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The most heroic thing you can do is 📍 not hate yourself.
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Sometimes people who try to do good things, they have like this shadow, they feel that they're not good enough or they feel that they're insecure in some way, and there's just some amount of self-loathing.
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Until you integrate your shadow into yourself, you will look upon the things that happened to you and call them fate.
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The reason you want to be better, is the reason why you're not.
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What is this trying to improve?
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The reason that you're trying to do that is that you don't understand that you're fine, but you're fine right now.
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And if you haven't laughed in a while, that's a sign something's not right.
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And anybody who cannot stand being made fun of, they're insecure in some way.
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One of my mantras is I like to look for things to root for as opposed to against.
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If you think someone isn't creative, look at their excuses.
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I want people to question defaults and more importantly, give each other space to like screw around and try something different.
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Jim O'Shaughnessy: Hi, I'm Jim O'Shaughnessy and welcome to Infinite Loops.
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Sometimes we get caught up in what feel like infinite loops when trying to figure things out.
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Markets go up and down, research is presented and then refuted, and we find ourselves right back where we started.
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The goal of this podcast is to learn how we can reset our thinking on issues that hopefully leaves us with a better understanding as to why we think the way we think and how we might be able to change that to avoid going in infinite loops of thought.
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We hope to offer our listeners a fresh perspective on a variety of issues and look at them through a multifaceted lens — including history, philosophy, art, science, linguistics, and yes, also through quantitative analysis.
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And through these discussions help you not only become a better investor, but also become a more nuanced thinker.
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With each episode we hope to bring you along with us as we learn together.
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Thanks for joining us, now please enjoy this episode of Infinite Loops.
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Jim O’Shaughnessy: Well, hello everyone.
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It's Jim O'Shaughnessy with take two of welcoming you to Infinite Loops.
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My longtime viewers and listeners know that sometimes being an old, I forget to hit record and Visa my guest, who I'm going to introduce you to in a minute, was already giving this incredible answer to a question, but now he's had the practice round, maybe it'll even get better.
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That's the way I think about it.
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My guest today is Visa Veerasamy.
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I got that pretty close.
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I was absolutely drawn to you via Twitter.
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And you do such a great job with threads.
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The stuff you put up like your memex, everything is connected.
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I could be on your feed forever.
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And so after looking into you and reading your books, I thought people really need to know you and that's why I wanted you to come on as a guest.
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So first off, we're going to talk about your first book, which you titled A Friendly Ambitious Nerd, which I really liked because of the way you played with words that don't normally go together.
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Friendly, I myself have tried to do that most of my adult life.
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Your point is that being friendly, you cultivate an abundance mindset in yourself, which I have found to be absolutely true.
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I have no problem going up to total strangers, starting a conversation with them.
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My wife, a little more introverted than I am and she's like, "No, don't do that."
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There was a guy when I was in Miami, this is a long time ago, he was smoking a vape and I'd never seen one.
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And of course, he fit the doorman role.
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He was heavily tattooed, biker vibes and everything with the beard and balled.
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And I start, "I got to go ask him."
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And she's like, "No, don't do that."
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Turns out to be the nicest guy in the world.
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Ended up talking to him for 45 minutes, and like, "Why are you doing that?"
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He's like, "My old lady, man.
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She said if I didn't quit smoking, I was out."
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I said, "So you found a way in."
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So it's wonderful what you can find.
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Ambitious, I love that too because most people think ambitious, they think I'm ambitious and I'm going to conquer.
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And really what you're using it as a term for is, it helps you create an abundance mindset, which I think.... We'll get into it.
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I think we're actually hopefully at a transitionary point in our human species where we might be able to move towards more abundance mindsets.
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And then nerd, for the second time.
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When I was growing up, I'm 62 so I'm tail end of the baby boom, nerd was not necessarily a positive thing to be called.
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But when I read your definition, which was basically, if you are deeply driven by curiosity, you are by definition a nerd.
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So Visa, welcome to the Nerd Zone.
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Visakan Veerasamy: Thank you for having me.
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Jim O’Shaughnessy: Let's jump right in and talk about your first book.
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What drove you to write it, why the title?
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I'm fascinated by all of this.
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Visakan Veerasamy: Thank you so much for having me.
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So I've always loved writing, reading, knowledge, books.
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So even before the internet, I always spent all my time in libraries.
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My mom would have to drag me out.
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And when I discovered the internet, I was drawn to it immediately because I thought, wow, this is a super library and I can participate directly, I can publish my own thoughts.
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And so I was always blogging, posting in forums, just spending as much time as I could online. And people liked it.
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So people would say things like, "Hey, we love your comments. We love your blog posts.
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Are you going to write a book someday?
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We would love to read your book."
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And I was ecstatic because I do want to write a book.
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But I remember being very torn up about, well, whatever is your first book is going to define you in some way.
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It's going to be the thing that people introduce you as.
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Here is so and so, he's the author of this book.
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And so I had played music had in a band when I was a teenager, I had worked in software marketing, I was interested in all kinds of things, but I didn't really want my debut offering to be A Guide To Marketing or A Guide To Living With ADHD.
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I even wrote a draft of a novel, which is about a bunch of teenage musicians in a music scene, very autobiographical.
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But none of those I felt was compelling as a debut offering.
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And so what I did was I would ask people who said that they wanted to read my book, "You tell me that you like my writing.
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When you introduce me to your friends, how do you introduce me?
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Or when you share my work, how do you describe it?"
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This is my marketing brain at play.
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And they would say, "Oh, Visa's always so encouraging.
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He's always talking about the power of friendship, and he's always encouraging people to be more prolific and do more stuff.
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And he's always so curious and nerdy."
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And so I just made a list of all the things that people would say about me that I liked, and then I assembled them into a bunch of buckets.
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And then I just moved stuff around and I'm like, "There's all this stuff about being a good friend, there's all this stuff about being more ambitious, and there's all this stuff about being curious."
