The Most Important Skill To Learn In The Next 10 Years With Devon Eriksen

Summary

Highlights

• Devon Eriksen emphasizes the need for agency over intelligence for long-term success 🌟.
• The conversation critiques modern education's focus on job training rather than true learning 🤔.
• Eriksen shares his journey from a software engineer to a self-published author 📚.
• The dialogue explores the cultural impact of science fiction and storytelling 🎥.
• Discussion around artificial intelligence highlights its complements to human adaptability 🤖.

Key Takeaways

• Developing agency is crucial for adapting and thriving in a world with advancing AI 🤖.
• The current education system falls short by not teaching how to learn and adapt 📚.
• Storytelling is a powerful tool for cultural influence and personal expression 📖.
• Intelligence alone isn't enough; coupling it with agency leads to real success 🚀.
• Future success involves learning continuously and not confining oneself to a single identity 🏆.

Overview

Chapters

• 00:00 - 00:30: Introduction and Context This chapter introduces a conversation with Devin Ericson, a notable figure who recently gained popularity on Twitter and social media due to his harsh truths and insightful commentary. Devin is also the author of a new science fiction book titled 'Theft of Fire,' which marks a significant quality in the conversation, considering it's the first fiction book the narrator has read in nearly a decade. This introduction sets the stage for a discussion influenced by Ericson's growing reputation, notably amplified by a retweet from Naval Ravikant.
• 00:30 - 01:00: Discovering Devin Erikson The chapter titled 'Discovering Devin Erikson' delves into a transformative encounter with Devin Erikson's content and ideas, which deeply resonated with the narrator. Captivated by his insights, the narrator not only followed Devin's work online but was also compelled to read his book. This led to a profound conversation about crucial modern themes. The discussion focuses on how individuals can prepare for the evolving landscape shaped by artificial intelligence, critiques of the existing educational systems, and the overall process of skill acquisition. A central theme is the significance of personal agency, portrayed as a vital attribute for achieving freedom and adaptability in today's world.
• 01:00 - 01:30: Topics of Discussion The chapter focuses on various topics related to personal growth and career transformation. It starts with the notion that intelligence alone is not a reliable predictor of overall success in life. The discussion then moves on to exploring how individuals can find direction in their lives and eliminate self-imposed limitations that hinder personal development.
• 01:30 - 03:00: Education System Critique The chapter titled 'Education System Critique' begins with a reference to Noah Harari's perspective on education, highlighting the uncertainty about what will be relevant to learn in the future. It then transitions to a critique that challenges Harari's view by stating that the problem lies in not understanding the true purpose of education. According to the writer, the modern educational focus should be on the Seven Liberal Arts, specifically emphasizing the importance of teaching logic and statistics to help students derive truth from facts and understand data implications.
• 03:00 - 04:30: The Concept of Agency The chapter titled 'The Concept of Agency' introduces several intertwined ideas essential for personal and professional growth, including rhetoric, research, practical psychology, and investment. At its core, the concept of agency is emphasized, focusing on the ability to make decisions and proactively take actions in pursuit of one's goals. This serves as a foundational discussion for the entire podcast. The chapter also opens with a critical question about the current educational system, inviting reflection on its potential shortcomings and the need for improvement in fostering these essential skills.
• 04:30 - 06:00: Agency and Intelligence The chapter titled 'Agency and Intelligence' examines the flawed educational system. It argues that the root cause of the dysfunctions in this system stems from its funding model. Specifically, it emphasizes the problematic nature of third-party payments, which distort the accountability and agency in educational institutions. The focus remains on highlighting how these financial structures affect the quality and intent of education, rather than on nitpicking minor issues.
• 06:00 - 08:00: Problem-Solving: Easy, Impossible, Hard This chapter discusses the dynamics of problem-solving by focusing on the roles and responsibilities within the context of education and government funding. It emphasizes the situation where the government pays for education, implying that the government has significant control over the curriculum. The individual, in this case, lacks veto power over what they learn as the funding does not directly come from them, but from a third party, i.e., taxpayers. The chapter suggests that this results in reduced personal agency in choice of education or curriculum, as options to seek alternatives are limited.
• 08:00 - 10:00: Educational Shift and Agency Development This chapter discusses the influence of government funding on college education, specifically through programs like Education grants and the Stafford Loan program. It highlights that since students aren't directly paying, they don’t have control over the curriculum, which is typically decided by those who fund the education. The implication is that the education system is designed to produce graduates who are useful to the benefactors, rather than fulfilling individual educational preferences or needs.
• 10:00 - 12:00: AI and Human Function The chapter titled 'AI and Human Function' delves into the significance of education that serves individual utility and purpose. It references Cicero's thoughts on education, suggesting a reading of his works to understand his educational philosophy. The discussion implies that there is a lack of a structured interpretation of Cicero's vision for education in contemporary discourse.
• 12:00 - 14:30: Fear of AI: Misunderstanding Its Role This chapter discusses the distinction between education and training, using the analogy of Roman slaves. The speaker argues that modern-day education is more akin to training, as it prepares individuals for performing repetitive tasks like a slave devoted to one duty. This misunderstanding of education's role highlights a fear of AI, as humans may end up being trained like machines, rather than being truly educated.
• 14:30 - 17:00: Natural and Artificial Stupidity In this chapter titled 'Natural and Artificial Stupidity,' the discussion focuses on the expected capabilities and responsibilities of a free Roman citizen. As a Roman citizen, particularly one with full rights, it was anticipated that the individual would possess a diverse set of skills and be prepared to engage in various activities throughout their life. Unlike slaves, Roman citizens were expected to act in their own interest and had the liberty to carry weapons and perform numerous tasks. This historical perspective is used to explore the idea of competency and self-reliance in individuals, contrasting with themes of natural and artificial intelligence or competence.
• 17:00 - 18:30: Humans as Navigators The chapter 'Humans as Navigators' discusses the philosophical perspective that individuals exist to both benefit society and serve their own interests, with the hope that these two goals will align. It reflects on the idea that it is impossible to teach someone everything they might need to know because of the unpredictability of future needs. Instead, the focus is on teaching individuals how to learn and adapt on their own, allowing them to navigate their personal and societal roles effectively.
• 18:30 - 20:00: Anarcho-Capitalism and Identity In the chapter titled 'Anarcho-Capitalism and Identity,' the discussion revolves around the theme of education. It suggests that education should focus more on learning how to learn rather than merely performing tasks. The modern Western educational system lacks a systematic approach to self-education and learning, as it is often constrained by those who control the curriculum.
• 20:00 - 21:30: Property Rights and Creation Education is primarily seen as a means to produce useful workers for financial interests. Agency is a crucial element in this context, potentially serving as a cohesive force.
• 21:30 - 23:00: Money and Self-Limiting Beliefs In this chapter, the focus is on the concept of agency and its critical role in determining the success of individuals. It begins by posing a question about what agency is and why it matters in the context of personal and financial growth. The discussion highlights that agency is one of the rare factors that contribute significantly to the success of high achievers, such as Elon Musk. Despite having a high IQ, akin to many others, it is implied that Musk's agency may distinguish his accomplishments from those of other intelligent individuals.
• 23:00 - 24:30: The Value of Stories The chapter discusses the phenomenon of highly intelligent individuals, possessing IQs above 150, many of whom are primarily found within academic circles in the United States. While some among these intellectuals contribute to fields like physics, others engage in producing postmodernist academic papers. However, despite their IQ and potential, not all of them succeed in creating impactful outcomes or achieving widespread success. The issue highlighted is that intelligence alone does not guarantee transformative results or the ability to turn every endeavor into 'gold,' suggesting that there are other factors or 'bottlenecks' influencing success beyond mere intellect.
• 24:30 - 28:30: Role of Publishers in Creative Process The chapter begins by stating that intelligence is crucial for success, but not the only necessary factor. It is described as a narrow concept that cannot solely solve world problems. Agency is defined as the inclination to take action to achieve goals, highlighting its importance alongside intelligence in the creative process.
• 28:30 - 30:00: Building an Audience and Authenticity The process of gaining understanding and building an audience involves a cycle of thinking, guessing, testing, failing, and refining. Success often comes from repeated trials and learning from failures, rather than immediate comprehension or consistently correct guesses.
• 30:00 - 31:30: Conclusion and Future Plans The final chapter looks at the concept of agency and its role in applying intelligence to the universe. It emphasizes the importance of having a feedback loop that encourages the initiation of actions. Agency is described as the belief in eventual success, fostering a willingness to take risks and the resilience necessary to persevere. These traits are presented as crucial for engaging effectively with and understanding our universe. Future plans may involve leveraging these human attributes to drive further exploration and innovation.

