How To Work Out What You Want To Want From Life | Kyle Eschenroeder | Modern Wisdom Podcast 189

Kyle Eschenroeder is a marketer and a writer. You do not want to live a life that you regret at the end of it. But working out what you WANT to want is a topic no one ever talks about. When you follow your default desires, you're much more likely to find yourself at a place in life that you didn't really want to be, or mean to get to. Today, we learn how to step into our programming and actively design our direction in life. I love this topic. Sponsor: Sign up to FitBook at https://fitbook.co.uk/join-fitbook/ (enter code MODERNWISDOM for 50% off your membership) Extra Stuff: Read Kyle's Blog Post - http://www.kyleschen.com/2017/04/11/what-do-you-want-to-want/ Follow Kyle on Twitter - https://twitter.com/kyleschen Get my free Ultimate Life Hacks List to 10x your daily productivity → https://chriswillx.com/lifehacks/ #meaning #purpose #philosophy - Listen to all episodes online. Search "Modern Wisdom" on any Podcast App or click here: iTunes: https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn Stitcher: https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/modern-wisdom - Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Email: [email protected]

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Chris Williamson?

  Oh, hello people in podcast land. Welcome back. My guest today is Kyle Eschenroeder, and we are talking about his fantastic blog post, What Do You Want to Want? I stumbled upon this at the start of the year and was just totally blown away. Working out what you want to want is the most important fundamental thing that you have to do in your life. We do not want to live a life of regret, and if we're not careful, we can quite easily end up at a place in life that we didn't really want to be or mean to get to. If you follow your default desires, societal norms, your evolutionary heritage, the programming that you've got, the way you've dealt with your traumas in the past, this is what's

• 0:44Chris Williamson?

  in store for you. You will be buffeted by the wind of life, just like a kite in the breeze. So today, we are learning why and how we need to step into our programming and actively design our direction in life. I adore this topic, and considering it's a subject area that I literally didn't know existed before I read Kyle's blog posts, it's amazing. I really, really hope that you enjoy this episode and take a lot away from it. You need to go and check the actual blog post out as well. It's a 60-minute read, but it's wonderful. So linked in the show notes below. Go and enjoy it. Thank you to everyone for the feedback about Modern Wisdom University. I'm blown away by that. Again, like, just the support from everyone on this show is beyond anything that I've

• 1:29Chris Williamson?

  ever had before. So thank you so much. The other thing I wanted to say was, I haven't asked for this for a while, but if there's an episode that you've enjoyed recently over the last few weeks or months, please send it to a friend. The only way that this podcast grows is if you refer it to other people. You probably started listening to Modern Wisdom because someone told you, hey, you should check out this guy from the north of the UK. You should see his podcast's not that bad. So be that person for me. If you can send it to someone or throw it in a group chat, just find the link, share it to someone. That is the best way that you could repay me, and it helps to keep growing, which means I can continue to access more and more weird and wonderful guests.

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• 3:36Chris Williamson?

  But for now, it's time for the wise and wonderful Kyle Eschenroeder.

• 3:56Chris Williamson?

  Kyle Eschenroeder in the building. How are you doing, man?

• 4:01Speaker 06

  Very well. How are you?

• 4:03Chris Williamson?

  Very, very well indeed. I'm happy to have you on. It's been a long time coming. First and foremost, for the listeners that don't know who you are, why, why do you think that I'm speaking to you today? Why do you think I reached out?

• 4:17Speaker 06

  Oh man, that's a good, that's a very good question.

• 4:24Speaker 06

  You may have had a lapse of, lapse in judgment.

• 4:29Speaker 06

  No, I actually, you know, I think it's an interesting time. I know you found this article about asking ourselves the question, what do we want to want? You know, has a lot to do with, with reevaluating our values and, and our desires. And I think, you know, a lot of us are being forced to do that throughout this, this COVID situation. So it's kind of a good time to talk about, talk about that and, and see if we might be able to do it in a more strategic or skillful way.

• 5:04Chris Williamson?

  I think you've answered my, my reasons pretty accurately there, man. Yeah. I, I stumbled across your blog post, what do you want to want? On your blog and I was blown away, man. It's a 60 minute read or so. And I absolutely adored it and I was 10 minutes in and I was already scouring around online, trying to find your email address. And it turned out that you already followed me on, on Twitter, which made everything an awful lot easier. So yeah, I have got you on because I, I just want to go through this blog post. It's one of the most fundamental concepts that I've never heard

• 5:47Chris Williamson?

  spoken about before. And I think there's an awful lot of people listening. I know a ton of audience members who will really benefit from this. So that's, that's why we're here. We're going to go through it. So first things first, why is working out what you want to want? Important?

• 6:09Speaker 06

  Mostly because you don't want to live a life that you regret at the end of it, right?

• 6:17Speaker 06

  I think that when we follow our kind of default desires, we're much more likely to find ourselves at a place in life that we didn't really want to or mean to get to.

• 6:36Speaker 06

  So I think that's kind of the big one. But there's a lot of things along the way that can benefit from asking ourselves this question. So actually, I knew you were going to talk about this, so I kind of pulled some of my favorite quotes from the article that I think emphasized some of these points better than I could.

• 7:02Speaker 05

  I love it.

• 7:03Speaker 06

  Off the cuff. Yeah, so Ralph Waldo Emerson in Self-Reliance has this line, "My life is for itself and not a spectacle." And I think our default desires so often

• 7:20Speaker 06

  push us towards trying to create a life that is a spectacle, something that looks great to others, but itself feels kind of maybe empty or off-center from what we would truly want for ourselves. And actually, that reminds me, your audience may be more familiar now with the idea of memetic desire that's gotten really popular since Peter Thiel started talking about it. It's this idea that originated with the sociologist Rene Girard. It basically means that we naturally want what those around us want.

• 8:04Speaker 06

  So those are kind of our default desires. And Thiel, in his book Zero to One, he talks about how realizing this helped him switch tracks from a legal career that he was getting really far into and had an incredible outlook, and switching into tech, which made his life a lot better. I mean, he had better outcomes and it was just more aligned with his true values.

• 8:33Speaker 06

  I think if you get, so if we get stuck in these memetic or default desires, they disconnect us from our actual ones. And I think there's this, there's a really beautiful, it's a two-sentence quote from Proust, from Swan's Way, that gets into, I think, the nuance of why desiring, you know, our defaults can be dangerous. He says, "To think that I've wasted years of my life, that I've longed to die, that I've experienced my greatest love for a woman who didn't appeal to me, who wasn't even my type." Oh, God. So, like, he was, you know, like, he was experiencing desire, right? He was chasing this woman, and he actually, like, longed to die,

• 9:17Speaker 06

  like, he was willing to give everything to her. And then, at the end of it, he realizes that she wasn't even his type. So, I think that, you know, it's how, you know, these default desires can be super seductive.

• 9:34Speaker 06

  And if we don't apply some level of awareness, you know, they're gonna take you places you don't wanna be. So, this, you know, then I'd add just a couple, a couple extra points. So, I think, you know, I think that we've experienced a lot of,

• 9:54Speaker 06

  kind of, breakdowns in societal, in trust in society, to the point where I think there's a significant portion of the population who is afraid to desire, you know, anything other than, you know, immediate comfort. Or, and I think that, you know, reassessing desires and realizing they don't need to be what those around us kind of think they should be, can be a really healthy way of rekindling healthy desires. And then, also, inevitably, in the long run, we fall into, our desires create our path of least resistance.

• 10:38Speaker 06

  And in the long run, I think that we all End up following our path of least resistance. Robert Fritz talks about this really beautifully in his book called The Path of Least Resistance. But so I think, I think if we can shape our desires even a little bit, it can create massive, massive changes in our lives. And it allows us to trust ourselves and, you know, experience flow more often. Right? Like if you can trust your desires to be in your best interest, then it can, it can, it can make life a little easier in some ways.

• 11:18Chris Williamson?

  Man, I really agree. I think it's such a fundamental question. And that's why I found it so fascinating when I began reading the article. And for the people that are thinking, oh, this article sounds great. It will be linked in the show notes below, of course. But to everyone that's listening, ask yourself, what do you want to want? Like genuinely, what do you want to want? Not what do you want? Like, I want that piece of cake. I want this car. I want whatever it might be. Like, what do you want to want? The ability to program our desires to choose our own path is something which has never been gifted to us in as high velocity as it has done right now.

• 12:02Chris Williamson?

  Right? You know, we have the depth and breadth of freedom that no other society in history has had. The first ever society whose problems are problems of surplus, not problems of scarcity. And with that in mind, it means that you get to do things that you usually wouldn't be able to. But because of this memetic predisposition that we have, where we reflect the people who are around us and their desires, and this path of least resistance, which you mentioned, which is kind of a number of different things, like a genetic predisposition towards certain bits and pieces. And then you compound that, this is the real pernicious thing about it, that you compound that over time.

• 12:46Chris Williamson?

