Naval Ravikant Clubhouse Chat [2021]: Part 1 – Truth, Knowledge & Wealth

But then the moment you hit puberty, you get this desire, and it's desire for the mating function. When you hit puberty, you're capable of replicating, so now you have desire for the opposite sex and for having children, and your genes spur you into action. Then, of course, the desire itself is a contract that you make with yourself to be unhappy until you get what you want. So now you're consumed by the desire to go get what you want. So go get it. Once you're an adolescent and up, you're fired up and ready to go. That's the point at which you can start compounding wealth, friendships, and societal status. You should go get all those things. Then, once you've gotten your fill, you can sit down and say, 'Well, actually, this isn't making me happier. I got what I wanted, but I'm not happy.' Then you can tackle the happiness problem. So I think there's a sequence to it. If you're very gifted, perhaps you can do both. It's difficult, but it's hard enough to make money. Making money is somewhat creative but also adversarial. Every simple way to make money has been arbitraged away. All these people running 'get wealthy' rooms on Clubhouse are just scammers. If they were rich, they wouldn't be selling you horses on how to get rich. That's a get-rich-quick scheme they're running, not one that will work for you. Nobody who's wealthy is going to give you actionable advice in a public forum on how to get wealthy. That's nonsense. They can give you vague, generic principles, but not actionable advice. So yeah, if it is your all-consuming desire and you can't sleep, can't think, can't do anything else but make money, you will make money. The universe is rigged that way. If you have one overwhelming desire, it will give you what you want, but it has to be your one overwhelming desire. The problem is that most of us are creatures of mimetic envy. We look around and want everything. You want her looks, his money, their friends, her attitude, his car, that person's family relationships. You want everything. Well, you can't have everything. You have to choose. So I do recommend going for wealth creation relatively early because it favors the young. When you're older, you'll have learned the systems and the principles. Aging naturally has a way of reminding you that you're running out of time, and that will force you to focus on your happiness because you'll realize, 'I'm making enough money, but I seem to be running out of time, and time is the one thing I can't get back.' So yes, both of these things can be figured out. The myth in our society? There are two myths. One of them didn't used to be a myth. We used to call it the American Dream. 'Hey, anyone can be wealthy.' I think that is still true. But the myth that is emerging now is that no, you're a victim of your circumstances and you can't make it, so don't even try. Or the equivalent myths like the get-rich-quick scheme myth. All these Clubhouse rooms or Twitter 'make money' people selling PDFs for $29.99, teaching you how to be rich — they're scammers. So that's a myth as well. But the bigger myth in our society is that you can't do anything about your happiness, that it's a set baseline point or determined entirely by your external circumstances. That's nonsense. Someone up here before, I think it was Leah, was talking about the hunt for a mate. It's fine, it's worthy. We all have to do it. But that man that she finds is not going to make her happy. Absolutely not. It's not another person's job to make you happy; it's your own job to make yourself happy. A happy relationship is a product of two happy people. If she meets someone who's happy but she's unhappy, that relationship is not going to be happy, or vice versa. The way to have a happy relationship is to find a happy person, and the way to find a happy person and hold onto them is to be a happy person. As Charlie Munger says, 'You want to find a worthy mate worthy of a worthy mate.' So happiness is something you have to figure out for yourself. The good news is it's completely doable. It's in your power. You just have to want it badly enough. But it's hard to want that and hard to want to make money at the same time. They run somewhat against each other. So I suggest you make money first, and once you're done with that, then you get focused on happiness.

