# Why You Need A Digital Detox with Andrew Wilkinson

Channel: Greg Isenberg
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o1J8p4bzrmU
Duration: 1 hr 7 min
Language: English
Words: 13216
Transcript page: https://viewrankai.com/tools/youtube-transcript/o1J8p4bzrmU

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[0:00] 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 [Music] what's going on man thanks for uh 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 uh 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

[0:42] 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

[1:14] don't i think it sounds like a dream but i think it's over simplification 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 wake ups and [ __ ] and in in that instance the 2 a.m wake ups 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

[1:40] city i i thrive on isolation thrive on it like i love to just you know in uh in my little town in in quebec and i look out and there's 95 acres of just like nothing basically um for me that's the best in terms of like getting like hot 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 yeah when are you sending out the packages when do they start yeah that's when they get down i'll look forward i'll look forward to getting the fbi exactly today's episode is brought to you by

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[3:48] d-r-i-n-k-l-m-n-t dot 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 reliable income stream these investments could be a valuable addition to your portfolio this is where fundrise comes in

[4:35] 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 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 i um it's balance right like i think i would enjoy being

[5:23] isolated and having that experience for maybe a month or a couple months a year um 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 it'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

[5:57] i'm curious uh 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 as everyone else did just constantly searching for uh 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

[6:31] to kill myself i can't get her to bed it was do 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 edge 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 lake house and i just said [ __ ] it i'm turning off all my devices i'm cutting

[7:01] off everything i'm putting up an autoresponder 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 podcasts 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 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

[7:35] 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 muzak 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 what did i do why did this work what's the science behind it and i happened to listen to

[8:15] an interview that andrew huberman did with dr anna lemke from stanford who specializes in addiction and i listen 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 the interesting thing they talked

[8:53] 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

[9:23] 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 i have a few follow-up questions on it so first off have you ever done something like this like have you ever even done you know like greg kind of

[10:02] does like a one day per week detox like a sabbath um 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 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

[10:34] 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 like 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 [ __ ] i forgot my phone that feeling of desperation what am i gonna do while i'm on the toilet or you know you need it constantly um i had that every five seconds and my kids you know we have this lake house and there's this little

[11:10] 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 uh 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

[11:41] 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 robinhood this morning and like i'm looking at like my net worth going up like crazy and going down like crazy like that 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 um the the genies out of the bottle right and i think there will be people who are

[12:19] 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 won't 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 are these

[12:57] aren't things that we should all swear off right i think they 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 sahil and i are constantly talking about this um so i'm made fun of a bit in my in my friend group because i'm like for many reasons for many reasons for many reasons one of them one one of the yeah but one of them is

[13:32] uh 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 i'm very similar to you actually so my my friends would also you know when i was in my partying days i would always go out and i'd only have

[14:12] 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 etc that will cause you to do that thing and then remove the stimuli from your home from your office etc 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 um a i'm gonna remove all the unhealthy

[14:50] snacks from my my pantry i'm gonna 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 gonna 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 uh i 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

[15:22] somebody else set my screen time passcode 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 deprogrammed 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 um i might go to the wall street journal so i'm always trying to cut those 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 a

[15:54] pattern change like that you need to hack your environment and 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 um 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 other things and maybe i didn't have friends around and

[16:30] 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 i do like 30 minutes a day no matter what of uh 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 will write down things that come into my head and i find that those periods of boredom end up being when my best ideas actually strike and it's no surprise i mean it's no surprise to me that that's

[17:01] 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 blaise 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

[17:37] 20-minute drives everywhere i go i've now slept obviously given i relapsed but i do think those sorts of things are really really helpful and that experiencing boredom at some day 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 in elastic band and you know drugs alcohol um stimuli that's you pulling up on the elastic band right but the cost is gonna 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

[18:13] you do some mdma and you go to eight well you're gonna go negative eight for the next couple days after that you're gonna 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 um 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

