Modern Wisdom - #216 - Matthew Kobach - Evolution, Meaning and Managing The NYSE's Social Media

Episode Date: September 3, 2020

Matthew Kobach is a content strategist. Matthew transformed the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) into a social media behemoth. Plus he's a very interesting guy with a fantastic moustache.  We get into everything today including evolutionary signalling, psychology, ancient philosophy, social media strategy and much more... Sponsor: Sign up to FitBook at https://fitbook.co.uk/join-fitbook/ (enter code MODERNWISDOM for 50% off your membership) Extra Stuff: Follow Matthew on Twitter - https://twitter.com/mkobach Follow Matthew on Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/mkobach Get my free Ultimate Life Hacks List to 10x your daily productivity → https://chriswillx.com/lifehacks/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom - Get in touch. Join the discussion with me and other like minded listeners in the episode comments on the MW YouTube Channel or message me... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/ModernWisdomPodcast Email: https://www.chriswillx.com/contact  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Oh, hello friends, welcome back. My guest today is Matthew Kobak, and he is the man who single-handedly turned the New York Stock Exchange into a social media behemoth. Plus, he's a very interesting guy, and he has a fantastic mustache that makes me nostalgically jealous for the passing of my old one. We get into literally everything today, including evolutionary signaling, psychology, ancient philosophy, social media strategy, and an awful lot more. Really, really enjoyed this episode and the projects that Matthew's got coming up soon sound super interesting.

So go and check them out online, I highly recommend you follow them on Twitter. They're very, very smart, dude. But for now, it's time for the wise and wonderful Matthew Koehbuck. That facial hair is absolutely crushing it. It's making me wistful for my old mustache, which is now gone. If people are listening to this, I do have a mustache. It's been four months since I've had to see anybody. So I decided in that four months to grow a mustache because really to see if I could, that

was a challenge to myself and it turns out I can. Every guy that I know who's had latent mustache desire for the last few years of their life has been like, yes, this is the opportunity I've been looking for, a global pandemic when I don't have to see anyone. Let's grow some ridiculous facial hair. The pandemic has been bad for a lot of people, but great for my stashes.

I think the stock price of moustaches. Anyone that was long moustaches in February time, what a return. They've seen hacker returns, that's for sure. Sure, man. So talk us through, give us a bit of background to you. What do you do? What do you do?

Yeah, so if anyone happens to know who I am, it's solely because of Twitter. So over the past, maybe 14, 15, 16 months, I've built up a bit of a persona on Twitter just by regularly tweeting, just by putting out stuff, really every day. I make it a goal myself to do it once a day. Social media rewards consistency. So literally, however long ago it was,

I made a pact with myself that I was gonna take everything I knew about social media and apply it to my own personal profile and just see what happens. And it just, it caught fire, to be honest. You know, it's a little bit of luck, a little bit of knowing what I'm doing. And over the past 16 months, it's gone from like a thousand to, you know, 65,000, whatever

it might be. And it was because I work professionally in social media, so I've been doing this for over 10 years. And I know what kind of works, at least know what works for brands. And I kind of decided, why don't I take that same concept, apply it to my own personal profile, and not do it in a way that's deceiving or that I'm not being true to what I think or who I am. But just like, let's write tweets in a way that I know works.

Let's talk about things that I know people are interested in and it check off it. Here we are. And I'm on your podcast. That's right. Yeah, exactly. So I find it really interesting. I've got a number of buddies that work in the social media world and there does seem to be two very distinct types,

especially as you get higher up. There's one type that Steve Bartlett from a company social chain in the UK, which my buddy works at, who exactly as you said, takes a principal, supplies him to his own. Then there's his business partner, Dom McGregor, also a good buddy of mine,

past modern wisdom guest twice, who doesn't give a fuck about social media. He's like, that's work, this is home. I'm gonna draw a line in the sun. So it's interesting to see what happens. So what were the principles? You said that you were consistent, target messages, what else did you do?

So one key thing that I think a lot of people leave out is that they're not focused enough on social media. So you know like we're all complicated, interesting people that have you know I might like to go kayaking and then I might like to think about philosophy and then I might like to pet my dog and you want to share all those things in your social media. The problem is when you're on social media, you're more like a TV channel. You're more like ESPN where you've gotta kinda stick to one programming if you want people to follow you. So you really have to narrow in

what it is that you talk about. So even using you for an example, it's the same idea with your podcast. If all of a sudden you started had a guest on tomorrow that wanted to talk about cricket, people are going to be like, well, why is this episode on Modern Wisdom? So really, you just use that same concept and apply it to social media and you apply it to your personal brand. And that's how you start getting a following and getting people interested in what you have to say and building a community. I mean, you absolutely have a community around your podcast

and social media works the same way. What were you talking about then? What have you been tweeting about for the last 18 months? So a lot of it was about social media Just kind of anything about content in general about the stuff that works and the stuff that doesn't work Social media was interesting because it came up, you know what 2004? I guess this one Facebook started and When it first kind of got big, when it was clear that brands were gonna be using it,

there was like a land grab by people that were just kinda throwing out like, do this to grow your following and do this to get engagement. And that kind of worked in social media 1.0. But now we're to a point where that stuff doesn't work anymore, either the algorithm has changed or they have, you know, there's new platforms

that you just can't game the system that way. And so I just started tweeting matter of factly, which again works, you'd be direct, you can size about stuff that works and stuff that doesn't work. And I think people found it somewhat refreshing, you know, it wasn't, if you follow social media stuff on social media, you get a lot of like just be authentic or, you know, social media is meant to be social. It's been repeated so many times. It just doesn't mean anything. That's not helpful to someone who's trying

to get better at it. So I would literally do things like if you're on Instagram, you're gonna post a photo that's this size. If you're on Twitter, you've got to tweet every day or you've got to be consistent. You've got to narrow in your focus. And it was the stuff that these people kind of that work in the industry knew to be true.

You know, it's like they felt it and that's what's key to getting retweets. It's this thing that you kind of feel in yourself that you just haven't articulated yourself. And then when you see someone else articulate it, they've now spoken for you and they're likely to retweet it. And so that's as simple as it was, if you can tap in to what someone else is thinking and do their, you know, put it on paper, like that's how you, you get people that are like, I like the way this person thinks because I think like I think, and that's really what I did.

And then on top of it, I just happen to be interested. This is actually how I found your podcast. I happen to be interested in philosophy and happiness and, you know, making my life as enjoyable as possible. And I feel like you probably, there'll be some overlap with your interests as well. You look for this really, really old advice that has stood the test of time.

Like, I don't want someone's advice from five years ago. I want someone's advice from 2,000 years ago that's still relevant today. And so I just started taking that. I mean, like, stoicism kind of stuff. Like, you can apply it to social media. And so that's still relevant today. And so I just started taking that. I mean like stoicism kind of stuff like you can apply it to social media and so that's all I would do. I would take this like philosophical lens just took it and look at content and so many of my tweets I swear to God. If you take out the word social media and the tweet replace it with life. I've just plagiarized it from someone who 2,000 years ago, but it just resonates.

People understand these beautiful concepts that people get. And you could literally do it with anything. You could take out social media, put it in motorcycle repair, put it in canoeing, put it in friendship. It's like a lot of the big problems we've had and life people have been thinking about for a lot of years. So use their wisdom and apply it to the problems we're facing today. I wonder if Senna can you 2000 years ago that you would be providing you with content.

In a couple of millennia, there's some guys, can you remove some of the words from this, put social media and get a thousand retweets? I would love to thank him if I had the chance. There's no way he ever could conceive of that. But like if you really think about Twitter too, it's no different than that kind of philosophy. Like that's why I love Twitter so much. There are these ways to spout out wisdom, to be pithy, to kind of say these things that like, the reason I like pithy sayings and the reason I like Twitter is because there's a way that you can say certain things

and it just hits you, you know, and it's different than a long-form conversation like this, which is equally as valuable, not saying it isn't, but there's ways that you can say certain things that it just hits someone, right, and the soul, right, and the heart, and you know, if only for a second, you can kind of change their thinking or kind of shakes them out of their day-to-day stuff, and I think that's what a lot of ancient wisdom does, And so I'm just kind of taking it. Sometimes I don't even get rid of the word life. I just keep it in. In other times I apply to social media. Yeah, you're very, very correct about what you say that small aphorisms can really make a big impact because a large concept ends up being distilled down to probably one sentence description and perfect example of that. I know that we're both fans of

the moral animal by Robert Wright and I was reading it this morning and there was a sentence that stuck out to me right in the middle of the book. It's like 60% of the way through and it's the sentence which to me describes what most of the book is about and it says Gene our genes did not design us to be happy. They designed us to be effective And I'm like that's just some throwaway line in the middle of this huge like multi-hundred page book I remember the sentence and the sentence is a distillation of the concept of the book. Yeah, and that's honestly how I go about tweeting is I read books like that I read stuff just because that happens to be my hobby it works out. And you get beautiful lines like that you get or you're just able to think about it and and summarize it yourself and that's what kind of goes through. Like you see the, you read lines like that and it hits you so hard that like,

and I could go off on that for a while. Like I love evolutionary psychology. I'm a full, you know, if you want to call it a cult, I'm in the evolutionary psychology cult. I've been, I've been, I did a dissertation, started writing it. And that was my theoretical framework was evolutionary psychology. And I, I, I've sidetracked myself now because you were talking about it. Let's go down. Let's go down. Let's do it, man. Oh, tell you what, before we go into that, who do you think is the best aphorist on the

planet in your mind? Oh, man. Probably, Naval. Oh, man, I know. I know. I don't. I don't want to give the obvious answer. All right. How about this? How about there is, I'll give one that maybe some people don't want to give the obvious answer. I'll give one that maybe some people don't know.

There is someone called Orange Book on Twitter. It's an orange book, I think, underscore. One word, orange book, underscore. Brilliant. A lot of that same stuff, a lot about just how to live a better life, how to be happier, and just write it in a way. What I think a lot of people miss about Twitter, or don't understand about Twitter, is you can have these ideas, but you also then have to get them on paper.