The Most Important Skill To Learn In The Next 10 Years With Devon Eriksen Transcription

• 00:00 - 00:30 I just finished a conversation with Devin Ericson who recently blew up on Twitter and social media with his harsh truths and deeply articulate insights he is also the author of a new science fiction book titled theft of fire and this is the first fiction book that I've read in almost 10 years and I think that is a testament to the quality of this conversation as a whole now I came across Devon after Naval ravikant reposted one of his tweets and I was
• 00:30 - 01:00 instantly hooked I followed him I continued reading his content and it was incredible he was saying the things that I knew deep down but did not know how to articulate then naturally I instantly bought his book I burned through it and now we're here so in this conversation we talk about how to Future proof yourself going into the age of AI what's wrong with the current school system and how people learn skills as a whole why agency is the most important trait you can develop to be come free why
• 01:00 - 01:30 intelligence is not a good predictor of overall success how to find direction in life and remove dangerous self-limiting beliefs how Devon left his career as a software engineer built an audience and became an independent author and Creator and much more I hope that you enjoyed this conversation with Devin Erikson I want to start with that very first post of yours that I came across and it was you responding to uh youall
• 01:30 - 02:00 Noah Harari like a clip of him saying that nobody knows what to learn because nobody knows what will be relevant 20 years from now and then you started it with that's because this dude doesn't know what education is yes inde which that that caught my attention immediately yeah and you went on to say this in my opinion the Seven Liberal Arts of the modern world are logic how to derive truth from known facts statistics how to understand the implications of data
• 02:00 - 02:30 rhetoric how to persuade and spot persuasion tactics research how to gather information on an unknown subject parenthesis practical psychology how to discern and understand the true motives of others investment how to manage and grow existing assets and agency how to make decisions about what course to pursue and proactively take action to pursue it this will set us up for the entire podcast so I want to start with this question what do you find wrong with the current educ system and why are
• 02:30 - 03:00 we not teaching what you call these liberating Arts well the root cause of what is wrong with the education system is that a third party is paying for it you know we could go on all day sort of nitpicking the symptoms but that is the disease and when when something is being paid for the person who pays for it is the is
• 03:00 - 03:30 the customer and it is the customer who gets served so when you don't pay for your education when the government pays for your education through money that it has taken from other people then the government decides on some level what you are going to learn and you do not have so much as a veto power because if you if you pack your bags and go somewhere else to some other
• 03:30 - 04:00 college you're getting the same thing because the government is paying that for that either through these kinds of Education grants through the Stafford Loan program you're not writing the checks so you don't decide the curriculum and when somebody else decides the curriculum that you are going to be educated from then they are going to give you the education that is going to make you useful to them not specifically the
• 04:00 - 04:30 education that is going to make you useful to you and this is something that Cicero talked about when he talked about education and I would highly recommend giving those bits of his writings a read because we don't really have an organized version of what Cicero would have considered education
• 04:30 - 05:00 you know that what we call education today is mostly actually training and that is the kind of education that in Rome would have been given to Slaves a slave is essentially a human machine where he's property he's going to spend his whole life doing one task so you give him job training job training is not education it is preparation to do a
• 05:00 - 05:30 specific task if in in that era of History if someone was a free man a Roman citizen with the full rights thereof who could you know carry weapons and do all the things that Roman citizens could do he was expect it was expected that he would probably need to be able to do many different things in his life because he would be acting in his own own interest he was not a slave he did
• 05:30 - 06:00 not exist to serve someone else he existed to benefit his Society but also to serve himself and hopefully the two would align so that meant that you couldn't Teach You couldn't possibly teach him everything he might need to know because you had no idea what he might need to know he had no idea what he might need to know so you taught him how to train
• 06:00 - 06:30 himself you taught him how to learn and education is not about how to do a task it's about how to learn a task and we do not have systematic education in this Society in the modern West about how to learn and educate yourself because the people who are determining what goes into educ
• 06:30 - 07:00 education are really more focused on okay what's going to make this person a a useful worker for the moneyed interests that I actually serve exactly beautiful with that it seems like agency is a massive part of that equation the the last art so to say is could be the glue between it all so in your eyes what
• 07:00 - 07:30 what is agency and what is the importance of it in this context agency is is really sort of the the one most rare factor that determines Highly Successful People in life you know if we look at someone like Elon Musk we can say oh he's very smart and clearly he is you know IQ probably 150 Plus but there are lots of people
• 07:30 - 08:00 banging around with 150 plus IQs thousands upon thousands of them in the United States alone and a lot of them are cloistered in Academia and they come up with these sort of postmodernist papers or maybe they're doing something slightly more useful like physics but they don't get this magical effect where everything they touch turns to gold and that's because the bottleneck is not
• 08:00 - 08:30 intelligence intelligence is only one of the things that is needed for Success it's necessary but it's not sufficient and intelligence is a very narrow thing so what agency is is it is the tendency to initiate action to achieve your goals and we don't solve the world with intelligence we don't look at the world
• 08:30 - 09:00 and think very smart thoughts and oh I understand everything now that's not how it works because when we look at the world and we think very hard we get a few things right and we generally get most of it wrong and then what we do is we try something we have our guess we test it some of it fails maybe it succeeds but usually it fails we find that guess and try again so what raw in
• 09:00 - 09:30 what applying raw intelligence to the universe is missing is that feedback loop and what agency does what this tendency to initiate action what the belief that you will eventually s be successful which is what agency is what it does is it makes us willing to take risks and it makes us resilient
• 09:30 - 10:00 to failure because if you're trying something that really is is an achievement worth having that somebody hasn't done before the first time you try it you're going to fail no matter how smart you are you're going to get a lot of things wrong so you have to keep trying again until you eliminate all of the errors from your model or from your plan and you can't do that with pure
• 10:00 - 10:30 intelligence because intelligence is just the ability to analyze it doesn't give you data it doesn't tell you what the universe is like so you have to go over and over and over and over again and you have to you have to have this notion if you're going to do that if you're going to persist in that you have to have this notion that gosh this problem is too hard for me to solve
• 10:30 - 11:00 right now but if I keep at it I will learn how to solve it and I will succeed notice that word learn you have to teach yourself education is teaching your is learning how to teach yourself then when you go and do a hard task you have to learn how to do the task if you don't learn how to learn then you can only do things that somebody already understands how do
• 11:00 - 11:30 absolutely so what's special about the Elon musks of this world is not intelligence it's intelligence coupled with a very high degree of agency yes and what that reminds me of specifically with Elon or people in general who have who like the thought of achieving a very high goal but since it seems impossible to them they just write it off as if they can't do it Elon on the other has this massive Vision he
• 11:30 - 12:00 knows that it's not possible right now and it wasn't before but he built the steps yeah he's going to make it possible and this is this is why I think agency is so important because you can't make yourself more intelligent intelligence is biological I I know that in some of your videos you disagree with that but I want to talk about it I think you're defining intelligence more broadly than I am the
• 12:00 - 12:30 narrow sort of narrow band analytical ability IQ type intelligence you can't increase that that is that that is determined very early on in your biological development and it is a physical and chemical feature of the brain there's not much you can do about that but agency is a skill you can learn it and more importantly you can teach it to your
• 12:30 - 13:00 kids you can raise your kids with the correct attitude that is going to enable them to go out and do cool stuff that is hard and fail and fail and fail and fail until eventually they succeed so it's about beliefs and it's about emotional resilience yeah yeah so for those who haven't watched the video I kind of I tried to paint a connection between
• 13:00 - 13:30 Susan crook Susan Cook gr's uh stages of ego development and intelligence with each of those levels and so the way that I thought about it in this sense when I read your uh article on what is intelligence and you defining it as the ability to tell stories yes what that brought to my mind maybe intelligence wasn't the right word for me to use but uh perspective and the ability to collect integrate and widen your
• 13:30 - 14:00 perspective to notice more opportunities through some kind of skill or self-development and so with that the way that I think about it with perspective is that kind of increases your ability to maybe not tell a story but to create a story because you can see further what do you think about that well I think I think that the concept whether you call it intelligence
• 14:00 - 14:30 defining intelligence broadly or whether you call it something else is is about Effectiveness the question you're really asking is what makes an effective human being correct a human a person who can go out and accomplish significant goals that contribute both to his own life and to his entire civilization and I think we would both agree that IQ is
