The Startup Ideas Podcast - Why You Need A Digital Detox with Andrew Wilkinson
Episode Date: May 19, 2022Does dopamine have you hooked on tech? If you find yourself unable to put down the phone, it may be time for a detox. Entrepreneur and investor Andrew Wilkinson walks us through his personal addiction... and how getting off the grid for a technological rehab helped him bring back his inner fire. Andrew is a father, original thinker, and co-founder of Tiny, a not so tiny company that buys internet businesses. He joins hosts Sahil Bloom and Greg Isenberg to explore creative boredom, original thinking, building your board of personal advisors, and humans inability to manage risk.SPECIAL THANKS TO OUR SPONSORS►► This episode is brought to you by Fundrise. Fundrise is on a mission to use technology to build a better financial system for the individual. With over $2.4B AUM and 250k active investors, it’s the largest direct-to-investor real estate investor platform in America.Their platform is so easy to use and they make it so easy to diversify your portfolio. For a limited time if you sign-up, you can get $10 bonus. Just go to fundrise.com/room.►► This episode is brought to you by LMNT. LMNT is a delicious electrolyte drink mix with all of the things you need and none of the junk. It contains a science-backed electrolyte ratio: 1000 mg sodium, 200 mg potassium, 60 mg magnesium. LMNT can help prevent and eliminate headaches, muscle cramps, fatigue, sleeplessness, and other common symptoms of electrolyte deficiency. It tastes amazing and is great after a workout or one too many drinks :)Right now LMNT is offering our listeners a free sample pack with any order. That’s 8 single serving packets FREE with any LMNT order. Get yours at DrinkLMNT.com/HAPPENS. And it’s so good they have a no questions asked refund policy but you won’t need it.►► Want more community? Learn more here: http://trwih.comTHIS EPISODEAndrew Wilkinson: https://twitter.com/awilkinsonSahil Bloom: https://twitter.com/SahilBloomGreg Isenberg: https://twitter.com/gregisenbergProduction & Marketing Team: https://penname.co/FIND US ON SOCIALTwitter: https://twitter.com/_trwihInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/_trwihTikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@_trwihWeb: https://trwih.comSpotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/6aB0v6amo3a8hgTCjlTlvhApple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/where-it-happens/id1593424985
Transcript
Discussion (0)
We're all just regurgitating these memes over and over and over again.
And actually having original thought is very unique, right?
And you don't get that unless you're spending time actually having deep learning on something.
What's going on, man?
Thanks for taking the time to join.
Yeah, it's great to be here, guys.
So where are you right now?
Are you at home?
Are you traveling?
I'm in my office in Victoria.
So we, instead of having a really expensive office downtown, we actually bought a really
beautiful house on a cliff in Victoria. So I'm looking out at a amazing bay and it's super sunny out
and amazing. So yeah, I really don't know why more people don't use houses as offices.
It's probably going to become more of a trend now, you know, in light of COVID and the flexibility.
And honestly, like Starlink and being able to do high quality work from literally anywhere
in the world as that continues to expand, I just imagine more people are going to buy a ranch
in Idaho and go build out an amazing office.
And you can have like a few houses on the property where people come and live and
you like have amazing people come in and out.
I mean, it sounds like a dream.
I don't.
I think it sounds like a dream, but I think it's oversimplification.
I think it's like saying like, oh, I'll have a baby and it's going to be awesome
because it's going to have cute little feet and it's going to look like me.
And they're not imagining 2 a.m. wakeups and shit.
And in in that instance, the 2 a.m. wakeups are you have to build fences and deal with all
these logistics.
You're in the middle of nowhere.
You miss people.
You want to go to a coffee shop.
I know, Greg, you like being kind of isolated sometimes,
but I'm like, I need to be in a city.
I thrive on isolation.
Thrive on it.
Like, I love to just, you know, in my little town in Quebec,
and I look out and there's 95 acres of just like nothing, basically.
For me, that's the best in terms of like getting, like,
you know, creative output is the best.
Like when you're writing your manifesto, you mean?
Yeah, when I'm writing my manifesto, exactly, my memoirs.
Yeah.
When are you sending out the packages?
When do they start?
Yeah.
That's when I get down in Miami.
I'll look forward to getting the FBI call to where it happens.
Exactly.
Today's episode is brought to you by Element,
a tasty electrolyte drink mix with everything you need and nothing you don't.
That means lots of salt with no sugar.
It contains a science-backed electrolyte ratio, a thousand milligram sodium, 200 milligrams potassium,
and 60 milligrams of magnesium, but none of the junk.
No sugar, no coloring, no artificial ingredients, no gluten, no fillers, no BS.
I absolutely love it and how it's fit into my lifestyle.
Whether you're keto, low-carb, paleo, or just want to feel better and more active,
element is the drink for you.
I drink it after an intense workout to replenish my electrolytes.
I also drink it after a few too many whiskeys late at night.
It totally helps with the hangovers.
When you sweat, the primary electrolyte lost is sodium.
Athletes can lose up to seven grams per day.
When sodium is not replaced, it's common to experience muscle cramps and fatigue.
The same goes for after a big night out drinking.
Element will fit into your lifestyle no matter who you are.
Right now, Element is offering my listeners a free sample pack with any order.
That's eight single serving packets free with any element order.
It's a great way to try all eight flavors or share element with a salty friend.
Get yours at drinkelement.com slash happens.
This deal is only available through my link.
You must go to D-R-I-N-T-com slash happens to take advantage of this special offer.
Try Element. You won't regret it.
If you're anything like me, your portfolio is a mix of the usual suspects, stocks, bonds, and mutual funds.
Maybe you've even dabbled in some alternative assets, like crypto.
But those investments can be incredibly unpredictable.
You know what typically isn't unpredictable?
Apartment buildings, rental homes, industrial facilities, places we go every day to work, eat, and live.
That's all private real estate.
And thanks to its historical stability, as well as its reputation as a reputation as a
reliable income stream, these investments could be a valuable addition to your portfolio.
This is where Fundrise comes in. Fundrise is changing the game when it comes to real estate investing
and making this powerful asset class easily available to investors like you and me.
Their easy-to-use app lets you build a real estate portfolio tailored to meet your goals.
It's a great way to benefit from real estate's many perks while adding some much-needed
diversification to your portfolio. So join over 250,000 other investors, building a better portfolio
with private real estate. Signing up is easy. Just head over to fundrise.com slash room. Again,
that's F-U-N-D-R-I-S-E dot com slash room to get started today. I do think, I mean, look,
it's balanced, right? Like, I think I would enjoy being isolated and having that experience
for maybe a month or a couple months a year.
But doing it full time and around the clock,
I agree with you, Andrew.
I think it would be, you know,
it would drive me insane probably to not have the human connectivity.
But look, like one of the things,
one of my first encounters with you, Andrew,
was a thread that you wrote on Twitter,
I don't know, that's probably close to a year ago now,
or maybe October of last year,
where you basically wrote about your experience of getting off the grid
completely, both, you know, physically,
but also from a technology perspective.
And so I'm just, I'm curious what precipitated that and to get a little bit of context
around that for anyone that might not have seen it.
Sure.
Yeah.