You have to write them in a way that's easy to read. This person is anonymous or student anonymous, and so I don't know who he is or she is, but the way that they write, the way that they think is just super clear, super concise. And it's one of those people that adds so much value to your timeline if you're a regular Twitter user. I know, that's why Naval, as a guy who doesn't follow anyone, and just tweets single words sometimes, or like a couple of word sentences, has like nearly a mass, like a nearly a million followers now. And you're right, as much as I don't want it to be the obvious answer, it is for a reason. Now that there's a reason that Floyd Mayweather

was the best boxer on the planet for a while, you don't wanna say that he is the best defensive boxer of all time, but he was. And Naval, Naval's the Floyd Mayweather of aphorisms man, with a little bit more humbleness. He is. And he would say a healthy, more dose of humbleness if we're comparing him to Floyd Mayweather. But healthy, more dose of humble, than super comparing them to what may weather.

But like, and even in a ball aside, like you can see the reason someone like him is so popular, and you can, people can mimic this. And it's certainly just a style of writing. But it's the fact that there's this sense that so much wisdom is packed into just such a tight, concise package that that's what makes it so interesting and makes it so relatable and so easily to understand. It's almost like a picture is worth a thousand words. You can have tweets that are ten words, but they feel like a thousand words, and that's

how he tweets, and that's how some of these people that are so popular, like they tweet the same way. And it's the same idea of the more landable summarization you gave. And one sentence, you understand how we're designed. We're not designed to be happy. We're not even necessarily designed to reproduce, we're designed to reproduce specific genes. So you get a gene that doesn't care if it's like, if it's doing something good or bad, it's just like, well, this gene multiply next time. Like, well, it'd be around. And like, that's all really boiled down to two. And I'll go down this rabbit hole just for a second.

That's why I love thinking about evolution and psychology. Once you know how we're programmed, you can think, how do we communicate? How do we relate to people? If I'm a brand, how do I sell stuff? How do I get people excited? How do I kind of make a cult following out

of this brand that I'm representing? And whether it or it's yourself, there's just so many things to understand about human nature that you can then look at and apply it to any part of your life. And I just happen to be in marketing, happen to be in social media. But you could use it in sales, you could use it in presentations, you could use it in podcasts. Like it's just, it applies literally everything. That's why I think it's just such a beautiful theory to just have in the back of your head

and have dancing around there in all times. Yeah, relationships, family life, and friendships, everything. I genuinely believe that evolutionary psychology is the ultimate red pill. Stopps you from seeing matrix and starts you seeing code, but it does it in a way that means that I don't know whether you found this when I started reading it, I started slowing down a lot. I became less effective in the real world because

I was triple quadruple checking everything that I'm like, oh, so why do you think that? What does it say about me that I'm asking myself? Why did you say that? What does it say about me that I'm asking? What did you what does it say about me and you just ended this like constant regression all the way back? You know, I mean oh Absolutely, that's why one one concept I've been kind of playing with and I'm real bad at it And it's super like it's super like down the ramp at whole kind of thing But it's a sense of like identity like who are you? What do you think and if you but it's a sense of identity. Like, who are you? What do you think?

And if you can lose your own sense of identity, if you can just say, like, I'm just another person in this big blue planet, whatever, it's easier to understand your own thinking. So like, you're going down, like, why did I say that? Well, he responded to this and I said that, and that, and you realize, like, that's kind of how your hardwired.

But we have such an ego. You want to defend everything you said. You want to defend everything you think. You want to defend everything you think. But as soon as you, you can just take a step back and think, you know what, this, this is just some person doing something. Let me try to disassociate with what that person did, even though it's yourself.

And that's how you can better understand all the stuff and hopefully make better decisions. Now, it's next to impossible. It's really hard and I'm not good at it by any means. I've got an ego. I take things personally all the time. But the best thing you can do, if you're ever in an argument,

and you can just take a step back and think these are just two people who aren't communicating properly, you can then all of a sudden be a lot more logical and see the other person's point of view so much quicker than if you go, that person heard my feelings and they did something wrong, and now I'm mad and I'm upset about it. But again, we're animals that are designed to have emotional reactions. So it takes a lot of practice to do that.

It takes a lot of practice to see like how we're programmed. It takes a lot of practice to see that like I'm reacting like this because at some point it benefited my ancestors to react like this. And I've got to be a smarter person. I, you know, like, I've got, we've got the frontal lobe capacity to realize that just because we're programmed this way, does it mean we have to act this way? It means we're likely to act this way. It means that we want to act this way, but it doesn't mean that we have to act this way.

It's all well and good, saying, this is my gene expressing itself through feelings, but when you get sadness, happiness, anger, any emotion, it feels, it's not as logical as that, right? It is a sensation. It is the expression of that gene giving you a sensation in yourself that causes you to act in a particular way. If you haven't been around people for a while and you start to get lonely that yearning for people is to get yourself back to the tribe But it just feels like loneliness. It feels like some Curse bestowed from the gods or on the positive side some sort of blessing that's been handed to you

You know what that feeling after you complete a workout you don't think oh that was me expanding my domain of competence And you know like it's not that's not what you think yeah, but that was me expanding my domain of competence. And you know, like, it's not, that's not what you think. But that is what's happening. And learning that slowly as Robert Wright continues to deep throat me with this evolutionary psychology red pill. There's a hell of a metaphor there. We don't have these in the states. Hey, look, you get a little bit of colorful language. It is our language. Well, anglicized what we want. We'll spell everything with an S. We'll add use into every word that we can.

And we'll talk about Robert Wright deep-throwing the Red Pool. Uh-huh. Um, I just love this. One thing, too, is it is so hard to be in the throws of it, to be feeling something emotional and to take that step back. And what really helps me is I'm very lucky. I have a fiance and we're really good at kind of holding each other accountable when something like that happens.

And it literally happened today. I moved out to New York. I had to ship a bunch of packages. And for no reason, the mail just returned them back to a place that we don't live anymore. And I got super frustrated, got a little stressed out like how are we going to get this. And you know, like that's your body like in fight or flight. But there's literally nothing I can do about it right now. So you know, she's like relax, like take a breath.

Like there's no like we can't solve this right now. We're going to have to figure out a solution like we'll get a friend to come over and do it, but like literally stressing about it right now, does you know good, it's just gonna make you more and happy. And I was getting ready for this, she's like, she didn't say this, but this is what I internalized. It's like, do I really wanna be stressed out for this podcast that I'm excited to go on,

for this person that I'm eager to talk to. And you can see so many issues in people's lives where they kinda let these little stressful things build up and then you come out and explode or that you're not your best possible version of yourself and you're having a conversation like this and you're not expressing what you actually think and you're not having a rational train of thought or rational mind. So it's so important to be able to do that and then to surround yourself with people who think the same way and that's really what I'm trying to do going forward is who thinks the same way that I do, who can reel me in, because I'm

not perfect at it by any means. And then who are the people that don't do that, that don't control their emotions, that do go and stress about things and bring you down? Take a step away from those people and take a step closer to the people that understand this and want to get better at it. You, the external accountability is such an assistance, man. It's such an unfair advantage. I've been thinking about this a lot. I'll be interested to hear your thoughts on this. This is very tried to say, if you want to go fast, go alone, if you want to go far, go

together. I'm aware that that's off the back of a bumper sticker somewhere. That's the perfect tweet. It's a perfect tweet. Hey, look, thousand retweet. But I've been thinking about that an awful, awful lot about where the optimal line is for solitude versus relying on others.

And as someone who's 32 and still single, it's interesting for me to see the pace at which my buddies are moving. And I think that there's been, I've had a disproportionate advantage up to now, but I'm now starting to see that situations that perhaps might be diffused by a partner or by like having a family, having dog, having kids, whatever it might be, that distraction is actually now the tables are starting to turn. Does that make sense? Like, the literally I'm watching that go fast in the beginning, like, taught us versus hair situation, play out in front of my eyes.

It's funny. I think this goes back to a concept. You've talked to, you've had Roy Sutherland on, right? And one of his things is like the opposite of a good idea is sometimes another good idea, you know? And it's that same kind of concept. It's like the opposite of going fast can also, like, the opposite of like having success by going fast and also having success by going slow. And I think some of these, it's like, it depends on what stage you are in your life. It depends what you want to accomplish.

And so I can certainly see a scenario where you're alone and you're able to spend time and you're able to like kinda get your head right that you can't do with someone else. But you just mentioned before we got started that the moustache is going because you've got to go to a wedding. Like there's 50% of the weddings that you need to go to are your partner's friends

and 50% of them are your friends. So if I don't have to go to the wedding, I do 50% for your weddings and everyone else. That's a competitive advantage. Like you cannot get out, even Naval Rava can't get out of going to his wife's friends wedding. Like, it ain't happening, you know?

So there's a perfect example. Well, right, and it ends up being a trade-off, obviously. And so you get to, but a lot of it too is you end up, if you can in solitude, if you can win your single, win your in your 20s and 30s depending on one, you get married and settle down, which by the way, I'm slightly older than you, but I was in the same thing at 32, I was single, like spending time with myself, like I had a dog, like we would go to the dog park every day and walk a trail for an hour. So it's like taking a book. But yeah, but it's like I was in the exact same shoes and honestly doing this, you're

obviously in a situation where you're setting yourself up to succeed not only right now, but later talking to all these interesting people, not that I'm interesting, but all the other people that you've had on before, but talking to them talking to all these interesting people, not that I'm interesting, but all the other people that you've had on before, but talking to them and getting all these different perspectives on lines, like you've got a lot of good stuff like bouncing around in your head, even if you don't write it down or repeat or something,

it's still in there, it's still processing. And so whenever it is that you settle down sort of family, whatever it is, you've already got such a good foundation that it's going to end up being. It's kind of like you've put up all the bricks of the house and you're like, all right, there's literally no more bricks I can put up. I guess I can add some more bricks, but it's not going to make the house any better. It's time to add some drywall.

It's time to add some paint and some furniture and stuff. And that's where you get to a point where someone else is able to help you add those things. That's really nice. That's really nice to me. I love it. I had Andrew Scott was on the show the other day, a longevity expert. He said, more women in 2019 had children over the age of 40 than under the age of 20. Oh, wow.