Yeah. I don't have a prescription for other people. The problem is that you have to live up to your own moral code. Your life is just an internal single-player game. You're not competing against anybody else. You're competing against yourself. You set your own desires, your goals, your own perspective, your own morality, and you have to live up to it. So there's no standard meaning or purpose. If there was a single purpose for all of us, we'd all be robots fighting each other in conflict to hit that one purpose. There's not even a single purpose for you necessarily, other than the one you create. So you get to create your own meaning and purpose. You kind of crafted your own story here. Look at any situation. You could have two people walking down the street, in the exact same situation: the weather is the same, they're walking the same way, roughly the same health, height, attractiveness, bank account. It happens all the time with two friends who are peers, yet one is unhappy and the other is happy. Why? Just because the lens through which they've chosen to view the world. One has meaning, the other doesn't. Why? Because one has just chosen a meaning they can live up to, and they're moving along to that meaning. So it is a race, but you're just running against yourself. You pick the finish line, the goal, the meaning, the purpose. You can pick a meaning that's antithetical to happiness or one that aligns with it. There's a classic example. I was in Thailand once and I ran into this guy. He was absurdly happy, one of the happiest people I've ever met. Genuinely happy, not pleasure-filled happy, but calm, content, beautiful smile. Married with kids, just floating along. I was impressed and asked him, 'How come you seem so happy all the time?' He said, 'I used to work for Tony Robbins, setting up events. I sat in the front row, took notes, and listened to everything. Tony helped me realize how malleable my own life is. We grow up, at 10 years old your goals and personality are set, and you think that's who you are. Tony helped me realize that can be changed. You can revisit it.' He said, 'I realized that somebody out there in the world has to be the happiest person in the world. It's their job to be happy all the time, as an exemplar and role model. That's going to be me.' He took on that role. That's his meaning, purpose, and happiness. So they're not mutually exclusive. The idea that they are is a myth. I'll say something that is controversial and will annoy a lot of people. To me, the only true test of intelligence is if you get what you want out of life. If you're not getting what you want, how smart are you? A lot of people hate this because they think being smart means you can't be happy, that they run against each other. Not really. If you're really smart, you'll figure out how to be happy and get what you want. You have to be careful what you want. If you want six arms, you're not getting that. If you want to fly, you're not getting that. Part of intelligence is not just getting what you want but knowing what to want — what is rational and reasonable. I reject the idea that meaning and purpose run counter to happiness. You can absolutely align them, as many people do. Look at the Mother Teresas of the world. I don't mean to stumble on this, but they're absolutely compatible. This is the oldest wisdom. Go to the Bhagavad Gita. What does it say? 'You are entitled to your labor but not to the fruits of your labor.' That means you do your work but don't get attached to the outcome. The value is in the job you did, the beauty is in the work you put in. Whatever happens happens. The universe is a big, complicated place. All you know is you did your best job. That means you're impatient with your actions but patient with your results. There's a beautiful saying in Arabic: 'Inshallah' — God willing. Whether you're religious or not, it's a lot of just how the world works. Look at everything you didn't choose: where you were born, when you were born, your parents, your height, weight, genetics, environment, conditioning, actions. You chose almost nothing on this planet. So do your best work according to your own moral code, and what happens will happen. It's like a movie playing out. How much of it did you really pick? Don't get too stressed out or attached to the outcome. One helpful exercise: do this for yourself. On a lazy afternoon, journal or self-reflect. Think back to your life five years ago. Envision where you were, how you dressed, who your friends and lover were, what you were working on, your emotional state. Write the best advice you can to yourself from five years ago. Then do the same for 10, 15, 20 years ago. You will find that you are your own best therapist and adviser. You know yourself best. You'll see a consistent pattern in the advice. That will, in a weird way, answer the question you asked. But I don't want to do it for you because then it loses all meaning. True knowledge only comes from doing the work. If you can't embody it, it's not real.

First, thanks for recommending me to all your hot girlfriends. Unfortunately, my wife treats our relationship as a zero-sum game. Also, Nicole is a hot woman who's also a fan, so don't forget yourself. Anyway, on getting wealthy: I use the provocative title 'How to Get Rich' because it grabs attention, but we're really talking about wealthy. Wealthy is assets. The goal is to get out of the 9-to-5, which is modern slavery. Not the real horrific slavery, but a modern trimmed-down form of wage slavery. You don't choose when you wake up. You have to punch in, punch hours, as if input has anything to do with output. We live in an age of infinite leverage. With your mind, you can move mountains. Elon Musk doesn't have more hours in the week; he just spends them better, or has the knowledge to apply it. Omniscience implies omnipotence. If you had infinite knowledge, you wouldn't need to do anything to achieve results. Knowledge is literally power. The way to earn in the modern world is through knowledge and leverage, not through work. You want to be a knowledge athlete, not a physical athlete. To create wealth requires a few principles. I have a framework of three things: specific knowledge, accountability, and leverage. Specific knowledge is knowing something others don't. It can't be trained; it's built up through your passions. Follow your passion — if you're obsessive about something for genuine curiosity, you'll be better at it than anyone else. It will feel like play to you but work to others. Develop that. Second, accountability: taking risks, branding with your own name. Trumpled by people like Kanye West, Jay-Z, Elon Musk. Accountability has downsides — screw up in public and you're tagged forever. Use your name. Third, leverage. Leverage is the most important. There are three forms: labor, capital, and product leverage. Labor is people working for you, the oldest form. It's the shittiest because managing people takes too much effort. Capital leverage: using money, like making a good trade amplified by scale. The problem with labor and capital is they require permission. Product leverage is the most powerful. It comes from code, media, books, or products with no marginal cost of replication. Productize yourself: combine your specific knowledge with accountability and leverage into a business. Nobody can beat you at being you. It takes time, but once set up, it's a flood of money. Then you can figure out how to be happy.