I mean, so basically over COVID, I just got into this habit of constantly being on Twitter,
constantly checking my email, as everyone else did, just constantly searching for entertainment
on the internet and losing the kind of day-to-day touch points that I had of seeing friends
and stuff, which calms your brain.
And so I got to the state by the end of July where I was just waking up every single day and I was miserable.
And the way I would describe the misery isn't, I want to kill myself.
I can't get her to bed.
It was, you know, like when you're scrolling Netflix on a Friday night and you know you want to watch a movie,
but there's nothing that will scratch the itch, right?
No movie is good.
You keep stopping movies, starting new ones.
You're pissed for not choosing the right thing.
That's how my entire life felt.
Nothing was satisfying.
And so I didn't know what was happening physiologically, but I just knew something was
off. And so I just basically went up to, we have a lakehouse and I just said, fuck it. I'm turning off
all my devices. I'm cutting off everything. I'm putting up an auto responder. I told my assistant,
like call me if there's an emergency, but otherwise I don't want to hear from you. And I did no music,
no podcast, no device, no screens, no anything for a full month. And I just read books. All I would do
is go on my Kindle and read books and hang out with my kids and kind of occupy my time. And I'm
And I didn't know what happened.
I didn't really understand what I was doing.
But effectively, in retrospect, I was doing a detox.
This is like when someone's a drug addict or an alcoholic, you go and you go to rehab and
you spend three to six weeks just not doing that thing.
And it kind of resets your cravings and your brain and your dopamine system.
And so I got back after a month and things that would have been very unsatisfying were very
satisfying. So walking into a cafe and hearing music sounded like the greatest thing I'd ever heard.
Listening to a lecture on YouTube was like, you know, like glass of ice water and hell. Everything
was just incredibly satisfying. And so I was kind of on a quest. I was going, why is, well,
what did I do? Why did this work? What's the science behind it? And I happened to listen to an interview
that Andrew Huberman did with Dr. Anna Lemke from Stanford, who specializes in a dick.
And I listened to it only because I have an interest in opioid addiction.
I'd kind of researched the Sackler family and that whole story.
So I thought maybe I'd learn something.
And as I listened, I went, oh, my God, like she was talking about how addiction is not
just to drugs.
It can be to anything that stimulates the dopamine reward system.
So it can be eating a piece of chocolate.
It can be scrolling Instagram, listening to music, anything that fires you up and makes
you feel motivated. And the interesting thing they talked about was that there's this kind of
pleasure, pain, balance. So when you first do it, when you first eat the piece of chocolate
cake and you haven't done that in a long time, it's pure ecstasy. It's the best thing ever.
But if you do it every week, it gets less satisfying. If you do it every day, it gets very
unsatisfying. If you do it every hour, your body craves it and is in pain until it gets it.
But then it's not even, doesn't move the needle, doesn't make you feel good. You're just
constantly craving. And so effectively what I realized was I was a drug addict for Twitter,
for dopamine, and that I needed to detox. And frankly, I mean, like anyone else, you go to rehab
and you relapse. And I have now seven months later started to relapse, listen to podcasts,
constantly listening to Spotify, you know, going on podcasts, going on Twitter a little bit.
but I think it's an important habit to build for yourself to create those spaces.
So I decided every August I'm just fully sabbatical, no devices, and we'll see how that goes.
I have a few follow-up questions on it.
So first off, had you ever done something like this?
Like, had you ever even done, you know, like Greg kind of does like a one day per week detox,
like a Sabbath where he gets away from technology?
Had you ever done anything like this?
or was it the first time and you went cold turkey for the month?
I'd done it by accident.
So I have a friend who lives, his family lives off the grid on a remote island in BC,
and he took me there for three days.
And I remember feeling incredible.
You know, it's obviously very hard for the first, you know, day or so.
But I remember feeling really incredible, but not knowing, not knowing what I'd done.
But no, I mean, it was the first time in 20 years.
I'd been without a device for more than 24 hours effectively.
And did you experience similar to a drug addict who goes to rehab?
Did you experience that the first 48 hours were excruciating silence?
Oh, yeah.
I was furious.
Like I was like literally, you know, when you stand up and you're tapping, you go to the
urinal and you're tapping your pocket?
Oh, shit, I forgot my phone.
That feeling of desperation, what am I going to do while I'm on the toilet or, you know,
you need it constantly.
I had that every five seconds.
And my kids, you know, we have this lakehouse and there's this little beach there.
And so I'd sit there reading with my kids there.
And even the instinct of, I need to take a photo and text it to my friends.
Or I need to capture this moment.
If I don't capture this moment, I haven't won or there's something wrong.
And removing that instinct was really, really helpful.
Because, you know, do you want to be present and remember it or do you want to just be taking photos of it and looking back at things you probably won't even look at?
right, that urge to text your friends and tell them about something you're doing is like the most
bizarre thing. I think the, the scary thing about what's happened with social products, like,
and I've worked on a lot of the large social products, the social products are gamified, but now
basically all apps are being gamified. Like Robin Hood, like, I just logged into Robin Hood this
morning and like I'm looking at like my net worth going up like crazy and going down like crazy.
Like that gets your heart jumping. And it's kind of happening to all spectrum of apps.
which is pretty scary.
I'm curious, you know, what your perspective is on that.
Well, I think it's the genies out of the bottle, right?
And I think there will be people who are ethical, you know, the work that Tristan Harris does
to try and coach some of these companies or up-and-coming companies to use this stuff for good.
There's actually a company I'm investing in right now.
I think it's still stealth.
So I'll be vague.
But effectively what they're trying to do,
they're a bunch of very experienced people in the gaming industry,
and they're trying to use this same dopamine pathway and biology to harness it for good.
So to teach kids things, to do it in a healthy way to kind of promote pro-social behavior and that kind of stuff.
And that's very interesting to me.
To me, these aren't things that we should all swear off, right?
I think they're good.
Dopamine is something that motivates us and moves us forward.
but that said, you don't want to be, you don't want to feel you're a rat in a maze being drawn, you know, down, down a, you know, down a path you don't want or understand.
Let's talk about that for a second.
Because we talk, Sahel and I are constantly talking about this.
So I'm made fun of a bit in my, in my friend group because I'm like the man.
For many reasons.
For many reasons.
For many reasons.
For one of them.
One of them.
Yeah.
But one of them is that I'm like a man.
of moderation. Like I'm, you know, if I'm going out, I'm only having one drink and I stick to it. And
if I say I'm not, you know, checking technology for 24 hours, I'm not checking technology. Other people
aren't like that. And so how do you, like, how do we, for people who aren't into moderation or
it's very difficult for them, what are some like ways for them to become more, you know,
Well, I'm very similar to you, actually.
So my friends would also, you know, when I was in my partying days, I would always go out and I'd only have three drinks, right?
It was always like, I will not drink, drink dinner.
I'll wait until we're at a club and then I'll drink three drinks, get buzzed, and then I'm going home by X time.
So I'm kind of similar to you.