  And that becomes patterns of behaviour which are increasingly more and more difficult to change. So your desires that you have now, which as we've identified very well may not be chosen, they're just kind of emergent from you never actually looking at what you want to want. Over time will become increasingly harder to step out of that valley of, right? Because like a river, it cuts a path that's ever deeper. And then after time, you're like, well, this river's now like Niagara Falls and it's going to take a extra human, superhuman effort in order for me to redirect this flow of water.

• 13:28Chris Williamson?

  So yeah, I think, man, it's, um, it's a really fascinating, a really fascinating thing to think. And you were, you mentioned there about the, um, the, the quote where this guy had realised at the end of his life that it was a woman who wasn't even his type. I was talking to Greg McKeown, guy that wrote Essentialism, and he said he was working with some huge tech execs from Silicon Valley. And this guy who'd made it to the top of the corporate ladder was very successful, basically said, um, that his relationship with his son was breaking down. He has this teenage son who he essentially can't speak to, they can't have a conversation, his son wants to leave the room whenever he enters it. They're just a terrible, terrible relationship, you know?

• 14:12Chris Williamson?

  And, um, that is someone, Greg said, who won at the wrong game. And holy shit, if that's not the sort of thing that makes the hairs on the back of your neck stand up. You know, this guy who's dedicated his life towards something that he thought would give him purpose and meaning and a sense of fulfillment and is actually, you know, in every, by everyone's definition, has dedicated himself to a thing, but dedicated himself to the wrong thing with time that he can never get back. Like, man, that's hell, you know? That's hell incarnate on earth.

• 14:50Speaker 06

  Yeah, it's pretty terrifying.

• 14:52Chris Williamson?

  It's absolutely terrifying. So, okay, so we understand that working out what we want to want is important because it allows us to program our desires, which in an essence in programs our life, it forms a foundation upon which our behaviors can draw from. And also, I like the idea of it being kind of like a trustworthy friend, you know, or a good advisor on your shoulder, that if you have designed desires, you know that what you want to want is a, what you want is a good indication of what you should want, because it's designed as opposed to emergent. Next up, what should we want?

• 15:33Chris Williamson?

  We've decided that we should want, design our wants. What should we want? Got an entire world out there to choose from.

• 15:42Speaker 06

  Awesome. Yeah, one thing I wanted, I want to bring up, there's this, there's this great, before we, before I answer that, I don't want to make this sound easy or something, you know, like, the article was written a few years ago, and I, you know, it's, this isn't, I'm, I'm not here pretending to have mastered my every desire, right? So, so I'm very much, like, this is very much a work in progress and-

• 16:09Chris Williamson?

  Do as I say, not as I do.

• 16:12Speaker 06

  Yeah, and I, well, I think of this great line that, that Confucius had, and so Confucianism was like basically all about reprogramming your desires, so that you could, you would behave properly, and, you know, basically what we're talking about here, your, your desires would line up properly with what you want to want, or, you know, what, assuming you wanted what Confucianism was pointing at. And he talked about how he measured his progress over decades, you know, not years or months or anything. So I do think like, simple things, just even stopping and asking yourself this question, could have huge, huge dividends. But, but we're talking about like,

• 16:55Speaker 06

  fundamental programming, and there's definitely ways to support change, but, but none of them are, are, are easier painless. I also want to say, so, I, I do think that there are things that we can all agree on, you know- We should, you know, we should want, that we would love to want rather than, you know, the opposite. But, but I think above all, self-reliance matters. So, the core thing here that, that I think is, is the most helpful is the question itself. And like you said, you actually, you know, kind of invited the audience to consider the question.

• 17:39Speaker 06

  And I always loved this, this Indian sage Krishnamurti, like every time he would give this talk, a talk, he would, he would kind of force the audience into engagement with the ideas. Don't take the ideas and like organize it, file it away, and you know, your ever know. Like, this is something to engage with now in real time, in reality. So, so that being said, you know, self-reliance matters. There's a lot of, you know, a lot of this gets into kind of moral territory. And I am not suggesting that I or anyone has kind of moral superiority over, you know,

• 18:22Speaker 06

  over, over you and what you think, or is trying to tell you what you should want. The, the suggestion is that if you do dedicate yourself to some degree to considering what you want to want and shaping those, there will be benefits. But, so anyway, but with that all being said, I think that there is some that most of us can agree on. So, you know, ultimately, the idea of wanting what is, to some degree, seems pretty desirable. That's essentially achieving, you know, Nietzsche's amor fati. But then if we want to get, you know, more specifically, it seems that life, life would

• 19:04Speaker 06

  be better if we were to want the things that were nourishing for us in the, in the long run. Naval, the founder of Angel List, actually the other day on Twitter had a really good tweet, he said, and you know, he is, he's good at tweets. The, he said, "The modern devil is cheap dopamine." So I think, I mean, that's like a really great heuristic for what we don't want to want, right? You know, we, we...

• 19:32Speaker 06

  Ideally, we are not designing ourselves to desire cheap dopamine hits above all. Cheap dopamine hits being like candy or the intellectual equivalent, like a badly constructed Twitter feed or Reddit or things like that.

• 19:53Chris Williamson?

  It goes to everything as well, right? It goes to that reply from a random girl you've never met on Instagram DM when you've got a girlfriend to bolster your sense of whatever. It goes to texting in the car while you drive. There's so many iterations of that.

• 20:10Speaker 06

  That's a great example, yeah. And so I'd like to, and I also, I'd like to imagine a spectrum of desires. So it's really helpful for me to envision the enlightened sage on one side and who, for our purposes, whose desires lead to eudaimonia and human flourishing. And then on the other side, we have a caveman or something that's completely driven by their id, by their lowest desires. And this isn't perfect, right? There could be, there's like the noble savage idea and stuff that I think we can talk about a little bit more later.

• 20:54Speaker 06

  But I think that that spectrum helps you, what side of this spectrum does this desire land on? And I think that's a helpful way to orient our desires.

• 21:07Chris Williamson?

  I agree. I think that learning what you shouldn't want to want first is a very easy way to work this out. So people who listen to episode 69, The Most Ever Played on Mental Models with George McGill will know the power of inversion. It's really hard sometimes to work out what makes us happy, but it's quite easy to explain how you would make a happy person depressed. And then if you flip that on its head and you say, well, okay, if that's how I make a happy person depressed, if I either choose to do the opposite of them, I don't do the things that would cause it, or I do do the things that would stop it, like that's how I make myself happier. I need to wake up on time and get sunlight and exercise and see friends and drink water

• 21:50Chris Williamson?

  and have healthy food and blah, blah, blah, blah. And it's the same for this, right? What would be, when it comes to wants? Ask yourself, and this is a, this is a full deep throat red pilling that me and Kyle are giving you throughout today. This is an active podcast. This is not a passive one, as Kyle's already said. But ask yourself, like, what are the things that you really should not want to want? Should you not want to want the appreciation of people who you don't care about that are not in your immediate circle? Should you not want to want a whole host of very shallow, very meaningless friendships and/or relationships and/or sexual encounters with people? Should you not want, you know, continue to iterate on that as much as you want, but like, ask yourself, you know, what would

• 22:35Chris Williamson?

  make, what wants, if you took them to their nth degree, would guarantee that you led an unfulfilled life? Because I, man, I can make a list that's longer than my arm of those things. So I think that's, that's a pretty good place to start. But you actually, you created a, like, four areas that you moved through in the blog post, right? There was four different sections. Why did you, why did you choose those four?

• 23:03Speaker 06

  I think they were, they were pretty fundamental, pretty, I don't want to say not controversial, but I think they're, they're, they're pretty well-founded. And, and I actually, you know, a lot of them came from inversions. So taking desires I had that I felt were unhelpful and figuring out, looking at them as closely as I could, right? And, and figuring out where, you know, could they be helpful? Were they pushing me in a healthy direction or not? And if not,

• 23:47Speaker 06

  how could I change them? And so, so, yeah, we looked at, you know, one from, from, you know, switching from wanting fame to actually doing something, making change, from wanting extreme wealth to wanting a frugal heart, from wanting to be extraordinary to wanting the ordinary, and from wanting an easy life to actually desiring struggle.

• 24:17Chris Williamson?

  I think, man, it's that little sort of paradigm thing that you've created, I really like. And it is high level, wanting an easy life, wanting to be somebody, wanting extreme wealth and wanting to be extraordinary. Those are four very, very common wants that people want, but probably don't want to want. Certainly not when they actually fully appreciate what the implications are of wanting that want. Would you agree?

• 24:51Speaker 06

  Yes, I would. I would agree fully.

• 24:54Chris Williamson?

  Good.

• 24:54Speaker 06

  Wholeheartedly.

• 24:55Chris Williamson?

  Good. Well, it's just as well because I've taken that learning from your blog post, mate. So also, I am banning you from doing any more caveats throughout the rest of this podcast, man. Like, your article, your article is fantastic and it is extensive, not exhaustive. And if anyone's got a problem with the fact that you don't go to the nth degree or the end of the earth to explain all of the different possibilities, then they can, my DMs are open, they can come speak to me. You're just unloading wisdom today, man, and everyone else can fuck off. So let's get into it. Wanting an easy life versus wanting a life of struggle. Why would someone not want an easy life? Why should they want a life of struggle? That sounds shit.

