#862 - Visakan Veerasamy - An Ode To People Who Take Things Seriously
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What's happening, people? Welcome back to the show. My guest today is Visakan Virasamy. He's a writer and an entrepreneur. It's perhaps the biggest competitive advantage no one ever talks about because it's so obvious. But what does it mean to be a serious person? And if it's such a help, why is it so hard to find?

Expect to learn why being serious is so important, how to deal with being too harsh on yourself and holding high standards for everybody else, how to get better at being disliked, the relationship between seriousness and earnestness, ways to deal with procrastination more effectively, and much more.

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Why is being serious so important? Why is being serious so important? Well, you know, we have a limited life, right? We have limited resources and we get to live it however we want.

I just think it is really tragic if we don't make the most of it, basically. And it's funny. It depends on who you talk to because there are people who kind of

get very hung up on the kind of thing I just said and you can kind of go too far with it. And then you get really stiff and grimaced about, oh, I got to make as much money as possible. Oh, I got to acquire as much status as possible. And in my mind, that actually isn't. So when I describe seriousness in my essay, that is slightly unserious. It's kind of a fixation on a particular model of trying to make some number go up.

So if you read my essay, the conclusion is that seriousness is love and curiosity expressed earnestly over a long period of time. And that I just think really it's like life is a feast and you really want to sample everything you can and find the thing that's yours and really enjoy it. Yeah. And actually, the way I would answer that question other than that is

having lived through the opposite which is you know being around unserious people going to school or other institutions where there's like an unserious energy where people are kind of you know just not taking things seriously and they might have their reasons maybe the job's not that important to them and they want to focus on something else which is fine but what I found is that when I reflect on my life and think about when are the moments when I've really had a great time it's

invariably when I'm serious about what I'm doing, which involves playfulness and so on, and I'm surrounded by other people who are also serious. And that just produces something, you know, there's that je ne sais quoi, that excellence that is, once you've tasted it, it's such a nothing else compares. And so I kind of

I talk about things like that in part to, you know, like my friend Kevin Kwok has this quote that's like, it's like tapping a tuning fork to see what else resonates, right? So if like in a sea of people, you have a distribution of different kinds of seriousness, you want to find the kind of people who vibe with you and I'll, you know,

So I was at a bachelor party, a stag do, in the UK about two years ago. And we were playing shuffleboard. And we'd been going for maybe six hours or so. So people had kind of gravitated into whatever their normal social groups was. Some of us had priors. Some of us had known people from before. But a lot of the people in each of the groups were new. And I looked over at the other table.

of people and they were the the guys were sort of like flicking the little pucks and they were sort of being playful and messing about and no one was really keeping score meanwhile on the table that i was on we were whispering tactics to each other we were talking about oh he's really weak when he he has to come short so blah blah blah i was like dude we're at a bachelor party but we had separated ourselves out we had literally triaged the group by seriousness and i realized in that moment

that I like to be around people that take things seriously. And it doesn't mean, I really appreciate you saying this isn't sort of, uh, solemn, tedious, rigid, stodgy, uh, use this term dynamic persistence, uh, sort of a sense of humor being critical to that because it's difficult to persist for a long period of time. If you're too, if you take yourself too seriously. So, uh,

you become rigid and you become stiff and the opposite of being dynamic. And yeah, I just, I saw that thing. I saw that situation occur in front of us. And I saw a group of people that were, they had resonated with the people that weren't taking things seriously. And I realized I was on the serious people table. No better, no worse, but just I'd found my tribe, so to speak. Very nice. It's so fascinating to me how easily people tend to triage themselves that way. Like there's no, you know, like top down,

It's just naturally people gravitate towards people who are similar and away from people who are not.

And, you know, I used to play in a band when I was a teenager. And it's so funny that like 10, 15 years later, we find out that, oh, this person has ADHD. This person is bipolar. This person, like it's all these people who were misfits and maladjusted in some way that were all just drawn to each other. And it's not like we signed up for who has, you know, this issue. We didn't even know. We just knew that we were all very passionate about what we did. And we just all found each other. It's so magical, actually, when you think about it.

I love the idea of this. I also think I became quite frustrated. One of the reasons I really wanted to speak to you was reading your blog post was kind of like a it's an allowance for people who are serious to not feel embarrassed in their seriousness.

Because there is... The person who doesn't seem to be taking things too seriously, who doesn't seem to be paying that much care or attention, they're kind of lackadaisical. They're chill, man. Just fucking relax a little bit, dude. That person...

often comes across as sort of more fun, more cool. They're more vibey, right? The vibes are vibing. And I've always found myself as somebody who prefers to be on the serious table as opposed to the non-serious table. And seeing that as a virtue, not in a virtue as in like some superiority complex of some guy in a stuffy fucking library somewhere, but genuinely just, this is a predisposition you have. It's some weird personality trait.

Probably some form of orderliness, conscientiousness, a couple of other industriousness maybe. But beyond that, it's an amalgamation of you pay care and attention to the things that you do. And you think that

there is utility in effort and there is utility in trying. Yeah, what you're describing reminds me of an anecdote from one of Michael B. Jordan's classmates. And she was saying he was such a weird kid. You know, he would come to school with his headshots and stuff like that. And it's just so striking to me that being serious when you're starting out is really difficult socially because, again, it's like, I think the general sentiment in most of the world is like,

who do you think you are, you know, to take this thing so seriously? Like, why are you so... And, you know, like another joke I liked was, imagine being Shakespeare's English teacher, right? Like, this annoying kid coming up with his own phrases and words and stuff like that. And I also have sympathy for people who, you know, like, so for the teacher, for example, who is just trying to teach a class, but there's a student who's like, nah, I'm going to do my own thing. God damn it, William, not again. Exactly. And,

And at the same time, I think about all the kids everywhere who had that spark of something, but it was snuffed out because their social environment just didn't allow it. It's tempting to think that, oh, you know, I have it and I've made it so far, therefore I'm special. Which, yeah, in some sense, yes, but we always, I think, underestimate that.

The degree to which a kind word here, a supportive context there, just really, you know, you watch the right movie at the right time of your life and it just hits something for you. And someone else just random walking didn't get that. And it's like virtuous cycles of do things get better or not. And yeah, it's just a lot to get into about how society is structured in a way that kind of...

you know, it's like, I can always see both sides of this. Like, it's both good and bad. It's a kind of sorting algorithm in a way. Like, in the long run, the people who are most serious and kind of, there's this quote from this old French poet,

poet, writer, Baudelaire, something like the great man in order to exist has to overcome the resistance of millions of people, his family, his friends, his school, his society. So by the time he gets there, he's got this immense strength or however you want to frame it, immense persistence, immense capability of managing his psyche to get there. And

In a way, because we live in a world where there's so much information, so many people doing so many things. And, you know, I used to work in startups and like you would hear from someone that their startup is going to be the next big thing. And two years later, they're gone. And so since there's competing demands on your attention, it's,

very normal and reasonable in fact to kind of dismiss most things so most people assume that most people are not serious you know in this frame even the ones who say that they are being serious exactly because everyone says they're serious so the only way to demonstrate it is over time and you just you keep shipping another podcast episode you keep writing you keep showing up year after year after year and i found that um there's something magical about like the seven year mark sometimes it's less sometimes like three to five but like once you've been around for like seven years ish

people's memories are not that long. And so once you've been around that long, it seems like you were there all along, like forever. And so it's just interesting. I guess, yeah, I say this. Explain to me the line between this people that LARP

and people that are serious. And the fact that what everyone is trying to do in some form or another is get all of the benefits of seriousness, i.e. being taken legitimately whilst not necessarily having to pay the price of seriousness, which is consistency and hard work and all the rest of it. And also being able to seem chill and cool and like the vibes are vibing. Yeah.