The most effective thing is similar to what you do if you're an alcoholic, which is don't expose yourself to environments, people, et cetera, that will cause you to.
do that thing and then remove the stimuli from your home, from your office, et cetera. So I'm very,
they call this term self-binding. So the idea would be like, hey, I want to eat healthy when I'm at
home. A, I'm going to remove all of the unhealthy snacks from my pantry. I'm going to make it a real pain
in the ass to get to it. Yeah, sure, I can go drive and get it, but that's annoying. And then I'm
to have alternatives. So for me, for example, you know, for a while I was like snacking on all these
like shitty things at home, I now have, always have berries and I have pistachios and I have various
things that I just substitute. And I find when I'm craving something and I eat the healthy
alternative, I don't usually crave it afterwards. So that's been my approach to it. I also use
screen time very aggressively. So I have somebody else set my screen time pass code. I totally limit
my ability to look at news, social media for more than about two to three minutes a day. And that has
really deprogram my brain. Like, you know, I don't, I don't naturally just go to Twitter when I'm on my phone.
The problem is you search for a new thing. So it's like I might scroll my YouTube feed.
I might go to the Wall Street Journal. So I'm always trying to cut those pathways off.
Yeah, it's like environment hacking is kind of how I think of it generally is like when, you know,
you're trying to create a pattern change like that. You need to hack your environment so that your actual
systems can can adapt and change. Like I've always thought about a combination of environment hacking and then
just creating a new habit. Like I've written about this recently of basically this whole idea that
we've lost the ability to be alone and to be bored. And when I was a kid, I remember spending
hours like what I would typically define as bored, like wandering around outside, reading a book,
you know, doing literally nothing. And that was just we didn't have iPads. We didn't have
things and maybe I didn't have friends around. And so I was like outside and just walking around and
my parents didn't worry about where I was. And I think over time, we've just lost the ability to do
that. So I do like a 30 minutes a day no matter what of, I call it like creative boredom, but basically
just like walking around, no music, no podcasts, no phone, whatever. I carry around a little
notebook, which I just like carry with me everywhere and we'll write down things that come into
my head. And I find that those periods of boredom end up being when my best idea is actually
strike and it's no surprise i mean it's no surprise to me that that's the case but it is quite interesting
yeah no i think um i think it's a very um it's a very real problem and i think i said this to you
we were doing a call maybe a month ago there's a great quote on this by blaze pascal which is
all of man's miseries arise from an inability to sit quietly in a room by oneself right think about it
you can't just sit still, you can't have a moment of boredom. One of the things I did after this dopamine
fast was I said, you know, rule, I don't listen to things when I drive. So I just have these quiet
contemplative 20 minute drives everywhere I go. I've now slipped, obviously, given I relapsed. But
I do think those sorts of things are really, really helpful. And that experiencing boredom at some
time in your day is important. The way I kind of think about it, I remember a therapist said to me
10 years ago, she said, look, if you're an elastic band and, you know, drugs, alcohol,
stimuli, that's you pulling up on the elastic band, right? But the cost is going to be whatever the
equal reaction is on the other side. So an up, let's say you're a zero as a baseline and you go
to eight, you know, you do some MDMA and you go to eight. Well, you're going to go negative eight
for the next couple days after that. You're going to pay for it in the same vein if you are a zero
and you just allow yourself to be bored, and that's a negative two or a negative three,
probably for the next week you might have a rebound that you're going to be a plus three,
plus four.
So there's this idea of paying, you know, buying yourself happiness or selling yourself
future sadness.
I think of it as like reducing the amplitude.
Like if you're a wave, you know, the amplitude of the wave is like the distance from the
baseline that it swings.
And you know people, we all know people who are like this, you know, wild swings up and
down above and below the baseline. And I've always found that the most impressive people in the
world, like, find a way to just reduce the amplitude. Like, they never get too high. They never get
too low. And they have these, like, so everyone has waves, right? It's going to happen. You're going to
have things that spark happiness, things that spark joy, et cetera. And you're going to have
downward swings. But being able to, like, squeeze that into a tighter band is a real skill. And it's
something that I think needs to be honed. Have you guys heard of, it's Taleb, his concept of the noise
bottleneck? No. So it's pretty interesting and it relates to all of this. So basically he has this
concept called the noise bottleneck, which basically says that we assume that consuming more leads to
more information, more knowledge, et cetera. So you like, you know, if you're going to watch the news
for 30 minutes, that's great. But if you watch it for five hours, that's even better. Because
you just consume so much more information and you've got more insight, knowledge, et cetera,
and it accumulates in compounds.
His whole theory is that it's actually a paradox, basically,
where by consuming more information, the noise to signal ratio actually increases by bringing
more and more in.
And so your actual insight and knowledge goes down from consuming more.
And so you need to beware with certain things of consuming more and more actually leading
to an inverse relationship in terms of your growth and progress.
I think it applies so, I mean, he talked about it in the context of news.
I think it applies so broadly to different things that we're consuming where like more
and more actually leads to this massive bottleneck that is contrary to what you would believe,
but all of a sudden you're like, oh my God, I know nothing, even though I just consumed.
This is the fascinating thing is you end up with cocktail party knowledge, right?
So if you read the New York Times Wall Street Journal every day, I'll be at a cocktail party,
I can sound very smart for about two minutes on any topic, but I cannot go in depth, right?
I have no, I'm an inch deep and a mile wide.
And what I try and focus on the, I find the times where I'm actually learning the most.
I'm focused on long narratives of a single story.
And I'm looking at stuff that's happened five or 10 years ago where you have full context
and knowledge.
I think looking at day-to-day news is like looking at a stock ticker and going, oh my God,
it's up 1%.
It's down 2%.
It's not that meaningful.
And what I've noticed as I've stripped news out of my day-to-day life for the most part
is that people will still tell me, right?
I will know if there's a nuclear bomb that goes off somewhere in the world or, you know,
the Twitter merger with Elon Musk.
I know all the details because friends text me and talk about it.
I don't need to be sitting there scanning my stock portfolio of news constantly and watching
the tickers.
So I really just try and focus on long form, longer narrative.
and kind of rear looking.
I just don't think there's any upside
and looking at what's happening in the moment.
The cocktail party knowledge point,
there's a great paper if you haven't read it.
I think it's Dan Liu on this whole thing
of cocktail party knowledge.
And incidentally, the people that have cocktail party knowledge,
he kind of ties to like cocktail party ideas.
Basically, the people that have that surface level of insight on something
are also the most likely to be actively proposing solutions
to problems that they don't understand in any level
of depth. And it's like this fascinating phenomenon. You go to cocktail party in San Francisco.
Everyone there will talk to you and wax, you know, wax poetic about how they would fix,
you know, all of the deep challenges of San Francisco politics, a lot more challenging than that.
You have like surface level knowledge. It's easy to propose solutions.
Well, it's also not original knowledge, right? It hasn't come from contemplation. It's come from
regurgitation where I don't know if you've had this happen, but there's often these big podcasts where
I'll hear someone that gets interviewed and it's very much in the zeit.
So it's somebody that everybody knows, everyone listen to the same podcast.
And then I'll be sitting with a friend and he'll say something very interesting and insightful.
And I'll go, wait a minute.
I heard this on Tim Ferriss and I heard ex person say it.
And this is the thing.
We're all just regurgitating these memes over and over and over again.
And actually having original thought is very unique.
Right.
And you don't get that unless you're spending time actually having deep learning on something.