• 14:30 - 15:00 not enough because we are constantly birthing people with high IQs and a lot of the time when you read about somebody who has you know an IQ of 180 or 200 or something and we inter the viw them for a magazine or something you never heard of this guy like who who the [ __ ] is Chris Lang
• 15:00 - 15:30 and why do I care you know and the only reason we really care about intelligence is because it's a component of getting things done and I think what's very important is to realize that there are other components of getting things done that we as a civilization could be making a much better effort to teach to people who are born with this high IQ thing instead of just shoving them into
• 15:30 - 16:00 government schools and then you know shoving them into you postgraduate education and then saying gosh why is the only thing that's coming why does Academia produce nothing but uh you know criticism of old literature because it was written by dead white males or you know Michael Fuko
• 16:00 - 16:30 constructing rationalizations for how he wants to sodomize young boys so you know it's it's because we have not we we' confused the condition of necessity with the condition of sufficiency you know for this kind of groundbreaking civilization will progress high IQ is necessary but it's not sufficient and we are not grooming
• 16:30 - 17:00 our high IQ children for success and that's where the what education really is comes in yeah so in that case where if you want to take a stab at it or if you have some idea about it how education could start to shift to shape that thing but more importantly you mentioned that the one of the most important things you can teach your children is agency yeah is that the
• 17:00 - 17:30 first step is on an individual parental level yes yes yes because if children have agency then even if there's something you miss they can address it themselves as an adult because they believe they can and I like to characterize agency as belief in the existence of hard problems nice oh what do I mean by that well
• 17:30 - 18:00 there's there's three kinds of problems there's easy and these are the things that we can do the moment we turn our hand to them with the intelligence the skills the knowledge the resources that we already have you know if you wanted to go down to the store and and buy a carton of milk that's an easy task you already know how to do it you already have the
• 18:00 - 18:30 resources you already have the techniques so there then there's impossible tasks things that you not only can't do with your capabilities and resources but things that you don't know how to you don't know how to overcome the distance between you and that and there's no meaningful attempt if I told you to eat a bicycle you wouldn't try yeah because you know you can't do it
• 18:30 - 19:00 your teeth don't work that way you know you're not I'm not going to be able to Hype you up with enough motival motivational speeches that you can tunnel to Java you can't dig through the center of the earth some tasks are impossible so the trick is to raise children who believe in a third category of tasks those are hard and those are the tasks where you can't
• 19:00 - 19:30 do this right now but you can learn if you keep trying and the way that we educate children in government schools erodes this ability because what is the definition of success in a government school well you got an A on the test that means that you answered all the questions with a which which all were selected for
• 19:30 - 20:00 having a difficulty determined by the lowest common denominator and you didn't make any mistakes so if you are raised in this government School environment and if you are sent to public school in America in your childhood you spend almost as much waking hours there as with your parents right so this really shapes people's personalities you know your
• 20:00 - 20:30 definition of success is avoiding failure except in the real world the real definition of success lies on the other side of a whole lot of failure yeah so when you create a an so-called educational environment that makes children risk averse and especially when you do it to high IQ children you are
• 20:30 - 21:00 crippling what you are psychologically crippling what could be the next generation of hyperproductive people right so in that case with I'd like to summarize that in my own head as the greatest mistake is no mistake at all yeah and in that case for people that have already gone through this school
• 21:00 - 21:30 system who are at least have the Curiosity to listen to this and actually be open-minded to it yeah what is something that they can do or think about to practice this the the agency the how to learn uh well start thinking about your own emotional makeup start thinking and trying to notice ways is that you are risk averse
• 21:30 - 22:00 that you are too afraid to do something where there's something you want that lies on the other side and you know you can watch a bunch of YouTube shows about success and motivational videos and whatever but the first thing you have to realize is that is that belief in your ability to succeed is like a muscle it has to be trained you don't you don't go into the
• 22:00 - 22:30 gym and bch 300 on the first day so what you can do is you can first be aware of this and you can make a plan to where you can set yourself goals that are achievable that are things that you can't do right now but they're achievable in steps and lifting is actually excellent for this you know lifting weights is excellent for this because you go in and as a beginner you pile a bunch of weight
• 22:30 - 23:00 on the bar you lift it till you can't lift it anymore and then the next time you go into the gym you can put on like three or five more pounds like wow I I got better and this this is not only making you stronger but it trains you in the belief that if you work at something you can't do now you will eventually succeed because you have to teach yourself to
• 23:00 - 23:30 believe in the possibility of success and you have to teach yourself not to be ashamed of the distance between who you are and what you can do and who you want to be and what you want to be able to do because if you are ashamed of that if you allow yourself to be ashamed that a small amount of it can
• 23:30 - 24:00 motivate you but a lot of it will make you avoid the very kinds of tasks you should be seeking out in other words you have to go do something and give yourself permission to suck yeah give yourself permission to suck at it awesome with okay so tying this back around to I have so much to talk about but
• 24:00 - 24:30 the in terms of agency intelligence the connections between those making mistakes looping back to the original post by you all of people not knowing what to learn yeah is it possible to know what to learn or is it just a process of making mistakes until you cultivate enough Vision through that to move in your own
• 24:30 - 25:00 Direction well I think the further into the future you have to look the harder it becomes to get everything right so I might know what I need to learn in the next two months I might have some idea what I need to learn in the next two years I don't have any idea what I'm going to need to learn in the next 20 years yeah I'm going to find that out as
• 25:00 - 25:30 I learn what I need to learn in the next two years so if you decide in the beginning when this child is you know 5 years old or whatever and he's entering kindergarten this is what this child needs to learn no you're going to get it wrong because the world is going to change in order to follow a moving Target you you have to have a feedback
• 25:30 - 26:00 loop so what you want to do the way you want to structure how you learn is not I make the best plan at the outset no my plan sucks cuz I don't know anything yet I need to I need to get moving I need to get moving at learn as I go and so you know what we really need to be cultivating in children and
• 26:00 - 26:30 calling it education is the tendency to move and the ability to learn as we move yes the ability figure it out get get started do something time in the market beats timing the market yeah you're not going to get it all right you're not going to be perfect you know you're not going to make a million dollars in your first year as an online content
• 26:30 - 27:00 creator you know you're not you're not going to be the most popular show on YouTube you know you're not going to write a book no matter how good it is that sells a million copies in its first year when no one's ever heard of you you just have to get going you just have to move forward and make your mistakes and learn as you go and agency is the willingness to do that
• 27:00 - 27:30 beautiful in theft of fire when Marcus is describing the the the robot guard spiders of Miranda yes after being attacked multiple times on the ship he describes them as or it it may not be them exactly but the artificial int the quote is simple reactive predictable artificial stupidity yeah I feel how do I set this
• 27:30 - 28:00 up with the talk of intelligence and agency and this artificial stupidity and people going through this regimented education system that many could say leads to that definition what makes us human what is the thing that if we're so afraid of this artificial intelligence and what it is
• 28:00 - 28:30 right now yeah how how do we make sense of our own place okay so I think that the reason people are afraid of artificial intelligence right now is they don't really understand what artificial intelligence right now is we do not have an artificial human we do not have something that can
• 28:30 - 29:00 replace a human or do the things that a human can do because what the defining capability of a human is the ability to look at your environment and say I need to learn that and then go learn that and do it so we can make an artificial intelligence that can play chess better than us we can make an artificial intellig that can draw better than well not all
• 29:00 - 29:30 of us but certainly draw better than me I can't draw I haven't devoted the time to learn had other priorities but you know these are task specific machines and they're no more a a threat to our Central Humanity than a machine that can lift more than we can is and you know I'm sure that a lot of
• 29:30 - 30:00 people in the uh in the industrial revolution thought oh no you know human beings are obsolete because machines can now lift and move more than us and it's it's not true what human beings do is navigate their environment and learn things and decide what to learn it's that executive function it's that ability to tell ourselves stories to look at the universe verse and say a all these things I see fit
• 30:00 - 30:30 together into a story and now I'm going to tell myself another story which is my plan and I'm going to make my plan happen and of course a plan is a list of things that don't happen but that just means you have to make another plan Midway through and eventually you you hit the moving Target if you if you have your feedback loop running and you can chase it but when I call these things artificial stupidity when I call these machines
• 30:30 - 31:00 artificial stupidity they've essent they are essentially a robot with a neural net that's been trained on one set of tasks okay I'm going to protect this person and there's numerous instances in this story where they do something very counterproductive to Miranda's real goals because they only know how to do this one thing they can't think about the broader context of what's going