[18:43] 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 etc and you're going to have downward swings but being able to like squeeze that into a tighter band is a real skill

[19:12] um and it's something that i think needs to be honed so have you guys heard of um it's teleb 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 uh more information more knowledge etc 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 consumed so much more information and you got more insight knowledge etc and it accumulates

[19:48] in compounds his whole theory is that it's actually um 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 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

[20:28] 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 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 and 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 in a mile wide and i what i try and focus on that i find the times where i'm actually learning the most i'm focused on long narratives of a

[20:56] single story um and i'm looking at stuff that's happened five or ten years ago where you have full context and knowledge um i think looking at day-to-day news is like looking at a stock ticker and going oh my god it's up one percent it's down two percent 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

[21:28] i don't need to be sitting there scanning my stock portfolio of news constantly and watching the tickers um so i really just try and focus on long-form uh longer narrative and kind of rear looking i just don't think there's any upside in looking at what's happening in the moment the cocktail party knowledge point there's a great paper if you haven't read it um i think it's dan lew 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

[22:04] 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 like 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

[22:38] and it's very much in the zeitgeist to 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 x person say it right 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 uh actually having deep learning on something is that why like is that why you one of the reasons you live in victoria like to a lot of

[23:11] especially the americans listening they don't even know where victoria is probably there's like oh yeah maybe it's it's in canada or maybe it's on the west coast or maybe it's like 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 um when you were growing your business were you ever tempted to to move to san francisco where you know the center of a lot of the technology noise were was is i i think um it's difficult what is the galilean relativity it's hard to understand a

[23:48] 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 um 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

[24:22] francisco um did i ever get tempted by it absolutely was i intoxicated by the excitement of being there yes um you know was it a contrast when i would go down there and talk to people who were fired up in the startup world yes like i we didn't i didn't have that in victoria but what i ended up doing is just having a really great network of people who i talked to on the phone and text you know just like today like we're all interconnected we were still 10 years ago um so i think that the nice thing about victoria and for those that don't know

[24:55] victoria is a 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 um there's something really nice about not needing to be a multi-billionaire right you can actually in 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 um 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

[25:33] 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 uh i had one guy he's worth two billion dollars and he goes uh oh you know this person's so rich and it was someone with 20 billion dollars 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

[26:07] 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 gonna 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 um you know the the wealthy partners that have made 50 million are still working 70 80

[26:36] hours a week because they're like well that guy has made a billion or a few hundred million and we got to raise bigger funds and i'm still stressed and i'm not you know spending time with kids or whatever it is um and i always just thought it was 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

[27:04] having this one conversation that triggered it for me where one of the uh one of the people um at another firm was was talking about one of the partners of that firm and saying how oh he's the laziest guy ever uh 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 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 um but

[27:38] 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 i mean i don't know if you guys have read uh 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 right so if you're a comedian you want a netflix special if you're a musician you might want a grammy um you know if you're a

[28:12] professional baker you want to win great british bake off right like you just have these different desires and the 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 gonna play the hair competition game make sure we always have nice hair if i lose my hair i will literally think i'm gonna die and i've lost all my worth have i no i probably look fine bald hopefully i 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

[28:47] 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 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 greg you and i have talked about like you you get to the thing that you thought

[29:21] was where you were gonna get to and then your number just changes and i've known so many people who were like oh when i make 15 million dollars i'm done i'm just gonna 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 a hundred thousand dollars is like scientifically proven do

[29:51] not fundamentally change above a hundred thousand a year where you can like basically get all the baseline things that you 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 in new york and we moved here and i was so happy i

[30:17] was like man this place is amazing and then literally like a couple weeks later i was 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's a pain in the 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 a zero right you're always gonna go back there you're gonna overanalyze anything you have

[30:45] 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 times 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

[31:18] 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 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

[32:01] 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 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 1000mg sodium 200 milligrams potassium and 60 milligrams of magnesium but none of the junk no