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And so I just move stuff around and I figured I would love to be introduced to people as a friendly, ambitious nerd.
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And I felt like it's also an ideal to live up to.
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I think there's a soft version of the idea, which is like, oh, you're just friendly.
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Oh, you're just ambitious. Oh, you're just curious.
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Which is fine, which is nice.
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And I don't know if I did justice to this in the first edition of the book, but it's definitely going to be a bigger part of the second edition, which is that there's a strong version of it or a hardcore version of it.
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When I say friendly, I don't just mean pleasant to be around socially, but really actively working to organize events, build community, host dinner parties, being a super connector.
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And when I say ambitious, I don't necessarily mean prestige seeking, wanting a lot of money and power and influence, but more of wanting to express your taste and your values at the highest possible level, whatever that means for you.
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Just really expanding and being sensitive.
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And when I talk about nerds, I talk about being driven by your curiosity, driven by your taste.
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And I really like my definition because I feel like you can even say the more of a person's behavior is directed by their curiosity, the bigger of a nerd they are.
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So you can be a casual, weekend nerd, which is fine, or some people pack up their lives to study butterflies in the Amazon rainforest. That's a huge nerd.
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And I like how that introduces way...
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So the thing I really enjoy about having written my book is that I started out just trying to write about myself and share ideas that people had already liked, but once I pieced it together, I started to see that it actually functions as a lens or a framework to examine the world with.
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And I found, to my surprise slash...
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So Aristotle had this whole model of Ethos, Logos and Pathos, and I'm like wait, that logo, it fits in the same tripartite model.
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Just being warm and human in one way, being very rational and curious and tinkering in another way, and being a man of action in another. So it's the same thing.
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So it's like, wow, I'm so happy that there's this timeless quality to the thing that I had just cobbled together.
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And my current preoccupation is I have been wanting to investigate who have been the friendly, ambitious nerds throughout history.
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And I've been doing my reading, I found when Einstein was doing his stuff, he would hang out at Max Planck's house.
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So Max Planck and his wife, they would host these dinner parties, and Einstein and all these other physicists, they would show up, they would play music and they would have that whole scene going.
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And these scene managers and connectors, they're underappreciated in creating...
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I don't know if I would say creating, but catalyzing the scenes where great value happens, and just learning and delight.
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So I feel like the book, I wrote it, but it's almost like I was lucky to be in the right place at the right time to connect some dots and it feels like it's something bigger than me.
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I've shared it online, it's been a couple of years now, and I keep encountering people who really resonate with the idea.
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And so I almost feel like I'm the custodian of the idea.
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And because it's natural language, it's not like I made up a word, I'm using existing words in a certain way, people like to contribute their suggestions and their perspectives, which I find very enjoyable because, you get it.
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Jim O’Shaughnessy: And there's so much in your reply that I noticed too, you use philosophy a lot.
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I was a fan of philosophy, read most of the major philosophers.
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I like the way that you use it because you use it as a way to illustrate the point you're trying to make.
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So you're not in quotes, an Aristotle nerd, but you know about the ancient Greek idea of Arete and Aristotle's multipart model, which made me think of Walt Whitman, “I Contain Multitudes”. And we all do, I think.
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And the thing that I liked about how that led into your second book, which was Introspect, where you had a line which really grabbed me which was, the most heroic thing you can do is not hate yourself. Elaborate, please.
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Visakan Veerasamy: Thank you for asking.
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Where do I start with this?
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So it's funny because with Introspect, I did not expect the book to swell into the massive project that it became.
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I thought it would be fairly small.
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Again, it's the same bottom up thing where I would have lots of conversations with people in my DMs, for example, and they would ask me for simple life advice and stuff.
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And I just have a lot of practice.
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When I was a teenager, I used to read a lot of advice columns and magazines and stuff, so it's not that I am exceptionally wise or anything, I just happen to be a switchboard for a lot of wisdom from elsewhere.
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But routinely I would get people telling me, oh, we chatted six months ago and that chat changed my life a little bit and I've been doing better.
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And I would receive dozens of people saying things like that.
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And so I found myself thinking, "Wow, if I can have this effect on dozens of people, wouldn't it be nice if I put together something more coherent and shared it with even more people, then I could help maybe thousands of people."
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But it turns out that writing a book is much harder than having a conversation.
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But anyway, so your question was about the most heroic thing is to not hate yourself.
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I've always been fascinated by success stories and biographies and just the stories of people, and people who've accomplished great things and people who have struggled and so on.
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And a recurring motif I've found is that sometimes people who try to do good things, they have this shadow, and again, the language is tricky, but there's a part of them that resents some part of themselves.
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They feel that they're not good enough, they're insecure in some way and there's just some amount of self-loathing.
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It's a common feature in a lot of hyper accomplished individuals.
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And I don't want to say that it's a horrible thing, but it's a thing that's...
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And I'm sure any parent surely recognizes this, anybody who runs a company will surely recognizes this.
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Whatever our own internal anxieties and worries and struggles, will end up coming out in ways that we can't anticipate and it will end up shaping the culture.
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If it's an organization, it ends up shaping the organization's culture.
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If it's your family, it ends up shaping your family's dynamics.
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And that sometimes or often ends up having pretty bad consequences, and the person can't really see it, it's in their blind spot.
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And again, I won't claim to be wise, I'm still figuring out my own life.
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And I think I got part of this idea from Kenny Warner, who's a jazz pianist, and he has this wonderful masterclass on YouTube where he's just lecturing to a bunch of jazz musician students.
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And he was saying things like, the most beautiful sounds that you can make are when you accept what is happening perfectly in the moment, and you has no self-judgment and you play a note.
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So he does this thing where he puts his entire hand on the piano so it plays all the discordant, jangly sounds, and he presses it all at once and he goes, "How beautiful that sounds."
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And then he starts playing something that glows with it and makes it work.