• 31:00 - 31:30 on and so a real human being is able to outwit them despite the fact that he doesn't have the speed or the strength or the the the processing speed that they have you know because he's able to understand the broader context that he's operating in and to to act appropriately you know the
• 31:30 - 32:00 real when you were talking about ego development in this other video you know one of the things that that jumped out at me is I don't see these as levels you move through I see them as tools you add to your toolbox because even someone on what you would call the highest level of development you know your your philosopher king or whatever if you drag him out and you stick his head in the horse trough and you hold him down he's
• 32:00 - 32:30 going to act on ego development level one I want air I'm going to fight you and that is not a regression or a failure it's just he's pulling his earliest tool out of the toolbox because that's what's appropriate to the situation so Marcus the human real intelligence versus the robot the artificial stupidity Marcus can decide what tools to use
• 32:30 - 33:00 based on his understanding of the total context that he's in you know the robots only have the tools that have been provided to them by this neuronet training data set and they're unable to say okay my whole Paradigm no longer applies so I need to learn to do something totally different they can't make that jump and the way this ties back to what we
• 33:00 - 33:30 see with artificial intelligence right now is that it is this kind of artificial stupidity and what it's revealing is you know our Research into artificial intelligence has actually discovered natural stupidity because what it's revealed is that a lot of people are only functioning on the level of the this this chatbot AI a lot of people are only
• 33:30 - 34:00 functioning on the level of chat GPT you know because either because they're dumb or because that's how we've educated them right interesting connection there we have we have tried we have created an education system that makes human beings into single-purpose tools and then we feel threatened when we can build computer single-purpose tools but human
• 34:00 - 34:30 beings did not evolve to be single-purpose tools we evolved to be Navigators of an everchanging environment and we need to recapture that ability and ReDiscover that capacity within ourselves and stop looking to our society and to our so-called leaders for what we're going to do next take
• 34:30 - 35:00 responsibility for our own lives what do I need to learn what do I need to do what are my goals what is important to me and then we won't feel so threatened by artificial intelligence because artificial intelligence won't do any of can't do any of that yeah I like the distinction there where humans being natural generalists they shouldn't be the tool because they build the tools yeah the the cheetah is
• 35:00 - 35:30 perfect for its Niche but then you put it in another environment it doesn't survive same with the polar bear but the cool thing about being human is that we are in all of the environments because we created the parka or the coat or whatever it may be so we can survive in that context so AI being a tool to help us survive better in some cases do you see that being used as mainly a a tool for the person to get
• 35:30 - 36:00 work done more efficiently or just be more productive for the foreseeable future right now obviously it is at least theoretically possible to make a software entity that can do the things that humans can do because if you were to take a human brain and scan it and simulate the
• 36:00 - 36:30 physics of every atom of it in a vast supercomputer the size of a solar system then this would be able to function like a human brain functions there's nothing magical about meat so I'm not saying that a that a truly sentient artificial person is not someday possible what I'm saying is that what we have right now is a tool that
• 36:30 - 37:00 does certain types of thinking like processing and that's going to be very useful and we could use it and we can maybe even to some extent integrate with it where the the line between us and the tool starts to blur as we incorporate these capabilities into ourselves technologically and that's fine but what a human being is really for is that executive function is
• 37:00 - 37:30 deciding what do I want what are my goals what do I wish to achieve okay how can I do that with the tools I have and if I can't do that with the tools I have what kind of new tool do I need to create and when you are able to navigate your life on this
• 37:30 - 38:00 level then chat GPT doesn't feel like a threat to you you know if you are for example an artist you know people prompting um doly through chat GPT is very threatening to you oh my God you know how will how will I get work I am an artist and all these
• 38:00 - 38:30 authors are making book covers out of AI art and they're stealing bread from my mouth and you know we need to boycott them and shame them so we don't do this well the problem you have there is that you have defined yourself as a tool don't be a tool when you say I am an
• 38:30 - 39:00 artist that is a self-limiting belief because you have defined yourself in terms of this one capability and now you are threatened by the existence of a tool that has that same capability because you have reduced yourself to the level of a tool right I'm noticing in terms of that identifying like identification with
• 39:00 - 39:30 something that's rather narrow MH I'm noticing a few connections here between different worldviews and one the thing that I've been most interested in after following you for a good amount of time is just that it's your worldview where I've where I want to talk about uh ancap after this yes and give a brief intro to that because I'm a newbie to it but before that in terms of how you make sense of
• 39:30 - 40:00 the world is there any guiding religion philosophy some way of making sense that already has a label or do you kind of just have your own way of thinking about it well again self liim you have to beware of self-limiting beliefs so I would describe My Views as somewhat anarch aroc capitalistic but if I call myself an
• 40:00 - 40:30 anarcho capitalist you know I can do it sometimes for convenience we don't want to fight the great linguistic Crusade but if I do it so consistently within my own head then I have made my then I have made that my identity and then I am unable to critically examine anarcho capitalism yeah and to critique it as a tool and
• 40:30 - 41:00 say does this or doesn't this serve my goals right now and this is one example you know so I I describe myself a lot as an anarcho capitalist or a Libertarian and I get other people who describe themselves as Libertarians doing the uh the sort of the uh the favorite hobby of Libertarians which is calling other Libertarians not real Libertarians yeah
• 41:00 - 41:30 because I say well I would like to see seed oils Bann and they're like right that is a statist position no you have identified with a political philosophy to the point where you are thinking about how to serve the political philosophy not how to achieve your goals the political philosophy was made to serve you not the other way around so
• 41:30 - 42:00 the reason I describe myself as an anarchist or a Libertarian is that I want to see people be free and when I understand that that is my motivating goal to see people having control over their own Destinies I can say well you know does what move in this specific situation allows people more control over their
• 42:00 - 42:30 own Destinies which is more important the freedom to poison people or the freedom to not be poisoned right I think that's one of the things there where we can go over some of the principles of anap but yeah with that you are the Nuance here is that the thing that makes a person most free isn't always absolute freedom it's not it's
• 42:30 - 43:00 having those limitations like the seed oils as an example if someone doesn't have the choice or they don't know then that's not inherently freeing yeah yeah yeah political philosophies have to be understood as tools not as goals you know we don't we don't do Classical liberalism to achieve a classical liberal Society we Implement ideas from
• 43:00 - 43:30 Classical liberalism because it is good for people's quality of life because it is good for the economic productivity of society as a whole but any tool that you have that you're using to do part of a project you have to know when to set it down and when to pick up another to tool so anytime you say to yourself I am an
• 43:30 - 44:00 artist I am an author I am an anarcho capitalist I am a republican I am a Democrat I am a communist you know I am white I am male you know all of these things are useful ways to describe yourself but you have to be careful with them because any of these can become self-limiting you know
• 44:00 - 44:30 even even something like I am male well it's a biological fact but I'm writing the sequel to theft of fire right now yes and Miranda for part of the book is a point of view character so now I have to write from the perspective of a woman mhm and the fact that I am male is the truth but I have to set that tool
• 44:30 - 45:00 down and pick up another tool of oh this is my mental model of how women work and how what it feels like to be one in order to achieve the task that I want to achieve so one of the biggest reasons why people are unwilling to take risks and try new things one of the biggest things that can be a real risk to someone's agency are these self-limiting
• 45:00 - 45:30 beliefs I can't do that I can't try that because it threatens my sense of identity my sense of Who I Am from where I get my sense of value and if you're running around saying I am an artist and I am worthwhile because I am a great artist then you're not only threatened
• 45:30 - 46:00 by AI that can draw you're also threatened by doing things that aren't art because no you're an artist you know ultimately we are not a tool for doing any particular task we are here to navigate our own lives in in a way that makes sense to us
• 46:00 - 46:30 and what what it really means to develop as a human being is to have this toolbox have the ability to expand the toolbox and be able to express whatever part of our capacity helps us to do what we want yes on so when I say when I say I'm an anarcho capitalist it that's that's that's not about the methods I want to use it's about my goals it's about I
• 46:30 - 47:00 want to eventually make government Obsolete and get rid of it I know there are certain things we do with government now that we don't know how to do in other ways so I need to build a new tool or I need to help my species build a new tool we don't have all the tools yet it's a long-term goal it's a hard problem that we will face fa and fail and fail and fail at until eventually we learn how to
• 47:00 - 47:30 succeed yes really well said and that ties it back to we can't do it now but exactly we can build the tool so the entire argument of yeah oh that's not possible or like that's crazy for thinking that way it's an ideal that we're working towards to and and building the tool so that it becomes possible and at that point in terms of what you want or what that goal is it's a goal that once you achieve it may