What's the line between this sort of public world of seriousness and how it can cause cynicism and criticism among the general population? Oh, that's a good question. I think, and you know, the messy thing is that

nobody has it all figured out at the start, right? I love to look up, you know, any, anybody who's like very successful now, I love to look up their earliest, like if you see like Obama's earliest speeches or like Jason Mraz's first concert, they look nervous. They don't look like they, like they know what they're doing, you know? So in the earlier stages, I think if anybody has any like intellectual honesty, they are going to be like, well, I think I got a shot, but I'm not completely sure, but I'm going to try. Right. And, and,

and you know so there will be self-doubt and if someone tells them you're not serious they might be like am i i'm not i'm not i think i am but i'm not sure right like there's there's that cluster of people and then okay there's also the cluster of i imagine kanye is probably an extreme and of just radically certain of themselves and you know that group probably splits into those that don't crash and burn and those that make it and then there's like out of survival bias you get a

You hear from a lot of those who do make it. I'm drifting from your question. You were asking about... That causes cynicism. So basically, the way that I see it is that the fact that so many people...

want to be seen as serious and so few are right and that you don't really have a way to expedite working out whether or not somebody is legitimate in their claims of seriousness beyond just waiting which is the exact opposite of expediting yeah that causes cynicism to occur

as a defense mechanism against sort of fraud and bullshit. And the trouble, you say, with cynicism as a defense mechanism is you can get so good at it that you inadvertently also defend yourself

against anything good ever happening for you too. Tasks failed successfully. Yeah. I think it's especially difficult when you're starting out, which is why I tend to think about and focus on teenagers and like people in their early 20s a lot because that's such a... I do think as you get older, if you've been...

somewhat rigorous. You have some hygiene principles in how you examine things and who you talk to. Over time, you cultivate a social graph, a social network that's the people in your life. If you have other serious people around you who are serious about figuring out who's for real and who's not, it gets easier a little bit. You might still make some errors here and there, but after a while...

I think Steve Jobs has this quote about how, and he's talking about a company and running a team. When you hire A people and you put them in a context with other A people, they become self-policing in only welcoming other A people and pushing away, not necessarily pushing away, but they keep out the B people, I guess. But yeah, so if you are not rigorous about your information environment and who you allow to take up your time and energy and attention,

cynicism becomes a natural response because you keep seeing failures and you keep seeing evidence of people bullshitting you. And if you look out into the world, there's always people bullshitting. I have an essay I want to write. I haven't written yet. It's called Shit Watch. And it's like, it's already funny. It's like the social media algorithms incentivize high arousal emotions. And so there are people who, whether coordinated or not,

end up... So the analogy I give is, imagine there's a group of people in your city who go around looking for the worst public toilets they can find, and then they look for the shit, and then they scoop up the shit and they present it to you, and they say, hey, here, look at this shit. Smell it. Taste it. I don't know. And you'll be like, that's disgusting. What's wrong with you? But we do the equivalent with...

information and content and be like, oh, here's these people fighting. Here's this. And it's like, you know, in a city of millions of people, there's going to be someone fighting somewhere. And if you can scroll through some feeds where it's like fight compilations and it's just, oh my God, in five minutes of scrolling, you would think that the

the whole world is full of people fighting. But if you go out into a restaurant, everyone's just sitting around having lunch or dinner. So there's that. With regards to cynicism, I think it's very much a function of how well you

curate your information. And I think, yeah, there's this unfortunate tendency for people, especially like intellectual types, who want things to be objective and they are like, and I remember thinking this way as well. Like, I need to know all of the bad things. I need to know the truth. I need to know the, so like, you know that somewhere out there, there is shit.

true. You don't need to be in denial of that, but you also don't need to go around sniffing it. You don't need to immerse yourself in that. So my recommendation is always to do an audit of what you have been consuming, what you have been reading, who you're talking to. How does that make you feel? Does it inspire you towards action? Does it inspire you to make things better? If it doesn't, if it's making you feel more helpless, more angry, all of those things, then what's the point? You know,

And even just knowing that you can experience different realities by modifying what you allow in, I think that's like a huge...

as a way of overcoming cynicism. And, you know, like our... To be fair, as a species, we are new to having smartphones. It's only been like 15 years, 16, 17 years. And it takes time for the collective to develop antibodies and proper protocols. It's funny, you can read up about when the telephone was invented. People didn't know how to use it. And they would just call randomly at any hour of the day. They wouldn't say hello. They would just...

to start talking and they would have to write into magazines to complain about people crank callers and all that. And it took a while for healthy norms to develop. And I think we're still in the process of figuring out how to

have healthy, chaotic information environment diets. But the scary thing is that, you know, like AI and all these things are coming up. And so by the time we adapt to whatever is happening now, like new stuff is going to happen faster. So it's a challenge. Given that longevity and doing things for a long period of time is so important to being serious, that seriousness is smeared across time. What would be your advice to people who don't want to get

seriousness burnout. The people listening who go, wow, I feel seen by this. I have care and attention. I am bothered by details. I want to do things well. I want to leave the world better than I found it. But I find it a little bit exhausting sometimes being around people who aren't so serious, who don't support me in my seriousness. And I

I don't want to feel too rigid and sort of stodgy. I need to be dynamically persistent in that way. How can people be more sort of psychologically flexible or robust in managing their own motivation?

You know what's coming up for me, strangely enough? I know you've done podcasts with the Renaissance periodization guy, Israel Tell. Yes. Great. Yes. And so I used to have a problem with my lifting patterns where I would try to go as hard as I could.

And it would go pretty well for like three months, four months. And then I wouldn't realize it, but I'm getting kind of burnt out in some way. And then I would either experience a minor injury or thankfully nothing serious, but like a minor injury or I'd start losing my appetite. And then eventually I'd take like a week or two weeks entirely off. And then my habit would fall off the rails and then everything just went bad. And I had like years and years of cycles of this until I watched Dr. Mike.

And he was talking about deloading, right? And I think that's just such a, I can't believe I never encountered that concept until, I mean, I guess I may have encountered it in passing somewhere, but I didn't take it very seriously. But when I saw Mike speak about it, I was like, oh, this guy knows his stuff and

I gave it a shot and it totally works. It's like, so the idea is basically keep doing the reps or maybe, maybe fewer reps, maybe fewer weight, but like, you know, still show up, but like at a lesser intensity. And that kind of keeps you in the game, but not balls to the wall, kind of pushing yourself too hard. And I feel like there's a parallel here with like seriousness in general, or just, you know, any kind of project management,

Like, athletes need their downtime, right? Like, rest is a part of the recovery process. And so if you're serious about doing anything for a long period of time, you should consider how that break from the main thing keeps you

allows you to return to the game with a healthy perspective. And I'm thinking also now of David Ogilvie, who was an excellent copywriter, excellent manager. He was just a great guy. You should read his book. It's fantastic. And he would work really, really hard for, I think, months on end. And then he would switch off completely and go into... I don't know where he would go. Just go on vacation, I guess. And he would...

just let his mind lay fallow. And I think the quote he gave was like, he would receive telegrams from his subconscious and the telegrams from his subconscious would inspire him and give him a new perspective and that kind of thing. Another person I'm thinking of now is Paula Sher, who is the designer of the Citibank logo. She runs this great design consultancy and she's like, you know, I can't design anything if I'm not in a state of play. So what she does is she sketches while she's in taxicabs and

And yeah, I think there are very few things that are interesting that don't involve some amount of playfulness, some amount of you need to step away from the thing so you can see the big picture and not get lost in the weeds of the thing. So yeah, like, you know, I'm kind of going in circles a little bit because I don't want to be too prescriptive. Like if you say, oh,

take seven days on and two days off. Like, no, that is not necessary. Maybe, maybe that's correct for your thing. But like, you have to be sensitive to your own rhythms. And now I'm thinking of Christopher Alexander, who's like a, he's a, he used, he was a famous like architecture thought leader, I guess you could say. And one of his quotes that I keep coming back to is, is like,