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And I found that to be so just mind blowing in some ways, heart expanding.
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And multiple musicians and artists have said things like that, when you've made a mistake, it's the flinching around the mistake that designates it as a mistake and the audience feels that it's a mistake.
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Whereas if you just play a note and it's not the note you wanted, you can flow into the next note in a way that makes it still work.
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And if you flow smoothly enough, it's like a spicy note.
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It doesn't seem like a mistake.
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So it's your own flinching and aversion that designates a mistake as a mistake.
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So Victor Wooten says, you can erase the mistake by making music with it.
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Which is very profound when you witness it and you feel it, you feel that acceptance of the mistake.
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And I think this really generalizes beyond music to all human relations.
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If you're feeling awkward and you just, "Hey, I'm feeling awkward, I'm feeling nervous."
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If you just tell the truth and you're accepting of that feeling, everyone can relax.
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Whereas if you're tense but you don't want to admit that you're tense, then everyone around you gets doubly tense.
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And so when you lay out all of those things around the table and you look at them, you're like, huh.
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The problem is that when there is someone attempting to do heroic action, which is noble, I would say, and something worth encouraging.
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It's the ways in which the hero is self unaccepting or self-loathing.
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When there is damage, that's where the damage happens.
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And so I do think that the most heroic thing you can do is, so I say not hate yourself because it sounds a bit spicy, but it's really just really accepting who you are and accepting where you are.
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And so another thing that Kenny Werner says is that when people go to see beautiful musicians and artists and dancers performing, half of it is, oh, we want to see someone who's very technically competent and skilled at their craft, but at least the other half, maybe more, is you want to see someone who's in the zone and they're so accepting of whatever is happening and they're letting it happen.
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And there's something about that self-acceptance that's almost divine, almost godly and it's acceptance, and we all want a taste of that.
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Because so many of us are going about our day-to-day lives feeling like, oh, I'm not good enough, I'm not smart enough, I'm not working hard enough.
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And you get tense and then you get closed up and it's just not great.
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Whereas when you're relaxed and loose, people like to hang out and it's just great vibes.
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Jim O’Shaughnessy: So we could spend the entire rest of the podcast just talking about what you just said. I have many thoughts.
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When you were talking a bit about the music and relaxing, I'm a huge music fan and I have music on all day long.
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And typically it's Baroque and Bach when I'm working, and then it is the gambit, classic rock, EDM, literally everything.
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And I completely share your idea that there is a magic in music.
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And it made me think of the poem by TS Elliot, ‘Portrait Of A Lady’, where they're talking about going to hear the latest poll, transmit the preludes, that's Chopin, through his hair and fingertips.
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So intimate is Chopin that he should not be questioned or rubbed, and I can't remember the exact line, and questioned in the concert room.
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And I always loved that line because it spoke to me, as you just said, with the music and the idea of just letting yourself experience it.
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And the second thing that you inspired is this notion of...
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Kapil Gupta, I've read all of his books, and he's got an interesting thing in there where he says he's working with a client and the client is saying, "I am so angry."
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And he says, "Why are you angry?"
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And the client says, "Well, somebody told me I was dumb." And he goes, "Huh, okay.
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And that makes you angry?" "Yes, I'm furious."
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And he goes, "Well, I think you're an ugly horse."
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And the client is taken aback and looks at him and says, "What?"
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And he goes, "I think you're an ugly horse."
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And the client says, "whatever dude, that makes no sense to me."
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And then he goes, "There's the lesson."
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If you get insulted by something someone else says about you, there is at least a small part of you that agrees with what they're saying.
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It's virtually impossible to be insulted, if not a single fiber of your being, if somebody calls me an asshole or whatever, and if I don't think anywhere in my being that that is a case, you're unaffected.
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And finally, Tony DeMello.
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I'm a huge fan of Tony DeMello.
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And he says that paraphrasing, he says, "If you want to know what your own shortcomings are, look at what irritates you in others.
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And I love that because I've always had this idea that, we're not great, but we're not bad at assessing another human.
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We suck at self-assessment. All of us. Myself included.
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I'm not trying to say I am the only exception. I'm not.
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I'm running human OS just like everyone else.
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And so that really resonates with me in terms of the, you got to try...
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It's a very Daoist concept.
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And Jung, he says, the shadow, that's the part of us that all of us have too, good observation.
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Jung is always like, "Until you integrate your shadow into yourself, you will look upon the things that happened to you and call them fate."
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And what Jung was trying to get across was, we're all writing our own script here, and you've got to accept that you have, he called it the shadow, you call it a Minotaur.
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There's a lot of different histories, a Gollum, all of these things.
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And one of the things that you say that syncs up really well with a former guest and somebody who I've devoured his entire catalog, Will Storr, wrote in a book called Scientific Storytelling.
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And Will says, listen, we're all confabulating, unreliable narrators, forever writing our own story.
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And what he points out is, of course we want to be the hero of our own story, unless we have a real problem mentally, we want to do that.
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And so when I was reading your stuff, of course I'm a huge Joseph Campbell nerd, but you talk about The Hero's Journey, and enter the labyrinth that's going down to the side that you might not like.
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And I think of the Campbell line, the treasure you seek is in the cave you fear to enter and then you basically call it confronting the Minotaur.
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And I'm going to let you talk about that.
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But spoiler alert, the Minotaur, which scares us so deeply, it turns out if you really, really look, what you find is a child. Talk about that.
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Visakan Veerasamy: Man, I had such an emotional experience writing that part of the book, and so I actually got a tattoo of a classic labyrinth on my- Jim O’Shaughnessy: I noticed, I love it. Visakan Veerasamy: ...
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after I published the book and I remember I would struggle to write the book.
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So the first book I wrote fairly easily, I was just going off the cuff.
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But the second book, because it's so intimate and talking about going into one's emotional depths, I would get tired just thinking about the book sometimes.