• 47:30 - 48:00 change when you realize okay this was a mistake oh yeah absolutely absolutely and we have to develop all our Technologies along the way we as a species recently figured out how to do money without a government yeah but we haven't yet figured out how to do criminal justice without a government so we need another tool yeah What's it gonna be I don't know exactly but let's let's work at it yeah on that point of doing what you
• 48:00 - 48:30 want it it reminded me of a a common thing that comes up with my audience or even young people anyone in general if let's take an example of identifying with a goal something that you really want to achieve and that you love and you want to dedicate your entire life to let's say artist or art or being an artist yeah with how the world is changing do you see that as a worthy
• 48:30 - 49:00 goal to pursue or would it be a different kind of goal the question I'm asking here is the underlying question is how does one F find fulfillment in what they do if what they do may not be relevant or allow you to survive in the future well the simple answer the base level answer to this is whoever said you had to do one
• 49:00 - 49:30 thing whoever said you had to do one thing with your whole life I have done many different things with my life and each one of them has been very fulfilling at the time that I was doing it our wants change and that's okay and we We Leave Behind Some of the goals we have achieved or the goals that we abandoned because they weren't quite right for us but we take with us all the
• 49:30 - 50:00 learning and all the learning how to learn that we picked up along the way so we become deeper richer more developed characters as we as we go through this process so even if you learn to draw and then an AI comes along and draws better than you you you you still learned something from that process you've still learned
• 50:00 - 50:30 how to learn to draw you've you've learned how to pursue an ambition you've learned a lot about envisioning a scene and creating it that you can now do with AI tools so that's the simple answer but there's a deeper level answer to this which I think is a little more difficult to grasp but it's it's very important is that what is the the real reason why you had that goal why did you
• 50:30 - 51:00 want to be an artist did you want to give vent to a creative impulse if so there are lot there are still lots of ways to do that did you want to entertain people did you want to show the world what exists in your head did you want to be famous and make a lot of money that's just as good as
• 51:00 - 51:30 any other goal that's that's fine you know that's not shallow you know what is it that you wanted out of that goal what is it that you wanted to experience in your own life in your own psyche that made you decide I want to be an artist I want to be an author I want to be an entrepreneur because when we boil it down most of our goals are
• 51:30 - 52:00 about the core things that make us happy you know I spent many years as a software engineer and I was I was told I was very good at it I was I I had a lot of other software Engineers saying wow how did you figure that out but I always found myself having this sort of ition with uh the people that I worked
• 52:00 - 52:30 for and I always experience them as very shortsighted you know we need to be building this or that thing for the next 5 years for the next 10 years and they would be like okay here's a list of features that we need to get done by our next two-month release cycle and why are you going off the rails building all this you know
• 52:30 - 53:00 foundational cryptography toolkits to support our next five years of programming you know just write the login page or whatever and what I realized was that eventually was that yeah these people didn't trust me because I did what was good for them rather than what they said to do but also that I was giving vent to a creative
• 53:00 - 53:30 impulse and it's like if I had said well my life goal is to be a really great software engineer I would have been stuck there it would have been a self-limiting identity belief and eventually you know it took me some time I got gray hair but uh you know I eventually figured it out that I'm doing this because software is
• 53:30 - 54:00 the ultimate set of Lego blocks and I can create things and I want to create things I want to bring new stuff out of my imagination and into the world but working as a software engineer they don't want that because you know they don't want to most people don't want to take risks most most people don't want to do Green Field development of something that's never been done
• 54:00 - 54:30 before because that's scary unless you have a whole lot of agency and then it's still scary but you could stand it um so I was like what is my real goal no my real goal isn't I am a software engineer my real goal is I want to be creative my real goal is I want to imagine something that no one has imagined before and make it real so I said okay I'm going to I'm
• 54:30 - 55:00 going to retire early and I'm going to start writing science fiction and it's tremendously satisfying and now it's blossomed out into some of the political opinion writing and the sort of the sort of the philosophical musings that people find interesting but it's it's all I I take something out of my brain and I show it to people and I gol and they go ooh and that is that is
• 55:00 - 55:30 what I really wanted out of being a software engineer all along so maybe if you're if you're you know your your skills that form your identity run up against this dead end either because the skills have become obsolete or because they aren't serving your real purpose you sometimes have to stop and say well what is my real
• 55:30 - 56:00 purpose what is it that I wanted out of this and how do I find some way to get it that is more directly related to what I really want yeah so that was the one of the what was the thought process there unless that was it of choosing to do the fiction writing instead of let's say Indie hacking and building uh a tool that you could share in a similar way if you had the same
• 56:00 - 56:30 audience because I felt like ultimately stories meant more to me when I started doing this self-examination I I realized that there's something that uh there's something that a lot of people think that sort of genre fiction is this very frivolous thing and this is something that this attitude that you see in a lot of these sort of uh you know Sigma
• 56:30 - 57:00 hacker grind set Bros or like I haven't read a fiction book in 10 years I only read Tech manuals and well that's how you lose the culture War that's how you lose the culture War because stories are the DNA of societies and you know think about it Elon Musk did not grow up reading uh Little House on
• 57:00 - 57:30 the Prairie you know I don't know for sure but I bet he grew up reading you know hinin and nien and pornel and then he went I'm going to make that real yeah you know if you think about the if you think about the history of the 20th century as a whole all the inv ions of the 20th century all this stuff that humans
• 57:30 - 58:00 figured out in that 100-year period name four that didn't happen in science fiction before they were real I can't well yeah maybe you could do it if you if you search the internet enough but the point is that this is a hard task so you know science fiction is is in some sense very important to
• 58:00 - 58:30 our future because it is this technology that allows us to think about thing about new technologies before they're real it allows us to decide how we feel about true artificial intelligence before it's real it allows us to think about how we feel about genetically engineered posth humans and what we want want to do about that possibility before it becomes real it
• 58:30 - 59:00 allows us to lay the groundwork for how we're going to deal with new technology and it fires our imaginations to create it so I felt like yes science fiction is entertaining but it's also important in ways that people don't realize because you know people people don't people don't start these Tech
• 59:00 - 59:30 startups and you know build reusable rockets and you catch the first stage with a giant pair of Mecca Chopsticks and then somebody sticks a microphone in their face and he says well you know I was really influenced by the writings of Marcus aurelus Nichi no he's like I read ring world yeah stories are important because they appeal to the
• 59:30 - 60:00 part of our brain that does the actual thinking intelligence is stories Consciousness is stories So Stories influence us in important ways yes on that subject we previously talked on the call prior to this call about how theft of fire was the first fiction book that I'd read in the first in the last 10 years yeah and you asked me why that was you
• 60:00 - 60:30 asked me was that just because there weren't any good books out there yeah and when I thought about it it's yeah nothing really grabbed my interest so over those past 10 years and with a lot of the things that we've talked about with the education system the stories being put out there how dangerous is that and why why is it happening yeah it's it's very dangerous and I I completely
• 60:30 - 61:00 understand why you haven't been reading fiction and I don't mean to mock you for it because you know you talk to you for 30 seconds and anybody can realize you are an alpha male type with a four-digit testosterone level you know that's readily apparent and if you were to go to a bookstore and try to find some fiction that Appeals to an alpha male with a four-digit testosterone level you ain't going to find much right because
• 61:00 - 61:30 and I think what happened there was that was this attitude that I have just been denouncing where conservatives and uh people who were Interest Who were pro- Western Civilization they somehow decided at some point that art was for sissies that because a lot of artists were you
• 61:30 - 62:00 know sort of L haired noodle armed hippies that art must be for long-haired noodle armed hippies and we are going to seed that entire Battlefield to them but see children read stories children read fiction and if they're not reading your
• 62:00 - 62:30 culture's fiction who fiction are they reading you know and this hit me one time when out of sheer curiosity and boredom I was watching one of Steven Crowder's YouTube shows and you know he says conservative stuff and he he talks about politics and it's all okay I guess but then he does this weird thing where he says I don't
• 62:30 - 63:00 read fiction in this one particular show he goes I don't read fiction and he said it like he was proud of it right he said it he said it like this was a point of Pride like I am a serious person who doesn't go into frivolous Pursuits and then he starts talking about how that's childish and then he does this cartoon voice like tell me a story daddy and it's like you [ __ ] you [ __ ] you sit here whining
• 63:00 - 63:30 about how you're losing the culture war and then you go on this whole rant about how culture is for sissies well why do you think you're losing the culture War you know if you if if you if if your children say tell me a story daddy and you're not telling them a story then who is yeah and what values will will your children
• 63:30 - 64:00 absorb from that story so any political philosophy any cultural philosophy that doesn't have art and stories associated with it that doesn't have a coupled artistic aesthetic is doomed because it will not be able to propagate itself so you know it's like yeah there's no there's very little fiction for you as an alpha male type with a