• 25:39Speaker 06

  Yeah. So first of all, it can kill you. So, so.

• 25:48Speaker 06

  So, so, yeah, I mean, there's this, Sheldon did a study of these employees that retired at 55 versus those at 65. And the people that retired at 55 died significantly sooner than those that retired at 65. And that's been, you know, there's tons of studies that'll show you that. If you retire early, right, and you live a normal retired life, you will die earlier. There's also, so like, struggle is universal. There's nothing we can do to eliminate it. So if we're able to embrace it, again, to like, whatever degree is possible for you now.

• 26:30Speaker 06

  It it makes life, you know, you're fighting against life a little bit less, um, paradoxically, right? Um, Kelly McGonigal actually has, she, she has a ton of great examples in her book, The Upside of Stress. Um, but my favorite is, um, is this bit where she talks about how our bodies actually release different chemicals depending on how we perceive a stressor. So, um, if we think that a particular stressful situation is just bad and regret having to take it on and kind of try to avoid it, our bodies will put out less helpful, healthy chemicals. So it's basically, they pump out this chemical mix that's more, uh, cortisol heavy, uh, or sorry, cortisol heavy than,

• 27:14Speaker 06

  than if we embrace the stress as something healthy and that can provide an energy to get past obstacles. So if we allow ourselves to embrace a stressor, we will, our bodies will actually respond different physically and release different chemicals into our system that will, uh, that will give us, you know, healthier, better energy.

• 27:38Chris Williamson?

  Man, that's so, that's so fucking cool. And, um, to link that back, you may have heard Sam Harris talk about this. He uses this hilarious analogy, uh, where he says, imagine that spontaneously, you just were given the full physiological sensations that you have at the end of completing an incredibly hard, high intensity workout. Like you're just driving down the street and that happens, heart rate's jacked up through the roof, you're sweating, like you're panting, you're tired, you can't breathe, all this stuff. You would be terrified. You'd think, holy fucking shit, what is going on? Am I gonna die? Darling, darling, ring the, ring the ambulance immediately.

• 28:19Chris Williamson?

  Um, but reframe that, reframe that at the end of a workout, that is the signal you're chasing, that is the discomfort you're leaning into because it is a marker that you have done something. So that immediately shows people for millennia have been avoiding cold. It's been a thing that has killed countless, countless humans. And now, all of my friends do cold exposure first thing in the morning, they go and get a cold shower. Because they see that as a signal, that is something. So that shows exactly, not only is there a mental reframing, which changes the way that we see that discomfort or that struggle.

• 28:59Chris Williamson?

  There's also, as you've identified there, the reframing then is reflected physiologically with how our body responds to it too. That's super, that's super cool.

• 29:10Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah. And, and, and I mean, the, the examples go on and on. You know, two thirds of, of trauma survivors that have actually experienced post-traumatic growth.

• 29:23Speaker 06

  And, and the, the difference between the ones that experienced growth versus not is, is, is purely mindset. And again, you know, that's to some degree, that's, you know, there is a breaking point. And, you know, Nietzsche's idea that, you know, what doesn't kill us makes us stronger is obviously not 100% correct. He lost his mind and, and, and physically weakened and never, you know, he, he, he reached a breaking, breaking point, just like everybody can. But the, the, the amount of, of pain that we, we can take is, is often surprising to us.

• 29:59Speaker 06

  Again, and adults who late in life actually experienced more struggles throughout their life, reported greater satisfaction with their lives.

• 30:10Speaker 06

  And a stronger sense of purpose and made more original contributions than those who reported having a more consistently pleasant life.

• 30:21Speaker 06

  And, you know, there's, you know, Viktor Frankl, the author of Man's Search for Meaning, actually considers suffering, suffering well to be one of only three sources of meaning in life. The others being doing work you consider significant and caring for another person.

• 30:39Speaker 06

  The case for struggle is is significant, right?

• 30:43Chris Williamson?

  Seems pretty, seems pretty bloody robust. Man, here's one, here's, here's a red pill moment for all of the type A go-getters out there. Two, actually, I don't know whether you've heard these, you probably will have done, but I'm going to give them to you anyway, Kyle. First one, anybody that's ever owned a business or has ever been to uni or done any group work or worked on a project that they care about, think about what your favorite part, some of your favorite memories that you have when you're talking to other people about that project. The favorite memory is never like when it was easygoing, when everything was sweet, when you got to rock up to work late and everything was still moving fine.

• 31:25Chris Williamson?

  The best memories, the ones that you recall are the 3am finishes where you had to order Domino's direct to the office and you slept under your desk and you grinded and grafted, but you got it, you got it done, you got that proposal finished and then you got it, you did the thing, or you, you worked your art and you're painting the shop and then you finally, it's launch day and you finally just got there by the skin of your teeth. That is what you remember. That is the, the, the love that you have for your project. Those are the best memories that you have. That's a, from Ben Bergeron's Chasing Excellence podcast, a really, really eye-opening insight. And the second, the other side of that, if you're a type A personality who really, really wants to struggle, especially if you're a business owner, tomorrow, don't touch your

• 32:10Chris Williamson?

  phone, don't look at a screen and don't do anything, don't read, don't meditate, don't exercise, spend the whole day doing sweet fuck all and that will be, that will be the definition of a day of struggle because you're just going to be itching to go and do shit. But yeah, both, both of, both of those things kind of map onto that easy life versus wanting a life of struggle somewhere.

• 32:31Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah, I think that I love that second, that second example. It's beautiful. And I do, I want to say, you know, you said no caveat.

• 32:41Speaker 06

  And this is not, this is not really a caveat.

• 32:43Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 32:44Speaker 06

  But I just, I, I, you know, people can take this the, the wrong way, right? So, um, this is in no way trying to promote self-flagellation, or fetishize suffering, or belittling suffering that is, you know, super intense and, and unhelpful. So, uh, it's more of a call to flinch less when something bad happens, and to let ourselves try things where, that are pretty much guaranteed to add obstacles into our life, that would, that's going to make it more of a struggle, but also, uh, very likely more meaningful. So, it's not about adding drama, or, you know, any unnecessary drama.

• 33:28Speaker 06

  It's, it's about how you act in the face of struggle that already exists, and enabling yourself to choose harder paths in life that will ultimately be more fulfilling, but will also necessitate more struggle.

• 33:47Chris Williamson?

  Yes, I like that. I like that a lot. Okay, so, wanting an easy life, people think, I just want to coast along, but they're gonna die sooner. They're not going to find as much meaning, they're also going to have worse memories. Viktor Frankl, if Viktor Frankl said it, then it is, it's correct, you know? So, that's, line drawn under that, people should want a life of struggle, or at the very least, lean into the struggles that they have, and embrace them, and see them as challenges to overcome, rather than kind of curses to bear, I suppose. Up next, wanting to be somebody versus wanting to do something. How does this map?

• 34:30Speaker 06

  So yeah, this is, this one is, is tough right now, right? Because uh, uh, everybody wants more attention, right? I mean, um, and, and it gets murky, right? Because attention has become valuable, right? Like, you can build business off, businesses off of the amount of attention you get, right? So, um, so this one gets, uh, the nuance here is very important. Um, but fame is, is, you know, absolutely addicting. It's one of the most addictive things. Um, Adam Smith said that, uh, to those who have been accustomed to the possession or even the hope of public admiration, all other pleasures sicken and decay.

• 35:13Speaker 06

  Um, which you can kind of see, like, you know, if you, the, the, the, the pain of a waning celebrity is, you know, visceral. And you can see it in their decisions that they make, right? They'll make, kind of, they'll, they'll agree to, and sometimes it's about money, but a lot of it is often about getting, squeezing out the last little bit of attention that they can out of a career when they go on like these, uh, humiliating game shows and stuff like that. Um, so, a, a, and another huge, huge danger, uh, with fame is that it, it puts our happiness

• 35:55Speaker 06

  on, on the whims of, of those, uh, to whom we're famous. Um, so the person who seeks fame is, is making their happiness largely dependent on the opinions of other people, right? Um, so those, those people who have the power to build you up, uh, have the same power to, to tear you down. And, you know, um, I mean, we see this all the time, um, kind of in scapegoating, right? Like, uh, everybody will just, uh, pick, uh, pick a celebrity who did some kind of minor, made some kind of minor infraction and just tear them, tear them apart. Kevin Kelly, Kevin Kelly wrote a great article just on advice and he pointed out

• 36:35Speaker 06

  that anybody who's read a famous person's biography should understand that you don't want to be famous. You know, it becomes super obvious that, that a life that makes a really great story is not necessarily the, the life, the life that feels best to live while you're in it. So, and again, you know, there's, there's, there's obvious value to fame. You know, few things matter more than your reputation. But the point is here that we should, you know, shift the order. So if you desire impact more than attention, then any fame you achieve

• 37:19Speaker 06

  will be based on a solid foundation and your happiness won't disappear when the attention does. So, so, you know, if, if somebody makes an individual breakthrough contribution technologically or something, they'll become famous for 15 seconds. But in most cases, when that fade fames, as it inevitably will, because they're not the type of people who are doing the work to increase their fame or maintain their fame daily, right? Their happiness doesn't go away because the work that actually is meaningful to them, which is creating change, creating, in this case, whatever technologies, still is there for

• 38:02Speaker 06

  them, right? And so, you know, they might feel a little twinge, but it's nothing like, you know, the pain that a celebrity feels when, when the spotlight is fading.