Real happiness is unconditional. The moment you have a condition, you're saying you won't be happy until it's met. Someone truly free and happy is unconditional. But most of us aren't monks or sages. We're on Earth for a fight, to do something interesting. So it won't be unconditional for most of us. You're right, the real happiness is conditional because there's always something missing. As for owning a piece of a business: what I described about accountability, leverage, and specific knowledge eventually productizes into a business. Equity is the upside. A business has four sets of people with claims: customers, creditors, employees, and owners. Customers pay for product; creditors get fixed interest; employees get fixed employment; owners get no guarantee but all the upside. In Silicon Valley, equity is given to employees, creating a larger class of owners. The upside can be nonlinear — a $10 million business can become $10 billion. You must own a piece of a business for financial freedom. Even doctors or lawyers who get rich often own a private practice. Bankers at the top end own hedge funds. The hallmark of a business is it earns while you sleep. You don't have to wake up at a specific time or answer to anyone. You grind in your career until you hit escape velocity with a business. Once you're done, don't go back to wage slavery.

It's a little glib. Most coaching and mentorship is just procrastination. Everything interesting anyone accomplishes is done through willpower. At some point, they decide they have to do it and they do it. There are unlimited gurus, guides, training routines. If you're obsessing over nutrition books, if you just adopted the policies from any one, you'd be healthier. Reading more is a form of procrastination. You get what you want out of life if you want it badly enough. If it's your all-consuming desire, you will create the path. The right answer is not fooling yourself about what you want. I adopted an internal deal: I won't break my word to myself. If I make a promise, I keep it. Once broken, the system no longer works. If I want to drop a bad habit, like caffeine, I can't lie to myself. If I give my word, I have to follow through, otherwise I'll never trust myself again. That puts things into stark focus. Most of what we do when asking for help, going to seminars, watching videos, is procrastinating. We're not serious. When you're serious, you just do it. It's about figuring out what you are serious about. There's a common belief that you can only replace habits, not drop them. But there are moments when you see something you can't unsee, and you change instantly. Like a relationship where you see someone's true nature and they're gone. Or an addiction where you see the damage, like smoking causing lung cancer, and you drop it. Much of it is conflict avoidance, pretending to work on things we don't really want. I don't believe in struggling anymore. It's about being very clear: do I really want to drop this? If yes, give myself my word and never waver. If I do, I can't trust myself again. Focus on what you absolutely want and follow through.

I don't believe in New Year's, holidays, or resolutions.

Look, I'm not perfect. I struggle with my own things. This is aspirational. When you see me tweeting or writing about this, it's like: who are the best people to talk about heartbreak? The heartbroken. Who is good at making money? Those who grew up poor. People good at breaking habits are those who struggle with them. I have an obsessive personality; I fall into bad habits quickly and find it hard to break them. I don't fall for the New Year's resolution trap anymore. I've seen through that. But I've realized that the few times I was able to break a habit, it was because it was my overwhelming priority and because I saw something I could no longer unsee. Suffering is when you can no longer deny the reality of something. In a relationship, you overlook negative traits, and when it ends, you see it all at once. If you live your life with complete honesty, you become closer to peace, happiness, and effectiveness. Most problems come from not being honest with ourselves because we have an image we can't live up to, pretending to be who we're not. That's the modern disease.

There's a threshold you get past where you're not fearful anymore. I speak for myself. If you were born rich, maybe your numbers are different. There was a point where I could breathe a sigh of relief, not having to work a job I don't want. People say money can't buy happiness. My retort: it can, if you earned it. If you know what it's like to be poor and struggle, and you earn it, you have satisfaction without impostor syndrome. It gets you to a baseline where you don't worry. It's not gonna buy you genuine, actually happy. I know far more rich miserable people than normal middle-class ones. Below a certain poverty level, misery reintroduces itself. But there are things that matter more for happiness: community, friendships, values, self-esteem, peace, ambition, perspective, religion. We threw religion out the window with science and excesses, but we're poorer for it. We're creating new fashionable religions. There was a deep human part that spirituality fills. The most important questions are not about money or happiness, but 'What the hell am I doing here? Why am I here for?'