Is that why one of the reasons you live in,
Victoria, like to a lot of, especially the Americans listening, they don't even know where
Victoria is, probably.
There's like, oh, yeah, maybe it's in Canada or maybe it's in the West Coast, or maybe it's
near Vancouver, but for the most part, I think it's safe to say they don't even know where
it is.
And I know you were, you know, making lots of trips to San Francisco when you were growing
your business.
Were you ever tempted to move to San Francisco where, you know, the center of a lot of the
technology noise was, is?
I think it's difficult.
What is the Galilean relativity?
It's hard to understand a system when you're part of it.
And I think having distance from it actually gave me a lot of context and made me realize
that the things that those people wanted were not that important to me.
And I was able to be somewhat of an original because I was here.
I wasn't getting caught up in all the memetic desire of, you know, these people raised from
Sequoia.
that's how I measure my worth as a person.
Therefore, I need to go raise from Sequoia and move to San Francisco and BNYC.
So I think it saved me.
And I don't think I'd have a profitable at-scale business today if I had moved to San Francisco.
Did I ever get tempted by it?
Absolutely.
Was I intoxicated by the excitement of being there?
Yes.
Was it a contrast when I would go down there and talk to people who were fired up in the
startup world?
Yes.
I didn't have that in Victoria.
But what I ended up doing is just having a really great network of people who I'd
talked to on the phone and text, you know, just like today.
Like we're all interconnected.
We were still 10 years ago.
So I think that the nice thing about Victoria, and for those that don't know,
Victoria is about a 300,000 person city on the west coast of Canada on Vancouver Island.
So I'm about 30 minute flight from Seattle, 30 minute flight from Vancouver, Canada.
and there's something really nice about not needing to be a multi-billionaire, right?
You can actually, if you're in Victoria, if you can get a couple million bucks together,
you can basically have the best life of anyone in town.
And there's just not this endless ladder of achievement.
And so I felt like I won the game 10 years ago.
And from that point on, it was like, okay, now I can think about, you know, higher pursuits
or whatever I want to focus on.
Whereas if I'd been in the in San Francisco, I mean, I've got friends that are worth 200, 300, 500 million and they're still striving because they're not worth a billion.
I had one guy.
He's worth two billion dollars.
And he goes, oh, you know, this person's so rich.
And it was someone with $20 billion.
And I said, like, what?
Like, what can they do that you can't?
And the guy goes kind of quiet and glassy-eyed for a second.
And he just goes, super yacht.
And it's just like, what?
Like, who cares?
This is crazy.
Yeah, I mean, you bring up an interesting point on like the game.
You called it the game.
You know, I think of it as like the meta game.
Like, what is the game that we are all playing?
And is it a game that you want to be playing too?
And should you opt out of the game that you've been told you were going to play?
I spent the first seven years of my career in private equity, which is very much that game that you just said right there.
Right?
It's like, you know, unless you're a billionaire fund manager, you're nothing.
And, you know, the wealthy partners that have made 50 minutes.
million are still working 70, 80 hours a week because they're like, well, that guy has made a
billion or a few hundred million and we've got to raise bigger funds and I'm still stressed
and I'm not, you know, spending time with kids or whatever it is. And I always just thought it was
like, like, at some point I came to the realization that I was on that treadmill and thinking like,
okay, did I get a bigger bonus this year than last year and what did that person's, but why did they
get more than me and why didn't like I put in more work, whatever? Like you start having these weird,
weird pathways of thoughts.
And I remember having this one conversation that triggered it for me where one of the,
one of the people at another firm was was talking about one of the partners of that firm and saying
how, oh, he's the laziest guy ever.
And like that he, he worked so little and made all this money and like it's, it's so stupid.
And like they were saying it in a derogatory way.
And I said to the guy, I was like, wait, doesn't that just mean that he won the game?
Like he won the game. He made more money than everyone else by working way less. That sounds like an awesome thing. But there was this glorification of like the hours worked associated with getting there that just felt out of whack to me. So I just realized like, man, what is the game that we're all playing and why are we playing it? Totally. It's it's insane. And I mean, I don't know if you guys have read Wanting by Luke Harding or familiar with Mimetic Desire. How are you guys familiar? So effectively just high level.
you want what the people around you want.
So if you're a comedian, you want a Netflix special, if you're a musician, you might
want a Grammy.
You know, if you're a professional baker, you want to win Great British Bake Off, right?
Like, you just have these different desires.
And the concern I have whenever I'm competing in a game is I end up wanting the things
that everyone else wants.
So here we all are with nice hair, right?
we're all going to play the hair competition game make sure we always have nice hair if i lose my hair
i will literally think i'm going to die and i've lost all my worth have i no i probably look fine bald
hopefully don't have any weird moles under there but you know at the end of the day it's like i'm fine
but i've defined what happiness is but it's not intrinsic happiness it's totally external um
and it can be any metric right you talk to people and they're like what plane do you have right and and it's
like what like that the people just have crazy metrics that they value happiness on and at the end of the
day none of these things actually move the needle what moves the needle is doing things that you
intrinsically want where you would do it even if nobody was watching and you couldn't post it on
social media right so i mean it just changes right like gregg you and i have talked about like you
you you get to the thing that you thought was where you were going to get to and then your number
just changes and i've known so many people who were like oh
When I make $15 million, I'm done.
I'm just going to quit.
And then they make $15 million.
And then they're like, well, if I just got $50, 50 is the number where like, I'll just quit.
And then they get to $50 and it's $150.
And no matter what, the future that you're working towards just changes.
The number just changes.
I mean, it's the hedonic treadmill, right?
It's like this whole idea that we just adapt.
And happiness above $100,000 is like scientifically proven to not fundamentally change.
Above $100,000 a year where you can like basically get all the baseline things that
need in life and to take care of your family. At that point, the only thing that changes happiness
is big changes. So, like, you get the second house and all of a sudden, you're like, oh, sick,
I got a second house. I'm a baller. This is great. And then a week later, you're bitching about
how it's hard to maintain. And it's just the way it works. You like, you know, I got this house
in New York when we moved here and I was so happy. I was like, man, this place is amazing. And then
literally like a couple weeks later, I found myself in my own head complaining about, you know,
having to maintain, like it has a pool. I was like, oh, man, this pool is a pain in ass. I was like,
oh, two weeks later, I was so happy about having this house. And it was like my dream come true.
And you just find a way to adapt to it. And it makes- Also just accepting that misery is the human
condition, right? That's the baseline. That's zero, right? And you're always going to go back there.
You're going to over-analyze anything you have, right? And there's tools that can slightly
increase that to a one or a two. But at the end of the day, you will be miserable in some way at all
and that's okay and accepting that.
I actually have an iPhone reminder every day
and it just says being bored or sad is okay, right?
Like it's like it almost,
and it goes back to that model I was talking about before.
When I experience it, I go, I'm buying myself future happiness, right?
If you're anything like me, your portfolio is a mix of the usual suspects,
stocks, bonds, and mutual funds.
Maybe you've even dabbled in some alternative assets like crypto.
But those investments can be incredibly unpredictable.