• 38:13Chris Williamson?

  It's fame for fame's sake, isn't it? And, uh, man, the, I actually think...

• 38:20Chris Williamson?

  I actually think that in all of the article, in all of your blog posts, the wanting to be somebody is probably the biggest red pill to swallow in there. It's certainly one of them. And I don't know how much you know about my background, but I was on a couple of reality TV shows in the UK. So like, that's where the blue tick wanker and all that sort of stuff comes from.

• 38:41Speaker 06

  Dude, I'm on air with a celebrity?

• 38:43Chris Williamson?

  Oh, no, no, please, for the love of Christ. No, no, Kyle, stop. But what, what happened? I was on a dating show, Love Island, which is essentially, if you can imagine what, eight weeks of television that looks like what life would be like if Instagram put a filter over it all. That's kind of how it comes across, right?

• 39:07Chris Williamson?

  And what that does is people don't get to win that show or be successful on that show because of something that they do, or even something that they are. It just completely dilutes everyone down to the lowest common denominator. The people that win might be very talented at a thing, but they don't win because of their talent. They win because of the fact that they chose the right girl or guy and have abs and got a tan and said the right thing at the right moment. Like, there was a real talented boxer on there. There's been doctors on there. There's been all sorts of people. They didn't do well or badly because

• 39:48Chris Williamson?

  of anything that they actually did, or created, or had impact, or worked at. They were just there and gifted fame for no reason. And the challenge with that is, as you've hit the nail on the head, like, those who giveth can taketh away. And if you put your sense of identity and your sense of happiness around that fame, and that fame is simply hollow, when it goes, you're left with nothing. Whereas if you have it on a foundation, a very firm foundation, of it being built on something that you love to do, that you create, that scales over time, that becomes anti-fragile. You know, I'm sure there'll be times, inventors, if there's

• 40:31Chris Williamson?

  anyone who's listening, who's ever got famous and then had it go away, especially if you're an inventor, you might be actually like, right, fuck all of those, that attention's gone. I can now actually get back to doing some work.

• 40:43Speaker 06

  Right, yeah, if it's all right, I have a couple, a couple of questions.

• 40:48Chris Williamson?

  Hit me.

• 40:49Speaker 06

  One, do you think that the cast, and I don't know if you, you've, you've kept in touch, but, but did life get easier, or, or I should say better or worse for, for, for, for the majority of people after the show? And, and two, uh, it, it, do you think your, your, was, was, was the show and kind of recognizing the danger of that fame or that, that, that taste of attention that you, you received, um, did that, was that, uh, an impetus to, you know, start the podcast and, um, explore some of these other ideas?

• 41:34Chris Williamson?

  Got you. Yeah, two really good questions, man. Um, so with regards to the other people on the show, like I, I still follow some of them online. I don't follow any of the girls. Like I didn't speak to the girls while I was on there. So it's pointless me following them when I'm off. Um, but they, they, you know, some of the boys are doing good. A couple of them are on other reality TV shows or doing whatever. Um, there's certainly a little bit of a case of some of the guys have got a taste of fame and are now sort of clinging on to it. Some of the guys have now, um, embraced normality again and just see it as what it was, which was a good experience. Um, the problem is that people want fame

• 42:14Chris Williamson?

  for the purpose of being famous. They want to be famous for being well-known, not famous for having done something. And it's, it's so dangerous, man. Like I log on to hear people talking on live streams about...

• 42:34Chris Williamson?

  Their reputation or what people are saying about them, which was created off the back of nothing, like it was picked up out of the back of no virtue, no, no, just nothing, nothing happened. They were selected the same way as a lightning selects a victim, you know, like just with a tiny, a tiny little bit more discrimination. And I don't know, I think, I think that all of the guys, certainly from my season, I think that they will, they're slowly on the path to kind of integrating those two different worlds, like the post sort of fame world, or the poster relevancy world, and the world where they still were. And then on the

• 43:14Chris Williamson?

  second one about kind of my insight into that, yeah, it certainly identified in me that I was playing a little bit of a persona, that that route wasn't really the one that I wanted. Now, don't get me wrong, man. If I was able to get the sort of traction that the top level people, because the show's kind of got exponentially bigger since I was on it five years ago. If I was able to get that sort of traction because of this podcast, or because of other stuff that I do, maybe some writing, maybe some, whatever it might be, if I was able to get that kind of traction from something that I genuinely care about, I would, I would love it. But even if I didn't, I don't care. I do this podcast. I don't like, I love the audience. Everyone that's

• 43:57Chris Williamson?

  listening, I love you to bits. And thank you so much for being a part of this journey, because it is the most fun, most engaging, most exhilarating activity and project I've ever worked on. But in the nicest way possible, if you all fucked off tomorrow, I'd still do it. Like, I would still be here, still speaking to people, still, still loving this process. And that's the most robust situation, I think, to be in. And, you know, I hope everyone that's listening finds a thing in their life. And that could be being a mother, being a brother, you know, being a good friend, being a good community servant. That could be being a high performing athlete, or a good businessman, or someone who's creative, whatever it might be. Like, if you find that

• 44:41Chris Williamson?

  thing that makes you lose yourself in it.

• 44:45Chris Williamson?

  The fame, notoriety, wanting to be somebody can come and go, but the joy of the activity itself remains and that's really pure.

• 44:56Speaker 06

  Amen. Yeah, especially, I think like you pointed to in creative, creative work, where, you know, oftentimes the thing that you think is best is maybe least appreciated. And so you have to, and you know, the thing that gets, you know, most popular might make you feel misunderstood or something, you know, like, hey, almost betrayed by a fanbase. So it's like, and obviously for a long time, you have very little chance of monetizing creative activities. So few finds that you would do either way. And that, you know,

• 45:41Speaker 06

  if you, yeah, doing something for attention is incredibly fragile endeavor.

• 45:48Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I think that gets, it's been magnified, right? By social media because the content often which is actually the best or adds the most value or hits people the deepest is also some of the worst performing shit that goes out on there, you know? Like I can put, I can put a trailer out for an episode which has taken two hours to research, two hours to record, another couple of hours of editing, and then put a 60 second subtitle trailer together up on Instagram or something and it kind of just does okay. Some people support it, some people don't. But then you put up

• 46:27Chris Williamson?

  a topless photo with a couple of emojis and it absolutely flies. And you're like, well, like you gotta, you gotta play the game. And I, you know, it is what it is. You can't hate that, but it's so seductive, right? Because you think, whoa, why don't I just keep on chasing what people, the be somebody route, right? Why should I bother doing something when I'm not getting the volume of attention that I do when I want to be somebody?

• 46:57Speaker 06

  Yes, and I think, I think this is, you pointed to the order mattering, right? Like, the, the thing that you care deeply about is what's important. And then you're doing these other activities that are essentially marketing to, you know, to, to sustain and

• 47:18Chris Williamson?

  Gotta play the fucking game, Kyle. Gotta play the fucking game.

• 47:20Speaker 06

  Attention, right, yeah, you gotta be able to, I mean, I'm a marketer, right? Like, I, I, I, like, getting attention is a good game, right? But desiring fame for yourself for its own sake is incredibly dangerous and leads to very, very bad places.

• 47:37Chris Williamson?

  Well, remember what you said at the very start, it was about programming it, right? It was about the intentionality of what you are doing. Like, are you wanting the attention or the, the likes on your photo because you genuinely think that that's going to bring you happiness? Or are you playing the game because you know that if you do that, it furthers something which you truly care about? That's the difference between Matrix and Red Pill.

• 48:06Speaker 06

  Amen.

• 48:08Chris Williamson?

  Cool. Okay, so we should want to do something not to be somebody. It's going to make us more robust if and when the somebody that we have become goes away. It also means that we don't have our sense of self-worth lynchpins to other people's opinions of us. And that's so important as well, like, before we move on. Fuck, man, like, being in control of your own happiness or not giving other people that control, like, that's one of the principal reasons that young people's relationships fail because they're so terrified of opening up to another person, another human being, that they're gonna be like, um, they don't, they don't ever actually end up being fully faithful to them because they're terrified of what that means.

• 48:52Chris Williamson?

  Or they, they don't ever end up actually fully opening up to them, you know? Like, it's, it's so important, I think, to not have your sense of self-worth leveraged up against other people's opinions for you. So, we've got, we want a life of struggle, we want to do something not to be somebody. Next, wanting extreme wealth versus wanting a frugal heart. What does that mean?

• 49:20Speaker 06

  So I think Arthur Schopenhauer has this line that I think frames this whole point really perfectly. He says, "Money is human happiness in the abstract. He then, who is no longer capable of enjoying happiness in the concrete, devotes his heart entirely to money." So, like we just talked about, right? If you are, you know, trying to go after fame for fame's sake, that's almost like it's an abstract version of love versus doing something where you actually have to pour love into something, right?