I don't want to quite say what my purpose is. My purpose is ludicrous, it's absurd, it's not worth talking about.

I don't schedule anything, but thank you. I literally don't.

Let us say amen. I actually have a question for DeAndre. Actually, I have two questions. DeAndre, is your father still alive?

You sound like you've been healed. But has your father been healed as a result of your tolerance, or at least your patience with him?

I'm happy for you, man.

Oh no, no, I don't mind the interruption. It was a beautiful story. I mean, if I can add to it just in a little bit at the edges, a couple of things about what you said. I've had my own experiences. I would say my father gave me the gift of not being around in my life, and that allowed me to become stronger and resilient and capable and to figure everything out for myself. So I'm grateful to him for that, but it took me a while to get to that perspective because the easy narrative would have been, 'Damn it, my dad wasn't around, so I got screwed over in so many ways.' But it made me the person that I am. And whatever your father's treatment of you might have been, it doesn't sound good at all, it made you into you. And you look great, right? You look like you turned out well. So I don't see how it could have been a different story. If your father had been super loving and great to you, you'd be kind of a wimp, right? So I don't know if it's so bad. It may help to have that story.

The first is exactly, you know, warriors get built in wartime, not peacetime. So you're a warrior, you had to go through your wars. I think the second part of it is that there are things that happen, and then there are stories that we tell ourselves as to what happened. And those stories are very powerful. If you can change the story of what happened to you, it's sometimes just as good as changing what happened to you. For example, forgiveness. You don't forgive because you're a good person. You don't forgive because you're doing the other person a favor. You forgive so you can finally have peace, so you can move on, so you can clear your own mind, so you can be fresh and powerful and strong going forward. The only person I'm hurting is myself by holding on.

You're holding this grudge which is like a hot poker in your brain every time you think about this. And you can't let it go prematurely. You can't fake it either. If you fake it and try to forgive, that splinter will always still be there in your mind. But you just have to get past it at some point. At some point, you just get exhausted withholding the grudge, and you realize actually the carrying of the grudge is doing damage to me, and it's not like I'm actually getting some form of revenge or satisfaction in the other person. And that's the point at which you're ready to let go of the grudge. So before, when I was talking about how you change when you see something properly, same way you forgive someone when you see the damage that is causing you. You reinterpret your story when you see that those stories are malleable. All of these come from one place. There's a common root to all of this, and the common root is just self-awareness. And self-awareness is a thing that can be cultivated. So when people say, 'How do I become happy?' it's actually just be more self-aware. 'How do I become more successful?' just be more self-aware, because then it'll tell you what your true desires actually are. Self-awareness is the core of self-improvement, and natural, gradual, inevitable self-improvement, not the kind of fake kind where it's like, 'Oh, I just need to be better because my friends are better.' And self-awareness is a thing that is in incredibly short supply today. Self-awareness requires first that you be incredibly honest. You never, ever, ever, ever lie to yourself, and you never lie to someone else.