This idea of improving patterns by tinkering with things and then seeing how you feel about it. And it's really the feeling that dictates the action. And there's no, you can't outsource this. You know, you can't outsource your judgment and you can't outsource your feeling. Like these are things that

it's just like all the way to the top, right? Even if you're like Beyonce or Taylor Swift and you have a whole team of people managing your operation, you still at the top have to judge, do I want to have this pyrotechnics? Do I want to have this part of the show or whatever? Like people offer you ideas, but you have to decide by your feeling what's right or wrong. There's no escaping that. And it's the same for rest and it's the same for

If you've been doing things for some time and it's not working out, you have to sit back and feel it. And it's so funny to talk about it because I think people who hear it will be like, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, of course. But it's non-trivial. It's kind of tricky. I guess because you can get lost in the weeds so easily. So you kind of want to practice...

having time away from the thing. And like, I think Netflix has like, in their software department or something, they had this thing called Chaos Monkeys where they would basically program things to break randomly so that they would be like, oh no, if this breaks, we got to do that thing. And it challenged them to make things more robust and

And yes, I mean, and life is like that, right? And like, whatever you're doing, things are going to surprise you and blindside you and so on. So, okay. If you're a person trying to be serious and overwhelmed. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Trying to avoid that. And then also, I suppose you can add into it. How do, how do these people deal with the inevitable sort of

friction that they feel with people around them. Because if you're somebody that is serious about things, you're going to become very disliked because you throw everybody else into quite harsh contrast. Yeah, that's very difficult. So this is why my first book is titled Friendly Ambitious Nerd, because there are three variables. And also a lot of successful people tend to be ambitious nerds. And if they're not friendly, and when I say friendly, it's like sensitive to other people. This

This is tough because the people who are really at the absolute cutting edge, most exceptional, they tend to be uncompromising. They tend to be just very intense characters who they see it as their point of view is correct because they have put in so much work into it. And so it's like they don't suffer fools, right? And yeah, so it's like, how much do you suffer fools is basically the question. How do you do it in a way that is

Well, each person has to decide for themselves based on their values, how kind they want to be to people who can do nothing for them or, you know, are even like interrupting their process or,

And I'm kind of, you know, I remember when I was a kid and I felt like an idiot and I felt like, you know, no one was looking out for me and I had no mentors or no whatever. And I really just needed someone to kind of show me around and help me out. So I'm kind of biased towards when I see someone struggling or I see someone lashing out or being whatever, I try to, you know, like, can I at least...

Can I at least say something that they might consider later on and be like, oh yeah, actually that guy was unreasonably nice to me. But I don't know if... I've gone back and forth with regards to how much should I lecture people on that they should be nice to other people. I think...

This is one of those things where you may have some predisposition and it can vary a little bit slightly. And like, you know, I'm reminded of when the Google co-founders were looking for funding, right? And like, I think one of the investors said something like, oh, these guys are so arrogant and they're so...

just not socially nice, right? They're not kissing the ring and they're not... They're just kind of saying, oh yeah, we want to organize the world's information and it's going to be great. And I'm paraphrasing what they said. I don't think they said it's going to be great. It's like they just spoke in very clinical terms about precisely what they were going to do, which is like, I would say it's a tell for like, you know, the rocket scientists and the people that are really serious about technical things and they want to make progress on things. Like they are...

thing-oriented people rather than people-oriented people. So they don't... Often they're like neurodivergent, autistic, something like that. And so... You know, and I think... Okay, here's what I think. You don't... Nobody needs to do everything by themselves. You know, and it's a fool's errand to insist that

your cutting-edge scientist should also be a very smooth political operator. It's not realistic to expect someone to be both. Although really exceptional people are, but realistically, most people are going to specialize at the thing that they're good at.

But like, so the cool thing is life is a multiplayer game, right? Like when people are in, I kind of indoctrinated by school to think that, Oh, you've got to do standardized tests. You've got to be good grades at everything. And you know, like that kind of like super generalist perspective, whereas, you know, there's a lot of things where actually you just need a friend. You just need like one friend who can cover you for that. You know, you just need like a handler or a manager, you know,

And, you know, so like, like my wife, she's, I would say my wife is smarter than me in terms of like reading people. And in terms of like a bunch, there's a bunch of ways in which my wife is smarter than me, but she doesn't like talking to people that much, but like, so she married me. And so she gets to benefit from like my social butterfly, um,

instincts or inclinations. And I get to benefit from her being kind of like analytical about budgets and schedules. And so there's a quote from Rocky, which is like, we each have gaps, but together we have no gaps.

So yeah, I think the good news is we can trade. So we can make friends. So you have to make at least one friend. And ideally, every antisocial... They're not trying to be antisocial, but the kind of person who isn't very good with people should have one person in their corner who's their representative or their advocate or someone who can look out for them and kind of translate their perspective to other people.

And again, it's like the zero to one part of this is the hardest. Like when you don't have anyone, that's when it's really tough. But I think even just knowing that it's possible that if you can find someone who's like a nerd whisperer, right? And so I consider myself basically that. Like I'm kind of a nerd whisperer. I'm nerdy in general, but I'm not like all the way intense to the point where I'm like

tinkering with stuff. So you're able to translate for the ones who are too far down the artist ladder to be able to communicate. You're like the gateway drug to normal civilization. Yeah, that's true, actually. So yeah, I've described it as being like the bridge between worlds. I am a fan of Heimdall from the Norse mythology. And yeah, we need bridge people to bridge

people. Well, so you, you said before about, um, you had this sort of sense that you as a kid was yearning for role models, for somebody to give you an encouraging word in your ear. And, uh, I think I was very similar. I came up with this idea of the reverse role model because you've heard of food deserts in America. I think I was in the equivalent of a role model desert in the UK, classic working class town. Not many people like the person I wanted to be like, um,

And I realized that I think most success from life doesn't necessarily come from expediting success, but from avoiding tragedy and failure. Like if you multiply by zero, you're completely out of the game. So at least there is much more downside to be had than potential upside. So what I found was...

people who are very much like the sort of person I didn't want to be. So I don't want his relationship with gambling and I don't want the way that he cheats on his wife all the time. And I don't want the fact that this person never really seems to be able to speak their mind and so on and so forth. And, um, their way markers in the ground, you sort of place these different way markers of stuff that you don't want to be like. And I think that's reassuring to anybody that feels like they haven't,

yet found a role model or an encouraging word in your ear, because if you haven't had a single one of those, the likelihood is that you haven't just been sort of moving through some really boring gray middle zone. What you've been exposed to is the opposite end of the bell curve. Lots of people like the person you don't want to be like. And, um, it was just a, I thought that was an interesting and nice, uh, way for me to, uh,

rationalize, alchemize the situation that I'd been in. And it's for the people who don't have that many role models around them, I'm sort of here for it. Yeah, I respect that so much. To decide to do that kind of alchemy is a profound... Actually, I'm curious. Did you read anything? Would you point at anything that kind of set you off on that? Or do you feel like it was really just within...

It was intuition, I think mostly, that I just, I didn't fit in. I didn't resonate with the people around me in the way that they resonated with the people around them. And, you know, you find little glimpses every so often of someone that you can sort of get on with. And much of this is your problem, right? Much of this is a you thing that you don't really fully know how to present yourself in the most legible way. Yeah.