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Sometimes I would wake up in the morning, I'd have my coffee and sit down, ready to write, and I would write a couple of lines, and then I would feel like, "Oh my God, I got to take a nap. I can't work."
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And then I would go out and lie on the sofa and take a nap, and I would have these vivid dreams.
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And only in retrospect after publishing the book did I realize, I must have been processing my own childhood feelings and all kinds of stuff.
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So it's just in so many stories, and even in modern media.
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So in Encanto, there's this thing about we don't talk about Bruno, which is one character in the family who's the dark horse who's cast out of the family.
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And even in Thor Ragnarok, Hela, the sister, she was the dark horse of the family.
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Even in Frozen, Elsa locks herself up.
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There's this recurring thing in families and in individuals where there's some part of the self or some part of the family that's considered shameful or has done something wrong and grotesque and must be locked away or not spoken of and put away.
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And even in the original story of the Minotaur, there's the child of forbidden love between the king's wife and it's this cursed and all kinds of tragic things.
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And I have these pictures of one, it's a picture of a drawing of the Minotaur on this ancient vase.
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And you can see the mother nursing the Minotaur child, and the mother looks so angry and resentful towards the child.
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And so often we look at the Minotaur as an image and we think, oh, what a monster, how scary, how inhuman and evil.
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But in that image, you see a child and it's not receiving love from the mother.
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And there's another drawing by someone, I don't even know who the person is but I linked them in the book.
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They redrew that exact drawing, but the Minotaur's mother is loving and nourishing and cuddling the cute baby Minotaur.
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And I just really got the sense of, we can choose to walk into the labyrinth and face the Minotaur.
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And in the classic telling of the story, the hero kills the Minotaur, and in my retelling it's like, you don't necessarily have to murder you.
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So like Abraham Lincoln said, do I not destroy my enemies when I make them my friends.
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So you destroy the cruelty and the neediness and the fear associated with the Minotaur.
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But it's us, it's our repressed child self, it's that which we think is shameful and bad and wrong.
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And also, I want to say, the Minotaur is in the labyrinth for a good reason.
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The original act of repression, and now I'm reminded even in Black Panther, Killmonger is the Bruno slash...
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The father says, he was the truth I chose to omit, again the dark horse of the family.
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When you try to protect the whole by ousting the scapegoat or the black sheep, it's understandable why that decision might be made in the moment, but there's a debt to it and it will come back to collect.
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So it makes sense for people in their everyday lives to put away their traumas and their fears and their anxieties in a box in the basement in lock and key, like I don't want to face that, I got bills to pay, I got work to do.
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And that's very reasonable.
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And usually in a person's present state, if you just try and confront that stuff on an average day, it's going to overwhelm you.
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It's like, oh my God, I'm just trying to do my to-do list at work and suddenly I'm reminded of a fight I had with my dad when I was 12 and now I'm a mess and I can't work.
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So it's almost like you have to schedule the surgery, you have to set aside time to process those feelings and thoughts about even things like teenage dreams that were given up that you haven't thought about in years, that if you don't address it, like Jung said, it will direct your life and you'll call it fit because it's just background, just this shadow function effect.
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And another way I like to think about all of this is, the conscious self who is going about the day is the monarch of the self or the CEO of the self, the boss.
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And what happens when the boss is a shitty manager of the team in the team?
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In this analogy, the team is your subconscious selves, your drives, your desires, fears, whatever.
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If you're not a good manager, people won't tell you the truth as much.
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And so they'll wait until the manager is not around and then they'll do whatever they have to do.
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And so if you're not taking time for leisure, for example, a lot of people have reported doing...
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It's a phrase that started in China.
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It's called revenge bedtime procrastination.
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And a lot of people do this where throughout the workday or whatever, they're busy, busy, busy, and then they feel like at night when they're tired, they have to steal time and recreation and leisure.
28:41
When the boss is not fully there, then they have to steal that.
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Visakan Veerasamy: Is not fully there, then they have to steal that recreation.
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And it's not fulfilling, it's not pleasurable, it's slightly pleasurable, but it's tragic.
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On a day-to-day basis, it doesn't seem like a big deal, but when you look back on your life over a decade and you realize, oh, I spent my entire twenties never allowing myself to have fun.
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But then when you examine closely, it's not like you are productive 24/7, no, you're productive for a while.
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And then there's all this sneaking around stuff, and it happens really below the level of consciousness.
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So to be confronted with it, it can be unpleasant.
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And sometimes in relationships, a lot of fights between husband and wife.
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It's like one partner observing what the other partner does in that shadow state.
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And that other person gets resentful and angry because they might not even realize that they're doing it.
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And so they might feel like, no, I don't have a spending problem, I don't have a drinking problem. Like, screw you.
29:41
So that's very tricky and it takes a lot of grace and sensitivity to be like, I'm going to allow space for these feelings that I don't even know about. Jim O’Shaughnessy: Yeah. Yeah.
29:55
I love that last bit because I agree and it's something...
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We're going to talk about journaling later because I'm a massive fan of journaling. Visakan Veerasamy: Nice.
30:09
Jim O’Shaughnessy: I've been doing it since I was 18, and if I could show you around here, I'm surrounded by just journals of mine. Visakan Veerasamy: Wow.
30:15
Jim O’Shaughnessy: What's great about it is that I was writing notes to myself without realizing I was doing that.
30:16
And then when you have enough of a body of work, in my case was, I don't know, I started going back and reading journals I'd written when I was 18, when maybe I was 28, so maybe 10 years.
30:38
And wow, all of that stuff emerges and you mentioned a lot of Disney, Pixar movies there.
30:48
We're going to get to your favorite movies in a bit, but I also of course think of Beauty and the Beast, where the beast, of course, is this marvelous human being who was cursed.
31:00
And so I'm involved with the company's Stability AI, which is an OpenAI company.