I think clarity comes from... it's a combination of three things. It comes from honesty, a commitment to honesty, which I developed when I was very young because I grew up in the rough and tumble streets of Queens, and I used to hang out with some really rough characters. I used to hang out with some Russian mobsters when I was a kid. They were other kid mobsters, junior Russian mobsters, but they sort of had this weird code of ethics amongst them where they were brutally honest with each other all the time. If you told even the slightest white lie, they would beat the living daylights out of you or out of each other. But if you literally told them the truth, they would believe you even if their life was on the line. So it was just something that drilled honesty as a core virtue into me early on. And I've always loved science and physics, and those are also all about truth seeking. So truth was sort of always my number one value, to the point where I would rather be unpopular and disliked and be a loser in life and know what's real and what's true and speak the truth as opposed to the other way around. People don't always know the sound of truth, but they know the feel of truth. You know when someone's trying to snow you, you know when someone's bullshitting deep down. You're hardwired for it, I think people are hardwired for it. So just speaking the truth, having a deep, deep conviction for it, not just the simple one where it's like, 'Yeah, I'm not going to lie.' No, I mean deeply convicted and always telling the truth. That was a really big piece of it. Second is I had to figure everything out for myself. Part of it is because my dad wasn't around, part of it is just because I just don't believe anybody. Because if you're truth seeking, then you're also very skeptical because everyone's always trying to persuade you. The world is full of propaganda. Every major institution is spewing propaganda at you. Every book is spewing propaganda. Everyone's got a point of view they're trying to convince you. Almost nothing is clean. So you have to figure everything out for yourself from the ground up. I'm still not good at the advanced stuff. I'm not going to be good at calculus or advanced physics, or even like you could throw any advanced philosophy concept at me and I'll give you a blank look. But I just know the basics, and I know them rock solid. I would rather just read an arithmetic textbook 100 times until I understand it, then move to geometry. If there's even a single thing in the arithmetic textbook that I don't know cold, so no memorization, just understand the basics over and over until you have clarity. And then the third thing is self-awareness. And self-awareness for me is cultivated originally through solitude. Every exceptional person is built in solitude, because society is oversocialized. There's just too many voices in our head from TVs, from social media, from Clubhouse, from me talking to you. There's just too much noise. Even all the stuff that I'm saying to you is noise, because you're going to go back and you're going to be like, 'Man, that guy had 20 great ideas, how do I become like him?' And that's completely the wrong answer. You're never going to be me, but you can be an amazing version of you. You can be the best you that the world can possibly have ever seen. And the way to do that is to spend time by yourself. It's to really just embrace who you are 100%. And I don't mean this in some cheesy, 'Oh, you go girl, you're so powerful, blah blah blah.' I don't mean it that way. I mean it in the sense that you have to love yourself because you are correct. You are right. There is absolutely nothing wrong with you. There is not a hair on your head that is out of place. You are never going to be as beautiful as you are now. You have everything you need to succeed. It's just you need to fully accept yourself and you just need to go for whatever it is that you want. And you're not going to figure that out until you become comfortable spending time with just yourself. So whatever that takes, whether it's journaling, whether it's meditation, whether it's long walks, self-isolation. I don't think anyone is capable of greatness without solitude. And conversely, I would say with solitude, it's impossible for you to fail. But it's hard. Society now is rigged to give us all these escapes to run away into society.

I don't know about the word vulnerable. How about open? Language is difficult. I say one thing, there's a vision in my head. You hear the same word, you have a different idea in your head. So vulnerable is not a word that I love to use because I also grew up partially in Indian society. You're not even supposed to show your needs or your emotion.

I'm the same way. I don't expose my private life. I don't talk about like you're not going to catch me writing long bios about my childhood or anything like that. That's not what I mean by honesty. I think that part of honesty, I mean I'm honest with myself. Here's what I mean by honesty.

Let me just give one example while it's fresh in mind. Honesty is someone screws me over in a deal. I lose lots of money. I was screwed over. I am angry. I am livid. 'Man, how could this guy screw me over? I trusted him.' Honesty is sitting down and saying, 'Okay, maybe he didn't screw me over. Maybe I messed up. Maybe I should have shown up to that meeting when I said I was going to show up. Maybe I should have delivered what I said I was going to deliver. Maybe he took a look at the cards and decided I wasn't the right partner for him and he realized that there were other people out there who are better because I hadn't hustled hard enough. Maybe I'm getting worked up over nothing. Or maybe it's at least 60% my fault.' It's really easy to be honest about other people's flaws. It's incredibly difficult to be honest about your own. So this addresses the vulnerability point. It's not about being vulnerable to the outside world. The outside world doesn't need to know your internal business. It's about being vulnerable to yourself. It's about challenging your own ideas about yourself. It's about challenging the voice in your head that's always telling you exactly how the world works.