Yeah. I honestly, you have to kind of believe that too. I think there is a lot of people that are kind of doing what we're doing where you want to get yourself right first. You want to make sure that you're the best possible version, or at least you're on the right track. And obviously, if you have to have the means to do it and stuff, but I'm in the same boat.

I'm not rushing to have kids. I want to have everything feel secure, feel right and and feel like I'm ready for this next step as opposed to just being thrown into the fire. Like hope for the best kiddo. I know. I know. Yeah. Just jump into the deep end. Tell me about the stock exchange.

Tell it. Tell the people that don't know what you did for the last last few years. What what you did. So I was the head of social media and digital media for the New York Stock Exchange. Recently left that job just a few weeks ago. And what I did was they didn't have a social media presence really before I came. This is 2014. And so I had to create it. I had to figure out what we're gonna do,

figure out what platforms we're gonna be on, and it was so much fun. I was very lucky to be in a company to have a boss that just was kinda like, all right, if you think it's a good idea, do it, which is unbelievably empowering for any job. Like this is outside of social media. If you have a boss that trusts you,

but especially in social media where it's so public-facing, you know, like I mess. CNBC reports on. Like, that's a lot of stress, especially the first time. And I know every person who's ever done social media for a brand, it's kind of like that first tweet, that first post. It's like being on top of a cliff. And like, you're looking over, yeah, oh, for sure. And you're like, looking over the edge, and you, all right, I got a jump, I got a jump and you're, and you just kind of got to psych yourself up to do it. Obviously you do it a thousand times. It become, you know, second nature. But to know that like if you mess up, you're going to

trend for the wrong reasons and there's going to be reporters calling, especially for an institution like the New York Stock Exchange, like can imagine one wrong tweet, and you can arguably move the markets with a wrong tweet or with someone had ill intentions. Oh my God. They're taking away all the past from me now that I'm gone. Thanks for that. It's good to know. Yeah.

But so anyway, so I did that, and what happened was no one really expected the New York Stock Exchange to be any good at social media, which is good news for me because that means the bar was set incredibly low. And that's the secret to life. Have expectations super low and then make it so you can't help but to exceed them. It's funny, I was actually thinking about this and again, I'm going to go off an tangent because that's apparently just what I do. But think about like so much of your life is comparison. So it's kind

of like you if you live in this really nice subdivision and it's everyone's got all these beautiful houses and you got the crappiest house in that subdivision, you're going to kind of feel like you don't really have that good of a life. But if you live in a less nice subdivision, you have the same exact house and it just happens to be the nicest house in that subdivision, you're going to feel like you're a king. And it's You have the same exact house, and it just happens to be the nicest house in that subdivision. You're gonna feel like you're a king. And it's because you're comparing yourself to, you know, what's around you.

And that was the same idea for the New York Saga change. You're kind of comparing ourselves to other financial institutions, which were unbelievably boring, unbelievably dry, unbelievably uninteresting. And so all it was was like, what if we just kind of talk like we're a person? What if we put me on camera interviewing CEOs and real quick stuff like you know 60 seconds where we're able to demystify CEOs a little bit because you

know with the Elon Musk's and the Bezos and the Zuckerbergs, they become mythical creatures almost, you know? And so we wanted to do a little bit like CEOs of just regular people and it was and we did it super low five, got my phone called Creature's Almost, you know? And so we wanted to do a little bit like, CEOs are just regular people. And we did it super low five, I've got my phone right here, it was literally like me grabbing a CEO, doing this, and just talking to him, completely disarmed the CEO.

It felt super real, like whatever you're watching a CEO talk, they're hitting their talking points, they're talking to investors, they're, you know, they're super polished, but this completely disarmed them. And we could have fun little stupid, you know, questions that weren't about the stock price, that weren't about, you know, the next quarter. So is this really unique way to talk about financial markets, to talk about businesses,

and to talk to CEOs. And we were just making it up as we went along. Snapchat was invented or gained popularity while I was there. And it was like, what are we going to do on Snapchat? We should be on it. And that's when it turned into, all right, I'll interview CEOs. And again, that's where it goes back to having a team that empowers you. I literally said, I'm like, are you all right?

If I'm on camera as the face of the New York Stock Exchange on social interviewing CEOs and they were like, no, love it, great, do it, like we trust you. And so, and that's why again, far with that low, had a team that really empowered me. And then we got noticed by like media outlets and stuff, so people wanted to write stories, people wanted to say, you know, like, wow, we didn't expect the New York Stock Exchange Pinterest page to be this good. Why is it this good? It's like, I mean, yeah, I appreciate it. It's good, but it's because you expected nothing. So as long as I had, and like, again, the bar was one, I gave you a three

out of ten, but you know, three times expectations. So that's what I did for five years, six years, whatever it was. And then moved on, I had a cool new opportunity and jumped into that. You must have had some awesome experiences during that time. Oh, for sure. If you go, I wish I would have taken more pictures. That's my biggest regret. If you go to my Instagram, which is the same as my Twitter, you can see so many pictures of like so many cool celebrities and athletes and CEOs and stuff. It was like a pinch yourself moment every day. And I don't mean to say this right.

I mean to say this part because like I literally still can't believe it and still can't quite comprehend it. I remember I was interviewing Shaquille O'Neal for the second time. And I just remember thinking like nowhere in my life plan was the sentence ever going to be, I'm about to go interview Shaq again. And it was just so wild and so crazy. So that's why I'll have so many fond memories of that place. Like the amount of cool people I got to meet, it was just through the roof. And again, that fact that I was able to use

social media, you have someone in super famous like, Shack, come, he gets hounded. Everyone wants to talk with him. Everyone wants his picture. Everyone wants his autograph. But I legitimately had a business reason. So I can go up to their PR person and I go, Hey, I know Shack's here and he's talking about how he just joined the board of Papa John's. I do social media for the New York Sacu-Change. I'd love to get 90 seconds with them so that he can promote the Papa John's thing. And they go, yeah, sure, great. So they push everyone away, I get to go.

And I've got like a whole crowd around me. Like, talk about getting real good by doing something in public. You've got this whole floor of traders and all these people watching. But again, it's just me, him and a camera doing a quick little interview for 90 seconds because he's there to do press.

And I'm social media is kind of press, it's at least publicity, and was able to do stuff like that in a regular basis. It was just, it's still surreal to be honest. Dude, that must be so cool. Having memories like that from a job is worth an awful, awful lot. There's some things that if you're fortunate, you can look back on in your career. And be really, really thankful that they happened. And it's worth an awful lot more than the paycheck when it's like that. What's the atmosphere like in the New York Stock Exchange? Obviously, we see these kind of quite shared images of the guys with the pieces of paper shouting in the air. Like

it is. It's the kind of alpha male, a gram of caffeine per day, atmosphere, kind of, does it permeate through to the social media for? I'm happy. I'm happy. You said caffeine. Yeah. So a lot of it is done electronically now. So what you almost have, so you don't really have that, you know, like you see it in the movies, you see it on TV, it's not quite like that anymore. You still have people there, but what they're doing is facilitating these trades electronically. So they're just really overseeing stuff. They'll get on the phone for large trades.

They'll make sure, like, they have a phone where they can talk to the CFO, certain companies, vice versa, the CFO can talk to them if they don't like something that's going on with the stock or they have a question. But yeah, it ends up being a lot more quiet. It's a lot more like beeping and buzzing from the computers than people expect. The one exception or the, I shouldn't say the one exception, but the biggest exception is during the IPO time. And that's when an IPO is when a company goes from private to public.

So you've got someone like Airbnb who's private right now. At some point, they're going to go public. And when they do, they have to pick an exchange to go public on. And what that means when they go public, it's someone like me and you can buy shares. Like me and you can't buy shares in Airbnb now. But when they're public, that's when you can just open your Robinhood account, whatever it might be, by Airbnb. But what they've got to do is you've got this private market that has a bunch of shares and they have the public market that wants to buy shares. So they're pricing, they're trying to figure out the right price

to open the stock at, at what price, like, what is the public want this stock at? And that's where you have traders who, like, in real time are yelling at each other, wanting to know what, like, the current, like, what are people offering? What are people offering to sell it at?

What are people offering to buy that? So that's super exciting, and that stuff, like, and again, I got to be in, like, the middle of that, like, that's wild to me. And I had plenty of traders. I'm sure if there's any trader listening best, they're thinking, oh, that SOB Matt Kobach,

he got my wife so many times, because he had to get a picture in the video. Because you're a little bit like a photographer. If you've ever had like a photographer or a sporting event, you have to get up close. You have to be unapologetic about getting in someone's way and getting the shot. And it's the same way with social media. They didn't want, our audience didn't want the shot where I'm shooting this way and

it's 20 feet away of a trader, they wanted the phone right in their face so I could see someone yelling and doing that. And again, that's what sells our floor, that's what sells our product too, so it's just a Bible that I was that close. But then they also have a job, so you know, you kind of have these competing things and you get to a good rhythm of they know who I am, I know who they are. We try to stay out of each other's way. But super exciting, just being in the middle of that. Like there's so many IPO pictures, you have all these major companies that have IPOed for the past

five years. And you've got like Gadi and, you know, the stock photos of it. And I'm sitting there, like I'm just next to the CEO, just hanging out sadly, very embarrassingly, if you're on the podcast, you can't see this. But I'm gonna, like, I'm just sitting there looking at my phone like this. Like, I don't do it. Working, exactly. I swear I'm working, but they look like I'm just scrolling Instagram or something. Yeah, that just sucks.

