abstract questions like, how might this look if it's easy? How might it look if it's done skillfully and beautifully without anger?

01:20:20 Speaker_00
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?

01:20:31 Speaker_00
It's because part of the cycle of addiction, and this is true for all addictions, and procrastination can be a kind of addiction, part of what happens with the smoker who kind of wants to quit but is struggling to, and then

01:20:43 Speaker_00
He tries to quit, but he's half-hearted about it. And then eventually, he lights up again. And then he feels guilty and ashamed that he did that. And that is a high-arousal emotion. He gets stressed and he wants to smoke more.

01:20:54 Speaker_00
So there's that loop, and then there's 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? Because you assume that you're supposed to not.

01:21:05 Speaker_00
And that just creates this tension that makes it difficult to mess with the process. So same with budgeting software or even diets. The good ones say, don't change your spending, just track it.

01:21:17 Speaker_00
Don't change your food habits the first month, just track it. Just see what you're doing and don't judge, just observe. And when people are able to comfortably just observe what is happening, there's a breathing room that opens up.

01:21:32 Speaker_00
And you're like, oh, maybe I don't have to play video games until 3am in the morning. And I had an issue with schedules as a child, with school timetables and stuff. I found it very stressful and traumatic.

01:21:44 Speaker_00
And the idea of even using, opening up Google Calendar and putting, I'm going to do this work today, this work at this point, whatever.

01:21:50 Speaker_00
I hated that 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.

01:22:00 Speaker_00
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, you know, like it's a, it violates the puritanical thing, right? What do you mean schedule the fun stuff?

01:22:14 Speaker_00
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.

01:22:24 Speaker_00
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.

01:22:34 Speaker_00
Again, which people 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?

01:22:45 Speaker_00
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. So you schedule the good stuff. And then

01:22:52 Speaker_00
you will get, you know, like nobody wants to be on a beach vacation for like years, you know, like people feel like, ah, I would like to sit at the beach for a year.

01:23:01 Speaker_00
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, uh, before you start to go, ah, you know, what, what am I doing?

01:23:13 Speaker_00
Same for like, you know, there's, there's only like, if you were tasked with eating as much chocolate cake as you could, you would probably eat don't know, somewhere between half a cake to one cake or something, whatever your number is.

01:23:26 Speaker_00
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 horrible and they want to throw up.

01:23:40 Speaker_00
And then next morning, they're like, I'm never going to eat cakes again. 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 schedule the fun and the pleasure.

01:23:57 Speaker_00
And I remember so clearly when I was working and I was 25, and I felt I don't have the right to have fun. I have 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.

01:24:12 Speaker_00
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

01:24:19 Speaker_00
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.

01:24:30 Speaker_00
You know, it's just 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 if you don't think you deserve it.

01:24:41 Speaker_00
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

01:24:47 Speaker_00
And sometimes they say, like, LeBron James slept, like, 12 hours a night and, like, freaking God Almighty took a day off on Sunday.

01:24:55 Speaker_00
So, you know, schedule your breaks and, like, yeah, cultures, like, historic cultures have, like, the Sabbath and you're supposed to respect the Sabbath because that's how you decompress.

01:25:04 Speaker_02
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 what I've really enjoyed doing?

01:25:15 Speaker_02
Really enjoyed taking, like, one, two days a week and just not, you know, not working quite so hard. And 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.

01:25:29 Speaker_02
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.

01:25:34 Speaker_00
The most interesting stuff that's happening for me right now is on my Substack. So if you go to visagenv.substack.com. Most people like my Twitter, but I feel like my action is moving to Substack. I follow both, I guess.

01:25:47 Speaker_00
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.

01:25:54 Speaker_02
Dude, I appreciate you. Thank you. Thank you so much for having me. This was great.