Look, I'm never going to say do this technique or don't do that technique because different things work for different people. If 12-step works for you, fantastic, do it. I've just never tried it. For example, there are people in my life who use therapists and they get huge value out of it. I use meditation. That's self-therapy. I just sit there and listen to myself. And who knows me better than me? And it's cheaper and it's free. I can do it every morning. So whichever technique works for you, do it. Just do something that helps raise your level of self-awareness. Some people need to have their words echoed back to them slightly reconfigured, so they get value out of talking to friends or a therapist or psychic hotlines. All a psychic hotline is, you pay 20 bucks an hour, 30 bucks an hour for some stranger to sit there and talk to you. Preferably a mother-like character who's going to kind of console you and has some sort of authority through the astrology or psychic powers, even though it's not real. It doesn't have to be real. Just someone's willing to talk to you and listen to you. Whichever method works is fine. These are all ways of exploring yourself. In that sense, I think they're all valid. Now they can become a game too. They can become traps. If the 12-step person is always going to 12 steps and then 24 steps and then 36 steps, at some point you got to get off that wagon. Again, I can't prescribe for you. I'll tell you what worked well for me. I find it's easier to just drop the past completely than it is to try and fix it. The past is like this giant messy hairball of narratives, and you can spend your entire life trying to untangle your past. In some ways, the more you dive into it, the more it kind of traps you in there. It can actually become weirdly comforting because that can become your purpose or meaning. You're kind of on that inner journey. If you enjoy that, then fine, do it. But if you're suffering through it and you're untangling it slowly, I hope that at some point you just get sick of it and drop the whole thing. It's sort of like if you're ever trying to go through old emails and there's just too many of them piled up, at some point you're just like, 'Okay, screw it. Select all, delete.' And if you can get to that point, I highly recommend it.

Shame is part of social conditioning, as is guilt. Guilt is society's voice speaking in your head, and shame is society warning you like, 'Hey, you should feel bad about this because if we catch you, we're going to make you feel even worse.' So it's social conditioning. Now, some social conditioning can be good. I don't know if any of you ever had the experience where you take your clothes off in public, like let's say you're in a situation where it's acceptable to do that, like you go to some hot springs or a bath where everyone's nude. It's an incredibly uncomfortable feeling to take your clothes off in public if you've never done it. Your hands will resist you. You're conditioned like an animal. It's like a dog who's worn a collar too long being told to take his collar off. It's hard to do. So society conditions you like an animal, and it uses guilt and shame as these drivers to remind you of what to do and what not to do. Is this always terrible? No. There's some good advice that comes with it. For example, it might be designed from a time when there was no contraception. It was to keep women from getting pregnant through an early encounter with some guy that they barely knew, and then next thing you know their life is over because they're having someone's kid who they barely know. Or it could have been to avoid spreading or getting some kind of disease, or breaking a law and ending up in jail, or killing somebody. So social conditioning is not always bad. You need it to function. But a lot of it is obsolete. The problem is our parents' generation is not the generation that we live in. So we have to figure it out for ourselves. And that's the beauty of life. We're not just here to repeat what our parents told us. But they give us a good default operating system. Now you have a Persian Jewish operating system, a cultural operating system installed in you. And maybe that doesn't apply to the world that you're living in. But I don't know. The problem is the word shame is so broad, it can be applied in many different contexts. But overall, I would say this comes back to self-awareness. If you were sitting there journaling or meditating and realizing every time shame emotion came up, and you unpacked it and you understood why you were having it, and you could kind of say, 'Oh, well that's why I'm feeling ashamed. Does that really apply anymore or does it not apply anymore?' Instead, when you have these emotions, instead of getting caught up in them and swept away with them and identifying with them, if you were to kind of analyze them a little dispassionately, and that's one thing therapy is good for, someone else is analyzing that emotion for you, or meditation where you're just watching it play out, or journaling where you're writing about it and it's cathartic, then you can sort of decide which of these you want to keep and which of these you don't. Because when you have kids, you'll be doing it to your kids too. You'll tell your kids, 'Hey, put your underwear on.' Why? My kid is always asking why anything I tell him to do, he needs an explanation, which is good. So I think we should all have explanations for why we feel ashamed or why we feel guilty. But it doesn't mean that it's always wrong to feel shame or guilt. These can be very practical. It's just some of these may be obsolete.

I don't prescribe anything. I advocate nothing. I recommend nothing. I tell you what worked for me. I reject community. I reject groups. I reject consensus. I reject others. I love others. I take care of them. I embrace them. I help them. But it's because I myself am strong and individual and whole. And I am my own responsibility. Everything I feel, everything I think, everything that happens to me, I take agency for. I take responsibility for. So this is essentially I reject everything from the group, because the group is always there to convince you of what's right for the group, not what's right for the individual.

No, no, no, I don't disagree. I know you do. And I'm being radical here. I'm actually being extreme. I'm overstating my position. I'm actually a lot more middle of the road. But I'm overstating my position because the group is always ready to jump on you and turn you into one of the group, always. And it's very difficult in society to stand alone.