Yeah. How is it that's best for me to be understood by people? It's not compromising. It's not changing yourself. It's not being a shape shifting, like sort of social climber, but it's putting your best easy to understand foot forward. You know, you don't need to talk to people about your rampant flatulence or erectile dysfunction on the first date. You can save that for further down the line. And yeah, the sort of social mores and graces and how you sort of slowly acclimatize people to you.

um, it's a skill, it's a real skill and it's a skill specifically for people who are serious and who care about things. And, um,

who want to have deep and interesting relationships, but they're terrified that if they bring that up too early on, people are going to think that they're some sort of a nerd or they're not fun. They're not playful. They're going to be a buzzkill. God, don't bring Visa like he's just going to talk about feelings again. You know what I mean? Like that, you don't want to be that guy, especially when you're young. And I really think that the point you made before about how when you're first starting out, you have no...

legitimacy why why on earth do you person at the same level as everybody else i.e zero novice beginner starter think that you have the right to be able to be this serious about anything why on a so fucking patronizing in a way that you believe it's solipsistic it's egotistical it's narcissistic to think that you deserve this level of like rigor um but then

When you look back, you need to have some of that. That spark needs to be there or else you're never going to take it sufficiently seriously to actually be able to become good at it. Yeah. I've thought about this a lot and I've encountered it myself back then and even now sometimes. And I find that what I find myself often saying is that there are assumptions buried in culture that people just

internalized from their upbringing, from wider society or whatever. And the idea of deserving is very tricky stuff. I think there's this implicit sense that it's like status hierarchies and

concepts of royalty even. It goes back all the way to our founding, our earliest myths, mythology. If you go back, and you can actually look at Disney movies and even superhero movies or whatever, and it's like, oh, you have to be a prince or a princess to be able to have agency. And

And that's like bestowed from, it's implied. It's like you're the chosen one. You're the divine, whatever. So everyone else is just, you're meant to be a peasant, basically.

And like this, these intuitions still remain in modernity. Right. And the way I put it is like, I'm not special that I get to be serious. Anyone can do it. Like it's, it's there for the taking. Right. And it's just, I guess maybe there might have been some validity to those old heresies.

old heuristics in ancient times. But, you know, and like one analogy I would use is like, it used to be that if you wanted to have your own TV show or a podcast or whatever, you basically had to go through the gatekeepers of traditional media. And back then, producing video was a very expensive thing to do. And so it was highly resource intensive. And like whoever had the cameras back then, you know, that whole operation was

Like they, you would need to justify things to them. You would need to, Oh, I'm going to do a show. It's going to make this much money. It's going to grow this much audience or whatever. And now with like YouTube and iPhones or whatever, like even like the cheapest phones, anyone can record anything and upload it for basically free anytime. But that has been true for like a decade at least. And yet people still think that,

We always use our old intuitions. So the present reality that we live in, culturally, is always like 30 to 50 years behind. Or maybe even more. As you say, this medieval serfdom environment where, well, you've got to work for the baron and the baron's not going to let you do this thing. You need to have agency bestowed on you. But you're right. Gazitarianism has freed this up.

There was a time where as a parent, if your son is trying to, let's say, wear fancy clothes, you would be protecting him by telling him, don't do that. The Baron has a temper. He doesn't like to see anyone other than royals dress up. He's going to kill you. And so they are protecting you by saying those things. But like, that's no longer true. But, you know, it's like that

That story of the five monkeys beating each other because they used to get electrocuted. So yeah, culture evolves very slowly relative to technology. I had a great conversation with this guy that researched the history of humans discovering their own ability to destroy themselves. So a history of existential risk. And he's got this great term that is apparently in the literature called conceptual inertia.

And let's say that we have a Copernican revolution. We go to learn that the universe is perhaps constructed in a different way to the one that we believe. And first off, people will deny that it's true. And you will continue to need to push with evidence and data and so on and so forth, observation. And then after a while, maybe some of the elites will begin to accept that it's true. Then maybe some of the normal people will begin to accept that it's true, but they still don't behave as if it is. And that's conceptual inertia. It's the

the archetypes, it's the stories that we tell ourselves, it's the way that we see the world. And this just lags behind this lumbering behemoth that we need to fucking drag along. And the other thing, just to kind of round out the social element, because I do get the sense that that's a really important seriousness derogating...

element that the social incentives will align for you to go back to the mean with anything, whatever it is that you do. Even if it's aggression, you will be socialized to be less aggressive. If it's funniness, like if you're too much of a comedian, it's like, dude, come on. We're trying to be, it's a fucking funeral. Let's be serious here. But, and I always wanted, especially because I was very sort of

lonely as a kid, I always wanted to work out how to make people like me. I wanted to be accepted. I wanted to have friends. I wanted to have a support system. And it took probably until about a year ago for me to realize that

I always thought that people wanted to be around charismatic individuals, other people around them to be charismatic, to have some sort of gravitational sense, some sort of pull. And then I reflected on the friends that I like to spend my time around, and it wasn't the people who were the most interesting. It was the people who made me feel like I was the most interesting. So I came up with this idea of inverse charisma.

which is what you want to be trying to cultivate is not necessarily a sense of everybody going, God, I'm so glad Visa's coming. He's going to tell us all these amazing stories. He's going to be like regale us with a dance. You know, he's going to do the limbo thing again. We don't want that. What we want is Visa's going to come. Fuck, like he always brings the best out of me. I always feel good when I'm around him. And none of the feel good when you're around this person has got anything really to do with

them other than their love their kindness their curiosity smeared across time and uh yeah i think it's just for the fellow uh charisma unenthused uh out there the people who maybe don't think i'm not you know full of confidence and charm and wit and whimsy uh

it kind of doesn't matter. You can actually be one of the best-liked people in the room to whatever regard you care about simply by being interested in other people, not necessarily by just being interesting. Yeah, I think there's a kind of...

selection bias effect or a garishness effect. I call a version of this the Times Square problem where like people like imagine thinking that the only thing in New York is Times Square, which is like all the ads and all the garish lights and everything, which is, you know, it's interesting to check out. But like,

similarly, like, you know, some people think, oh, the only people on YouTube are like MrBeast and whoever. It's like, it's when there's like so much interestingness just like two streets down, three streets down. Like you can, I follow this like

like publish some, just some guy running a really old printing press kind of thing. It's fascinating. And it's, yeah, it's, it's, it's like that kind of, it's not exactly the same thing, but like his love for his craft really shines and everyone in his domain loves to be around that. It's just so nice to see someone lovingly tending to the thing that they care about. And it doesn't need to be showy or flashy or loud. That's just,

you know it's if you filter that out suddenly you look at the rest of the landscape and it's like oh there's so much interestingness everywhere talk to me about the relationship between seriousness and earnestness hmm well i feel like earnestness is at the heart of like you can't really be serious and not be earnest right i guess you i guess you can you can

Choose how much of it you want to show. I'm not entirely sure why I've used two different phrases in two different essays, but it just felt natural to me, I guess. So I think my earnestness essay says there's nothing edgier than being earnest. So I got around to talking about earnestness

by talking about edginess and I guess I like the alliteration that's probably how I ended up doing that because you could also say there's nothing edgier than seriousness but you know it's nice to have alliteration but yeah so basically the interesting thing about um you know so some people want to be you know they don't want to go with the social herd right they don't want to just say what everyone else is saying they don't want to think what everyone else is thinking and so

they begin with that and then they think, well, I should contradict what is being said, which can be, you know, a little bit of a public service. And I think it was more of a public service in the past when we didn't have like Twitter and comments, like, you know, like in your, in your social friend group, if five, if you're in a group of six guys and five guys always saying the same thing, the sixth guy who says the other thing is providing the group with like a useful service, right? In a sense. But it's,

if it's something like, you know, so you upload something online and some like inevitably, you know, some guy is going to present the critical count like contrary perspective. So each additional contrary perspective doesn't add very much. And again, this is one of those things where like people are not yet good at acting in large groups. They still know snowflake feels responsible for the avalanche. Right. Um,

But the cool thing is, no, sorry, I didn't finish that thought. If you are going to try to be edgy by reacting to what the consensus is, you're always going to be lagging behind the consensus. So the consensus is there, then you analyze it, you compute your response, and you're always going to follow the consensus. And in fact, so like, if you're like a rigid heterodoxist, like you're being the opposite of what's the orthodoxy, you're

You can map it out almost mathematically. You're still following the herd. You're just following the herd. A black sheep is still a sheep, right? Yeah. And on the other hand, the interesting thing is if you go inwards, you follow your own heart, you follow your own interestingness, you do what you deeply care about.