• 50:01Speaker 06

  So in this case, it is, you know, when we have no other more meaningful or purposeful or, yeah, connection in our life, money is kind of the default that we assume will fill that hole. And so another way to look at this is actually another Peter Thiel example from Zero One. He talks about definite optimists versus indefinite optimists. And definite optimists are optimists about something in particular. So entrepreneurs tend to fit in this category. So optimistic about, you know, sustainable energy or, you know, and what exactly that

• 50:45Speaker 06

  should look like, what specific piece needs to improve in order to make the world better. And then indefinite optimists tend to, they think the world's gonna get better, but really they don't care how. And these people tend to be in finance and are obsessed with optionality. Because really, I think really because they lack a vision, right? And so if money is the most interesting thing that you think you can collect, you know, like, and you don't have more concrete reasons for achieving that, right?

• 51:27Speaker 06

  And some level of optionality is incredibly freeing and useful, right? But if you just keep going on and on and on and playing the same game, it's just... You haven't been very imaginative, right? So, yeah, so like fame, wealth is super addicting. And it's easy to think that happiness lies behind the next financial milestone. Obviously, if any of us who have been lucky enough to make some money know that that's that's truth. And then, you know, obsession with extreme wealth also is is dangerous to your morals.

• 52:09Speaker 06

  And I think we need some level of humility to admit that. But so on our way to acquiring wealth, we may give ourselves more slack in the actions that we take to acquire it. And then, once we're wealthy, it's super easy to listen to the sycophants around us that that hold us to less strict moral standards than they do to their peers. So we begin to feel that, you know, more rules may not apply to us in the same way. So I think the the reframe here that's that's I find really helpful actually comes from Tim O'Reilly of O'Reilly Media. They produce, he's been in the tech world forever.

• 52:52Speaker 06

  He produces a ton of like how to guides for programmers and things like that. But he he he he has this metaphor that we we should think of of money as gasoline on a road trip. So it absolutely sucks to run out of it. So you have to pay attention to it. You have to make sure that your tank is, you know, reasonably full. But the trip is not about getting gas at all, right? So that's not the purpose. The purpose, the gas has a purpose to power your trip. But the trip is in no way, like you would never plan a trip around going to the gas station, right? Unless you're preparing for a longer voyage. So.

• 53:38Speaker 06

  Yeah, another antidote is to stoke our desire to develop the frugal heart. So that's the switch, right? So from obsessing to extreme wealth, right? And that's where I kind of use the word extreme, right? Because obviously, wealth provides so many powerful options and enables so many important things in life that it obviously matters. But from that kind of moving from the obsession to extreme wealth to developing a frugal heart, and I stole that from this novel, Zorba the Greek. It's basically the ability to enjoy the little things in life.

• 54:19Speaker 06

  So like anyone who goes, you know, who likes hiking knows that that life doesn't get better than a really good hike with, you know, someone you love. And those cost very, very little. So if we're able to enjoy more things about our life as it is, I think we're less likely to go into debt for things that we really don't care that much about, or add unnecessary stress to keep us up with the, you know, keep up with the consumption of those around us. And I think, you know, a frugal heart also creates freedom by just lowering our personal burn rate. You know, so if you can, if you can get through life without, you know, the most expensive

• 55:04Speaker 06

  cars or, you know, brand new clothes every month or whatever, you know, whatever it is for you, if you can lower your burn rate, it creates freedom and possibility and choices that go away once you have a certain, you know, you have to maintain a certain lifestyle.

• 55:25Chris Williamson?

  Man, I had Morgan Housel, writer on Collaborative Fund and ex Motley Fool writer as well on here, one of the best Twitter accounts for finance and wealth management stuff. And he said, he has this amazing definition of wealth. He says, "Wealth is the Ferrari that you didn't buy. It's the square footage in the house that you didn't purchase." Wealth allows you... You to do what you want with who you want, when you want, for as long as you want, with no one telling you to do anything else. And you're like, there you go. That is what it is. It's an allowance of freedom. But the frugal heart thing, the wanting to do something and the wanting to embrace the ordinary,

• 56:08Chris Williamson?

  those three go together for me. I think the wanting an easy life versus wanting a life of struggle actually sits outside of it. But this is something that people that are listening might have realized or noticed in themselves during lockdown. I know that I certainly have. Like, I've never paid such close attention or taken such joy from tiny little things. I do a morning walk every morning and I know the order in which the trees on the street that I walk down on my morning walk, I know the order in which they leafed. I know this one went first and oh, that one went about two days later. And this one's got a little bit of flower blossom on it and this one's got that. And like, I know the shape of them. I know the color of them. I know.

• 56:51Chris Williamson?

  And it sounds, it's like I've turned into some horticultural fanatic or something like that, which I haven't. But the point is that because the amount of novelty that was going on in my life got downregulated because there's so much less stuff that I can do because the pandemics brought that down, I'm now paying closer attention to things that were right under my nose the whole time and I'm now actually taking joy from them despite the fact that they haven't changed. Like my garden's been the same garden as it's been for five years, but I never actually watched the, some of the plants and the flowers in my garden bloom and will and then leaf and then do all these other bits and pieces. But I'm taking joy from that, you know?

• 57:33Chris Williamson?

  And it's like, there's definitely an amount of frugality that's occurred due to the increase or the reduction in novelty, I think that the pandemic's caused.

• 57:43Speaker 06

  Yes, man, I love your leaf example.

• 57:49Chris Williamson?

  Oh, you've got a horticulture in your stomach.

• 57:54Speaker 06

  I, well, there's, there is nothing. Actually, I caught myself one day staring at a single leaf on the ground for like 15 minutes. And it's amazing that these things that we, you know, normally will just walk by, like you said, if you attend to them, if I just place your attention on them, and you keep it there, they cease to be boring and they become like impossibly interesting and beautiful, right? Like these, these, any little mundane thing, especially biological, you know, like organisms, like, like a leaf, like, and yeah, I think that that is, that's, that is like the perfect example for developing fruit.

• 58:38Chris Williamson?

  Hey, I've been thinking, I've been reading your blog post a lot. I put it on my, oh, here's one for the people who listen to the most recent Life Hacks episode. It's a long blog post. I didn't want to read it on my laptop. I used the Send to Kindle Chrome extension to send it onto my Paperwhite and it was delivered with all of the formatting retained. I was able to edit the font size. Send to Kindle on Google Chrome Extension Store. Go and get it. It's free. And it will turn your e-reader into an article reader at the, literally the click of one button. And it keeps the audio, the author's name and as title. It's absolutely phenomenal. Final thing on the frugal heart before we move on. Another Morgan Housel-ism from when I spoke to him. I was talking about the fact

• 59:23Chris Williamson?

  that I feel like there's a genetic set point. It's obviously socialized, but it comes so early in life. I don't think that you can really class it as that, or you can class it less as that, should I say? You have a spending set point, a materialist set point, mostly that you've probably inherited from your family, your siblings, your parents. If your parents were very keeping up with the Jones Zizy, they were always buying a new car. If people were spending a lot of money on birthday presents and Christmas presents and the relationships were always shows of gifts and showering each other in this sort of thing, you will have grown up with that. And if you are unable to

• 1:00:05Chris Williamson?

  deprogram that desire, you'd better hope that you get a good performing job that pays a lot of money. Because if you don't, you're going to spend your entire life chasing more and more in an attempt to try and fulfill that materialist desire. Whereas the frugal heart side of this, the person who's just happy looking at a leaf, I know that's like a stupid extreme example, but the person who would be happy spending an afternoon with the person that they love, going for a beautiful walk and having a nice meal on the evening time, as opposed to it being some five star hotel trip away to the Seychelles with fresh fruit floating basket and fireworks and all this sort of stuff, you know. The difference between those two in terms of enjoyment is the

• 1:00:50Chris Williamson?

  same, but as you identified, the leveraging of the system in terms of how much they need to work to achieve the same level of happiness, because presuming that you're, the money that you earn is a function of how much you have to work, it's totally different. So yeah, man, frugal heart, I'm all over it.

• 1:01:10Speaker 06

  Yeah. And like you pointed to, the point isn't to, you know, make less and go join a commune or something. It's, the point is to liberate yourself from the unending need for more. So it's not about, you know, doing less. It is, it is about enjoying more.

• 1:01:28Chris Williamson?

  Got you. Okay. So final section, wanting to be extraordinary versus wanting to embrace the ordinary. We kind of already touched on it with the, with the leaf thing, right?

• 1:01:42Speaker 06

  Yeah, I love how you tied those three together. And I think, and I think they do. You know, there are some, some kind of, I think that you can really get at some, some core shifts by, you know, if you tug on one of these, you're gonna, you're gonna see a lot, a lot of, a lot of change, right, in maybe unexpected areas.