31:07
And one of the things that we're going to do is hopefully collect all of the world's stories from every culture and then set the AI loose on them because we think that there are certainly themes and threads that we humans can see, but it's very difficult for us to look into latent spaces.
31:30
And we think that there might be a tremendous amount of information in the overlaps, in the latent spaces that we're not aware of.
31:38
And so it'll be a bit of a discovery because I think, you call it an inner tyrant.
31:46
And there's different names for it.
31:46
I'm a big fan of the fictional character known as Jed McKenna, who is in quotes, a spirituality writer.
31:52
He's not a spirituality writer, but what he is he's seeking enlightenment or what he calls human adulthood.
32:08
And one of his motifs is what you call the inner tyrant, he calls the little bastard within.
32:17
And what he means by that is all of these shadows.
32:17
And Jed says, you know what?
32:26
When you start to realize that the inner bastard is in there saying, let me out of this cage, he goes, that's why you're reading this book.
32:34
You're reading this book because your inner bastard came along and said, listen man, you're fucked up.
32:40
You got to integrate these personalities and it's not easy work and it's not necessarily pleasant work, but it's so liberating when and if you get into that vibe. Right? Visakan Veerasamy: Yeah.
33:00
Jim O’Shaughnessy: And which leads me to a question though.
33:02
It's I loved reading this book, but one of the first things I thought was how high on the Maslow's hierarchy of needs do you have to be before you can even start this?
33:13
Do you have advice for people who are worried about losing their job or with more basic concerns?
33:19
You're familiar with the hierarchy of course.
33:26
Visakan Veerasamy: Yeah, I'm thinking of it.
33:29
Jim O’Shaughnessy: Food, shelter, love, et cetera.
33:29
And then he gets all the way to the top and he calls it act actualization.
33:33
There's a bunch of different names, but I always try to think, okay, so what about a person who, for whatever reason, is maybe not up there? How do they do it?
33:44
Visakan Veerasamy: So again, I'm not an expert or any of that things, but I'm skeptical about the very linear nature of the hierarchy.
33:57
Jim O’Shaughnessy: I love that you say that because I agree.
34:02
Visakan Veerasamy: Right? Yeah.
34:03
Jim O’Shaughnessy: But it is such a culturally well socialized idea that if you want to cut to the chase, you referred to it.
34:07
But I love the fact that you're like, yeah, that's a bit linear.
34:16
Visakan Veerasamy: That's my instinct. Jim O’Shaughnessy: Yeah. But continue.
34:19
Visakan Veerasamy: Yeah, So there's a quote from Jeannette Winterson where she said something, she had a hard life, she was adopted and struggled with her adoptive mom and all those things.
34:27
And she said something like, some people describe poetry as though it's some airy fairy luxury thing for the bourgeois, I don't know what class high upper classes to debate about.
34:40
But for her, she felt that poetry was tough.
34:44
It was for people who needed meaning and people who are struggling with their identity and their sense of self and these were working class people.
34:51
And similarly in India for example, there's even poor people will go to watch movies, and a bit of it is escapism, I'm sure.
35:05
But I do think that it's a universal human thing to need some amount of, I don't know if I want to call it self-actualization, but to need meaning in their lives.
35:20
So I care about Singapore history for example.
35:20
And in the earliest days when it was just migrants from abroad, who people who left China left India and they were leaving poverty and starvation and political issues, terrible conditions.
35:34
So they came here to make a living, but they would have drama troops and there were many drama troops and way more than I expected. And why?
35:43
So I'm off the view that art poetry, yeah, some of it might be kind of frivolous, but I think when it's good, it really gives you meaning on the inside of your life that I can talk about this for hours.
35:59
And Ethan Hawke has a great thing where he says that the average person doesn't really care about what is meaning and beauty and whatever, but then your dad dies or you break up with someone and someone betrays you and you're thinking, wow, I feel terrible.
36:21
And has anyone ever felt this horrible before?
36:21
Or maybe you fall in love and something's beautiful and your heart is spewing out of your body and you're like, has anyone ever felt this amazing before? What's going on? I don't feel normal.
36:33
And in those moments you realize artists are there for you.
36:38
They have made the movies and the books and the music.
36:38
Again, you might not need it day-to-day, but at weddings when people cry, it's usually when the music starts playing.
36:44
And when there is calamity right after tragedies, people sing to mourn.
36:49
And so I'm very passionate about...
36:58
One of my favorite essays, it's not really an essay, it's a speech by Karl Paulnack of the Boston Conservatory to the freshman who are going to learn music at that place.
37:03
He was saying, what we do here we are like a spiritual chiropractor.
37:10
He said, if you were an emergency room surgeon, or if someone comes in at 3:00 AM in the morning and their body is broken, your job is to put them back together again.
37:23
And similarly, you might not feel it, but as a musician, someone's going to come into your concert hall who is weary and despondent.
37:30
And the story that he said, he said his most important concert that he ever gave was not at Carnegie Hall or any major thing, he once performed for World War II veterans at some place, and he was performing a piece that was written by a vet about someone who had lost his buddy in a firefight or something.
37:56
And he didn't even know this, I think about the song.
37:56
He was just performing it, and there was a vet who was just weeping openly.
38:00
And later on he discovered that vet also lost a compatriot in war.
38:08
And how astounding it is that something like music can really...
38:08
And so in his speech, he quotes the ancient Greeks and how they said, oh, physics is about the relationships of the outer world and music is the relationships of the inner thing.
38:20
Now I'm talking about music, but I think even in talking about spiritual wellness, and again, I don't mean spiritual in this very metaphysical sense.
38:32
I mean, meaning and identity, who you are, what your life is about.
38:32
Even when people are struggling to put food on the table, I believe they still have dreams, they still have concerns. And so it's difficult.
38:45
So it's harder, you don't have spare time to do yoga and you might not have time for all of that, and that's difficult.
38:51
I haven't personally suffered deprivation to the point where I know how terrible things could be.