Because each individual is socialized like kind of on the outside, the layers of socialization begin like

the way to talk about this is like young children, when they first start writing poetry, they write excellent poetry because they haven't learned how ordinary people speak. And so they have all these very fresh uses of phrasing that seems surprising and almost like ethereal. They'll just say very cool things until they get to like

i don't know like 13 14 and they start caring about their peers and so yeah the kids like toddlers like three to seven they are excellent freaks you know and i think um several artists have quotes that's like the challenge is to remain childlike and not let the world whatever which is difficult but yeah so if you if you go inwards and express what's really true for you and what you feel you know like what you'd like daydream about what you dream about literally so like that stuff

and you express that, you end up being more quote-unquote contrarian. You end up being away from the herd, right? And I think this is another thing where people who make predictions within a group

they tend to, it's like they're playing the price is right sort of, you know, they all kind of calibrate their guesses in relation to everybody else's guesses. And so there's like a bell curve of what all the people guess. And sometimes the answer is way out in the field, far away from the bell curve, right? It's like a thousand times more, 10,000 times more than in whatever direction. And the person who figures that out is the person who wasn't listening to everybody else. And the way, yeah, so the person who isn't listening will from time to time be more radically edgy

edgy than the person who's trying to be edgy. It's kind of a trip. You think about it for a while and it's like, whoa, whoa,

you know yeah just following your own rhythm gets you somewhere else you have this great line in that essay where you say as a general principle if your position on things can be picked out very easily predictably it's probably worth being suspicious of it because you're basically running a simple script and if nothing else maybe consider that you might soon be easily replaced by a chat gpt bot coming to your twitter timeline near you

I talked earlier about how earnestness gets suppressed. Sometimes a person who has lost the ability to focus on what they actually want can become superficially motivated by the social activity of attacking other people for the imperfection in their utterances. It's a fairly hollow form of nourishment, but hungry people without any good food will eat anything they get.

Yeah, man, I sound better in writing than when I speak. It's the British accent. It's the British accent. Yeah, it's very... I should get you to speak my audiobooks. Yeah, that's true. You know, it's... What is there to say about that? It's really... Well, when I hear that, you know, I find myself feeling some empathy for

you know, people who don't know how to be better than a hater, you know, it's like nobody, you know, like some people say they want to be haters, but you know, I kind of believe that if you could know how, if you could figure out how to be adored for your idiosyncratic personal flavor and style and essence, like you wouldn't want to go around disturbing, like annoying people for engagement, right? Like you just,

Like, again, we live one short life and like, you want to look back and be like, oh yeah, I really

you know, critiqued well. Yeah. There's, there's, there's some contexts in which that's true, but like, if you're doing it like compulsively, you wake up in the morning, you scroll your feet and you look for someone to be mean to like, uh, you can do better. You can do better than that. That's my thing. Yeah. Yeah. What's your, um, you, you start that essay with this really lovely quote from Ted Hughes saying, that's how we measure out our real respect for people by the degree of feeling that they can register. Hmm.

What's that make you think of? This actually ties back to what we were talking about earlier about, uh, when I was bringing up Christopher Alexander and stuff, like you have to feel like feeling is feeling is the highest bandwidth thing that a person is capable of. I think like this, there is, you know, I love this. There's this book called the user illusion by Thor Noritranders. He's a Danish physicist. It's not a very popular book because it was written in Danish originally, but he has all these brilliant bits about consciousness and, uh,

one of the things he says is that the bandwidth of feeling is more than the bandwidth of knowledge. I'm paraphrasing. I don't know what exactly he said now. And the bandwidth of knowledge is more than the bandwidth of communication. So we feel more than we know, and we know more than we can say, right? And we like, and thinking is somewhere in the know to say aspect. So what that,

if you sit with that and you really feel it, what do you realize is that you feel more than you can say. You feel more than you, like what you think about something and what you feel about something. The feeling is much more nuanced. The feeling is much more, and think about, you know, um,

intuition, right? Like, so one of the ways I think about intuition is that it's like you have a felt understanding of all of the ecology of relationships of things around you. One of my favorite stories is, I think in one of Malcolm Gladwell's books, he talks about a fireman who goes to a fire and like a senior fireman and like all the firemen are trying to work on the fire and he's just standing there and he's like,

something's not right. We got to get out. It's weird. We got to get out. And then he gets everyone out. And like a second later, the whole house collapses. He didn't think what's going on. He felt it. And what he felt was, it turns out, he felt that the fire is not going away the way it should. There's not enough smoke for this level of heat. There must be, and it turns out that the fire was in the basement. So it's way hotter than what they were used to.

But that's something he felt. He didn't think it. And I feel that similar to that kind of intuition, and that kind of intuition requires domain familiarity and expertise. So it's not the lackadaisical, hmm, I feel like the world should be more like this. Or I feel like, I mean, having an ice cream, if you want to have an ice cream, go ahead. But it's like, I feel that that person is bad vibes. Okay, those things are kind of, it varies from context to context. But what I'm getting at is,

There is, so like going back to the Ted Hughes quote, the amount of feeling that we are able to experience and like surf the waves of, because like our education systems and civilization as a whole, right, to minimize the

inconvenience to people because we are all smooshed together in very cramped environments. Civilization is, I call it, you know, it's like an iterative potty training, right? Like I said, the most fundamental level, please don't shit in the street. Don't shit in front of your friends. Like, shit in the toilet, right? And shit on, like, try to do it at appropriate times, you know? So, like, potty training is good. Like, you want people...

if maybe if you're a barbarian in the wild you can shit wherever you want whenever you want doesn't bother anybody else but like it's a public health issue if people are shitting everywhere so people need to be potty trained right and what that means is you need to be like emotionally like you need to regulate your feelings you think you want to go now no you got to hold it in and go somewhere else but okay so that's that's potty training and then you go on to i'm angry no you shouldn't be angry like you're saying you get socialized to be less aggressive right like

We need to find ways to express our feelings in healthy ways and in good containers that don't hurt other people excessively or unnecessarily or whatever. But from civilization's point of view, that's

that's a little bit more complicated and complex than it can manage. So what it does is it tells people to suppress themselves and it enforces this through culture and institutions and everything else. And so you have all these people who are suppressed all the time and they feel like shit and they don't really know why. And then they take drugs and then they all, all of those things. But, um,

It is possible once you are awakened to this reality to realize that you have the capacity to re-regulate yourself in a way that is optimal for you. So the thing is, civilization's mechanisms are optimal for civilization. And we all enjoy the benefits of civilization. So I'm not like anti-civilization or anti-capitalist or anti-whatever. It's just we...

inherit the circumstances that we're in. It's on us to take it and double it and give it to the next person. I've got the idea in my mind of being over-civilized. Yeah, that's a problem. There is a degree of being over-civilized and under-civilized. Imagine how, to a barbarian, civilized is an insult. You people need contracts to do things together. You don't trust each other. You put people in boxes in jails. It's a different...

value system, right? It's certainly something that I've had to get over. I did therapy twice a week for around about the last year or so. And in that, you're basically inviting somebody into a very intimate part of your home and they're pointing at all of the weird stuff that you've got. And they're like, why is that single spike on the floor over there? And what's that disused train set about? And what's this thing? And what's that thing? And I noticed that you keep on walking over to the sink backward as opposed to forward or whatever, whatever.