• 64:00 - 64:30 four-digit toer own level to read but if we don't have that there isn't going to be a next generation of you and people like you there's going to be a next generation of guys who are very high anxiety and low agency and nothing feels right and they don't feel comfortable in their own skin and they
• 64:30 - 65:00 decide they're going to put on a dress and call themselves a woman that's where this comes from yeah is we haven't we you know Generation X we stood by and let this happen the Boomers made it happen but we as a society have not created or maintained the the cultural and artistic scaffolding for a healthy strong robust
• 65:00 - 65:30 masculine identity right in that sense did you when you wrote theft of fire and even when you write now do you did you feel a sense of responsibility with that in contributing some new way of looking at the world or potentially some unpopular way of looking at the world because of how many of your values were baked into the book and are in the writing yeah well when you write you're essentially
• 65:30 - 66:00 tying a rope to a bucket and you're throwing it into your subconscious and you're dredging it across the bottom and you you take up that bucket and you pour it out on the table and so it's it's a very psychologically vulnerable act in some ways because the fiction you write is who you are and and I felt like you know this I want when I'm
• 66:00 - 66:30 showing other people you know who I am inside and making it into a story obviously I want other people to approve of this and like it but also it has to make sense it has to resonate you know the goal of writing is is to communicate something in a clear and interesting way if it's not clear they won't understand it if it's not interesting they won't read it so the responsibility I felt was okay
• 66:30 - 67:00 I need to be clear I need to be interesting I need to entertain people and it has to resonate with who they are so I wasn't setting out to convince the world of any particular thing I was just saying this is my story the responsibility I felt was to make sure that it was a story people would
• 67:00 - 67:30 like and and I I yeah I think I think there's a lot of of unfulfilled hunger for these kinds of stories right now because you know we're sick of post-apocalyptic despair you know we're sick of fiction which is a thinly veiled excuse for discussions about pronouns you know science fiction used to be about how we were going to go out
• 67:30 - 68:00 and conquer the Galaxy yeah and I think I think we're we're ready to do that again we're ready to work toward it you know there's a whole bunch of stuff we don't know how to do that we're going to need to learn but we're ready to start doing that instead of sitting around and winging about how everything is unfair so we need stories that that that have that attitude
• 68:00 - 68:30 yes we're going to loop we're going to naturally loop back around to this but I want to read a quote from theft of fire I'll go straight into it it was the equal share thing guess I got that from my dad he talked about ownership a lot about his plans for us said the reason most people spend their life spend their whole lives making someone else rich is that they sell their time get paid for the hours they spend on the job see if you're running a business and you make some money you can reinvest it by
• 68:30 - 69:00 buy more equipment hire more people scale up but if you're selling your time no matter how much money you earn you can't buy more time to sell it doesn't scale was this belief also a part of your decision to write the book and contribute in this fashion yes yes on the topic of ownership as well yeah I'm not too sure I understand that fully yeah well when
• 69:00 - 69:30 you the basis of all civilization is property rights which we should probably call investment rights because the basic idea is that you invest in something you own it you have the right to control it without that there's no civilization because when you're a pl's ape there's not nothing to own there's nothing out there but a rock a few sticks and some
• 69:30 - 70:00 grass and things only become worth having when you take material from the environment and you invest your time and effort into it and you start chipping out spear points and no one is going to do that if someone can come along and take it from them you know and they're they're there effort is wasted so property rights are
• 70:00 - 70:30 civilization civilization is property rights that's fundamental any political philosophy like communism that goes against that is anti-civilization so when I talk about this it's like okay all we've gotten into a rut right now where a lot of people sell their time because they are low agency I am afraid of starting a business on my own
• 70:30 - 71:00 I am afraid of putting my effort into something that I am going to own and try to make money off of I want a guaranteed paycheck so I am going to go to someone who buys my time directly and then how to monetize that is their problem and I don't have to work about that and I can feel safe but that makes you
• 71:00 - 71:30 dependent and it prevents you from getting ahead because you only have so much time and no matter how much money you make you can't buy more time to sell so when you sell your time you may be safe because it's somebody else's job to figure out how pay you and you know usually it's not too safe anymore you know gone are the days where people
• 71:30 - 72:00 worked for the same company for 50 years but when you do that you can't you you you you can't see that same level of success of oh I own something I'm going to double down on it you can't get that exponential growth you know when I write a book I can sell many many copies of that
• 72:00 - 72:30 book I can sell as many copies of that book as people are willing to buy and I can sell all sorts of stuff associated with it I can leverage that attention because you know when you get an audience you start to realize that some people love your stuff so much that they want to pay you they're happy to pay you they're like you know here's $10,000 put your com put my company in your next
• 72:30 - 73:00 book wow okay cool I'm down with that and but you can never you can never get that until you start until you take that risk and start making something that can scale you know I write a book I can sell it over and over again you you make these these videos and and cont content that helps people think about you know the philosophy of business and how to be
• 73:00 - 73:30 successful and people can watch those over and over and over again you produce it once with a limited amount of time and it can make revenue for you forever and you know a lot of people you know sort of the Socialist leaning types think this is a bug like you know you know he only did 3 hours of work and he's being paid tens of thousands of dollars for it but really
• 73:30 - 74:00 that's a feature because we want everybody to be doing things that require very little effort but have tremendous value and so capitalism rewards those people you know if you can figure out how to spend 4 hours shooting a video and make a lot of money off it or can figure out how to spend 3 hours a day working on something
• 74:00 - 74:30 and make you know 800,000 in a year or whatever it is then what that means is you've figured out how to efficiently produce something that has a lot of value to people and when you sell your time that means that you've taken this safe route which solves that equation well enough
• 74:30 - 75:00 to keep you going but it's maybe not the best or most profitable thing you could be doing with your time and you know don't get me wrong somebody has to do a lot of these tasks that anybody can do you know the we we we need we need certain things done that maintain civilization but I think there are
• 75:00 - 75:30 people out there who have the potential to produce amazing things and they've been raised to be afraid you know imagine if Elon Musk had been raised in a way that made him timid and nervous because it's very possible to do that to a
• 75:30 - 76:00 child if if you're not paying attention or if that makes you feel good or if you are a fearful person yourself and think of the loss to civilization not only the fact that it was a loss to civilization but that we would never have understood what we lost we had never we would never never have seen it so I think there are a lot of people out there who
• 76:00 - 76:30 have wonderful things in them and they're selling their time you know for minimum wage making sandwiches or whatever on that topic with the way that people are raised I was personally I I don't know how I overcame it really but I was raised in a Mormon household so LDS very strict
• 76:30 - 77:00 religious do what you're told we're going to church on Sundays put on your slacks put on your white shirt pass out bread all that stuff with that um my parents were they made a decent living middle class but they were very focused on hey you need to save your money you need to invest you need to get a job you need to go to school you need to do exactly these things and after speaking with a lot of other people and it's just a general thing that you can observe is
• 77:00 - 77:30 a lot of people have a bad relationship with money and so it prevents them from even thinking about making more or they'll see those the mega billionaires and make an assumption of oh that's shallow that's corrupt that's evil whatever it may be so they write off even things about starting a business no matter how small scale it is in terms
• 77:30 - 78:00 of perception of money how do you view that and making a lot of it well the the attitude you talk about reminds me of the discussion we had a little bit up a little bit further back about the sort of self-limiting identity beliefs you know I am not a
• 78:00 - 78:30 billionaire I will not be a billionaire therefore I need to formulate my beliefs and my identity in such a way that I am prevented from feeling bad about that and so I can formulate beliefs like oh oh they must have done something immoral to get
• 78:30 - 79:00 there and therefore I am not in the place that they are because I am not immoral and I can take pride in that or oh they had a tremendous amount of luck therefore it's not my fault that I didn't have that luck or you know they parents provided them with a certain amount of wealth and access that my
• 79:00 - 79:30 parents did not provide me with therefore it's okay you know that that so all of these sort of identity beliefs are designed not to not to help this person Prosper but to prevent them from feeling bad about not prospering and we will always work hardest on what our real goals
• 79:30 - 80:00 are if we're focused on defending our sense of identity and who we are right now and not feeling bad then we won't be focused on these external goals of how do I get ahead how do I make myself better and it may be very true that to reach sort of billionaire level you have to be very lucky or you have to have the
• 80:00 - 80:30 right parents or you need all other all sorts of other help you know thriving is a team sport no one prospers in a vacuum but at the same time this self-limiting belief isn't just about oh I'm not going to be a billionaire it it prevents any kind of getting ahead it prevents any kind of striving it prevents any kind of saying I am not as good as I would like