38:58
But at my worst when I was a military conscript and extremely broke, I wanted to dream because especially when your circumstances are bleak, this quote about man is between ape and God, or we are in the gutter and dreaming of the stars, it's something about that, yeah, I guess I'm a full stack muscles hierarchy kind of thinker.
39:21
I feel that everyone needs at least a bit of everything.
39:29
If you impoverish someone and you take away their meaning and their sense of belonging in community and how broad you want to think about it, then it's very difficult. So that's where I am at.
39:42
Jim O’Shaughnessy: So again, we just sync up on so much.
39:46
It's really funny because I have loved music since I was a kid.
39:53
I was the youngest, the martini baby, thanks mom and dad for having those martinis.
39:53
There's seven years between me and my next sibling, and most of my siblings were women.
39:59
So I came into the world bused around by four wonderful women.
40:06
That's why I know all the lyrics to the Supreme Song songs because they had music on all the time.
40:13
But I also loved poetry from a young age.
40:13
My dad was a big poetry nut, and I was transfixed when he would recite poems.
40:20
So I decided, okay, I'm going to show him, I'm going to go memorize a hundred poems, which I did.
40:28
And it comes after because they mash up together and they synthesize, which creates new knowledge at a level that neither one of them alone might have.
40:47
But I also was thinking as I was listening to you, I'm a big fan of the book Shantaram. Have you read Shantaram? Visakan Veerasamy: Yeah.
40:55
Jim O’Shaughnessy: Right.
40:56
So Apple TV did a reasonably good series based on Shantaram and I won't go into the plot lines and everything, but there is a gangster who our protagonist ends up working for.
41:13
In the beginning he doesn't really realize he's working for him, but the protagonist is this wonderfully erudite and well-read person.
41:18
And one of the things that he continually remarks to the protagonist is all of life's solutions can be found in Shakespeare. And I love Shakespeare.
41:35
I've read all of his plays, I've read all the sonnets, and he's an amazing dude.
41:42
But I love the way you put it together.
41:42
And they jumbled together because you did the Oscar Wilde quote there.
41:48
Some of all of us are in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars, right?
41:54
And that notion is very appealing to me because everyone can dream and everyone deserves to dream, everyone should be able to dream.
42:05
And again, as I listen to you, I think of Will Storr again, who wrote a great book called The Status Game.
42:13
It's about prestige seeking and all that.
42:13
And one of the things that comes through really clearly in Will's book, but also comes through very clearly in history, is if you really want to destroy a human being totally and utterly destroy them, humiliate them, and give them no avenue to come back.
42:35
Which I mean, so Sun Tzu who wrote The Art of War, he knew that.
42:43
And one of his great lines was, you've got to build your opponents a golden bridge with which they can retreat across.
42:50
And so this stuff is if you study history and you study thinkers, this goes all the way back to Lao Tzu, to Sun Tzu, it's everywhere.
43:07
It's in Emerson, which was made me think of him, "The man is a God in ruins," that's his quote.
43:07
And so if you really just take the time, and we're going to get into libraries in a minute here, but you can do it and you don't even need to physically go to a library anymore.
43:24
The amount of free things available to us all on the internet is just an unbelievable miracle.
43:30
And if you want to be cynical, you can say yeah, and that's why people watch 20 hours of cat videos.
43:41
But you don't have to, nobody's forcing you to do that.
43:48
But another thing you get in to which I wanted to move to next, which is that many of us have this and it references back to your tyrant, internal tyrant, this authoritarian choke hold on that presumably we think ought we have on ourselves.
44:15
I wonder whether that is ourselves or is that instilled in us when society is trying to make us fit into that round or square hole?
44:25
They want to cut off our edges.
44:25
You see it, it's one of the reasons I'm so interested in childhood education.
44:33
We're doing it all wrong, in my opinion.
44:39
Learning should be fun, learning should be play.
44:39
I'm a huge fan of Africa, and I've been several times, and when you watch animals in the wild, especially the lions, what they do most of the time is play or sleep, that's what they do.
44:52
And so the idea that we can't go huh, look we might learn something from this and Pink Floyd's The Wall, which is very anti conformity enforcing, but you get to something that I believe deeply.
45:14
And that is you get to we are essentially emotionally driven creatures.
45:20
I call us domesticated primates.
45:20
And human OS, we're all running human OS, all of us.
45:28
There are no exceptions unless there's aliens here that I don't know about.
45:33
And I believe that if you're a fan of Lord of the Rings, the one emotion that binds them all is fear.
45:42
We are a fear driven species, and we are especially afraid of novel fears.
45:55
And one of the things that I think about when I think about this is...
46:06
I mean when you accept that, when you accept that statement that we are fear-based creatures, all of the rest of it starts making sense.
46:13
I don't want to fuck up.
46:13
I don't want to appear like I'm an idiot.
46:18
I don't want to appear ill informed.
46:18
And so in my writing, I refer to manufactured Jim.
46:28
Manufactured Jim is the Jim that prepares the face to meet the faces that I meet.
46:36
And so the destruction of manufactured Jim became my primary focus for a long time.
46:46
How did you get beyond that?
46:46
Visakan Veerasamy: And I think one of my things that I came to is that it's so tricky because the moment you think you're certainly beyond it, maybe not in the start, but it's a trap.
46:56
It's a trap when you think you're done right- Jim O’Shaughnessy: You're never done, it's never done.
47:03
Visakan Veerasamy: So I have a tweet that's like the first step to not being an unintegrated wannabe is to accept that that's what you are, and see the humor and grace and humility in that.
47:14
So when you accept that, ah, I'm just some guy, I'm trying my best, but it's not great, but it's fine.
47:19
And Alan Watts had this great phrase that initially I thought was crazy, I thought it was depressing and terrible.
47:33
He said, "The reason you want to be better is the reason why you're not."
47:33
And he was laughing about it and he was cheerful.
47:39
And I was like, that's so bleak.