And one of the things that I realized was that I have a people pleasing tendency. I see other people's emotions as my responsibility, that their wellbeing emotionally is on me and that it's partly my problem. And one of the issues that you come across with that is it's very difficult to advocate for your own needs or your own wants, or to learn to forcibly say no, because you know that

invariably this is going to cause some sort of imposition or discomfort to somebody else. And if your concern is ever making anybody else ever feel uncomfortable, it's very unlikely that if you will subjugate your own desires in place of their wellbeing, even if you're in the right, even if you as a person that is, you should advocate for you, um,

So that's been a sort of a really interesting way of literally trying to uncivilize myself in some regards, I guess. And the curse of the people pleaser is that people can tell or like discerning people can tell if you are like

stiff in a way that's like, oh, I need to put your needs first. And then subconsciously or consciously, if they've thought about these things, they know that they can't entirely trust you to take care of your needs. And so then they don't, they're not pleased, right? And then they don't trust you. And then it's like, oh, you want to make them feel better. And they're like, I don't trust you. Well, you said it, you say in the seriousness essay that it's like this sort of odd roundabout thing

uncomfortable truth of life that the more you don't care about what other people think about you the more they seem to like you yeah it's crazy it's such a you know i'm writing about all this from a new angle now where i talk about like a blessedness spiral upwards and a wretchedness spiral downwards and like it's so tragic because the more blessed you are the more blessings you receive and the more wretched you are the more matthew principle all the way exactly exactly that yeah

And it's so harsh, actually. It's like every time you cross a threshold, suddenly everything is just better. And I think people know this instinctively, which is part of what drives the desire for wealth and social climbing, is that you know that at the next level, some things are less bad. And I remember once my wife and I, I think it was during COVID or something, there's a discount on the

like the fanciest hotel in town. And so we decided to go. And so it was wonderful. And then we had breakfast the next morning with all these people who are very obviously wealthier than us, like a whole tax bracket or two tax brackets higher. And I, it was such a lovely environment. Everyone, like people are playing with the children. Everyone was speaking politely. And I found myself getting kind of angry. Like, man, rich people have it good. And not just that they have consumer, you know,

you know, surplus, consumer surplus, not that they have spending power, right? It's not that they have fancy things. It's that in the nice neighborhood, it's peaceful. It's,

I'm sure there's problems that I'm not aware of. There's more pressure. They seem to have a lot of family squabbles about inheritance and stuff. So every context has its own upside and downsides. But in that moment, I was like, whoa, I am underestimating how much I would actually appreciate having...

the access to those kinds of spaces, which is... Well, think about how much less stress there would be on you. You know, there's this sort of poverty, this odd poverty trap, which is... Poverty is expensive, yeah. Yes, poverty is very expensive. If you're constantly having to get credit lines extended, if you're having to work two jobs, which means that you can't improve your education or your qualifications to get a better paying job, you're kind of stuck. And then you...

some people get to escape velocity in one regard or another and some people you know the elons of the world the bezos's of the world have this sort of i don't know like infinite money glitch or at least it seems like that yeah to everybody else and then you think what sort of quality of life comes along with that and uh yeah it's it's a weird it's a weird thought to consider uh the

advantages that wretchedness spiral and that that sort of ascendancy spiral as well yeah yeah it's just such a and you know it's almost too much to think about sometimes I think I think again like everyone is living in the immediacy of their reality right so it's like you have what's on your to-do list for next week you know what's on your you gotta ship this thing for work you gotta deal with changing the oil on the

something. There's all these nitty-gritty things. And it's challenging to step back and really see the big picture and have a long view of what do I really want my life circumstances to be? And it's a lot. What's your advice for people to continue struggling cheerfully when things aren't going quite as they'd hoped? Man, I have been in that

state for the past couple of years-ish. It's funny because when I was... I have struggled differently at different stages of my life and currently it's the best stage. When I was a teenager, I was struggling with

you know, my family didn't believe me when I said I want to be like an author and like my friends, you know, like didn't like that. I'm, I struggled to get people to take me seriously. And like those struggles were in some ways harder, but in some ways also, I guess more freeing. So this goes back to every stage is different and has its pros and cons.

But so in my current stage, I've written two books that I'm happy with and my readers love them. But instead of directing my energy towards doing marketing for them and selling more books and whatever, I feel like I got to move on to the next project and do the third thing. And that has been a struggle for me because...

I mean, I guess any interesting work creatively is going to be a struggle because you're trying to birth something that doesn't already exist. And so you have to find new perspectives and you have to, you want to say something and it hasn't quite been said before and you don't know how people are going to receive it. And, you know, it's just a lot.

And I have woken up very often and been like, oh my God, what am I doing with my life? What am I, how am I going to do this thing? Why is progress so slow? You know, like there's all these unpleasant thoughts. And I have to, it takes time

effort to contextualize things for myself. Like I have to actively remind myself when I go for a walk or something and be like, Visa, do you know you're living your dream, your teenage self's dream? Like if I could talk to my 17 year old self and be like, oh yeah, you know, I don't have a job. I just write and I talk to people. I just do whatever I like. I just, you know, he'll be like, what? How is that possible? Like how, like you succeeded. Like you've made it, man. I'm like, yeah, I just feel like, you know, it's,

There's this quote from Steve Jobs again where he says, when you haven't succeeded yet, when you're like a nobody, it's fun to fantasize about all the riches and all the things about dreams, like grand dreams. But once you have some means, once you have some money, you have some authority, some influence or whatever,

Now, the chance of your dreams coming true is not zero. It's not one either. It's in between. And you have responsibility to make that happen. And it's a burdensome responsibility, I feel. And I always feel...

survivor's guilt as a creative you know why me why not i know that there are people who are surely more talented than me more intelligent more articulate whatever but you know maybe their mom is sick and so they've never had like they've had to work extra hours and so they haven't had time to write right and i always feel like i gotta make it for that guy you know because he by care that's maybe my i feel like it's a little bit similar to your people pleasing stuff maybe i'm not sure but like

Anyway, you were asking about how do I help people who want to struggle creatively or struggle cheerfully, right? There's layers to this, but

I think Mark Manson has a quote about like, whatever you do, you're going to have to eat shit. I don't know why I'm saying shit so much in this call. Whatever you're going to do, you're going to have to eat shit. So find the flavor of shit sandwich that you like, right? Like find the thing. Orient yourself toward the pains rather than the pleasures. Yeah. Like what pain can you endure? And like what, so imagine you struggle at a thing for the rest of your life and on your deathbed, you know, maybe you had like some minor success, but it never really fully paid off. But,

you imagine yourself... This is a great exercise, by the way, a thought experiment of visualize your old self and visualize your young self and just have a conversation with them. So I imagine a 90 or 100-year-old visa and I imagine a few different versions of them. But one of them is like

Visa, I've been working my butt off for 50, 60 years writing every day and I have not achieved any great success. But I'm like, but did you love it? And he's like, yeah, I loved it. I love writing. I love playing with words. I made friends with other authors. We discussed things that were interesting and it was a good life. I can visualize that. If you told me something like,

well imagine visa you know being a software engineer and like never really like you know i i could i i know i could do it if i wanted to i don't want to though it's not you know so find the struggle that

you enjoy for its own sake and you don't mind not succeeding at. And then you can like, you have the energy to keep going. And I guess define for yourself small victories that are victories to you, even if it's not victories to other people. And I found, you know, so I've been writing for a long time. There were things that I wrote like,

10 years ago or like many years ago where nobody in my life then cared about my writing, but I thought it was good. And then now, 10 plus years later, when I do have an audience, I can share that old stuff with my audience and they're like, whoa, this is really good. I'm like, yeah, I know, right? You know, so it's like if you are a success to yourself,

and no one else sees it, but you have to see it. And there's a quote from, I think from Les Brown. If no one else will see it for you, you have to see it for yourself. You have to be honest about what you think is good work, what you think is, this was worth doing. I think this is worth doing. I think this is worth struggling at. And if no one else sees it, I will see it for myself. And then you try and find one other person who can see it, and then another person, and then another person. And then in that kind of mindset, I think...

you can try to be cheerful about it. There's all this other project management nitty-gritty stuff. So don't attempt extremely large projects that might sink your ship if you fail. I think Nietzsche said something like,

write a hundred like outlines of essays or drafts or something like so you can if you can like the saddest thing I see from time to time is like an author who spent or like a startup founder or an author who spends several years of their life and a lot of their money and their resources and whatever working on a project that

that they had like this kind of white whale idea like, oh, when my novel is done, everyone's going to love it. Magnum opus. Yeah. And then you do this really big thing and then you talk to people about it for the first time and they're not interested. And then that's just so depressing and so disheartening. Whereas what you want to do, and this is part of like being cheerful and whatever, you want to do little sketches, little outlines, little drafts, and then share them with people and then like see how they respond.