You know what typically is.
isn't unpredictable? Apartment buildings, rental homes, industrial facilities, places we go every
day to work, eat, and live. That's all private real estate. And thanks to its historical
stability, as well as its reputation as a reliable income stream, these investments could be
a valuable addition to your portfolio. This is where Fundrise comes in. Fundrise is changing
the game when it comes to real estate investing and making this powerful asset class easily available
to investors like you and me.
Their easy-to-use app lets you build a real estate portfolio tailored to meet your goals.
It's a great way to benefit from real estate's many perks while adding some much-needed
diversification to your portfolio.
So join over 250,000 other investors building a better portfolio with private real estate.
Signing up is easy.
Just head over to fundrise.com slash room.
Again, that's F-U-N-D-R-I.
i s e dot com slash room to get started today today's episode is brought to you by element a tasty electrolyte drink
mix with everything you need and nothing you don't that means lots of salt with no sugar it contains a
science-backed electrolyte ratio a thousand milligram sodium 200 milligrams potassium and 60 milligrams of
magnesium but none of the junk no sugar no coloring no artificial ingredients no gluten no
fillers, no BS. I absolutely love it and how it's fit into my lifestyle. Whether your keto, low-carb,
paleo, or just want to feel better and more active, element is the drink for you. I drink it after an
intense workout to replenish my electrolytes. I also drink it after a few too many whiskeys late at night.
It totally helps with the hangovers. When you sweat, the primary electrolyte lost is sodium. Athletes can
lose up to seven grams per day. When sodium is not replaced,
It's common to experience muscle cramps and fatigue.
The same goes for after a big night out drinking.
Element will fit into your lifestyle no matter who you are.
Right now, Element is offering my listeners a free sample pack with any order.
That's eight single serving packets free with any element order.
It's a great way to try all eight flavors or share Element with a salty friend.
Get yours at DrinkElement.com slash happens.
This deal is only available through my.
link. You must go to
D-R-I-N-K-L-M-T-com
slash happens to take advantage
of this special offer. Try Element.
You won't regret it.
So how do you build slow?
Like, for both of you, I mean, this is a question for both of you guys,
because my wiring, as Greg knows,
and we have a lot of conversations about this just as friends,
because I've learned a lot from him on this front,
is like my wiring is balls to the wall,
for lack of a better way to put it.
Like, I just want to go, put my head down,
and run through a wallet, whatever it is I'm doing. And it drives me insane sometimes because I take on way too
much. I'm not good at saying no to things. I chase every opportunity rather than being deliberate about
the best opportunities to really take on and the ones that are going to optimize my situation and
happiness. It leads me down a lot of bad paths. You guys, I perceive, you know, both you,
Andrew with tiny capital, which I want to hear you explain more about and Greg with, you know,
everything that you're working on now, I think are both really deliberate about what you take
on what you say no to. And I'm just curious how you've developed that instinct and what advice you'd
give to people that are trying to kind of get off a treadmill and make that change.
Well, I mean, I've been doing this for 17 years. And I'd say the first seven years were me
literally any business idea. I had no idea how to filter out good and bad. I would just do it.
And it would drive my team insane. I would throw a spaghetti all over the wall and nothing would
stick and I would pursue all these stupid business ideas, say yes to everything and have shiny
object syndrome. And after a very long time of doing that, I realized that it didn't make me happy
and that I was basically the guy walking into the gym and trying to bench press 300 pounds on day
one. So over time, I just learned that makes me unhappy. And I started learning the skills of
saying no and filtering out, you know, the bad ideas. So for me personally, I just had to learn it
over time. It just took time and I went through all that same stuff of being miserable, being
over-scheduled, you know, saying yes too much, starting dumb businesses, everything.
So that for me, it's just the only way I seem to be able to learn is to stick forks and
electrical sockets and figure it out. For me, I would say it comes natural to me. I remember in
the third grade, I got glasses. I had to wear glasses. My mom bought me these. They were Ralph Lauren
glasses that were designer and they're really expensive and, you know, I don't know if we,
you know, I didn't come from a poor family, but like it was a lot of money for, for to,
to sort of spend on it. And I remember we went on a class trip the next day to Quebec City.
And we're, we're on this boat. And it's like, you know, me and my three best friends and we're
kind of on the railing, just kind of looking around at the city. And all of a sudden, I can feel
my glasses falling down. And I just remember everything kind of like stopped and like my glasses were
falling down. And I had just told the story to my friends how these like were expensive and I kind of
felt bad about it. And like I was like in my mind, I was like, no, you know? And you know, I,
all of a sudden like glasses hit hit the ocean. And I just remember thinking to myself, I could either
be upset about this or just accept it for what it is. Like I'm not going to jump into the ocean. Like
I'm not, you know, it's freezing in there and it's it's gone. Right. So I think like naturally I've
always had that just built in. I will say though when I moved to San Francisco, unlike you,
Andrew, like I grew up in Montreal and the weird thing about Canada is you're kind of like,
you're so close right? To America. Like Montreal is a, it's 40 miles. It's a 40, actually, it's a 40
minute drive to the New York state border. So you're so close. You're looking at like the center of the
center of the world, New York, you know, New York City. And, but you're not there. So I moved to San
Francisco because I was like, all right, I want to be in it. And I got caught up with the noise.
And why I go like, why I think it's important that people have a Victoria or have a, you know,
my small town in Quebec is because it's important to kind of spend a few.
minutes, months, weeks, whatever it is, to just sort of center yourself and be like, what really
matters to me?
Well, this is, how do you, I mean, to that, like, broader point, how do you avoid the, like,
comparison trap?
Because, like, for Andrew or for you, Greg, if you're going to do things slow and
feel really fulfilled from doing that personally and individually, I think that's amazing and a great
thing.
and you're going to come you know you can compound wealth over the long term with something like tiny and you're building and you're trying to build something enduring and sustainable and lasting but the challenge i've always faced and i think that a lot of young people face is you're constantly hit with this barrage of like to your point earlier andrew so-and-so raised from sequoia at a billion after launching the company you know two weeks ago paradigm investing at a billion for some new crypto thing that my friend started you know so-and-so made Forbes 20 under 20 or whatever the you know you know
the latest accolade is that Forbes charges for to put people in. No offense to, actually, I guess,
offense to Forbes. And, you know, how do you avoid that aspect of it? Well, I think two things.
One, I realized what it meant. So I've always thought that raising money, at first I'd be impressed.
I go, oh, wow, you know, Sequoia invested a billion dollar valuation. The $100 million,
you go, oh, wow, did they sell their stock? They got a $100 million windfall? And it's like, no, no, no,
like Sequoia, who are like the most intense MFers in the world, just join the board.
They're going to hold a gun to that person's head and say, you need to grow your company 300% a year.
You need to spend as much money as possible to go there.
And that CEO's life is shit.
That's the equivalent of somebody saying, I'm going out, I'm putting myself into personal debt,
and I'm getting credit cards at 30% annualized interest.
To me, I'm just like, oh, no, I don't want that once I knew what it was.
So that was fine.
And the cool thing about what I did, and I'm sure Greg has had the same experience, is my business, Meta Lab was selling pickaxes to gold miners in Silicon Valley.
So we would provide the services to help them build their business, design, development, et cetera.
And we didn't take the risk.