Texting. So what are you having for dinner, honey? Uh, really, I really don't want to tally me again. The last time that we got that snap, you and Bazel. Yeah, and then you've got like traders in the background, like, yeah, speaking of snap, we had Snapco public there, which is awesome. You have Evan Spiegel, and then his,

I forget if it was wife or girlfriend of the time, but Miranda Kerr, they're there taking like Snapchat selfies with like the dog filter on their face. It's like this just super again Surreal mom. You're like this is the Snapchat with his wife Put on the dog filter with the tongue on the floor the stock exchange like Yeah, I'm just that work. Why did I quit? What am I doing? I know

Have you checked out the Slash wall street bets Reddit some thread Oh Dude Have you checked out the, ah, slash Wall Street bets, Reddit, sub thread? Oh, uh, uh, do I need to? Oh, dude. I don't spend nearly enough time. I don't. Man, this is, so these guys are the most outlandish traders on the internet. They made it to the front page of some huge financial magazine at the beginning of this year. There's been all sorts

of ongoing crazy litigation to do. It's like a million plus people now, but basically it's people that are beyond reckless on Robinhood, like insane calls and puts and within with ridiculous timeframes, like by the end of tomorrow. And there's people leveraging their entire net worth and more for internet points from people that they're never going to meet. And they get immortalized on this like within this sub-community. And there's some people that have made hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars in a couple of days and then blown the entire amount

and now like 300 grand in debt. And it's just the most, there's a, the dankest trades of Wall Street Bets is a YouTube series which summarizes each quarter's trades and goes back through it. Man, it is its intent. You will be on glib it. I'm stressed out now. I don't know. I worried that these people don't know what the F they're doing. I know it's a point. Oh, it's so, oh, it's

like, oh my god. I'll try. It can only look for so long. I think it's a point. Oh, it's so oh, it's like a oh my god. I'll try. I'll it can only look for so long Yeah, I feel the I think it bring I just Have you seen those you seen those videos of the guys that do they'll climb up a crane tower that's sort of 500 feet in there. Yeah, that's precisely the same feeling that you have when you watch wall street bets on Reddit My god, oh, I just hope these I hope they're not kids, but they are kids. And I hope they're responsible. I know I need I need someone to be like, Matt, you need to, you need to stop thinking about this. You're stressing yourself. No, exactly. We're talking about being mindful and reverting to the present earlier on.

It's what's funny too is working at the stock exchange. So many people ask me, like, give me stocks. You have to give me advice, and my advice is so unbelievably boring. It's like, fine, I'm doing nice, diversified ETF, just put your money in it, every month, and don't touch it for 10 years. That's what you do. But everyone wants to, you know, what's the stock pick of this year, yeah, exactly. No, dude, you're the guy that's been stood on the ground floor at the New York Stock Exchange for the last six years. And Morgan House is, as far as I'm concerned, one of the best sort of financial writers on the internet.

And both of you said the same thing. Just find something aggregated that's not going to tank and don't touch your money and hold on. And when it goes low, hold on harder and then keep holding on. And then maybe in a generation or two's time, you'll have some money. That's it. And it's so boring. It's so boring. Someone that what they want you to say is that at the beginning of February,

you should have decided to go long on Tesla because now it's at 4x. Yeah. Can you and it like, who, and it's like, cool, no one in the right mind would even send that. You know, like that's the problem too, is like you wanna do, you know, someone wants like a stock tip, like what you do and it's like,

you're literally asking someone to predict the future and to predict a motion. Like the, you, it's really hard to argue some stocks. I won't name any by name, but they don't necessarily trade on fundamentals. They don't trade on stuff that, anyone can see they trade because people love the brand or love the company, just love the idea.

And I don't know how to gauge that. I don't know how to predict that. I don't know how to say people love this stock and they're gonna keep buying it. Like maybe, maybe not, I really don't know, but it's not like, oh, I know this new chip manufacturer just cut their, you know, they got a new, they got a new plant and whatever country and it's going to cut their prices by half.

Like, that's the only reasonable type of information that you could use that would then be like, all right, and I don't think it's been priced into the stock price. That's a goodbye in my opinion. But like, it, the past four months, it's just been mostly emotion, it seems like, at least the big names. So like, I don't know. What was handling the stock for the turn?

What was handling the stock for the turn? During the last four months. So it became, so one, we don't actually talk about specific stocks that much. We don't talk about stock prices. The reason being is that so legally, our restrictions where you cannot talk about what a stock is going to do or what you think it's going to do. We can't give financial advice. We got to stay away from

that stuff. So it was very black and white about what we couldn't do. You could talk about what a stock is currently, like what it has done. So it closed today at $70. That was fine. You can't say anything forward looking. That was a big no-down. But what happened was we were a little, like we had some fun. Like if there was a cool trend on social media that made sense for us, we would join it. You know, again, it was me on camera, like pounding around with CEOs,

like it was showing them in a different light. All of a sudden, and what was it, February? Everything just starts tanking. So you're having like 1000 point drops in the Dow, and the way the stock exchange is set up, if it drops quickly enough, or by a certain percentage, in a day, it literally freezes. So like you literally, no one can trade for 15 minutes.

It's like, all right guys, circle breaker went on. What happens when that happens? Is there like a big red alarm bell that goes somewhere? Yeah, it's just like all of a sudden nothing happens, but all of a sudden it goes and it had I don't know that it happened I'm gonna someone feel free to reply and tell me the actual answer But it'd been like a decade or two. I think since it had happened last But all of a sudden everything on the floor just like pauses. So it's a different color you got red and green and I forget what it was. Maybe it was like yellow or something.

And it was like just like X's. And so none of the screens you could like trade. And it's an automatic thing. It's a computer program. So once it hits, I think it was 7%. Once it hits that, it's literally no one can do anything. And you just hang out for 15 minutes. And it's real surreal. You've got everyone on the floor just kind of waiting for 15 minutes. But for us, what we wanted to do is we knew it was going to happen. You can kind of, before the market opens, you can see what the futures are trading at. And you can see that the Dow is going to open up or down, whatever percent.

And so if you see that it's going to open down 6%, you know, like, oh, there's a chance that this could go further. So sitting there waiting, and for us what we wanted to do is one, this started happening. One, we wanted to be very real time. We wanted people to get their information from us. So if the stocks were paused trading, I was literally sitting there. I had the tweet ready because I knew it was going to happen. As soon as it did, I hit go.

And the reason is, we then became like the trusted source for that information. When people were doing stories about it, they saw our name. And so we got to get our brand out there significantly more than if we waited even a minute later. The other thing we did is now, I mean, people are losing money. You know, like this is people's 401K, this is people's investments that maybe they're living off of it at the very least now panicked that you bought something and now it's down 20%. So, we just, we got rid of all, you know, kind of cute stuff, we got rid of all fun stuff

and it just became very matter of fact. Here's where the market just opened it, here's where the market just closed it, and let's talk to this person about what this means for their stock. So we really changed our tone overnight almost. And so we're talking about people's money. And if money's doing well, you can have some fun. You can be a little silly.

But when people are losing money, that's when you kind of tighten the tie and you look a little more professional. And you don't have as much fun. Anyone that's ever been on a very long diet knows exactly the same feeling as when you've got money worries. It's like everything sucks.

Everything that happens in your life is like, this thing happened, but I'm hungry. And it's the same as that. It's like, this thing happened. My daughter just wanted her football. That's great, but the stock market's just crashed this thing happened, but the stock market's just crashed So you're right like don't anyone out there that is listening that is getting social media advice if you're the guy from the CDC Who looks after their social media or the the lady who looks after British rail network or something like that, if everything goes down,

don't do the TikTok dancing videos of everyone in the office, like save that for another day. Yeah, it's also a good lesson too, it's why we don't schedule anything. So a lot of social media managers will schedule stuff in advance, they got a calendar, it's, you know, time, it's evergreen kind of stuff,

like it works on a Tuesday, as well as it works on a Saturday night. But especially on Twitter, you don't know what's gonna happen. So you don't want like I remember when Kobe Bryant died All of a sudden like all the TV stations are breaking to it is news. We're still figuring out like no one really knows the information Who done and then if you're a brand and you're tweeting like LOL ice cream Saturday Like you look completely toned up. You look like you're not paying attention. And, you know, you maybe just had something scheduled on a Saturday, but it's, I will never schedule stuff for that reason, especially on Twitter, because you just risk looking tone deaf. Well, and you can, with all the black lives better. Black out Tuesday.

Same thing. Precisely. Yeah. Here's our new, new sale. Like, imagine if someone had done like a black Friday's come this June or something like that and it actually happened on that She said that could have been a very very unfortunate situation 100% It's just not it's just not worth the risk. I know the person who heads up comms and Social media for John Deere, the tractor company, and every morning, they literally take the temperature of what's going on in the world.

They're like, all right, what's going on? And they're a global company, so they're looking at different countries, they're looking at different cultures, and they're like, all right, our job is to make sure that we're not saying anything that could now be insensitive, that could now be misconstrued. I mean, you've even got it with COVID.

Let's say you had this like ad campaign with a bunch of people hugging. You've got to scrap that. You can't have campaigns with people shaking hands or high-fiving. Like all this stuff changes so quickly that you've got to be really, really nimble to make sure that you're not, you know, coming off insensitive. Did you ever take your interest in evolutionary psychology and use it when watching the traders and the atmosphere and the personalities of the people that you saw on the New York stock exchange? I can't.

So I certainly applied it to the content we did. So like I've always, so the, I'll rewind a little bit. I didn't actually explain what I did at a PhD and which by the way, I dropped out. I did not finish the PhD. A lot of people think I have the PhD because I did at PhD. Which by the way, I dropped out. I did not finish the PhD. A lot of people think I have the PhD because I say I pursued it. Just to be 100% certain, I do not have it. I'm a dropout and I'm a very proud PhD dropout.

I like to say I was smart enough to be a PhD dropout. Nice. What I did was this is in 2008, 910. And so social media was like just kind of getting started. And I wanted to predict how people use social media. So that's why evolution or psychology was such a robust theoretical framework to base predictions on how people would use social media.

So that's when it became clear of how to communicate on social media, how to do it if you're a brand. What are the kinds of stuff that people want to do? They want to build communities if you're a brand, like what are the kinds of stuff that people want to do? Like they want to build communities. Like we're tribal species, and so you want to like take into account like those things, like we're a species that needs to communicate clearly to understand each other.