[32:50] 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

[33:29] 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 happens this deal is only available through my link you must go to d r i n k l m n t dot 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 there's a question for

[34:11] both of you guys because i'm 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

[34:40] 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

[35:13] 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 spaghetti all over the wall and nothing would stick and i would pursue all these stupid business ideas i'd 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

[35:46] filtering out you know the bad ideas um 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 um 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

[36:22] 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

[36:56] 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 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 gonna 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

[37:32] to san francisco um unlike you andrew like i you know 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

[38:09] that people have a victoria or have a you know my small town in quebec um 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 how do you i i mean to this is to that like broader point how do you avoid the like comparison trap because like for andrew or for you greg if you're gonna do things slow and feel really fulfilled from doing that personally and and individually i think that's amazing and a great thing and you're gonna come you know you can compound wealth over the long term with

[38:48] 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 uh 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 latest accolade is that forbes charges for uh to uh to put people in uh no offense to actually

[39:20] i guess offense to forbes uh and uh you know how do you avoid that aspect of it well i think um 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 dollars you go oh wow did they sell their stock they got 100 million dollar windfall and it's like 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

[39:55] you need to spend as much money as possible to go there and that ceo's life is [ __ ] that's the equivalent of somebody saying i'm going out i'm putting myself into personal debt and i'm getting uh credit cards at 30 annualized interest right 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 metalab was selling pickaxes to gold miners in silicon valley so we would provide the services to help them build their business design development etc and we

[40:29] 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 render and then i would compare it to my life and i'd go sure you know my company is not worth 100 million dollars 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

[41:01] 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 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

[41:34] exhausted and i'm just slowly compounding it you know 25 a year um 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 um the new wework document series the with uh with jared leto and hathaway which if

[42:11] 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 dimon 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 you know i won't

[42:39] 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 dollars 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 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

[43:07] hamptons and they have all the stuff and i was like no they don't like you know it's not theirs like you're renting somebody from somebody at the end of the day if you're borrowing the money to do that um but that perception and reality gap around startup funding uh you know raising the round from tiger raising the run 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 uh i think he called it the personal board of advisors so

[43:45] uh every week julian and i used to meet at 7am 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 7am especially in montreal when it's like minus 40 in the winter time 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 um but eventually what i've grown to

[44:19] 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

[45:00] 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 you know i could never do that i think it would make me incredibly miserable um 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 uh or sorry 2014 i sold a

[45:36] business was sitting on a bunch of cash started reading about investing and read about buffett and monger 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 um 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

[46:14] are a little bit on the spectrum they just want to absorb data um 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 lie like their life and i am still trying to find that person like who who do i want to be when i grow 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 um

[46:44] sort of like hypotheticals that i've played out in my own mind is uh take two different people one person uh extraordinarily wealthy you know has made 200 plus million dollars but is like sort of known as kind of an [ __ ] like a scumbag people don't want to spend time with him or her um 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 uh not really like someone that you'd people want to hang out with or spend time with or or not someone that is well respected on the

[47:21] other end of the spectrum a um 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 network 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 um 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

[47:56] 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

[48:25] 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 you know 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 uh there's this friend of mine nick gray you've ever heard of that yeah for sure i'm uh nick here

[48:55] let's give nick a quick shout out because i have it right over here dude i have that too what is it okay so 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 um for years i kind of just passively followed him really interesting guy 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 friends newsletter and he sends this out i think every month and it's

[49:29] basically just here's all the interesting [ __ ] 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 he's actually just written a book um 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 good 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 are do not necessarily have the richest lives right

[50:02] 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

[50:35] 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 gonna fly to the galapagos islands on my g6 and we're gonna 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 like i i think wealth just in many ways just makes that stuff worse so a couple weeks ago on the pod i was saying my inspiration

[51:07] of the week was mike posner who's super you know he 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 can i remember him of course i remember him from way back in the day he used to do the songs right he did songs uh he he had a tv show in canada i think in the 90s where he basically stopped people in ottawa and just like kind of just say goofy stuff and and it was filmed and then he oh he was