And if you just talk to people every couple of days, even just a regular conversation, you may notice at some point you make someone laugh or at some point their eyes light up. And those are the moments that you want to collect and pay attention to. And you do more of that. I love the idea of the challenges that the person who's not yet successful but not a total noob is encountering. And the fact that

sympathy for successful people is very unpopular, but there is certainly a new skill set that everybody needs to learn. Just imagine that you get toward where you want to be. Not even where you want to be. Just imagine you get toward where you want to be. What fears are going to come into your life that you don't have right now? Well, what about the fear of losing something? You've got something to fucking lose now. Climbing higher simply gives you further to fall. You've got the...

onus on you to continue doing the thing because if you don't, you've actually risked something. Now, as opposed to before, if no one reads your blog, if nobody cares about your t-shirt designs, if no one's supporting your sports team or you're buying your products or whatever, what does it matter if you quit? It doesn't care. It's all on you. It's just a passion project, but that's not the case anymore. You've got this beautiful idea of the scarcity sprite,

And it really sort of spoke to me. You say,

A small part of me shyly raises his hand like a kid in a classroom and says, it's okay if you lose everything. I'll still be your friend. Yeah, man. Dude, fucking unbelievable. That sense of support from yourself from the past. I'm proud of you for doing what you did. Yeah, that's...

I have my moments, huh? You know, it's a, when I write, you know, when I hear this, right, it doesn't feel like me. You know, I can recognize that it's me, but it's my, it's kind of a peak state me or like when I'm in the middle of a thing, right? It's a day to day. I don't feel like my best self or I don't feel like my best writer self, but like I got to keep,

doing stuff and then it just comes by in flow. Elizabeth Gilbert has a great TED talk about this where she talks about the myth of the genius, of the creative genius in a sense where it's like

She goes back to, because she was a successful author of Eat, Pray, Love. And she described how when she was a struggling author, people were like, how are you going to feel never making anything worthwhile? What if you're never going to make it? And then immediately after she made it, immediately people are like, oh, aren't you afraid you're never going to match up to that success? And she's like, what the fuck, man? So yeah. And so she looked up

the history of how people thought about these things. And I think in the Roman times or antiquity, people were like, okay, people get possessed by genius from time to time. So if you do good work, you don't get full credit. And if you do bad work, you don't get full blame. It's like the creative... Sometimes just creativity happens and we are vessels for that. But yeah, with regards to the scarcity sprite, it's really...

I don't know. I think maybe I indoctrinated myself a little bit with video games, motivational stuff. But I feel it to be true. I really just want to have my own back. I think there's a quote from Montaigne where he says, you can try to be clever and fancy with all your words and stuff, but on your deathbed, you're going to really confront the barest...

barest truths about yourself. Like, did you live up to what you wanted? Do you forgive yourself for whatever? Do you... And like those very basal things. And I think

I think about that a lot. I'm like, how can I be a better friend to myself so that I can be a better friend to other people? And I say it's funny. It's funny that I'm so quick to go from that first sentence to the next. It's like, you know, like self-love or self-care, therefore that I can help other people, right? Yeah, the subjugating of desires. I must put other people first. Who am I to ask for the attention even from myself? My attention should be paid onto other people. No, dude, I'm...

I'm balls deep in that challenge at the moment. Speaking of the tactical stuff, we can talk Mark Manson quotes all day. You spent a good bit of time looking at procrastination. What is the TLDR 30,000 foot view as somebody that needs to write lots of words and do things self-powered every year?

What's the TLDR of procrastination? Yeah, so you know what's funny? I spent years reading everything I could about it, analyzing it, psychoanalyzing myself and everything. And these days, I don't even use the term anymore. I think one of the most major things I've learned is that you really have to focus on the outcomes that you want and not the outcomes that you don't want. And even describing things in terms of procrastination, somehow I feel it tends to...

reinforce the procrastination. I don't know if this is a slightly radical view. I can try and answer the question directly, but my meta view is that

you don't even need to use that term. You know, like think about what you want. Ask yourself what's in the way of getting to what you want. And the problem is, you know, very often procrastination is like trying to protect you. You know, it's trying to protect you from doing something that you don't actually want. You know, like my wife and I have been procrastinating on renovating our house for years and years. And I eventually realized, oh, I don't want to live in this neighborhood. And I have not been honest with myself about that. And like, but my subconscious protects me

from making a costly financial decision, like a very costly financial decision by just putting it off. Like, no, no, let's just keep looking, let's whatever. And the moment I realized that, oh, I actually want to be in a better neighborhood, then like it's so easy to fall into, I'm going to go see an agent, I'm going to go look at houses and like everything is just flows from there. So yeah, I think a lot of times procrastination is,

you know, maybe you don't, you don't actually want to do the thing. And I think people struggle with like, well, but I need to pay the bill. So I have to have a job. So I have to, which is fair, right? Everyone, everyone, most people go through that. But I think a lot of things boils down to, to like the story you're telling yourself about why you need to do what you're doing.

And I have been helping some friends with these issues recently. And one pattern I keep noticing is people have like this task master inside their head that's like beating them up over and over again. Like, you should be doing this thing. Why are you not doing it? Like, you're so lazy. You're so whatever. And it doesn't get to the truth of why you should or should not be doing it, what you are, what you care about, what you're afraid of.

And yeah, so when I was talking to my friend, he was trying to spend less time on Twitter. And I'm like, why? And he's like, oh, because I spend so much time on Twitter and Instagram and whatever, and I don't get any work done. And so I should spend less time on those things. And I'm like, I don't think that's actually true. You know, like somewhere out there, there's someone else who spends twice as much time on the socials as you, but they're happy because they're achieving their goals, right? So like, why is it that you're focusing on lowering the...

thing that you think you don't want instead of increasing the thing that you actually do want. And then we talked about that for almost an hour and we got around to, well, he wants to be doing some research stuff, but he hasn't made a study plan. And his initial plan was, oh, I'm going to read this whole textbook in a week. And that's not possible. It's a thick, dense textbook. So you've got to partition the thing. So it's so interesting when you lay it all out. It turns out that this guy

has the thing he wants to do, has like, and you know, if you split him into two people, imagine that there's like the, the client and the worker, right? Like the client is not the right word, but like you split him into two people, one person asking the other person to do a job, right? Like the manager and the worker, the manager is giving these really big, you know, requests with like unreasonable timelines, not,

unclear what needs to be done, what needs to be shipped or whatever, just get work done. And the worker is like, fuck this shit. I'm just going to goof off and play video games or whatever. Because the gradient of work to be done is just so out of whack that they're not going to do it. So you have to respect that there's some part of you within you that will not

except shitty management. So people are shitty bosses of themselves. And I guess there's some funny territory here where people might be like, oh yeah, bad workplace environments are horrible. My boss sucks. My this, whatever. How are you managing your own home, your own head, your own whatever? And people inherit the talk from their parents, from their teachers, from their whatever. And it's like, you got to work harder. You got to do more. It's very nebulous, vague, and

So I always ask people and I ask my friends, what are you really trying to accomplish? Why? What is the most sensible, reasonable, interesting, exciting way to do it? And if you really want the thing and the path to getting there makes sense and you can see your progress towards the thing,

And video games do this really well, which is why video games are so fun to play. You have some mission, you have some objective, and like, you know, you know how much XP you're going to get from each monster you kill. You get the gold, you get the skill points. It's very clear. The game has done the hard work of project managing your tasks for you. So you go in there and you have a good manager in the game and it's shiny and colorful and whatever. But like, you can do the same in your own life with your own projects. You know, so it's like if you're practicing guitar or whatever, like,

How much are you practicing? What specific thing are you trying to do? What's the reward? What song do you want to be able to play? And when you make that progress, progress feels good. And what's interesting is that

I think people don't even feel that they deserve the right to feel good making progress on their work. That's the real painful thing. They feel that work should be miserable and difficult. Puritan work ethic. Yes. And that's what really... And they have that, which is like, imagine a boss saying, oh, you're all going to have to grind, grind every weekend, every night. And the employee's like, yeah, sure. And then they just, their heart's not in it. And then...