And so it was really invested in there. And so that's what I use evolution and psychology from. If I was a trader myself and I was doing that, I probably would try to think about it differently, but it was like my world never necessitated, you know, interacting with them in that fashion. It was my job was to like show emotion

because I understand that emotion sells the New York Stock Exchange, but then it's explaining what a market model was. And so that means so for me, the evolutionary psychology aspect was, let me get in this trader's face while he's shouting, and I'm going to record a video, and that's what's going to resonate with our audience as opposed to me talking, having an interview with someone where they're kind of explaining what they do. I'm sure there's a whole lit

near thing. If I wanted to thinkist like college and why people are nuts about trading certain stocks and other stocks, I'm sure there's a totally ripe for exploration, but I've never, I haven't spent much time thinking about it. How many of your predictions about social media came true? Well, so what I ended up doing is I was, at the time, I was looking at interpersonal communication. And so it could, in to be honest, it's been so long I don't even remember what I ended

up predicting because what ended up happening was I would, and for anyone who has never done a dissertation, this is how it works at least for mine, is you do a bunch of coursework, then you have to have a, like a study that you set up. You make some predictions, make some hypotheses, and then you've got a test of. So I would write them based on where social media was at the current time, and then it was moving so fast, Facebook would make an update, and then make my predictions moot, because I had to work in the, like, they changed their algorithm, and now, like, what I wanted to do was, like, well, that's not part of what their platform is anymore.

And so I got really frustrated with that, which is why I left. It was like, a's not part of what their platform is anymore and so I got really frustrated with that which is why I laughed it was like a year of like writing and rewriting and rewriting I'm like this is I can't do this anymore but a lot of the predictions I made was about we're about attraction and about like how to engage with other people and so in again I forget exactly what I said but it was very clear that like online dating was going to take off it was very clear of what to how to position your profile to be more attractive as opposed to less attractive. The difference is what to do in a profile, if you're a male attracting a female and if you're a female attracting a male.

You kind of see all this stuff now and all the online dating, all the tenders and bumbles and stuff of the world. That was kind of where I was at. And then it was like, how do we then communicate with each other once we've decided, this is a person I want to talk to. So the closest thing I can say to a prediction that came true was really that we're going to use social media in the same exact way that we communicate offline. And the reason Tinder was so effective, or so

popular, the reason it totally zimmed up is why I made Game of Fight a little bit. They made it fun, interesting. But more importantly, it wasn't like a dating site. You know what? You don't do, if you're single and you go to a bar, you do not get to see what everyone's interests are. It's not like they're hovering over their head like I like canoeing and I like going outdoors and I'm this old or whatever. You go to a bar and you go, that person, I'm kind of attracted to that person. And you go over and you strike up a conversation or neither works or doesn't work.

And that's what Tinder was. The difference was instead of saying, like, I'm attracted to the person and you go walk up to him, you just swiped right. And then it mimicked what we do offline. And that's all social media does. It's like, people complicated. Don't understand how we work without social media, and then just, or without technology

period, and then layer on technology, and you'll know how we act. It's really that simple. It's like the most attractive people in real life are going to get the most dates. The most attractive people on Tinder are going to get the most dates, the most attractive people on Tinder are going to get the most dates. It's not some complicated formula here. And then if you're a guy, there's going to be certain things that you're going to have to add to your profile to be more attractive than if you're a woman. So it's super interesting to me.

I think in another life, I would have been like an online dating consultant or coach or something. I can see you do. You see so many men especially. You see so many men that it's like this is your profile. No wonder you haven't met anyone. Like why do you think guys and girls make when setting up their profiles online?

Yeah. So the biggest mistake one is set yourself up, well first I figure out what you're looking for. So if you wanna look for a long-term relationship, and I'll just do it for guys, I don't wanna speak for a woman, but what you're gonna wanna do is make yourself look like a long-term attractive mate,

and to be a long-term attractive mate, there's several different factors, like not everyone's high and everyone You can't be good looking and you can't be kind and you can't be funny and you can't be I have a lot of resources Yeah, you need a little bit of all of them So what you've got to do is figure out which one of these traits that you have are most desirable and highlight those traits so Again, this goes back to the evolutionary psychology thing.

We're attracted to one, people that are good looking. People always say beauty is in the eye to be older. It's not really. There's some cultural differences, but every culture likes good skin, good teeth, good hair. So there's certain things. That's why you have these Photoshop apps that are so popular is because from an evolutionary standpoint,

they make us look more attractive because they make us look more healthy. Because if you look more healthy, you're going to have a higher chance of reproducing with that person who's healthy. So you're going to want to highlight your attractiveness as much as possible. And again, it's why if you're a guy, the best thing you can do to be attractive is to lift weights. Just get fit. That is more than half of being attractive as a guy and it's going to go back to fitness, it goes back to evolutionary psychology. So one, so do that. So if you haven't

lifted weights, lift weights, you know, get a picture where your teeth and hair and skin look good. But then also, but like that, that's not, it's not just that. So you can't just be good looking if you wanna be a long-term mate. You've also got to really suggest that you're gonna be invested in the long term in the long run. And you've also got to show that you're gonna be able

to access resources, get resources, provide resources. So showing things like you're kind, showing things and maybe you have like a bond with your family, you know, that you're that you love your mother kind of stuff, you know, and that you would raise a kid who also loves their mother. And again, I'm not saying to be deceiving about this stuff. I'm saying it's marketing, highlight your best possible qualities and you want to be trustworthy and you want and being things like funny and intelligent are important because

Those are ways to get resources, you know people who are clever who work hard who have ambition who are smart tend to have more resources So again if you can crack a joke right away You can say something clever funny or that it's the same reason why you would put Harvard on your Tinder profile You know it suggests that you're someone of means that's gonna have more means. So you really want to do everything to highlight your attractiveness, highlight your commitment to being a long-term partner and your ability to gather resources.

And this isn't to say that women need more resources or need someone to do it, but again, I think we're all kind of programmed. We've all got this in our DNA that we're still attracted to that, those kind of people, even if we don't need it. It's very difficult, I think, for the vast majority of women to deprogram the attraction to a man who has the ability to gather resources. Like, it is, there are ladies out there who are the breadwinners in the family, that's awesome. But the likelihood is if you are richer or better educated, then the man that you are married to, the man is richer or more educated than you are and

or has some other social notoriety incredibly talented, very muscular, very good looking, whatever it is, because that's the way that life has worked. You are battling against some deep, deep, deep-seated genetics if you are able to work around that. I had Rob Henderson on the show a couple of months ago, and he was a beast, anyone that's interested in this sort of evolution and dating and how it rolls forward, should go back and check that episode out. But he taught me about the sexy sun hypothesis. Do you know about this? Oh, it is, yes, it's that. Well, let's see how much I get right.

I'm going to butcher it. Yeah. But it's essentially that women are attracted to men who they think would give them good looking sons, because then they would be more likely to reproduce as well. Yeah, precisely when you name it. Yeah, yeah, uh-huh. The, the, the, the, it's just, what's so funny is that's why I love evolutionary psychology so much.

It's like someone says that it's just, it just, it clicks. It seems so logical. And you know, someone comes up with a better theory. Believe me, I'll be the first to, to get rid of it. But like, it's just, everything just kinda stacks up so perfectly. What are some of the things that, I'll give you one of mine,

and then we'll see if you can give me some of your, some of the kind of like jaw drop moments when you read evolutionary psychology. One of mine recently has been learning about the purpose of pride that it's a positive feedback mechanism for doing something which is challenging and worthwhile. And the sensation of pride is something that we intrinsically seek for ourselves. As someone who anyone who is an entrepreneur who goes and decides to train or do anything that makes you feel uncomfortable, you kind of seek the endorphin

hit after doing something, but it's all abstract. You've kind of thought about it before and you know how it fits into the bigger picture of you in your life and you can kind of get lost in the weeds away from the fact that it's like, not evolution's there for absolutely everything that you do. And this is no different. The sensation of pride to me because it's something continuing to motivate yourself. Most of the motivation comes from chasing that sense of pride that comes afterward. And you think like, well, I'm not doing this for the hedonic treadmill. I've done my explore. I've ensured that I've got rid of the trivial few and focused on the trivial many and focused on the vital few and I'm expressing my logos, you know,

you've taken the top 1% of everyone's work that's looked at this over the last few years and you think that you understand why you're doing something, then evolution just goes in with a big sledgehammer and smashes you in the face and goes, yeah mate, but it's still just evolution. And then think about pride with a real sort of jaw drop moment for me. Yeah, well, and also too, I'll answer your question, but pride with social media.

It's so, it's so clear. So it's like if you're someone who's chasing that social status, that to feel good about yourself, think about how social media then plays into our evolutionary predilections, so other word predilections, whatever, the way that we're already designed. So I'm chasing this high of like approval

from other people and I'm chasing like, yeah, I'm working out, I'm getting fit and I'm doing all this. And then I'm able to post a shirtless picture of me on Instagram that then gets 1,000 likes. And you can see how it's like this is all just a big reward of us doing this thing seeking social status, seeking pride, and like that's why social media has totally, I don't mean this in a in a in like a bad way, but you can see that social media has like hijacked that or like used it to their advantage like we, and I do it too. Like everyone's part I do it too. Like, you want to argue that it's not a game though.

That is seeking. Yeah, there is absolutely a part of me that likes having, you know, however many followers on Twitter. There's a part that likes me getting a thousand retweets. I can say until the cows come home, I do it for myself. I do it to keep myself honest. I do it to make sure that I'm increasing my habits,

which sure that's true. And I could probably pass a lie detector. But again, it said, I did anything. And I've got to get out of my own head and get out who I am. And it's like, you also like the fact that you've got higher status now because you do it than if you didn't do it. It's always a bad answer. To answer your question now, to answer your question, the one, and we talked about it already, it's this gene thing. It's that we're not even in control of the ship.

We're not the skipper. We are cargo. Like this, what, you're brain, all of it. You've got a gene that wants to get passed on. It is going to do whatever it takes to get passed on. Because we think, oh, evolution, I get it. So I want to reproduce. I want to make another version of me.

And you're like, no, no, no, it's even deeper than that. It's like, you've got this one little weird gene that wants to make another version of itself. And depending on how strong that gene is compared to another gene, that's the stuff that's really wild to wrap your head around. And that's what makes you feel like, I'm not in control here. I'm not, you know, like, it's like, it's like,

it's like you go on a ship and there's like a little, like a steering wheel for the kids to do. Like, that's what life feels like. It's like, oh, I'm totally, yeah. I'm like, or when I was a kid, I have a little sister and she'd want to play video games with me and I didn't want her to play. So I'd give her a controller and tell her she was playing.