[51:46] freddy got fingered yeah he did yeah exactly then he moved to la he had a few movies did really well um he was actually one of the og podcasters like joe rogan actually was like attributes tom green to getting into podcasting um so he was in that scene and then when covet hit he got a van uh and he drove across america this is seems like a theme and he landed somewhere outside ottawa and he bought a a uh i don't know a bunch of acres um in 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

[52:33] 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 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 sahil we

[53:08] talked for 10 minutes and we're like we knew like 30 people in common even though we've never met right this is a very incest to a small world but there's fascinating people in every every industry um 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

[53:40] great but i just need to de-program my brain from 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 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 you know i don't know what he has

[54:14] done like he's pro like besides from 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 well 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

[54:48] 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

[55:18] 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 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 there's people i've known for 20 plus years and i'll hear all these stories about their life for their family that i never never would have got you can buy those at i think it's

[55:48] schooloflife.com um there's they're just incredible um but i am trying to crack this right and reading nick's book was fascinating um not enough people talk about the tactics of having an interesting life well it's 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

[56:23] 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 in the hut 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

[56:54] 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

[57:24] 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 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 uh that someone did that and it was it

[57:58] was more it was written about trying to understand how trump won and they went and like drove across america all these different places and did this um but i would do it with no you know 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 you know 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 you people used to be much more religious i'm not religious i'm you know atheist agnostic but you used to go to church

[58:30] and church was this you know central place where you connect with a whole wide variety of different people and you'd go you know 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

[59:04] 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 um 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 like i wanna do stuff like that i just wanna 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

[59:38] 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 the public pool and like the community was there and i'd meet other kids and and like all parents were there and we used to hang out over time

[1:00:17] over the years i noticed less and less people used to go to the public pool started asking why turns out like people started creating pools in their own backyards they wanted private pools and then the the the trend became like the privatization of these like public goods so i 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 you know what it's i think it's brilliant it also all relates to one of my favorite um have you guys do you know who jonathan

[1:00:57] height hate h-a-i-d-t he's like an amazing writer author he writes for the atlantic now um and he had you know like this general piece that he wrote that was really well known around like basically uh 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

[1:01:32] and i was probably like eight or ten 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 cycles 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

[1:01:56] it's just like insane insane proliferation of like tracking and fear of what's going to happen if we're just out in a 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 where like oh the town pool is not safe because my kid can't walk there so i'm gonna have a pool here and he can have his friends here but suddenly you lose your independence you lose the uh the exploration that was so transformative to how we thought and grew and developed as kids and that

[1:02:28] scares the [ __ ] 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 get there and we'll see you in four hours right and i would go off and i would just feel so confident and independent i never had any problems um 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

[1:02:57] 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 you're more likely to be your kid's more likely to die in the pool in

[1:03:29] your backyard or falling down the stairs than any of those you know kind of silly fears yeah i think if you map to 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 911 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 additional traffic accidents and deaths that happened from those additional miles driven was like far in excess of the

[1:04:01] 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

[1:04:33] i was 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 you know insular we've become right i'm a nick i'm an extrovert i love meeting people and i was like terrified to go to this party i just had a conversation with um you guys know tim urban um 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

[1:05:01] 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 of the bias where we assume everyone's looking at us uh 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 um

[1:05:34] well man look this was um this was so much fun and so much like wider arranging and uh and and personal than than i had expected it to get a very very interesting conversation i'm glad we got to have it and again to the uh to the point of me feeling privileged i am constantly astounded that i get to have these conversations quote unquote for a living so thank you so much for 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 uh newsletter i just i just subscribed to it but nick it's

[1:06:05] nickgray.net uh is the is the website i just subscribed my friends newsletter um and uh people can uh people can check it out and hopefully learn from it as much as you guys have cool awesome cool guys that was 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 hi trwih.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 [Music]

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