• 1:02:04Speaker 06

  But yeah, so, so the idea, you know, this is another one where it's a little bit paradoxical, right, because there's, there's, there's nothing that I can think of that's, that's more common in the West at least, than the desire to be extraordinary or to be special. And, and I think this kind of obsession gives us a, a odd relationship to other people, right? Because if the ideal is the extraordinary or, or the special, then, then who are these people around us who are not extraordinary or special? Like, what is their value? And then also, you know, what is your own value? So, until you achieve this extraordinariness, you are less than, which I think is, is unhelpful

• 1:02:50Speaker 06

  in, in a lot of ways. We also, we also, like, one of the other kind of boring things about the desire to be extraordinary is that, that, that we all basically want to be special in the same ways. Like, we want to be more famous, we want to be more rich, we want to be more powerful, right? There's very few of us who are like, "I'm going to be extraordinarily loving or kind or caring." You know, like, there's not a lot of that. I mean, there's a lot of people saying that, right? But, but they're saying it loudly and in a way that, that makes it look like maybe they want fame more than actual caring, right? So...

• 1:03:34Speaker 06

  And actually, one of the things that I anchored to on this one is it comes from Jack Kerouac, and I was read, this must have been 10 years ago now, this Brain Pickings posted a bunch of writing advice from Jack Kerouac, and it was just three words, "Respect your experience."

• 1:04:02Speaker 06

  And Emerson later put it this way, he said, "Trust thyself, every heart vibrates to that iron string." And so, the paradox here is that if we can drop this need to be special and extraordinary, we then free ourselves to be more creative, productive, happy, and authentic. So, because we don't have, our sense of what is ordinary, right, is our life as it is. And the need to be extraordinary then puts this layer of disrespect on our life as it is, right?

• 1:04:46Speaker 06

  So, we come from this anxious place of needing this very specific, very, like we talked about, boring vision of a world, of a new world for ourselves. But if we're able to take a step back, we can free ourselves from kind of that memetic, you know, like memetic desire of needing what our neighbors have to actually doing the things that are most energizing and exciting and meaningful for us. And this, you know, I return to that Emerson line, "My life is for itself and not for a spectacle." It's like, we're not here to create a life that somebody can go write a book about and

• 1:05:30Speaker 06

  make it a bestseller, right? That's not the point of living. I mean, you know, again, like, I'm not moralizing, maybe that's, but that sounds like an absolute nightmare to me. Like, the point is to craft a life that is lived beautifully and well, and, you know, for me, is generously and helpfully.

• 1:05:58Speaker 06

  Hopefully, just a good life, right? And you want that to be an internal experience. So, yeah, and I think, I think if you can release, even just trying to, you know, release this desire for specialness, it can be, it can be really liberating.

• 1:06:18Chris Williamson?

  That sounds, or that might be taken by some people as accepting a life of mediocrity.

• 1:06:23Speaker 06

  Yeah, and that's, so that's the, that's the big caveat on this one, is that where I was, when I was sending this around to people, you know, the, the article to, to get, that was a big place for pushback, is, you know, we don't want a mediocre, mediocre life, right? And so, the, the point isn't at all that we shouldn't strive, right? The first thing we talked about was, was struggle, and the point isn't at all to, to be small. The point is to be more yourself, and to, Kevin Kelly actually has this really great

• 1:07:04Speaker 06

  advice to, you know, find, you know, find the thing that only you can do, and do that. But you're never gonna do that if you're trying for some very, you know, if you're, if you're, if you're starting trying to be extraordinary, right? At least, I, I don't think so, I haven't seen it. The people who end up doing the most interesting, fascinating, unexpected things are those who, who, who find some interest that they have in their life, and then follow that, and follow that, and follow that, and, and amplify that. And, and that's where I think some of the most interesting art comes from, some of

• 1:07:49Speaker 06

  the most, like, touching, you know...

• 1:07:54Speaker 06

  Speeches or, or writing, right? Like, um, someone who, who, who sets out to write a book trying to communicate as authentically as possible their idea of, you know, uh, of something is, it's going to be much more pleasant to read and, and paradoxically probably have a higher chance of success because they can actually speak to, to someone than someone who starts out to write like a magnum opus. I'm gonna write my great work, right? And people, you can get away with that, like, if you're already super experienced in ridiculously skilled, or have some like genius intellect, right? But like, um, especially in, in starting, starting out, I think, you know, if you start

• 1:08:39Speaker 06

  out from a foundation of respect for your life, your worldviews, um, you're going to, you're going to create something much more stable than if you start from a place of, "Well, uh, my view doesn't matter until I achieve X," right? Like, um, "Or I get X followers," or, you know, um, so I think, and, and I think the shortcut there is to respect your own life, respect your own struggles, and respect doesn't mean give in to, right? Like, so, so, uh, if somebody's respecting your experience, i- i- if you're, you're struggling with overeating or, or laziness, whatever it is, um, it doesn't, it doesn't

• 1:09:24Speaker 06

  mean, um, it, it, it doesn't mean that you should just keep doing that, right? Like, obviously you don't, that's like, your deep desire is not to continue on that path. But to look at it, respect it, um, it actually reminds me that Carl Rogers, this psychologist, has this line, he says, "The, uh, the curious paradox is that when I accept myself as I am, then I can change." I think that's what this shift is about, right? If the extraordinary is what, who we are not, then embracing the ordinary and is, is, you know, embracing who we are now, even if we want to grow.

• 1:10:04Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:04Speaker 06

  So there's a long way of getting there, but I think that I.

• 1:10:07Chris Williamson?

  I love it. I really, I really like the idea of

• 1:10:12Chris Williamson?

  wanting an extraordinary life, being disrespectful to the, the person that you are. I think it's, I think it's very, very true as well, you know, any of the, the, the sort of type A people as well that are listening,

• 1:10:27Chris Williamson?

  you'll know what it's like. You can do the thing that you said that you were going to do and still feel dissatisfaction in having achieved it. Because that's only the thing that you did at your level of doing. Rather than it being, well, like that person's obviously doing it at that level. I know I did it my way or I, I did that workout. I ran the, the marathon in four hours and 10 minutes, but Elliot Kipchoge ran it in two hours. You know, so like, who, who the fuck am I? Like, it was all right, but you never actually allow yourself to pat yourself on the back for your own accomplishments. Because there's always this desire for more. It's the,

• 1:11:10Chris Williamson?

  it's the inner soul equivalent of a materialist wealth mindset. You know, it's like this sort of hedonic treadmill for self-worth almost.

• 1:11:25Speaker 06

  Hmm. And it's constraining, right? Like it, it narrows your vision.

• 1:11:31Speaker 06

  Which, you know, like in, in certain types of athletics can be really helpful. But in a more kind of like open world game, if you will, it is way less helpful. Because like we talked about earlier, you can get stuck very easily on the wrong hill. You can, you can get, you can, you can win the game and then realize you were playing the wrong game the whole time.

• 1:11:55Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, man. So we've gone through the four different layers. I want to revisit my favorite passage from the blog and then I'm going to get you to give everyone who's listening some tips and some advice on how to sustain change. We've redpilled them, but what are some of the next actions that they can take as they move forward? Also going to give you an opportunity to make any changes that you've changed, you've altered your mindset on in the last four years since then. But this is my favorite passage, and this was kind of the one, I think, that made me really fall in love with the article. So, "My biggest fear is to live a life I regret. It's easy to fall into the trap Proust is talking about and spend life blindly chasing something you never actually wanted. Blindly following

• 1:12:40Chris Williamson?

  your desires makes you a slave to your impulses, slave to the assumptions of those around you, the advertisements you're exposed to, and the confused chemical signals of your body. Our default is to spend our life as rats blindly chasing the next dopamine hit. This isn't a setting easily adjusted, but it's worth shifting our aims and becoming fully human. If we don't pause and ask ourselves what we want to want, we will spend our lives focused on those unhealthy aims defined for us by others and the worst parts of ourselves. We will pass these bad assumptions about life on to our children and loved ones. We will reinforce these boring desperate defaults in everyone we encounter. To achieve freedom,

• 1:13:25Chris Williamson?

  we must be able to think for ourselves. If we don't cut to the core and program our wants, our desires, then our best case scenario is to be the most successful, rich, or famous slave. If we never peer into our programming, then we may end up being the cleverest rat, but that's hardly worth celebrating. Asking yourself what you want to want can help you avoid wanting the wrong things." That's it, man. You nailed it with that. So good.

• 1:13:54Speaker 06

  Thank you, sir. Yeah, I think that summary did... Yeah, makes me want to ask the question.

• 1:14:05Chris Williamson?

  So good. Anyway, so we are moving on. First things first. What have you changed your mind about on this article since you did it? You may be nothing, but have you changed your mind on anything?

• 1:14:17Speaker 06

  So you gave me, yeah, I love this opportunity to get to revisit this. And there's a lot of little things I've changed as a writer, of course. But the only big shift that I would make, and this is purely, I think, a phase of life situation, is that I would focus more on shifting into things being nourishing or wholesome in the long run for life, rather than kind of emphasizing the struggle throughout. And so I think that would be, that would be like a big,

• 1:15:00Speaker 06

  there would be just a tonal shift. Because I think what comes off and what I think I, you know, and it depends how old you are, right? So like a 22-year-old is probably needs like the warrior mindset, right? Like you're fighting, you, it feels good to be pushing against something constantly, right? But then you get a little bit older, maybe you have kids, like things, things shift. And so I think that the tone, and this is why I think self-reliance is so important in asking questions like this, right? Like the whole point of this is to explore your desires. If you were to choose your desires, what would they be?