Like, that's what we are. There's no batteries in that controller. There's just batteries in the one that I've got. And you think you're controlling it and you're just as happy knowing it, but you're not controlling anything. Have you read Buddhism is True by Robert Wright? A wide world is true.

Dude, you would adore it. So imagine the moral animal and then adapt the evolutionary psychology to why meditation works and why Eastern philosophy has some truths to it. Highly recommended to anyone who's listening, if you fancy getting into this. The audible version also is really, is quite easy listening. I probably wouldn't have wanted to audible the moral animal. I don't think I would have enjoyed it as much. I liked rereading those mic drop moments, but for why Buddhism is true, that's good. If you had a look at much to do with self-deception. Not really, where are you going?

Just up in your mind? Yeah, man, that must stash. No, I've just been blown away with how convincing liars we are even to ourselves. Yeah, yeah. Like, I mean, this in the most panicious, like, source code level of a way. And this is one, this is one that really, really shocked me. So, couples that have been together for a significant period of time living together, let's say maybe sort of six, seven, eight years who still haven't had kids will tend to break up

and there's some moderately robust stats that show this. That's presuming that they want to break up. There's some moderately robust stats that show this. That's presuming that they want to have kids. Now when you think, why does this happen? Everyone that's listening will have had some friends. Perhaps you were one of them that was in relationship for a real long time. You know, got together at university. Now we're sort of 29 and we've just grown apart.

I don't really feel the same about them anymore. Our interests don't really align and this, that and the other. And you think not only is that perhaps what you told the other person, but it's genuinely what you felt or maybe you felt some version, some analog of that. So you were convinced, you yourself were convinced that that was the reason that you did it. That's what you told them, that's what you told you, that's what your brain told you. However, there is some pretty good evidence which

shows that if you've been together for a very, very long time, let's look back to our ancestral environment, if you and another person have been together for quite a while and there's still not been any kids, there's something wrong with one of you. That means it's beneficial for both of you to go and be with someone else. That problem might be you, but that problem might be them. And by leaving and going to see if the other person also has this problem,

more perhaps if you've taken it along with them, this is again, presuming that most people were trying to have children. The difference now is that people elect, not to have children. But the genes don't know and don't care about that. The genes don't care about the fact that you're on the pill and have been and you just want to wait until you're 31 and then you're going to have, you're going to start to become a baby making mum. Like that's, they don't care about that. So it would make sense for your genes to say,

something's up here, that person and you aren't a compatible match, because as of yet, there's been no children. But it wouldn't say to you that that's not the best, most effective way. What would happen is that you would become more easily irritated about the things that they did, the fact that they chew with their mouth open perhaps. It isn't cute like they used to anymore, the fact that they make little snoring noises in the night isn't as endearing. Maybe just not as attracted anymore. All of these different sort of the parameters and the dials and the knobs that your genes can twist to change things.

And then it tells you, oh well, you know, we're just kind of growing apart and we're doing this and the other. And then that's how it deploys. So not only are you convinced of that, but your genes have made you lighter yourself about what's going on. And like upon reading that and then a hundred other examples

of how you don't really know your own motivations at its deepest, deepest level. You realize cargo in the ship is exactly that. The child that's just got the toy wheel and thinks that they know what's going on. And you can go layers and layers and layers deep, right? There's a level of layers that you could go back to consciously, which you need to strip where you discussed about stripping away ego, and becoming fully aware of why you feel the way that you do and controlling that.

But then there's like another glass ceiling to kind of try and get through, and up there, that's where the real, that's where the real fact controller is. And he's up there with you genetics, twist in the knobs and move in the dials, blows my mind, man. Absolutely, and it's why it's so easy to see someone

else's motives, and then they tell you their motives, and it's completely different than what you observed as an outsider, but you know for a fact that they could pass a lie detector. It's like, I know you believe this lie because it's beneficial for you to believe this lie, and it's into you, it's not a lie, it's the truth. It goes back to this idea too, that we're all that we're all just again cargo, but imagine being cargo

that then when we arrive at our destination, we have to justify how we got there, why we got there. So you get there and you're like, so you ended up in, you know, in Brazil and you're like, yeah, that's where I wanted to go the entire time. I was always going to Brazil. I love Brazil. And you're like, yeah, that's where I wanted to go the entire time. I was always going to Brazil. I love Brazil. Rio is beautiful this time of year, and I love beaches. And you're like, and, but, and again, it's, you have to believe it. So yeah, and again, it goes back to that jeans thing.

We got our jeans doing things that we are then have to explain away. And again, it's why it goes back to this ego thing, and it's so unbelievably hard. It's like, I barely understand it. That it's a thing, let alone, you can do anything about it. But, and it's so hard to see in yourself.

It's next to impossible. But it's just, again, we're evolutionarily designed to decept ourselves. I forget, it's a saying, something like this. Like the way to tell a lie is to believe it. And so, and if you know it's a lie, you're not going to believe it. But if you honestly don't know it's a lie, then you're going to be just fine saying that no. We grew apart. That's why we got to the point.

That's what's going on. Well, I mean, one of the things that came up, I think it's moral animal or why Buddhism is true, this just sounds like a Robert Wright somewhere. It's gonna be sat at home with his fucking ears burning because me and you were just like, now they're not for buying for this entire podcast. It was in one of those where he spoke about the fact that our ability to detect the lies as humans

is really a deceit, deception is super high, super super high because the risk previously would always have been pretty vast. It's one of the reasons why we're the only primates who have white around the outside of our eyes so that we can see where each other's looking. If you had dark eyes, it would be more difficult to see where you're looking, but you've got white around the eyes which means you can see eye contact tends to be an indicator of truthfulness. And he was saying in that that everybody else's ability to pick up on our deception means that we need to become incredibly good liars. And as you said, the best way to teleconvincing lies

to believe it yourself and to not even know that it's a lie. Like the fact that that is the, as far as one of the theories in why Buddhism is true is concerned, is the reason that we have consciousness. So the reason that we have consciousness and central governor, the ability to have that like executive function is to be the narrative that plays the interim between what our genes want and what our actions are. next stand up. Like the fact that I'm able to step into my own programming, or that I think that I can step into my own programming, is the kid at the wheel again. Maybe the kid

at the wheel analogy is that that daughter can move the ship by like 3% in either direction. She has a minor amount of control, or maybe no, less than that, she can change the temperature of the climate control and the station that the radio's on. She can make some superficial changes, which do manifest and make her feel like she's in control. But yet, the big shit that's going on, that's daddy's sat up top and mom's got the map out. Like that's what's happening. And then the door up top and mom's got the map out like that's what's happening

And then the door is downstairs and she's she's put the air conditioning on and the radio's too loud She gets to pick whatever station she wants to listen to that's that's that's what we are We're on a road trip and we have notes saying how fast we go where we go when we get there But we can listen to 90s grunge if we want to. That's what we get. Especially as well as you're on this kind of wisdom seeking journey, which I have to say, I really love. Like the last sort of five years, this pivot, say what you want about him, but people like Sam Harris, Jordan Peterson, Ben Shapiro, Brett Weinstein, Eric Weinstein, Joe Rogan, the fact

that you have smart minds teaching you how to step into your own programming, or at least alerting you to the fact that it's possible to do that is something that I don't think we've had at least not on mass ever before. You know, you can read Seneca or Marcus Aurelius' meditations, but you need an, you basically need to read those with a companion book, which is' meditations, but you need an, you basically need to read those with a companion book, which is the person that tells you how it works, right? And that's what some of the best content creators

and podcasters and video writers from the last few years have done. They've synthesized stuff that's quite abstract, quite difficult to work out what's going on, and given it to people. And this kind of wisdom sphere, whatever you want to call it, I love. I think it's amazing. People like Naval who are obviously like the synthesis, like they're the pharmaceutical weapons grade plutonium version of like this wisdom

sphere. The fact that you have that at your fingertips is amazing. And what is scary to realize is that that's kind of pushing the limit of trying to break social norms as best you can to be in design of your own life, to be in control of the direction that you take. And yet, with all of this liberation, all of this information, the best minds on the planet giving you some of the best advice they can, sometimes distilled down into a 360 character tweet. Like you're still just cargo in the shape or the door to downstairs, but it was the air conditioning.

Fuck sake. The, at least the best part about it is, like being able to see it, you know, when like, when you turn on the media and you see what they're doing to you and you pay attention to political debate and you see how they're just going after emotional responses. And like, at least you can kind of choose not to participate

in some of the things that are unhealthy for you. Again, you're, you know, maybe it's like you get a little, maybe you start with controlling the volume, and then they give you the air conditioner, and then you can roll down the window. You know, it's like the more you do, you get at least a little more say. And that's why I think knowing these things is so important.

It's like it just, even if it's 1% better, it just has such a huge impact over the course of your life. What are some of the lessons that you wish that you'd known sort of 5, 10, 15 years ago, anything that comes from mind like that? I wish I would have gone a lot deeper on this topic in general, long time ago. So I started probably when I was in college to be interested in this and I've always kind of,

and it started with, I had an amazing professor, opened my eyes, it was a behavioral consumer, I think, consumer behavior class or something like that. But he didn't teach anything about marketing. It was literally about like, here's how we're programmed. It was how we're hardwired. And you have to be able to sell yourself before you can even sell a product. So learn how we operate.

And so ever since then, it's been bouncing around in my head. And actually, I still have, I might even have the textbook right here. I just moved and I kept it out. But it's something I like, I kind of revisited every few years. But I wasn't nearly I kept it out. But it's something I'd kind of revisit every few years. But I wasn't nearly as diligent about it and I didn't really go as deep as I could have. So I wish I would have gone real deep into that and I wish I would have found like-minded people early on to kind of have those conversations to sit and think about that stuff as opposed to whatever,

like you end up being friends with the people you're around. And I've actually got a friend in my house right now who might be listening and I don't mean you, friend. Like, we're good. But, you know, like your product of your circumstances, like think about some of your best friends often are the people that were in the same hallway, the same floor of you as your dorm, when you went to college.