47:39
You're telling me that I want to improve, but I can't improve because I want to improve, that's so cruel.
47:43
But now I'm starting to see the humor in it.
47:48
The humor is, and it just goes back to what we were saying earlier about the most heroic thing you can do is not hit yourself.
47:52
Because when you desire to improve yourself from an authoritarian, you better be better or else kind of perspective, then you have designated yourself as a mistake.
48:02
Now this ties back to the music thing.
48:02
When you've designated yourself as some kind of mistake that needs to be corrected, you're also going to trigger an internal resentment against yourself.
48:10
And so there's this increasing tension and you're just fighting yourself all the time.
48:14
And you can't fight yourself into peace, you have to put the gun down.
48:20
So I mean, your question was how did I get to where I am?
48:20
Man, I've struggled and I have been updating my own internal narratives about what my life has been.
48:31
I would say there were stories from when I was a teenager, when I bungled some friendships and I was just clueless, said whatever I thought and got into trouble for that, made all kinds of wrong assumptions.
48:41
And by the time I was like 21, 22, I was beating myself up a lot inside I'm like, oh, I made all these mistakes, I'm so incompetent, I'm so terrible, I need to fix myself.
48:52
And that was when I was listening to Alan Watts and I was like, wait, he's telling me that all these things that I'm doing, which are not working, it's not working because I'm trying to do the...
48:59
It's this paradox kind of thing.
49:05
And I lost it for a while.
49:05
I remember being very depressed when I was about 25-ish, which was I would say my second or third dark night of the soul.
49:10
And it was the worst 'cause I was an adult.
49:15
I had bills to pay so I would be depressed and I had to go to work the next day.
49:20
But yeah, and again, I think really my childhood love for books and music really saved me.
49:25
I think that was the beacon in the light throughout that was art still exists, literature still exists, music still exists, it has always existed.
49:35
There has always been this nurturing space of...
49:35
And even those creators, they weren't perfect, they were also human beings, but they tried to embody some kind of loving...
49:42
So I agree completely that fear is the main thing and the antidote is love, basically.
49:47
There are two light and dark forces throughout mankind, all history.
49:52
And fear is always more, it's violent, it's fast, it's decisive, it's aggressive, you can win by playing dirty.
50:00
Whereas love is always more subtle, it's slow, it's just people having conversations with their friends.
50:10
Whenever I watch a video that comes across my feet that's like, oh, someone's attacking someone else in a diner. And it's horrible.
50:15
Oh my god, what's going on?
50:15
The world's going to hell.
50:20
But every day, billions of people sit down for dinner and nothing happens, we just don't see videos of that. So that's the conflict.
50:23
But anyway, for me, I guess I got married very young.
50:32
I was 22 and I wanted to be a good husband to my wife, that's a big part of it.
50:39
And I regretted the mistakes that I made when I was younger and I wanted to do better.
50:39
And just in times of reflection, I guess whenever I was on the train on the way to work every morning I'd be like, what's this for?
50:50
It can't just be, I'm paying the bills for 30 years and then I'm old, I have to find some peace in myself.
50:55
And there's a great David Foster Wallace speech, this is water that he's talking about.
51:03
And I remember listening to that while I was on the train.
51:07
It was a crowded train and he's talking about somebody going to the supermarket after work and they're struggling and the wheels going off and everything looks like death.
51:11
And I'm like, oh man, that is the struggle.
51:15
And I was thinking about when I was younger, I've seen all these older men who are bitter and they're drinking and they're complaining about the government and they're complaining about society.
51:27
And I'm like, I never want to end up that.
51:27
That seems worse than death in a way.
51:32
It seems just bleak and sad.
51:32
And it occurred to me while I was struggling with going to work, and I loved my job, I have a great boss, you've met Danish, she's amazing.
51:44
So I had great colleagues, great work environment, and yet I felt this sadness and despondent in me that, what is my life?
51:51
So I just resolved, if I can survive this ordeal of living, if I can make it through with my musician slash artist literature, heart intact and stay, keep love afloat in this great sea of darkness, very dramatic, then I would have lived a good life. I really felt that.
52:16
I was very dramatic and I still can still get very extreme about these things, but it just became clearer and clearer to me that is the central...
52:31
Again, we see it in movies as good versus evil, dark side, light side, Aragon's people, Frodo versus Mordor. And it's all the same.
52:37
It's dramatized mirrors of what our internal conflicts are, inside each of us, there are two wolves.
52:48
There's like, are you going to still try and keep love alive when you can...
52:54
If you live with anger and rough and all of those emotions, there is a seduction to it.
53:02
Things become easier in a way, if you never expect anything, you're never wrong.
53:09
Or if you expect the worst from people, there's a certainty to the dark side.
53:16
And yeah, I guess at some point that just became the dominant thing on my mind and I was determined to be on the side of light.
53:24
Jim O’Shaughnessy: Which is great.
53:27
And I think it's really helpful for people to hear that.
53:27
Because you talk a lot about scenes and we're going to get to that in a minute.
53:35
I mean, I joked on Twitter before we started recording, I said, you- Visakan Veerasamy: You can talk well deep.
53:43
Jim O’Shaughnessy: What the chances are that we're going to be talking tomorrow at this time?
53:47
Because you hit so many themes that I care very deeply about.
53:53
And it's difficult if you don't want to be an authoritarian.
53:53
If there is one characteristic that really defines me as I am fiercely anti-authoritarian, and to the point where I will do the opposite if somebody tries to tell me what to do, fuck you, I'm going to go and absolutely do that.
54:16
And so I think that that helped me in understanding that you can't change another human, I don't think so. Visakan Veerasamy: Yeah.
54:27
Jim O’Shaughnessy: I think you can point the way, you can be an example, you can do all those things, but that person has to want to change.
54:35
And by the way, back to Alan Watts, his whole thing, I love him and I've watched many of his speeches and things and the quote you used is one of my favorites, actually.