• 80:30 - 81:00 to be therefore I am going to make an effort to become something that I am currently not this goes back to giving yourself permission to suck at something yeah you know you have to be you have to to be a business that's just struggling to break even before you can be a business that makes a huge amount of
• 81:00 - 81:30 money if you are so ashamed of being the business that is struggling to break even then you'll never get where you want to go I just finished my first year as a professional author and congrats thank you and I will disclose fully that you know I managed to break six figures but I did not make as much as I made as a software
• 81:30 - 82:00 engineer and I have to remind myself not to be ashamed of that because this is the first year and if you don't give yourself permission to start out and suck at something then you're never going to reach the the point where you're good you know you're never going to build that audience or whatever it is you need to do to achieve the success you want want to achieve you have to give yourself permission to not be there yet and if people start making
• 82:00 - 82:30 excuses you know these ego defending beliefs for not being there yet then that makes them feel better in that place but it prevents them Pro from progressing Beyond it so you know money is a measure of [ __ ] given and when you start out not a lot of people are going to give a [ __ ] about you because they haven't heard about you
• 82:30 - 83:00 but if you say to yourself well I don't want a lot of money what you're saying is I don't want a lot of people to give a [ __ ] about me yes and if you say well you know if if you have a lot of money then you must have done something evil then you're saying you know a lot of people only give most people only give a [ __ ] about evil people like what no no money is just a token that says I care
• 83:00 - 83:30 about this thing and it's how it's what we use to persuade people to care so if you're making money you know assuming you're not robbing banks or something or hitting the lottery or you know defrauding people or whatever then when the money starts to come in that is a signal that people care about what you're doing it's a signal that you're
• 83:30 - 84:00 on the right path it's it's the way people tell you what they like and what they don't like so when you when you hit on a formula that starts to earn that's not you being selfish it's you figuring out what people like and giving it get to that and that's so personal right because the
• 84:00 - 84:30 people the the thing that I find funny even before I was doing this in this business and I'm sure you have too when you would go and look at someone else's promotion like of a book or a product you'd always see the comments like oh you shouldn't be earning money from this or you're like this is a terrible product whatever it may be but it's extremely and they're doing extremely well and it's just those people that don't give a [ __ ] about that one thing
• 84:30 - 85:00 but they're in this reactive State and just don't realize that right and so they they're say they're objecting to the fact that somebody else cares about something that they don't care about yeah they're they're essentially saying that everybody should act in accordance with their priorities not with their own priorities it's sort of one of the most if you dig into it it's one of the most anti- Libertarian sort of anti-humanity sentiments that you can
• 85:00 - 85:30 think of like you know yeah people shouldn't spend their money how they want to spend it on what they care about they should obey me well who died and put you in charge yeah to expand on the audience part that's something I talk about a lot because I really I started off as uh in in terms
• 85:30 - 86:00 of business as like a freelance web designer and then when I got on social media I was doing cold Outreach before that to land clients and local marketing and other things like that yeah when I started to figure out my formula for Social Media stuff and really see the power of building an audience there was like no turning back for me right yeah with you having incredible success for first year of theft of fire that's insane for first
• 86:00 - 86:30 year and how much you've grown I mean I talk to these creators every day that's abnormal that is absolutely incredible so with that as you've been growing has there been any unique characteristics of the Creator economy or building an audience that you didn't see before that now you see as a very viable thing for a lot of people
• 86:30 - 87:00 well I can talk about what I've learned along the way which I think this sort of ties into is that as I don't like the term content creator I don't either and the reason I don't like the term content creator is it focuses on what you're making you know oh I'm a content creator well you know if you if you paint something
• 87:00 - 87:30 and you sh and you burn it or you shove it in a drawer you're a content creator you created some content doesn't do you or anybody else any good as an author you know both of fiction and non-fiction short and long form but as as a guy who writes interesting things for a living what I am my
• 87:30 - 88:00 primary thing that I'm doing in my business is building an audience and an audience doesn't mean how many people follow you on Twitter because there is an account on Twitter called why you should have a cat and you know he posts pictures of cats and he's got 2 million followers and you know that's great
• 88:00 - 88:30 people like cat pictures but that is not they're not following him they're following the cats they like cats I like cats I follow him but the point is that an audience it building an audience is about trust an audience is a set of people who trust you where if you come come out with something you know like if I write a book they're going to say well I'm going to spend 20 hours reading this
• 88:30 - 89:00 book because I trust Devon that I'm going to enjoy it or if you come out with a video that spends 45 minutes talking about you know success and some you know obscure philosophy of Marcus aelius and how these tie in together you've you've created enough value for them in the past that I that they say I am going to devote 45 minutes of my time
• 89:00 - 89:30 to watching this so really what you're doing is you're creating a PE uh you're creating this this group of people who know who you are and they trust you and in order to be in order to build trust you have to be trustworthy you you have to act with integrity and you have to act with these people's best interest at heart because
• 89:30 - 90:00 they are not stupid they know when you're trying when you're just interested in what's good for you they know when you're trying to scam them they know when you're trying to do something that 60 other people have done better and you're just going to try to jump on the bandwagon so you have have to be trustworthy and create real value and some of it you have to give away for
• 90:00 - 90:30 free so that they sample it and they say aha this guy makes good stuff I'm going to pay him because I want there to be more of this stuff that I give a [ __ ] about so and that is the mistake that I see a lot of content creators making now I focus mostly on on fiction authors but there's a lot of Indie fiction authors who some of them who whine a lot about not having success and then you look at
• 90:30 - 91:00 their Twitter feed and every single one of their Twitter posts is some iteration of buy my book yeah buy my book it's a good book and none of it is let me say something interesting right here right now to you for free to prove that I am an interesting person who can entertain you if you if you buy my paid
• 91:00 - 91:30 products so you know ultimately if you're if you're on the internet and that's how you make your money your product is you your ability to be interesting your ability to be informative your ability to be entertaining your ability to make something where people people spend some time paying attention to it and they walk away saying I liked that that was a
• 91:30 - 92:00 good use of my time I want more of that so there's no shortcut there's no here's the six bullet points to a successful internet influencer business where you can make millions of dollars going to cafes and taking pictures of your food you know that's that's [ __ ] you know people will click on that stuff but they don't care they don't care because it doesn't
• 92:00 - 92:30 provide any value to them you have to actually make something that people like and you know you have to actually be someone who's who's able to give them a good experience and you have to prove that to them and you have to not whine about that you know oh my books aren't selling write something interesting
• 92:30 - 93:00 yeah the way that I think about it with building an audience specifically is bringing back in the topic of agency and if you want to write a book or you want to make music or you want to do whatever creative challenge you want to do you want to build something and distribute it but you don't have like you don't want to give up control of that thing to a publisher to a record label to someone else who can give you
• 93:00 - 93:30 the resources to make some money from that thing but also take a large portion of it themselves so the way I view social media now is where most of the attention is attention and social media are a tool to get eyes on what it is that you built or created and you have to approach social media for what it is which is media media that people like to to watch but now it's different for mainstream media because it's one person media companies in a sense all creating
• 93:30 - 94:00 content to attract people that they like individually with that what in terms of did you ever want to go with a traditional publisher or the Manhattan I've heard you say Manhattan before but I'm not yes I think that's just referencing Manhattan the word Manhattan emerging from my mouth is not a
• 94:00 - 94:30 compliment right it is not intended as one um I I considered it when I when I first when I finished my first novel I wanted to weigh all my options and I realized that you know the during the 20th century there was a real need for Publishers because you needed you needed
• 94:30 - 95:00 to do offset print runs which typically had a five fig cost associated with them and you needed a finance year so a a a publisher was essentially a venture capitalist during that time you know they were going to were going to pay for your printing they were going to give you an advance they were going to enable people who were just starting out to
• 95:00 - 95:30 make a living as a writer and then they were going to make back their money on the ones that took off it was a it was a working viable business model that provided value for everybody involved authors Publishers and readers so there were two things that broke that and the first was the internet and the second was gay race communism because you had a whole bunch
• 95:30 - 96:00 of people who you know all these publishing companies that were Now sort of conglomerated together with offices in the same 10 blocks of Manhattan going to the same parties you know participating in the same Social Circles and they became less and less interested in what people wanted to read and more and more interested in what they thought people should