So much of your life is by chance. I met my significant other on Tinder and had I not swiped right and she not swiped right, it would have been complete, which by the way, it's just chance. And obviously we were able to filter through and realize that we both liked what we brought to the table and it all worked out.

But to not leave some of that stuff up by chance, you know, to search out like-minded people and to search out people who want to have these conversations and to think about these things, I would have pursued that a lot earlier and a lot more. And especially in a college atmosphere, like ideally, there's a lot of those people. I think it might be less and less true now. I might be You know a little nostalgic for a time that that no longer is might be maybe more than that as well Yeah, right right right we might be looking back at the 60s and we're like yeah They were revolutions and yeah, maybe they were smoking a bunch of pop But they were having these philosophical conversations and maybe when we go back there

It's really just now they're just partying the whole time and dancing the music and it's and it's no different back there, it's really just, now they're just partying the whole time and dancing the music and it's no different. So I wish I would have, and I feel a bit like I'm making up for last time. I've been able to, I mean, honestly, doing this podcast is an extension of that. Reaching out to people on Twitter has been such a godsend. So if anyone wants to do this, anyone's listening to this going, God, I feel like I'm behind. That's why I love Twitter so much. There's so many people talking about this. There's

so many people thinking about it, and that you can connect to any of them at any time. It's just so powerful. So I'm such a fan of Twitter for that reason. And it facilitates. Like I see the value in longer conversations. Like we could never do this via Twitter, even if we're in the DMs, it just doesn't happen. But Twitter facilitates, a Twitter can be the gateway to stuff like this. And so I just think it's so powerful. You're right, man. As well, to good point to bring up there to say that

if you're not, if you haven't decided to delve deep into reading evolutionary psychology or the basis for human emotion or you haven't started meditating, like it really, it doesn't matter. Like I was, I'm pretty much certain that under the age of 25, none of this stuff would be able to have much of an impact in any case because the context in which you are consuming it is so chaotic and changeable. Like there's still the vast majority of shit that you do is new. You know, you go out and you have a conversation with someone.

It's the first time you've ever had that conversation before. I think the ability to look at stuff with finer grain is when the ship is so big that it starts to steady itself on the waves a little bit. It's like if you're constantly flipping from one from starboard to port all the time at every single, oh my my god now I've got a girlfriend, I've never had a girlfriend before, I don't know what to do. Oh my god now we've split up, I don't really know, I'm on holiday, I'm here, I'm on a plane, I'm doing this. It's like do just live, live in that

moment. And this was a realization that I came across from a Luke Kuhm song while I was in America last year doing a road trip. It's the first line of this song and he says, at 17 you don't think that much about life. You just live it? I was like, holy fucking shit. That's it man. Like that is the reason that time seemed to expand and dilate when you are younger and seems to get quicker when you are older.

Like 24 hours today is the same amount of time as you had 24 hours 10 years ago and 20 years ago and the day that you were born. But the lack of a learner's mind, the lack of new and novel experiences, the lack of presence is what's causing time to speed up. What people say when they say, I need more time or time's going so quickly is I need more memories because memories are like individual slots. They're like little cuts in the cake that identify how many pieces you've gone through in that time. And if you're spending every day doing the night five, driving to work, the same route to work, the same conversation, the same Netflix and Doritos on an evening time, like, why would your brain make memories from that?

Like if you want to make memories, make something be worthwhile of being memorable. And again, it's that the sort of beauty of getting older is that you can increase the resolution of how you look at things to make stuff new. You have this wider context, you have all of these different examples, and then you can start to look at stuff with a little bit more dexterity, right, a little bit finer grain, and you go, fuck, like that's cool. I didn't think that I didn't think that that would have been cool before, and you can compare it to you 10 years ago and go, 10 years ago, me would have been embarrassed about this, but me now thinks this is awesome.

Mm-hmm. To your point, too, about making memories and stuff, fully in, and like, totally, you get stuck in a routine and you just realize, like, did I just waste a year after work and, you know, woke up, drove, went to work, came back home, turned on Netflix, had dinner, went to bed. So what we're doing is I'm in a place in Atlanta right now. We've rented it out.

We're just gonna drive across the country for five, six months and just stay in different cities a few weeks at a time where you're so taken out of your routine that you can't help but make memories. You can't help but build memories. To do as much stuff possible as outdoors, to experience just all these new things, and again, this is kind of a blessing of the current situation, is to take something that is a negative and to figure out how can I, actually let me say, well, it's's definitely negative, but take a new kind of scenario that you're in, and you kind of think, how do I turn this to my advantage?

And so the fact that we don't have to be in an office, the fact that we don't have to be in any particular city, we're using that to our advantage to go explore cities and to go explore an age like we're going to drive up through Yellowstone, we're going to drive up through some of the most beautiful parts of the United States and park there and work for a month or whatever it might be. And that's something that I'm going to remember that. I'm very confident. I will remember that. So, yeah, totally on board. And it was hard that we got an unprogrammed, our monkey brain, so being able to even enjoy it.

And it's so easy to get back in these comfortable habits. And one thing that you were talking about, and I thought of when you were talking about kind of this Buddhism and Eastern philosophy, part of me feels like the reason that some of the stuff matters and exists and even resonates now, it's almost like we're trying to find solutions to the fact that we live in a world now that we're no longer designed for. So obviously, we're not designed to live in society. We're not like all this, we're not. So obviously, we're not designed to live in society. We're not like, all this, we're not designed for agriculture, we're not designed to live in houses like this.

We were designed to kind of be in small groups and to travel. And now obviously, we're not designed to work eight hours a day, ten hours a day, whatever it is. We were designed to work like two or three, hunt something, gather something, maybe make a fire, maybe make some shelter, and then relax for most of the day. That's not our most productive, but then all of a sudden we need a better agriculture, you got a 10 to the crops all day, and then there's industry, and so now we're stuck, and there's no way evolution can keep up with that.

We've hacked our own brains. That to me is honestly what these ways of living are, is how do we take the society that we made that is not ideal for our systems and make it so that we're able to live in this environment that there's no way we're designed for this. It's interesting you brought that up. Shane Parrish, Phanam Street has a quote where he says, tradition is a set of problems, a set of solutions for which we have forgotten the problems. of problems, a set of solutions for which we have forgotten the problems. It's like these questions that have been asked. I had Alex O'Connor, Cosmic Skeptic on the other day, talking and teaching us about ethics. What ethics is? And he was giving us some of the

classical, ethical thought experiments that you can do. Like, would you push a fat man onto the bridge to stop the train from hitting five people? What if it was three people? What if it was one person, but it was a baby and blah blah blah. And he was saying so much of this stuff is just brought from classic texts and then repurposed. These are the fundamental questions that people have been asking since the beginning of time, since the beginning of working out what morality is, what ethics are, how to lead a good life, what it means to be a good person and to live well. Do you think those questions, it hasn't, do you think those questions started?

So let's say, just to make things easy, let's say that we've been, who we are, you know, DNA wise for 100,000 years, okay? And let's say that society has existed for 10,000 years. Go like agriculture roughly starts around then. Have we had those questions for 10,000 years or 100,000 years? That's a really good question. There's an interesting thing to do with

the Maslow's hierarchy of needs. And I think that one of the challenges we have, the existential crisis that people sometimes come up against and the melancholy and the feelings of hopelessness and meaninglessness and the increase in suicide that we see in the modern world, I think a big part of that may be due to the fact that the bottom levels of that pyramid are very well looked after. That if all that you want from life is to not freeze to death and to find some berries today, it's very easy to get a positive feedback mechanism from that. So, if it's 100,000 years ago and you're living somewhere that's real cold in the winter, surviving winter is like actualizing. That is you reach the peak of what you wanted to do. Whereas now when you can Uber, Michelin, star food

from around the corner to your house while you watch Netflix on your Amazon or all of your clothes that you need and do whatever else like Airbnb yourself a holiday, like the convenience is so high, those answers, those questions have been answered, which means that the things further up, which are more existential, more melancholy, more abstract, they require high levels of complexity and sophistication to even think about what's happening. You have to do self-development work to get to the top of that pyramid for the most part, unless you end up having to be lining up with a life which is perfectly aligned with your values, which tends to be quite rare, it seems. You're going to have these challenges.

Like, you're going to come up against stuff that makes you think like, why am I here? What am I doing with my life? But if avoiding a sabertoothed tiger, or like I managed to make a new spear today, like if that's actualization for you, then it's a little bit, it's bizarrely almost easier to feel, to reach the top of it. So I think that some of the more existential questions that we've come up against about what it means to lead a good life, I think that the luxury questions, the questions that can only be asked in a time of abundance rather than scarcity. I'm aware that there's still been serious times of scarcity throughout the last 10,000 years, but significantly less. As soon as you've got agriculture and you can trade and you've got security and you're living in bigger groups

Those questions come to the forefront because previously there would have never had to have been asked But and maybe this is all just a manifestation of Neurocy because we live in societies anyways, you know, it's like We've got you know when you put everyone in a city, you've got new problems. You've got more conflict. You've got strangers that you don't recognize. And so we've got all these modern anxieties or whatever it might be that are a product of this. Like, yeah, it's more complicated, but maybe it should be simpler. Like why we're inventing, we're inventing problems that don't have to necessarily exist.

Why wouldn't I love to make a spear and nap for most of the day under a sun, under a tree? Obviously, you are still finding mates, you are still finding love. Love is 100,000 years old, or at least a sensation of it. It sounds pretty good. The problem is you need everyone to jump into it. Everybody get on board. Right. Yeah, everyone, literally everyone has to be a boy.