So whether the company fails or not, we're not risking alongside of them.
And I got to be a fly on the wall in a lot of these board meetings and conversations and see the tremendous stress and misery that these founders were.
and then I would compare it to my life and I'd go, sure, you know, my company is not worth
$100 million, but I'm making $500K a year, a couple million bucks a year, living a great life in
Victoria.
No, this is pretty good.
Number two was once I understood compounding and I could do basic math, I realized that I was
going to be way wealthier than any of the people that I knew, even the people who had billion
dollar companies because I just knew that if I was compounding my capital and reinvesting, you know,
80% of what I made, eventually the numbers would get huge. And I kept, I built a spreadsheet where I was
like, okay, in 2010, where will I be at in 2015, 2020, 2020, 2025? And when I started noticing that I was
actually following the trend line, I was like, okay, this compounding stuff works. And it felt like
the tortoise and the hair, right? You're just slowly chugging along. The hair is running like a maniac and
getting exhausted and I'm just slowly compounding at, you know, 25% a year. And now I, you know,
when I see someone who's got more money or whatever it is, I just go, okay, well, if I just keep
compounding, you know, I'll be good. That separation of perception from reality that you mentioned
is such an important one. And I think candidly, it's just like there's an information gap.
There's probably a business in just like providing more open insight and information around the way
these things work. Like I thought I just watched the new WeWork
series with Jared Leto and Hathaway, which if people haven't seen, it's on Apple TV. It's
pretty exceptional. I thought it was really, really well done and very cringe, just as
cringe as you hope it to be. But one of the things I thought was interesting, I watched it
with my wife. She doesn't understand, you know, the way startups and funding work. And it led to
a lot of interesting discussions where like at the very end of the show, you know, there's
spoiler alert, I suppose. There's this scene where like, I think it's Jamie Diamond is talking to
Adam Newman to basically convince him to step down as CEO. And Adam's like, I'm never going to go out.
I won't do it. And Jamie Diamond is like, well, here's how it's going to play out. Wework is going to
run out of cash. The company is going to go bankrupt. We've loaned you $380 million against your
shares in that company that are going to be worth zero. You still have to pay us back for that.
And so you, you just ran this $44 billion company or a hero of the world, are literally going to be financially ruined for the rest of your life.
And people, I mean, it was so shocking to my wife.
She was like, wait, but they have that apartment and the house in the Hamptons and they have all this stuff.
And I was like, no, they don't, like, you know, it's not there.
It's like you're renting somebody from somebody at the end of the day if you're borrowing the money to do that.
But that perception and reality gap around startup funding, you know, raising the around from Tiger, raising the round from.
Sequoia, whatever it is, and you've made it, is such a big one I find, especially during
bull markets.
I learned a really great tip around this from our friend Julian Smith, or this concept is called,
I think he called it the Personal Board of Advisors.
So every week, Julian and I used to meet at 7 a.m.
We used to have these Monday morning meetings called the Punch You in the Face meeting, I think.
No one wants to meet for coffee at 7 a.m., especially in Montreal, when it's like minus 40 in the wintertime.
And we'd go, and it's one of the first things he taught me. And he said, Greg, it's really important to have a board of advisors in your head. And he's like, who's on your board of advisors? And I started thinking about it. And at first, I was kind of like Elon Musk type people and Jack Dorsey. But eventually what I've grown to realize is it's important to have.
these, yeah, a more balanced board.
So I was like my grandfather, my mom, you know, Andrew, Sahil, like, and maybe one Elon Musk.
And now when I make decisions, like, hey, should I go on this podcast or, hey, should I buy this
business?
I asked myself, what would each of these individual people on my imaginary board of advisors
in my head say to this?
And that's been like one of the biggest keys for me to like make decisions that are more
true to myself. I love that. I think one of the biggest problems is that everybody hypothetically
wants to be Elon Musk. They want the celebrity and the glamour and the genius of it. But if you've
read interviews with Elon Musk, you can see that the guy is very, I think probably troubled and has a
very difficult life, very exciting life, very true to himself. I'm glad he exists. But when I look at
his life, I go, oh my God, I could never do that. I think it would make me incredibly miserable.
And that's the thing is finding people who you believe are not only authentically happy but similar to you.
So one of the errors that I made was in 2012, I, sorry, 2014, I sold a business, was sitting on a bunch of cash, started reading about investing and read about Buffett and Munger.
And it blew my mind.
You know, I loved it.
I started worshipping these two guys.
And I started copying everything.
So literally structured our business, operated the exact same.
way they do, you know, everything I could do. And I thought what I would want was their life. And their
life is they sit on their ass and they read 10Ks and books all day. And I tried that for a while and I
hated it. I realized that I'm still entrepreneurial. I'm extroverted. I would say, you know,
maybe those guys are a little bit on the spectrum. They just want to absorb data. You know,
that's not me. And so if you worship someone, I think you can learn a lot from them, but you
don't necessarily want their life. And I am still trying to find that person. Like who,
who do I want to be when I grew up? And I think it's so helpful to just be like, yeah, my grandpa.
I really like my grandpa. You know, what would he say, right, versus trying to be Elon Musk.
I've always thought, to that exact point, I've always thought one of the most helpful,
sort of like hypotheticals that I've played out in my own mind is take two different people.
one person extraordinarily wealthy, you know, has made $200 plus million, but is like sort of known as kind of an asshole, like a scumbag.
People don't want to spend time with him or her.
Don't like the person, you know, sort of known as like a shady operator just generally.
Like super rich can afford literally anything in the world.
The money's good.
But not really like someone that people want to hang out with or spend time with or not someone that is well respected.
On the other end of the spectrum, a person who has very little money or like not a ton of money enough to be good and healthy and pay for things, but not rich.
You know, a million dollar net worth, $500,000 net worth can live in a city but not lavishly wealthy by any means.
But is extraordinarily well respected.
Smart people just flock to the person, want to spend tons of time with them, you know, want to ask for their advice, perspectives, ideas, brainstorms, etc.
always sought out. Where do you exist on that spectrum of who you would want to be? And I think it's a
spectrum. I don't think it's one or the other. I always ask the question as a hypothetical one or the
other because it's interesting to figure out which side you more closely align to. And for me,
personally, I would much rather be the latter. I would much rather be because what I care about
most deeply is not money actually or fame or any of those things. It's getting to spend time with
smart people. And that is what I find the most energy from is like things like this, where I get to sit here
and for a job, I get to talk to two really smart people.
And that is insane to me, and it's a massive privilege.
But that realization for me has clarified a lot of things, because then it means that I don't
want to chase money for the sake of money.
I want to do things that are going to get me in rooms with really smart people.
And I want to do interesting things that maybe attract smart people into my orbit and do things
the right way, hopefully quote unquote, that allow me to be the type of person that smart people flock to as well.
Do you guys know there's this friend of my Nick Gray?
Have you ever heard of this guy?
Yeah, for sure.
Nick?
Here, let's give Nick a quick shout out because I have right over here.
Dude, I have that too.
What is this?
Okay, so Nick is somebody that I've been following for probably 15 years.
I would, there's all these people in New York who I was friends with on Tumblr.
And so for years, I kind of just passively followed him, really interesting guy.