• 1:15:44Speaker 06

  And, and yeah, so for me now, the things that resonate more are pushing more towards nourishing, wholesome, kind of sustainable shifts. I'd also, I'd also add, I think, I think there's a lot of value to accepting.

• 1:16:05Speaker 06

  Current desires, like we just talked about in the, you know, the ordinary. And, and doing more subtle work in uncovering our desires. So, so we talked about the accepting quite a bit. It was, you know, the Carl Rogers line, the curious paradox is that when I accept myself as I am, then I can change. So, so although we're talking about shifting very deep parts of ourselves, we have to simultaneously acknowledge and accept those things. And then also, I think, I find shadow work really, really interesting. And that's basically, you know, it, it, for our purposes here, finding desires that aren't quite obvious.

• 1:16:46Speaker 06

  And so, so, uh, Robert Bly offers a really practical example of this in his book, A Little Book of the Human Shadow. He, he suggests that we think about someone that you really hate. You could do this right now, like, uh, think about someone you, you really dislike, who rubs you the wrong way, or who just drives you insane, right? And, and you, you probably think about this person, "I am not like that, and my whole purpose in existing is to be not like that." Right? So, um, and, and then, you know, take a step further, think about the traits that make you hate them the most, the ones that get under your skin the most. And if we're being honest, if we do this with a little bit of humility, um, we can

• 1:17:29Speaker 06

  probably find pieces in ourself, um, desires that we have that we really don't like, right? So we can find, the things that we hate most in others tends to be the, um, kind of, uh, unseen or rejected pieces of ourself. Um, and I think, so I think that's, that's really interesting practice. Another source for, for shadow, uh, shadow work, shadow hunting, uh, is Dave Chapman, who's the author of the site Meaningness, but he has a, he has another site called, uh, Buddhism for Vampires. Um, and so, so, uh, another suggestion for finding these kind of, uh, hidden desires.

• 1:18:15Speaker 06

  Is to pay attention to kind of weaker wants or desires that you would normally not act on at all, that kind of are just like a passing, you know, passing wind and grab hold of them. And, you know, he calls these velites. Emerson might call them a whim. And, you know, like, so, so if we're trying to discover what we really want out of life, or, you know, what, what do you, you know, what do you really want? What do you want to learn? You know, even if you're just looking to learn about yourself a bit more, you know, Emerson said about this kind of shadow hunting, that, you know, he says, he hopes that this is better

• 1:18:55Speaker 06

  than a whim at last, but we cannot spend the day in explanation. So I think our, our talkative minds will often reject our actual wants. And then because we've rejected our true, natural, and maybe more wholesome desires that just happen, we're repressing for, for one reason or another, maybe it's societal norms, or it's inconvenient, or whatever, those are then hidden and replaced by less nourishing, less wholesome desires. So I think, I think, you know, this isn't something we talked about a lot, but like actually finding

• 1:19:38Speaker 06

  your true desires, it would have been worth exploring.

• 1:19:44Chris Williamson?

  Well, let's do it. We've still got time, man. Before we move on to that, actually, I want to, I want to say about that, that the lowest, lower level of stimulus thing that I mentioned that allowed me to appreciate the trees on my street, or that

• 1:19:58Speaker 06

  Ah, yeah.

• 1:19:59Chris Williamson?

  made you, made you focus on your leaf for 15 minutes. I think that ties in, it's the, the ordinary versus extraordinary thing. And

• 1:20:12Chris Williamson?

  By thinking that life should be grander than it is, we almost feel a little bit embarrassed or shameful of some of the wants that we have.

• 1:20:27Chris Williamson?

  So for instance, I hid my intellectual curiosity for probably the best part of a decade, from when I got to uni and became a club promoter and was that big dick on campus, all this stuff, until pretty much until just after Love Island, when I got delivered that fatal dose of contrast between me and the guys who were the persona I was trying to play.

• 1:20:49Chris Williamson?

  But I was, I was like ashamed, yeah, kind of ashamed of it, just a little bit like I didn't think that that was the vision of what a young man was supposed to be. I was around a very alpha male type A mentality. And it just meant that I didn't allow myself to indulge in that. I didn't want to admit the fact that I watched, I had a desire to watch space documentaries on a night time. I was embarrassed about my empathy. I thought that it was a sign of weakness, the fact that I genuinely feel discomfort when I see someone else suffer and I can't get over that. I was like, oh, that's not what a courageous alpha male does. That's not what a man's supposed to do. They're supposed to be able to deal with things, you know?

• 1:21:35Chris Williamson?

  Like, so all of these different bits and pieces I had covered over with memetic or

• 1:21:46Chris Williamson?

  kind of unwanted wants. The want to be seen as a powerful man, the want to be seen as a capable businessman, the want, the want to be seen as someone who, a man who is attractive to women because of the stereotypical characteristics that he thinks women find attractive. You know, roll the clock forward as much as you want. And it's only upon doing sufficient introspective work to find out what my truth was, that I've

• 1:22:21Chris Williamson?

  Been able to embrace now that not only as tongue in cheek desires, but as proud parts of me, like the fact that I have crushing, crippling empathy is sometimes, sometimes inconvenient, but I'm proud of it, you know, like, why shouldn't I be proud about the fact that I desperately care? Or that sometimes when I see a dog that looks really happy, I want to cry. Like, why should I feel upset about that? Why should I feel embarrassed about that? Why should I feel embarrassed about the fact that I've got this intellectual curiosity?

• 1:22:59Chris Williamson?

  Because if I hadn't allowed that to re-manifest itself, I'd be two and a half million downloads less without a podcast or a project that I care about. But the fact that I did do that has permitted me to do this thing and meet all these cool people and connect with an audience that loves the project. And then find random strangers on the other side of the planet like yourself. Get a piece of work that I think is fantastic and then use my show as a delivery system to then try and distribute that understanding and learning to make thousands and thousands of other people's lives better.

• 1:23:38Chris Williamson?

  You know, like, if that's not an argument for trying to deprogram the wants that you haven't worked out if you wanted to want. Like, I don't know what it is.

• 1:23:50Speaker 06

  Yeah, that's, that's incredible transformation. What do you, um, what was the, the, in particular, what did those first steps look like? Um, were they big? Were they small? You know, like, was it, was it, you know, letting yourself put on that space document or like, what were some of the, do you remember some of those like early?

• 1:24:12Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, good, good question again with that. So I think, um,

• 1:24:19Chris Williamson?

  I think that starting to see, it was, it was a good time for it to happen because it was the advent of the Jordan Peterson era.

• 1:24:29Speaker 06

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:24:30Chris Williamson?

  It was a time when sort of 2017, just as he was coming to the forefront, just as Rogan was really, really starting to pick up speed. And you could learn from someone like Ben Shapiro, or Sam Harris, or Brett or Eric Weinstein, or John Peterson, whoever it might be, there was like tons of mindful content floating around. And you were just able to swim in it, man. So that was, that was a big part for me, like learning to tell the truth was the, the single biggest change that I made. And hopefully today, we have encouraged people that there is huge, huge value in understanding what their own truth is. So you'd mentioned, you'd mentioned something that you thought that we could revisit.

• 1:25:15Chris Williamson?

  And then I also want to, also want to look at some of the tactics that people can use to reinforce wanting the right things, or how we can make ourselves want the right things.

• 1:25:26Speaker 06

  So, so I was actually talking, the examples of the shadow work. So the, you know, recognizing that the people who you hate the most likely are useful mirrors to find desires in yourself that you've repressed.

• 1:25:47Speaker 06

  And the exercise of kind of paying attention as closely as you possibly can to whims, or kind of little quiet desires that you, you, you normally would just ignore and kind of look into and give those a chance. Those are the two kind of strategies that I would.

• 1:26:06Chris Williamson?

  I nearly forgot, I nearly forgot, man. I've got another one for you, real, real small one. Anyone who's thinking, oh, this all sounds well and good, Chris. Like, it's cool that you found a passion, but I don't know what mine is. Think back to what you did between the age of eight and 14 for fun. Think about some of the stuff that you did there. There's this example, the world's best. Color picker, it's a lady and she got asked on this interview, it's like, so she makes these amazing designs for different clothing companies or different interior design companies and stuff like that, selecting just the quite the right shade of of pastel pink to go with this shade of pastel blue and blah, blah, blah. And somebody asked her on an interview.

• 1:26:49Chris Williamson?

  So what are your qualifications? Why are you so good at this? And so why, you know, I've done a lot of continuous pressure to professional development and this, that and the other, but really it all stems from when I was nine and for Christmas, I got the biggest box of Crayola from my mom and dad that I could get and just ever since then, you know, I've just loved matching colors. I've loved doing that. And I think back to my childhood between the age of eight and 14, and what was I spending a lot of time doing? I'm an only child. So I was listening to audiobooks, like audio tapes, like His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman, like

• 1:27:27Chris Williamson?