• 96:00 - 96:30 read and so they were no longer providing a a valuable function to the audience because the function that Publishers provided to an audience was we are going to gatekeep this media for you and filter out all the trash you know but they were no longer filtering for Quality they were
• 96:30 - 97:00 filtering for aligned political opinions so they did not provide the benefit to the audience and then lo and behold their business model started becoming less Pro less and less profitable I wonder why and then the advances started to go away and the promotional you know exp spending
• 97:00 - 97:30 especially for new Authors started to go away and they started getting rid of their midlist and their midlist is an incubator for your future a-listers that's what that exists for so gradually because they weren't they weren't able to serve a purpose for the audience they also lost the ability to serve a purpose for the authors so nowadays I don't think book publishers
• 97:30 - 98:00 really serve any purpose at all for most for most genres and types of books I think that's true and as I started looking for agents and looking for Publishers I realized this I mean I was offered some publishing deals at certain points especially when uh when I got out there on my own and people figured out I could sell yeah then then they came knocking and I was
• 98:00 - 98:30 like what use are you to me yeah I can have a direct relationship with my audience where I can be more responsive to them and I can be more appealing to them and I can get better feedback about what I'm doing wrong and what I'm doing right directly from them not only from what they say but from their actions and what do I need this middleman for what value
• 98:30 - 99:00 do you offer and I've had a lot a lot of push back um from this attitude at things like science fiction conventions and such I had I had I I said that I I said something like in one conversation where uh um I don't think publishing houses add any value for new Authors and he absolutely blew up and threw a temper tantrum and called
• 99:00 - 99:30 me a sociopath for some reason and I later learned that he was an editor from a major publishing house so I was standing between this man and his bread but of course he had this self-limiting belief I am an editor from a major Publishing House yeah and you know but I very quickly learned that the the value wasn't there it was just this useless buffer in in the relationship between
• 99:30 - 100:00 author and audience that that actively disrupted the quality of the feedback loop and you know I there was the moment there was a particular moment where I decided that I was going to be self-published and that was when uh uh my editor who I hired myself um enthusiast ically uh shoved some sample chapters from my book in front of a a
• 100:00 - 100:30 sort of an Acquisitions guy from one of the major publishing houses and he looks at this folder he reads like the first three two three sentences he holds it out to me like this as if I had offered him a dead spider oh my God and he says rewrite it in third person you do know how to write in third person don't you in more or less that tone of voice yeah and I realized that this this
• 100:30 - 101:00 man had no idea that perspective and tense are tools in an author's toolbox MH and I would have had to teach him how to correctly employ these tools and why theft of fight is written in first person present tense and the precise technical craftsmanship reasons why that unusual Choice was
• 101:00 - 101:30 made if he could even be taught because he had the self-limiting belief I am an editor with 20 years of experience well that's great you repeated the same mistakes for 20 years and called it experience go you and I realized that this was this was this industry was full of people who were very full of themselves and who were very full of self-limiting identity
• 101:30 - 102:00 beliefs where I wasn't going to be able to get them to look at things in a new way I had to go and prove that I could sell and so I did and then they came with the publishing deals and I said well you know this deal you're offering me isn't very good because the only additional feature that this offers to me is you get paid yeah from my perspective that's not a future that's not a feature you know I you know there were people who offered
• 102:00 - 102:30 me like a $5,000 advance to sell them the Audi book wrs like really wow and so I was like no I'm going to do a Kickstarter so I did a Kickstarter to fund the audio book I raised I think $43,000 nice and and uh thank you to all the kickstarter backers out there you're amazing people
• 102:30 - 103:00 um and I was able to get three very talented professional actors one for each major role and just do it with all the bells and whistles and uh so we're going to put out the audio book pretty soon all the major recording is done and I think we've produced something really special and it just confirmed again this belief I had I don't need someone to give me
• 103:00 - 103:30 permission to create I can just create things and if they're good enough people will be interested you know that's that agency again you don't wait for someone to say you can create do so you say I can create and I will will do so whether you wish it or not and there are so many new Authors who are so much in doubt about whether
• 103:30 - 104:00 their work has value that they will offer up 80% of their earnings to you know tore books or something in exchange for what basically amounts to a pat on the head yeah so you know if if there are any aspiring authors watching this I'd like to speak directly to you for a moment I know you're
• 104:00 - 104:30 afraid I was afraid to everyone is afraid you know you you stay afraid even as you start having success the fear is constant but you don't know if your work has any value and maybe a few of your friends have read it and a few of your relatives have read it and they are some other people who leave through it and said yeah wow this is really good but you know you're not sure if that's true or
• 104:30 - 105:00 if they're just trying to be nice so you're in this difficult place where you you're trying to sell something but you don't know what its actual value is well I'll tell you something the way you find out is to try to sell it yourself because if it actually has value to people and you start getting out there and and flogging it and persuading a few people to read it if it
• 105:00 - 105:30 has value then they will start saying wow this is really good and recommending it to their friends it won't be a fast process but it does work and that is so much better as a measure of value than whether some Acquisitions guy at a Publishing House is going to compliment you because they don't know what's else they don't they don't have any
• 105:30 - 106:00 special magic knowledge or Insight that you do not have so people are out there they want good stuff and they will buy it if you have the courage to offer it to them you know it's not your decision whether your work is good enough it's theirs give them the opportunity to make that decision that is a great way to end
• 106:00 - 106:30 because I was going to ask what's your advice for aspiring authors that want to reach that so we'll end on that because that was beautiful I think we touched on a lot of great topics um in terms of the audiobook you said that's finished recording yes is there I know we're dealing with other things is there a date that it may be pushed back to or that you're hovering around um we
• 106:30 - 107:00 are our sound editor is booked up till about January and that was because we were unable to book at the time that we wanted to complications from my wife having cancer so that was that it is what it is so we're looking at maybe changing there but you know maybe we want to stick with that so it's it's probably going to be first quarter of
• 107:00 - 107:30 next year and then also working on the sequel again you know life has intruded so there have been some delays but we're looking at maybe spring of next year for the sequel and this is this will be the second book in what is planned out as a four book series awesome I'm very much looking forward to both of those because audio books are my thing so Not only was it like the first time I'd read a fiction book in a while
• 107:30 - 108:00 but I very rarely read unless it's like a physical book that I just burn through and so I think I think there is a big future in audio books and I think there is a big future in a certain type of audio book like this this High effort high production value kind of audio book because they started out being called books on tape and it was just like somebody read the book onto tape yeah because you know
• 108:00 - 108:30 you wanted to be able to listen to the book and there was there was nothing beyond that it was just kind kind of somebody reading the book out loud and what we're starting to discover really resonates with people is good narration and moving over into to it being an audio production with real acting something akin to a sort of a
• 108:30 - 109:00 1930s radio play where they're really trying to make it into an an acted piece of media and I went with that and I went and I found some uh some really very very talented voice Act actors who I really felt like I went from saying oh I suppose I should do an audio book to oh we're going to make
• 109:00 - 109:30 something special so you know all the raws are done we're just waiting on Sound Engineering but I directed every moment of it personally and we had a lot of fun with that and we're very proud of what we put out so I think I think it's either I'm completely delusional or this is going to be good it's going to be good that's one last thing that I respect is it seems like in every piece
• 109:30 - 110:00 of content even on Twitter like something that could be as short as a one- sentence tweet on Twitter there's a lot of quality and thought that goes into it then same with the audiobook it seems like that's a driving factor in your decision making yeah it goes back to the Integrity thing you know you can't you can't just try to to cheat people you can't you can't just you take pictures of your food and
• 110:00 - 110:30 put it on Instagram and pretend you're a success you have to offer them real value and I try to proceed from the assumption that people are smart yeah because I want an audience of smart people because smart people have more money [Laughter] all right so with that um I'll have links to everything in the description the book The
• 110:30 - 111:00 substack the Twitter account all of them are great follow them hopefully I I'll follow up with you on how that does because I I actually want to see yes absolutely uh and then outside of that any else you want to plug website General things that people can find uh well I'm not sure I want to plug it yet but we may have we may have a another special collaborative project in the works with those voice actors oh
• 111:00 - 111:30 cool so okay yeah if you do if you do let me know I'll put the yes sweet Devin thank you so much I got more out of that than you know so very excited to get this out well thank you for having me on it was it was it it was a really good conversation I love doing these things and it's it's so good to be able to talk about what I do to interesting people who really have
• 111:30 - 112:00 have been there and have an insight into what that whole journey is like yeah the audience will benefit a lot from it too so thank you