I actually at one point stayed in his apartment while he was away.
And I've just kept track of this guy for a long time.
And he started what's called Nick Gray's friend's newsletter.
And he sends this out, I think, every month.
And it's basically just, here's all the interesting shit I've done.
Right.
So it could be, hey, guys, I bought a Tesla.
Here's me video reviewing it.
Hey, guys, I learned the perfect way to do a kettlebell swing.
Hey, guys, here's my breakfast routine.
And he's actually just written a book that I don't know if he's cool.
with us talking about. But basically, it's a, I'll just broad strokes, it's a very well-written book on
how to socialize, how to build meaningful connections with others. And one of the things I've found
is that the richest people do not necessarily have the richest lives, right? In fact,
great wealth often isolates, you know, they have security teams, they don't trust people,
people are always pitching them. The most interesting people are the ones that actually find
creative ways to use small amounts of money to live a really great life. And this is something I've
thought a lot about recently of like what are the things that have actually made me happier.
And for example, one of them is I just host lunches.
I host lunches.
I rent out a restaurant.
I have a whole bunch of interesting friends come.
I put out down name tags and get people together.
And I love connecting people and being around smart people.
That's it.
Right.
To me, that's the ultimate way to use money to be happy.
But that is not something that's expensive.
Right.
You don't need to be a billionaire to do that.
Right.
And then you think about like, well, if you're a billionaire, what would the version of that be?
okay we're going to fly to the Galapagos Islands on my G6 and we're going to stay in a crazy, fancy
hotel. Well, maybe that's worse because everyone feels indebted to you and they're awkward about it
and there's all this status. I think wealth just in many ways just makes that stuff worse.
So a couple of weeks ago on the pot I was saying my inspiration of the week was Mike Posner,
who's super, you know, he ran across America and he almost he got bit by rattlesnake.
and I just thought he's really cool.
My recent obsession is Tom Green's YouTube channel.
Tom Green.
Tom Green is a comedian.
I remember him, of course.
I remember him from way back in the day.
He used to do the songs, right?
He did songs.
He had a TV show in Canada, I think in the 90s,
where he'd basically stopped people in Ottawa
and just like kind of just say goofy stuff.
And it was filmed.
And then he moved.
Oh, he was Freddie got fingered.
Yeah, he did exactly.
Then he moved to L.A.
He had a few movies, did really well.
He was actually one of the OG podcasters.
Like Joe Rogan actually was like, it attributes Tom Green to getting into podcasting.
So he was in that scene.
And then when COVID hit, he got a van and he drove across America.
This seems like a theme.
And he landed.
somewhere outside Ottawa and he bought a, I don't know, a bunch of acres.
And the middle of nowhere.
And he has this YouTube channel where he basically, it's him and his dog.
And they've got a barn and he's discovering animals and he's having fun.
And I will tell you, this guy just looks like the happiest guy in the planet.
Tom Green is a happy guy.
Like Tom Green is a thousand times more happy than Elon Musk.
Well, this is the thing is how do you find five Tom Greens to hang out with, right?
Or how do you?
So this is one other thing is like we're all hanging out.
We're all interesting people.
We're talking about business and life and some of that stuff.
How do you meet the people that are not in your own bubble?
Because we all exist in the same bubble.
I mean, Sahel, we talked for 10 minutes and we were like, we knew like 30 people in common,
even though we've never met, right?
This is a very incestuous small world.
But there's fascinating people in every industry that have day jobs that are just, you know,
they work normal lives.
They are artists.
They're musicians, whatever.
How do you find those people?
How do you bring them into your life?
And how do you create new interests that are unique?
Because the struggle I've had is for 10 years, all I've read is business, right?
So like I've started reading fiction over the last six months or so, which has been great.
But I just need to deprogram my brain from consistent.
consuming the same things and doing the same things over and over and over again.
Okay. So I have a tip here. And the tip is hang out with old people, period.
I spent, you know what I did from 6 a.m. to 7 a.m. today. I was in a hot tub with a 97-year-old
man who was in the military and was telling me about, you know, Vietnam and was telling me about,
you know, multiple wars. And it was just like telling me about family and, and, and, and, and,
And, you know, I don't know what he has done.
Like, he's probably, like, besides him that, I don't know.
Maybe he went and created a billion dollar company.
I don't know.
But, like, probably not.
He's probably just an old guy who, like, served in the military.
And I don't think we do a good enough job spending time with older people.
And the way to do it is go to public settings.
Like, I also don't think we do, like, we spend a lot of our time in private settings, you know, Soho House this or whatever, you know.
these like private settings or like high-end restaurants and stuff like that and we don't
spend enough time like go to your public pool like go to your public park it doesn't have to be in
a hot tub that you hang out with old people though right it doesn't have to although it is more
enjoyable the other the other two things I've been doing recently that have been really interesting
so with my existing friends um one I do this thing um I basically do a YPO forum with six guys
and I've been doing it for 15 years, and I have a few of them.
So I do one a week.
And it sounds like it's business, but it's really not.
We almost always end up just talking about personal stuff, family life.
And you learn so much more about someone than if you're just friends.
Some of these people, if I was friends with them for 15 years, I would never hear this stuff.
So that's been good.
The other thing I started doing recently is using structured conversations.
So I will sit down with a friend and I'll bring a pack of cards.
And the cards will just be random, deep questions.
And it's fascinating.
people I've known for 20 plus years and I'll hear all these stories about their life or their family
that I never never would have got. You can buy those at I think it's schooloflife.com.
They're just incredible. But I am trying to crack this, right? And reading Nick's book was fascinating.
Not enough people talk about the tactics of having an interesting life. Well, it's also just
about being interested. Like it's so easy to go through your own life thinking about like who can
benefit me and having this like transactional mindset whether or not you are truly transactional
a lot of us have a transactional mindset so you get into an uber and you're like i'm going to a
meeting you know with some important person and the whole time you're in the uber you're thinking
about whatever the important person is and what you're trying to you know whatever deal or whatever
trade you're trying to make with them and you lose sight of the fact that the uber driver might
have a really interesting life story and if you just ask them like hey you know how's your day going
like what's been, you know, causing you headaches, like what's interesting, whatever,
you end up having this amazing conversation.
Like, Greg, with the old guy and the hot, like, if you didn't say hello and ask about his life,
you'd never learn all these interesting things.
I've often thought about it in the context of like going to bars alone.
I think personally, every single person should have at least one dinner by themselves per month.
Just like go out by yourself and sit at a bar, talk to the bartender, talk to random people
sitting there. It's weird in America. People will look at you and be like, why are you talking to me?
But in most cultures in the world, it's like super normal and great that you're talking to your neighbor and
people around you. And so it's something that needs to adapt in American culture. And it's actually
coastal American culture. If you go to the Midwest and you go to like a local bar, everyone wants to
talk and people are super friendly. So I think it's something about like coastal culture. You're supposed to like
keep your head down and do whatever, you know, whatever it is you're up to. I've often dreamed and I think
I think I will do this at some point in my life of taking like two, three weeks or maybe even a month and driving around to different parts of the country and just like staying in random places and doing a night or two and just going to like the local dive bar and the local pizza shop and just sitting and talking to random people.