  40 tapes, 40 double sided tapes, back to back across three tomes, like 60, 70 hours. And what is the 2020 audiobook if it's not a podcast? So that's a good, that's a good way, I think, to kind of look at some of the things that used to bring you joy. Especially if you've spent a long time, perhaps mapping over that with societal norms and path of least resistance and all that stuff. Think back to what you did as a kid. Think back to the stuff that you enjoyed.

• 1:28:00Speaker 06

  Yeah, that's, that's perfect, man. I, that's, that's an awesome example. That's super cool. I love thinking of you running around with like tapes in a backpack or whatever.

• 1:28:11Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, man, it was cool. It was really cool. Okay. So how do we make ourselves want the right things? What's some of the tactics? People can use to reinforce wanting the right things?

• 1:28:20Speaker 06

  So the article has a ton. I don't want to, you know.

• 1:28:24Speaker 06

  Use up our audio here to go through too many of the little ones, but I think the core ones are your community. So paying really, you know, do the people and communities you spend time in want to want the same things that you want to want? So, you know, and this is, you know, CrossFit is like obviously incredible place for someone who wants to desire to work out. You know, there's few better places to go if you want to, you know, really want to work out. I think of like worship communities for people who want to get, you know,

• 1:29:08Speaker 06

  grow spiritually in some way. Even, you know, so, and this is all, you know, various sizes and play different roles and affect different desires. So like I've been experimenting a lot with book clubs just as ways of, even with just me and one other person, where we're reading a book together and then talking about, you know, it's like picking someone who you want to want like, you know, and finding ways of just spending more time in their presence, right? Your marriage, right? Like your partner is obviously a huge, huge. I mean, I think Ryan Holiday said like, that's the best life hack ever. I think that's, that's

• 1:29:51Chris Williamson?

  Just getting a good partner.

• 1:29:53Speaker 06

  Yeah, like if you can get a great partner whose desires are maybe even a little bit ahead of yours on, you know, on certain spectrums of these, you know, desires that we were talking about, that that can do a lot of work for you. You know, and then the company that you work for, what's their culture like? What is, what kind of desires do they, do they add? So anytime there's people involved, I think that's like, that's probably the highest leverage area where we can, where we can start shifting our desires. I think regular reflection, especially journaling where there's a record, right? So you can see if you are desiring or failing to kind of push yourself in a certain direction, like you see that over time, right?

• 1:30:38Speaker 06

  And it's painfully obvious how little attention or how frequently you're struggling with a certain desire. And I think those reminders go a long way. Internal scorecards are popularized by Warren Buffett, who he basically talks about how he has an internal scorecard for investing in that internal versus external. So an external scorecard is, you know, what are the returns on the fund versus internal? Am I executing on my strategy in a way that I believe is good, right? And being able to separate out, you know, this is, you know, goes back to the fame

• 1:31:22Speaker 06

  versus doing thing, right? If you have an internal scorecard that is measuring what you're actually doing and taking action on, that's going to help a lot in pushing you through kind of these asymmetric activities where you have to do a ton of, a ton of hard work that may or not, may or may not pay off, especially in the short run. And if you're just using an external scorecard, like what's my follower count? How much money am I making? It's going to, it's going to de-energize you very quickly. So I think those three are pretty, pretty powerful, especially again, the communities. I think everything follows from that, honestly.

• 1:32:07Chris Williamson?

  Well, you're rejigging the memetic predisposition that we have to your advantage, right?

• 1:32:15Speaker 06

  Yes, yeah.

• 1:32:16Chris Williamson?

  It's such a, it's such a cliche. You are the average of the five people that you spend the most time with. But you've got to think now, like, there will be some people in lockdown, some people listening right now. Perhaps for whom I am one of the people that they've spent the most time with during lockdown. You know, like they've listened to this podcast more than they've seen the fifth other, the bottom fifth person in their life. Does that make sense? You know, like some guy who's working-

• 1:32:44Speaker 06

  Yeah, that's a huge gift of podcasts, right? They have total control. If someone, they're not finding what they need and they're like in the physical area around them. Podcast is such a low friction way of like spending time with different types of people.

• 1:33:01Chris Williamson?

  Feeling connected, you know?

• 1:33:02Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:33:03Chris Williamson?

  So I think you're totally right with that. Like getting yourself a squad of people who are like the person that you want to be like. And obviously what that, the implication of that is that you need to work out what you want to want. Or else you're just going to think, oh, well, that guy over there, he's got, he's the one with the Ferrari or he's the one, oh, hang on a second. I listened to that podcast with Kyle and Chris and they said, frugal heart. Let me, that means I probably need to go back, do a little bit more work. And then maybe you're fully actualized and you're like, actually, yeah, I do want a Ferrari because it's shit hot. Cool. If that's you speaking your truth forward. Um, yeah, I think that's great. The internal scorecard thing as well, man, like

• 1:33:47Chris Williamson?

  that is the marker of someone who is so resilient. Like everyone will have that friend who just seems not unflappable, but just like they're always on their own path, you know, like stuff will go right, stuff will go wrong, but they've just got this higher, higher purpose, this kind of road that they're walking. They don't really ever seem to get kind of flustered. If they do have setbacks, they overcome them. I've got a buddy, Sonny Webster, who's been on the show twice. A lot of people listening will know who he is. Ex Olympian, Olympic weightlifter. And man, that guy just keeps on coming up against big setbacks in one form or another.

• 1:34:29Chris Williamson?

  And he just steamrolls them. He absolutely flattens them, which is easy when you've got like-

• 1:34:37Chris Williamson?

  Like 28 inch legs, but he completely annihilates whatever happens to him. He's like, oh, okay, cool. That's a thing. It doesn't matter. I'm just doing my thing. I'm on my path, completing my journey. And he doesn't give a fuck, man. It's so inspiring. I love being around him. I adore being around him.

• 1:34:58Speaker 06

  That's awesome. I, I always, I always think of, of that as somebody is so interested in their own game, that they don't have time to be worried about their score on a game that they're not playing, right? Like, they're, they're so fascinated and, you know, into their own game. And I think that's, that's the goal.

• 1:35:17Chris Williamson?

  Bro, that is it. When you are so interested in your own game, you don't care about the score on a game you're not playing. Fuck. Yes. I love it. Um, look, man, any parting remarks, any parting thoughts, any, anything that you'd want to leave the listeners with? We've sort of thrown a lot at them. Obviously, the blog post will be linked below, so people can go and read it in full. But yeah, anything you want to leave them with?

• 1:35:42Speaker 06

  Yeah, I, I think, you know, I just hope you, you, you sincerely ask yourself, what do you want to want? Especially in hard times, especially when you're being forced to reconsider values anyway. It's a perfect opportunity to say, is that what I really wanted anyway? Is it possible that this is actually an opportunity to, to go after what I truly want? Um, and yeah, yeah. So I, you know, ask the question over and over and over and over again. Um, and, and I, I, I promise it, it, uh, it can be helpful.

• 1:36:22Chris Williamson?

  Man, how amazing. Look, where can people find you online? Are you, um, have you got any plans? 2020, you considering writing any more stuff as well?

• 1:36:33Speaker 06

  Yeah, I need to, I need to. It's been, uh, uh, uh, yeah, I'm on, I'm on Twitter, Kyle Eschen. But actually, I have, uh, I have a draft of something, um, that I've been, I've been noodling on. Maybe I'll, I'll have to run it by you.

• 1:36:50Chris Williamson?

  Oh dude, you gotta get it out there, man. If it's, if it's even a hundredth of what, what Do You Want To Want is, then, um, you gotta get it out there. Look, I'm really glad to everybody that's made it through this podcast. I know there's a lot to take in. I know there's a lot of kind of different concepts and it can sound a little bit sort of, I don't know, like erudite and esoteric sometimes where we're talking about these real fluffy concepts, but I wouldn't have gone out of my way to try and deliver this message if I didn't think it was something that really can move the needle in your life. Like this is, we are talking about the fundamental underpinnings of why you are here and then on top of that, what the implications are of that

• 1:37:36Chris Williamson?

  relate to how you're going to operate within the world and the things that you do very much so can constitute the legacy of what happens when you're gone, you know? So you should very, very seriously consider everything that we've gone through today. You should totally go and read What Do You Want To Want on Kyle's blog, which will be linked in the show notes below. And if you've got any questions, if you want some clarification about bits and pieces, or if you've just got some ideas, @ChrisWillX or @KyleEschen, which will also be linked in the show notes below, on Twitter, wherever it is that you follow us. Kyle, man, thank you so much. And thank you for your work as well. You know, this is a, this really is a

• 1:38:17Chris Williamson?

  fucking magnum opus of a blog post. So, um, you know, congratulations from someone who's five years late on saying it, but, uh, but really appreciates your work.

• 1:38:27Speaker 06

  Thanks so much, man. This has been awesome.

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