That latter statement strikes me as too extreme. There are no generalizable truths across humans? I think that there are definitely things that are more likely to work, less likely to work. Obviously each human's life is unique and everything is contextual, but at the same time, reality is a thing. Gravity is a thing. Objects held up on the earth fall down at 9.8 meters per second squared. Same way, laughter is good medicine. Sunlight releases dopamine or serotonin when on the skin. So there are generalizable truths that do apply. But the set of things that are generally true is actually fairly narrow. It's limited probably to hard sciences and maybe to some epistemology, the theory of knowledge, maybe some philosophy. And after that, you're on pretty thin ice. Certainly when it comes down to questions of how should you live your life, there are some truths, but again it depends what you want. To me, I don't like to talk philosophy. A lot of people talk philosophy and they say, 'Oh, you're a philosopher.' I almost consider that an insult. I think it's much more practical. It's very utilitarian. If you have a point of view on something that will get you what you want out of life, then it is useful. Let me give you an example. People talk a lot about relationships. It's probably one of the most common topics. Everybody loves to talk about relationships all the time, and usually they're talking about romantic relationships. So one truth that I heard in relationships that over time I realized this is a deep truth, again doesn't 100% always apply, but it does apply most of the time to most people, and it's utilitarian because it helps you get what you want. And that truth was: when you first enter into a relationship, you should be selfish. What does that mean? I don't mean being inordinately selfish. I don't mean being incredibly selfish. I just mean being your normal selfish self. We're all selfish. All of us. You have to be, otherwise you wouldn't survive.

I'm not trying to insult anybody, so we don't need to make people feel better either. I think most people understand when I say you're selfish, I'm speaking a truth. If you think I'm lying, then sure. But I think deep down we do things for ourselves. All of us are trying at every good moment in time to live up to our own self-image and to make ourselves happier, etc. Getting back to my relationship point: when you first get into a relationship, when you're first in that kind of honeymoon period, the first 6 months, the first 12 months, you're on your best behavior trying to make the other person happy, and they're on their best behavior trying to make you happy. The guy is opening doors and buying dinners and cleaning up after himself and putting the toilet seat down. The woman is being very demure and charming and fun and always dressing well and doing her makeup and trying to be responsive and laugh even when his jokes aren't funny, and have sex even when she doesn't want to. All those things. You're doing all these things to make the other person happy. And then eventually it wears off. You just can't keep it up. You can't live a lie for your entire life. So eventually it starts wearing off, and then we get into discussions of like, 'You've changed. How come it's not working? It's not like it used to be. Why do we fight so much now?' One of the truths that I realized is that when you're in a relationship, you actually want to be... this is why I say I use words like selfish to be provocative so it sticks in your head. It may offend people just slightly, but that's how you get them to remember it. This is a little secret.

Yeah, people feel good and more in just making the point. So anyway, my point is that if you behaved like your normal everyday selfish self at the beginning of a relationship, then you wouldn't have false starts in relationships. You wouldn't waste two years at a time figuring out that it's not going to work. You'd figure it out in the first 30 days. And then when you do find the right person, the right person by definition will make you happy by just being themselves, and you will make them happy by just being yourself. And you can sustain that for a lot longer, and it's a much easier, smoother relationship. So that is an example of a truth. It's not generalizable in the sense of E=mc², it's not that solid, but it's generalizable in the sense that it does apply to most relationships. It is an insight, and it can improve the quality of your relationships. So it's sort of a practical philosophy about relationships.

You want me to go off? Of course. Of course. This is a performative. We're doing a performative. This isn't just for you and I. This is we're all out loud here to figure things out. One of the things that I love about life is that I am a weird character. I am a lonely character. I have very extreme points of view that are way out in left field, and that allows me to be exceptional. I don't want a world full of clones like me running around. It'd be pretty boring.

Well, look, the DNA, the combinatorics of human DNA are staggering. If you take the genetic structure of any human being, you scramble it up and you keep rolling those dice over and over and over, and you do it trillions and trillions of times, you're never going to find any two human beings who are vaguely similar. I'll bet in your entire life you've never met two different unrelated human beings where you're like, 'Yeah, this one's a substitute for that one.' They're nothing alike. Humans are so individualistic. We are so different and so unique from each other that that inner world that you have of your internal mind and your mindset, and that outer expression you have of your capabilities, is so unbelievably unique to you that all I'm arguing is that there is tremendous benefit in embracing your uniqueness to the core, to the max, way more than society wants you to, way more than society makes you feel comfortable doing.

You're definitely the trickster, the villain.