And like maybe documenting it, maybe not.
But I like read a book that someone did that.
And it was more it was written about trying to understand how Trump won and they went and like drove across.
America on all these different places and did this. But I would do it with no political business,
whatever aims. It would just be interesting to go talk and meet all these people from different
settings, understand how they're wired, what interests them, what concerns them, all of that.
But it all comes down to being actually interested. Well, the problem also, we have this
breakdown in our society where people used to be much more religious. I'm not religious. I'm,
atheist, agnostic. But you used to go to church. And church was this, you know, central place.
where you connect with a whole wide variety of different people and you'd go into the you go shopping at
the market you'd see people and now we've just we have these very insular lives and we've lost that friction
and in my 20s I would go to bars all the time right I would go out drinking I'd make random friends
I would do all those things as I had kids and marriage and everything else it's amazing how those
things slip away and you have to create new rituals to create that stuff I have this idea
for a party or cocktail party or something, but effectively you invite, you choose six very interesting
unique friends who you know enough but not super well. And you say, I'm hosting a party. I'll
handle everything. Everybody gets to invite six friends, three male, three female. They just have to be
interesting. And you end up with this mix of people. And I'm like, I want to do stuff like that. I just want to do
these hacks to meet people I wouldn't otherwise know because otherwise you end up in this very sad state where,
you know, in your 30s and 40s, your friends dwindle down to this core group. And, you know,
it's lovely, but you're just not getting new people in. I like that. Yeah, you end up. I like that
a lot. I think the one thing I just want to add to that is I think a lot about the importance of
public spaces and how cities are designed. And I'm worried that over the last 30 years,
we've had a lot less public spaces. And I'll give you an example. So at least in America or
North America. So I remember as a kid going to the public pool. And I'd go to the public pool
and like the community was there. And I'd meet other kids and like all parents were there and we used to
hang out. Over time, over the years, I noticed less and less people used to go to the public pool.
Started asking why. It turns out like people started creating pools in their own backyards.
They wanted private pools. And then the the trend became like the private type of
of these like public goods.
So I worry about that a bit.
Like I want to give,
I think it's important that we invest in our public spaces
so that it isn't just like cocktail parties and houses
and also public events.
What do you guys think of that?
You know what it's,
I think it's brilliant.
It also all relates to one of my favorite,
have you guys,
do you know who Jonathan Haid,
hate,
H-A-I-D-T?
He's like an amazing writer,
author. He writes for the Atlantic now. And he had, you know, he's like this general piece that he wrote
that was really well known around like basically how we've become so fearful. And this was about
American society, but we became so fearful about our kids. And I think it ties to this, Greg,
of like privatizing everything because we suddenly got scared that our kids couldn't be out. Like,
no, you couldn't go to the public pool on your own. I mean, when I was a kid, I used to just walk to the
pool and like meet my friends there. And I was probably like eight or 10 or something. I would just
go. I didn't have a cell phone. Like my parents didn't know where I was. I was just gone during the
day and then I would come back. And there wasn't this intrinsic fear. And then all of a sudden,
news cycle start changing about like child abductions and cell phones are hitting you with all this
stuff. And now every kid needs a cell phone by age seven so that they can be tracked and monitored at
all times. Like, you know, you put a baby monitor on your kid that has like a heart sensor and all.
it's just like insane, insane proliferation of like tracking and fear of what's going to happen if we're just out in the open.
And so I think part of it, Greg, is that.
Like we've developed this fear of public spaces.
So we brought everything back in into these private spaces.
We're like, oh, the town pool is not safe because my kid can't walk there.
So I'm going to have a pool here.
He can have his friends here.
But suddenly you lose your independence.
You lose the exploration that was so transformative to how we thought and grew and developed.
as kids. And that scares the shit out of me. Like raising a child now. I had, I, I remember like,
really key moments of independence where my parents would be like, okay, you want to go to the
computer store? Like, go downtown. There's a pay phone here. Call us when you got there. And we'll see
in four hours, right? And I would go off and I would just feel so confident and independent. I never had
any problems. And I think that today that would be seen as kind of insane. And I think it's because
we've been watching all these movies where every time you see an old man at the park,
he's a pedophile and he's going to abduct your children and there's pattern matching.
I've found myself do this, right?
I'll be at the park, see some old guy reading and go, is that, you know, is that a creep?
And it's kind of like optimizing your life around a jet engine falling out of the sky and killing
you because that's how likely that is to occur, right?
It's like the odds of being in a terrorist attack or something else are just so much higher.
It's not even worth thinking about almost.
you're more likely to be your kids more likely to die in the pool in your backyard or falling down
the stairs than any of those you know kind of silly fears yeah i think if you mapped the things that
people are afraid of versus the things that are actually risky it would be absurd there was like
the whole stat post 9-11 where um plane flight like no one took plane flights because everyone was
scared of another terrorist attack and so people stopped flying and the miles driven that year
went through the roof because everyone started driving places and the number of
of additional traffic accidents and deaths that happened from those additional miles driven
was like far in excess of the number of people that had died in 9-11. And it's not to,
you know, make light of it, but it's an amazing fact of like the human inability to weigh and
balance risks like that, where way more people died from 9-11 as an indirect result of people
being scared all of a sudden because of the news cycle around what terrorist attacks had done to the
world. It's crazy. Crazy. And you know, at the same time, even like Nick
I remember Nick and this guy that Greg and I know invited me to a party in New York and I was freaking, I didn't end up going. I was busy, but I was scared to go, right? The idea of going to this party where I don't know anyone and there's all this social anxiety, that's how insular we've become, right? I'm an extrovert. I love meeting people and I was like terrified to go to this party. I just had a conversation with, you guys know Tim Urban. I just had a conversation with him about this exact thing of how he was like,
I love being alone, but I was on this trip, and I was like the fifth wheel with,
there were these random groups. And suddenly I noticed myself being all like self-conscious that
they were looking at me. And it started pissing him off that he was feeling that way.
Like he realized he was feeling that way. It started annoying him that he was feeling that way.
And like it's the spotlight effect is the name and the bias where we assume everyone's looking at us
constantly. The reality is no one really cares about you. Everyone's just thinking about
themselves. Well, if they have a bad time with you,
they will assume they said something stupid.
It's not because you were stupid or whatever it is, right?
That's the craziest realization.
So true.
So true.
Well, man, look, this was so much fun and so much wider arranging and personal than I had expected it to get.
A very, very interesting conversation.
I'm glad we got to have it.
And again, to the point of me feeling privilege, I am constantly astounded that I get to have these conversations, quote unquote, for a living.
So thank you so much for taking the time and joining us, man.
Yeah, that was awesome, guys.
That was really fun.
And we need to link to Nick Gray's newsletter.
I just subscribe to it.
But Nick, it's nickgray.net is the website.
I just subscribed to his join my friend's newsletter.
And people can check it out and hopefully learn from it as much as you guys have.
Cool.
Awesome.
Cool, guys.
That's fun.
Thanks so much for listening to today's episode.
If you have any questions that you want featured in a future episode, email us at high at t-R-W-I-H.com.
Leave us a review at Apple or Spotify to help us grow the reach of this podcast.
Until next time, we will see you soon.