We're two, we're way past it that we can't go back to it. So that's why you got to figure out like the self-actualization techniques to make do with the society that we're in, you know, the hand that you're dealt. Well, think about Diojenis, right? One of the first cynics. He was living in a pot, which he was

like literally living in the thing that people used to urinate in. And yet he was, this is two and a half thousand years ago, and he was talking about casting off possessions that living simply is the key to a happy life. There's this story where Alexander the great went to go meet him and said, Diojean is, if I should not be Alexander, I would wish to be you. And he basically replied and said, yes, I'm not surprised. He said, is there anything I command half of the world? Is there anything that you would want? And he replied and said, yes, for you to get out of my sun. And replied and said, yes, for you to get out of my sun. And you think like when you have someone back then, there's the level of abundance present in ancient Athens was nowhere near

as much as we have now. And yet, you still have philosophers and people who are talking about casting off possessions, casting off desires, stripping themselves back the ascetic lifestyle. And look at what we're seeing now in the modern era, the minimalist movement. We're seeing people who are living lives with 40 possessions and in apartments that are a couple hundred square feet. And this van life thing, this van life thing, which is like, you're like the glamping version

of van life at the moment where you've got. We're staying in the Airbnb's. I'm getting a fresh hour. I talk a big game, but I'm not living a van. I'm going to cost him to certain things. Yeah, I'm like pooping in a up. Yeah, that's a big one for me. Maybe one of them will have a bed day and I'll get lucky. That would be really good. But yeah, dude, I think, I don't know, man. It would be interesting if everyone was able to cast it off. And I think everyone asks themselves this question a little bit.

You know, you look at a dog. Anyone who's ever spent a lot of time looking at a dog and getting pure joy from one, will have looked at it and thought, fuck, it would be so easy to be that dog. Like, to be my dog, I would not have to have a concern, I would be loved, I would be fed, I would be watered. The question of whether or not that's an option, I don't know. I genuinely don't. You would have to be incredibly bauzy to say, look, this is my commitment. I know the things that make me happy in life. But I definitely think that if we look to the people that are older than us as examples of an evolution of lifestyle and or ideas that show where where our

projection up trajectory is likely to go. Most people end up leading a simpler life as they get older than when they were younger. It's like you have a state of disorder going to order, right? You have like this kind of bizarre entropy thing going on, but within Apple's lifestyle design, you know, you look at the Dan Bills' Aryans of this world or anyone that's 18, you're excited by everything. And rightly so. But look at your grandad that's 70 years old, 75 years old. He's just happy going to watch the football and the Saturday afternoon, chilling out, reading his book, doing this and the other. Like, what does that tell us? That tells us probably that given all of the choices of things within the world, there are a few simple pleasures that people will tend to ward.

And I wonder how much we can shortcut our own path to get there by using people that are older than us and have allowed this evolution, this AB split testing of lifestyles to say, well, maybe I'll try that a little bit sooner. Maybe I try and get there a little bit earlier. It's probably easier said than done. It reminds me of something, I think Jim Carrey has this quote. Something along the lines of, I wish everyone could be a millionaire, so that they would realize it's not the answer to anything. And it can is the same thing.

It's like, you don't think sitting on the porch and having a cup of coffee in the morning is going to be like the best there ever is. You're like, no, I've got to go travel and I've got to do this experience and that experience and get going to Vegas and do whatever. And then once you do it, it's like you have to have the comparison. You have to know that like, was it actually really that great? You know what's nice is just being peaceful here, just sitting and enjoying this moment with someone that I enjoy talking to or even solitude in yourself.

And so I don't know that there is a shortcut to it. The 70 year old does it because the 70 year old did the other shit and was like, this is too much of a hassle. This is an enjoyable. This is what I love. I like this football team. I like watching it or I like drinking sweet tea

on the porch at sunset. And you realize that's what happiness is about, and that's why you realize it's not about getting a bunch of stuff. Like at the end of the day, anything behind me could disappear tomorrow. And if you're attached to that stuff, it's bringing you the wrong kind of happiness

is not happiness anyways. Well, look at what Elon Musk said on Joe Rogan. Joe was like, so Elon, why are you selling all of your possessions? your possessions He says because it's an attack vector and he's right and attachment to anything is a weakness Because that thing can be taken away from you now There's certain things that you don't want to not be attached to like your family and the people that you love and your friends and the passions that you have in life and the interests and so on and so forth there is Probably a million caveats that I'm gonna get criticized about for that like evolution of ideas, just do what old people do. Basically, let's all just be old age pensioners at the mid 20s. But one of them is a Naval quote.

It is easy to fulfill your material desires than to renounce them. It's like significantly easier to go and buy a ten-year-old beat-up truck after your last car was a Ferrari, then to go through life wondering what it's like to drive a Ferrari. And part of it is going to be a selection bias for the fact that those people might have completed a bunch of the stuff that they've done. So I had Aubrey Marcus on the show about a year ago and he said I was like it's what is a good life to you and he said like to live, you know, to do the things, like to take the drugs, not all of the drugs, to have the experiences, to go to the places, to make love, to laugh, to see these things, to build the business,

to fail building the business, you know, like all of the different things, because that is what life is. I don't know how much of that you can shortcut, and I don't know how much of that you could just pass off and say, well, I don't choose to do this. You know, anyone that's ever worked on a project that they really don't like, you know, like, oh, there's just been a bit of a grind and you're there again and you're like, why am I doing this to myself? Like I could just go outside and just have a cup of sweet tea and look at the night sky and I'd be perfectly happy. Have I ratcheted up the level of complexity that my life is required to fulfill to a

point which is so unbelievably chaotic that basically I've detached myself away from the vast majority of stuff that would have truly made me happy. And in a society of abundance like we've got now, hypernormal stimuli from our mobile devices and the artificial light that we've got, which is playing around with Asakadian rhythm and diets that are misaligned to us and living for longer, like living for so much longer than we've ever lived before, like, I don't know, man. I don't know. Yeah, it's for the most part. Well, this is what I love too, is like so many of these problems

that we have. There's old solutions to them. That's why, again, we'll just go back to evolutionary psychology, because apparently this is like a fanboy conversation of psych. But you look at, like, you're not feeling well. You're feeling over what? You're feeling lethargic. Like, look at your diet.

What did people use to eat? Like they these are all modern elements Again, like you're feeling sleepy. You're feeling like you don't have enough energy. What are you doing physically? Like are you mimicking what what they were doing? What are you doing for your sleep? Like so many of these problems Can be solved with with this ancient wisdom or this just really what comes natural to us and and we've got it like sometimes you got to shake yourself out of it. And again, I'm just as guilty of it as an expert and there's plenty of times where I get

lost on Twitter at you know 10 pm at night trying to go to bed. I justify it because I say it's from my job but but still it's you know there's all these like the secret to me or like if anyone asks like what's a secret to life It's think about about you know 15,000 years ago how people would have lived and just try to mimic that as much as possible And and it's again, it's easier said than done and we live in a different society where you need money You need resources you need these things to survive and get by but just kind of know where you're these things to survive and get by, but just kind of know where your, like what your end objective is

into getting this stuff, you know? And maybe, and to your point about the Ferrari, some people just need to get the Ferrari just to know that like, all right, I did it, and I'm, you know, like I don't have that yearning anymore and I scratch that edge and I don't need another Ferrari and you know, it brought me a moment of happiness or even a year of happiness but after a while it's just your car you know it's just something that sits in your garage.

I love it man I think that's a good point to end there dude I really enjoyed this so people want to check out your stuff where should they go. Super easy go on Instagram go on Twitter m, M-K-O-B-A-C-H. That's M-Cobach. Yeah, follow along. I've got a new job that I'm super excited about. Can you tell what it is? Are we?

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, certainly. No, no, no. It's a tech startup. It's called Fast. And the reason I joined is, one, I wanted to get into the startup life. It's kind of the same idea. It's like you wanna, you know,

you wanna try new things. Like I have this itch. It's the same kind of Ferrari thing. Like I wanted to join a startup and I'll build something. And if it succeeds, I'm unbelievably happy. And if it fails, I still get to say, hey, I tried to do this new thing. And I got to be part of it.

What's the first part of this? What are they? So their goal is to make everything that you hate filling out on the internet only one click. So anytime you want to buy something, you don't have to fill out your credit card, your email, your name, all that stuff. It already knows who you are, and you just click buy it. Anytime that you need to identify,

like the bigger picture is anytime you need to identify who you are on the internet, as long as that website has their API in it, you will be able to just click that one button you're done. So you can think like, you know, I'm not gonna give away any secrets or anything, but literally anything you ever do online that you need to prove who you are,

and I'm not talking social security number, but like literally ordering something online, you need to prove who you are, that they would then be the one stop shot for all that information. That's cool. It's like a digital passport online, where it automatically just shows it, and the website lets you through and does the thing. Fuck man, I need Amazon one-could-

Think about how much time, yeah. Think about how much time you waste filling out forums online. How many times you would have bought something online, and you're like, eh, I don't feel like filling this out. Never mind. I can't check out as a guest. I'm not doing that on that website because it's too much of an arson for me to enter my emails and sign up to their newsletter. Yep, and imagine and you can see like, yeah, you can imagine it for newsletters. You can imagine it literally. It's not just payments, but it's anything you need to log into. You would you would do so many different things if all you had to do was click in your end. I like it, man.

That's cool. And I'm going to guess you'd be able to integrate that with password managers and all sorts of other stuff so that it would be like, that's the dream man, a seamless world where I don't have to fill forms in, fuck you now. Can you hurry up and get off holiday and get this start up moving, please please so that

I don't have to fill forms in. I don't. I've already started. We're doing it, man. It's the launch. But it's just the reason you join too. It's such this pain point that everyone gets. It's if you think about it, the internet's like buying stuff online is 30 years old and

it hasn't changed. It hasn't updated once. It is such a hassle of a process and it should be so much better. So we're hoping to make it better. So I love it, man. Fingers crossed. I love it. You ever see the button, you just got to promise me you click it.

If you ever see the button, it's just fast, black. You'll recognize it. You'll get my pick. You'll get my pick. I'll pick this. Don't you worry, you will get my pick. Well, that's good. Dude, thank you so much for your time, Matthew.

Everyone that is listening, if you enjoyed this episode, go and give Matthew a follow online. Let me know what you thought as well, if any of the comments about Buddhism or your child's driving the space ship. If any of that stuff resonated, you know where to get me at Chris WillX, where if you follow me like, share and subscribe and all that good stuff. For now, Matthew, thanks man. Thank you, I I loved it man had a great time.