So then you get this conflict, this, this, um,

just this dive, this, the person becomes unintegrated. They get split selves. And you have this phrases like revenge, bedtime procrastination, where basically like your, your, you know, and so it's your prefrontal cortex that's making all the plans. It's like the manager is a shitty guy. It's like, you know, um, in law of the rings, there's King Theoden. And then there's the worm tongue whispering poison in his ear. It's like a lot of people's prefrontal cortex is worm tongue. And it's like, you know, you, you, you gotta do more of this. You gotta, this not okay. That kind of thing. And it,

it's, it's when you see it as that, and then you're like, and I have this whole analogy with, well, Gandalf is a friend who sees what's best in you and encourages you to grasp your sword of, of, uh, agency and do what you actually want to do. And, um,

Yeah. So when people's like, and when you get tired, like your, your, your prefrontal cortex shuts down. It's like the boss leaves the office. And then what people are going to do, they're going to goof off. They're like, we've been grinding on this thing that doesn't make any sense. Like, let's just, you know, like we need to have fun too. So we're going to, and at that point you feel like you're, you're, you're burnt out, you're tired and you feel you have no choice but to like go

like go along with the thing. And next thing you know, you're on a bender. It's 3 a.m. And then, and then you feel bad about that. And then you feel bad about that. And then, and you justify, I should be harsher on myself. And then it's a, it's a, the only solution, the only solution is to grip things more tightly. Yeah. I, I wrote this essay yesterday and,

And I actually spoke it at a live show last night. So this might be interesting to you. I wrote, I think type A people have a type B problem and type B people have a type A problem. Insecure overachievers need to learn how to chill out and relax and lazy people need to learn how to work harder and be disciplined.

Given you subscribed to me, I'm going to guess that you're probably type A. Some version of a walking anxiety disorder harnessed for productivity, as Andrew Wilkinson says. Yeah, I have a tweet like that, and it's goo for my prickly friends and prickles for my gooey friends. And there's a whole bunch of things like that. Which is like, yeah, everybody...

overextends the mode that they are good at. And again, it's like coping mechanisms, right? And it's like in like D&D and video games, there's this concept of a glass cannon, which is like a character who can do a lot of damage, but like dies very easily. And you think, oh, why is he like that? And it's like, oh, because he dies very easily, he has learned to do a lot of damage. And so he takes pride in that and that his identity becomes tied up in that. And it's just, you know, it's that, yeah.

Yeah, it's a lot. So you asked for the TLDR and I went on this long, rambly circular rant. But I would say at the heart of everything, you have to really step back and observe the patterns non-judgmentally. I recommend really abstract questions like how might this

look if it's easy? Or how might it look if it's done skillfully and beautifully without anger, without, you know, like, one of my favorite things in the book Easy Way to Quit Smoking by Alan Carr, they insist that you keep smoking as you read the book.

And it's like, why would they do that, right? It's because part of the cycle of addiction, and this is true for all addictions, and procrastination can be a kind of addiction. Part of what happens with the smoker who kind of wants to quit but is struggling to, and then...

He tries to quit, but he's like half-hearted about it. And then eventually he lights up again and then he feels guilty and shamed that he did that. And that is a high arousal emotion. He gets stressed and he wants to smoke more. So there's that loop. And then there's like the meta loop that keeps the loop going harder. And when the book says, I want you to keep smoking,

you're like, am I being punked? Because you assume that you're supposed to not. And that just creates this tension that makes it difficult to mess with the process. So same with budgeting software or even diets. The good ones say, don't change your spending, just track it. Don't change your...

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

And you're like, oh, maybe I don't have to play video games until 3 a.m. in the morning. And so, yeah, and I had an issue with schedules as a child, like with school timetables and stuff. I found it very stressful and traumatic. And the idea of even using, opening up Google Calendar and putting, I'm going to do this work today, this work at this point, whatever. I hated that because I felt like I was always dishonest. And when I put whatever I

I would get excited and fill in with lots of stuff and then I would miss it and then I feel bad and then the cycle continues. And what someone suggested that really worked for me was

Only schedule the fun stuff. Which, again, it sounds immoral. It sounds like, oh, gasp. It violates the puritanical thing, right? What do you mean schedule the fun stuff? But if you say, I'm going to play one hour of video games every evening, you no longer feel this anxious, grabby, I might not get to play tomorrow, so I better play three hours tonight. And then you don't sleep. And then your sleep gets fucked and then everything spirals worse and worse. So if you begin with the premise that

To do your best work, you have to be emotionally well. Morale has to be good. Again, people don't want to admit until it gets so bad that it's horrific. And then they don't even get to enjoy. Then the only rest they get is that they fall sick. And then it's like, what kind of leisure or recreation is that? You're just lying in bed. You don't get to go and see things. You don't get to hang out with your friends. So you schedule the good stuff. And then...

you will get you know like nobody wants to be on a beach vacation for like years you know like people feel like i would like to sit at the beach for a year no you wouldn't like three weeks maybe two or three months is about as long as anyone would really enjoy a beach vacation most people i guess uh before you start to go ah you know what am i doing same for like you know there's there's only like if you were tasked with eating as much chocolate cake as you could you'd probably eat

I don't know, somewhere between half a cake to one cake or something, whatever your number is. But you would eat... So the people who, when tasked to have pleasure, they tend to contain it reasonably. But when they've been suppressed away from pleasure, that's when they eat three cakes. And then they feel horrible and they want to throw up. And then next morning, they're like, I'm never going to eat cakes again. It's yo-yo...

extremes and it's just chaos. It's just bad. So you want to dampen that extreme yo-yo stuff. You want to like

schedule the fun and the pleasure. And I remember so clearly when I was working and I was like 25 and I felt I don't have the right to have fun. I have like overdue work. I don't have the right to... One of the saddest days of my life was I think 2015 or 2016, the New Year's Day. My wife was like... Both me and my wife were at home and I was anxiously trying to get work done because I had gotten myself into such a

spiral of self-loathing and whatever that I'm not doing enough work, that my poor wife was sitting in the living room by herself while I was working. And I can't even tell you what I was working on. I don't remember. It's how... So I was like, never again. Prioritize what's important to you. You are a human being who deserves love and space. And even if you don't think you deserve it, that's what good performance requires. I hope you get to the point where you feel that you deserve it. But even...

you know, like, and sometimes they say, like, LeBron James slept, like, 12 hours a night and, like, freaking God Almighty took a day off on Sunday. So, you know, schedule your breaks and, like, yeah, cultures, like, historic cultures have, like, the Sabbath and you're supposed to respect the Sabbath because that's how you decompress. Well, it's wild. I think about

Sometimes me and my friends reinvent shit that was literally with us from the beginning of time. Like, you know what I've really enjoyed doing? I've really enjoyed taking like one, two days a week and just not working quite so hard. And you go, hey, guy, that's called a weekend. Like...

It's fucking baked into your calendar. Look, Visa dude, I appreciate the hell out of you. I love your work. I love your writing. Where should people go? They want to keep up to date with all of the stuff that you're doing. The most interesting stuff that's happening for me right now is on my Substack. So if you go to visaganvi.substack.com or like, okay, most people like my Twitter, but like,

I feel like my action is moving to Substack. But I follow both, I guess. You can just Google me, V-I-S-A-K-A-N-V. You get my personal website that has links to my YouTube channel and everything else. Dude, I appreciate you. Thank you. Thank you so much for having me. This was great.