54:50
And it's kind of like, what is this trying to improve?
54:50
The reason that you're trying to do that is that you don't understand that you're fine, but you're fine right now.
55:03
And Jed McKenna again, he's like, what we all are is this little unique bit of spiritual DNA, but what then he goes on to say, what we really are is the flaw in the prism that expands from us.
55:23
And so that acknowledges everyone's unique, absolutely.
55:23
But there's a lot of ways that unique people, ideas, et cetera, can work together instead of opposing.
55:30
I've found that one of the worst things in people that I've encountered, I've employed a lot of people, I've worked with a lot of people, but if you are a fundamentally dark, pessimistic person, the chances that you're going to have a good life are virtually null.
55:53
Now I always say virtually because hey, there's a chance, it's a low one though.
55:59
And I also came, and I probably shouldn't take credit for this, maybe it's just in my nature, but one of your cures is also one of my cures, and that is lighten up.
56:15
I love how you talk about humor, levity, frivolity, being the cure.
56:26
And I so passionately believe that.
56:26
So tell me how you came to that, because it's such great advice.
56:34
Visakan Veerasamy: And every authoritarian hates comedians.
56:38
Even all the way back to jesters and kings and stuff.
56:38
So I have quote John Cleese in that, where he talks about how you can be serious, you can discuss serious matters, but you can discuss serious matters but you don't have to be solemn. Right?
56:50
You don't have this grave sense of importance.
56:53
And again, a lot of tyrants, I love the idea that tyrants are like drama queens.
57:00
There's this great, I don't know the full context of it, but there's like this movie, I think, called Springtime for Hitler. Jim O’Shaughnessy: Yes. No. That's The Producers. It's The Producers. Visakan Veerasamy: Oh.
57:12
The movie's called The Producers and in that movie, they produce a show called Springtime for Hitler.
57:16
Jim O’Shaughnessy: Right. Exactly.
57:17
Visakan Veerasamy: And they present Hitler as this theatrical, crazy, and I just enjoy that idea that tyranny is always a kind of production.
57:25
This was played out beautifully in Andor, the latest Star Wars TV show that everyone says is great and I agree.
57:31
They say there's this idealistic character who writes a manifesto and he says things like tyranny takes effort.
57:36
Freedom is the natural expression of humankind but tyranny requires surveillance and vigilance and enforcers and you need all this effort to preserve this static order, this kind of static self-image, this static configuration of society versus natural. Babies laugh.
57:56
One of the first things, every child is laughing all the time.
58:00
And because they don't take themselves so seriously, they don't think anything so seriously.
58:03
If you haven't laughed in awhile, that's a sign something's not right.
58:07
I love how the rubber duck has become a protest symbol in many different parts of the world.
58:16
Again, so you just put authoritarian leader and then you put a rubber duck next to him and instantly it looks silly and it takes the piss. Right?
58:22
It says we don't respect your authority in that sense.
58:29
A good king, so I have this mental model thing about what a good king is like, and you take someone like Aragorn or who's the other guy in ...
58:37
I mean any good king understands that people need to laugh and people need to breathe and have fun.
58:48
And anybody who cannot stand being made fun of, they're insecure in some way.
58:48
Maybe it's a tragic thing.
58:54
Maybe they're trying to do good but then you laugh at them and it hurts them in some way.
58:58
That can be a kind of tragedy.
58:58
But at the extreme end, humor is like the canary in a coal mine.
58:58
When your laughter has died, you know something's really wrong.
59:07
Whatever you're struggling with, if you can still laugh, you're still doing okay.
59:13
Everything else in your life might be going to shit.
59:18
But if you can still laugh, you can breathe.
59:18
We used the phrase oh, he cracked me up. Right?
59:26
What is being cracked up?
59:26
The edifice that we've manufactured that, like you said, we manufacture this very careful, rigid thing that doesn't deviate from the script and then someone says something and we laugh and we're like oh, okay. You got me. Fine.
59:38
Now we can talk like real people and that's such a beautiful and simple idea.
59:42
Jim O’Shaughnessy: And a wonderful one as well.
59:48
I'm a huge fan of comedy.
59:48
Mark Twain said against the assault of laughter, nothing can stand.
59:57
And basically, what he was getting at was this ...
59:57
I did a salon for Interintellect. Visakan Veerasamy: Nice.
1:00:07
Jim O’Shaughnessy: Anna is a good friend of mine and she's actually on my advisory board here at OSV. Visakan Veerasamy: Nice.
1:00:14
Jim O’Shaughnessy: The idea of the Russian fool which is an archetype in Russian history.
1:00:16
The holy fool, they leave alone.
1:00:16
It's a bit like the court jester. Right?
1:00:26
Because the holy fool can be a truth teller. Visakan Veerasamy: Yes.
1:00:32
Jim O’Shaughnessy: They get him killed. Right?
1:00:33
It's like he can call the emperor naked.
1:00:33
And so, the importance of comedy, to me, is it's sacrosanct.
1:00:42
It's right up there with music and poetry and literature because it also underlines the fact that tyrants are children.
1:00:50
They're literally stunted humans and they want to impose their will on everyone else.
1:01:01
What does a child want to do?
1:01:01
What is a toddler, the terrible twos, what do they want to do?
1:01:06
They want to do what they want to fucking do, mom and dad, and they're going to act out unless I get my way. Right? Visakan Veerasamy: Yes.
1:01:17
Jim O’Shaughnessy: So tyrants are children and if you can understand that and introduce humor into it ...
1:01:20
But you also have to be really careful.
1:01:20
So Billy Wilder said if you're going to tell people the truth, you better be funny or else they'll kill you. Right?
1:01:33
Visakan Veerasamy: That's true. Yeah.
1:01:34
Jim O’Shaughnessy: So truth-telling is very difficult in many respects.
1:01:36
Visakan Veerasamy: It is.
1:01:37
Jim O’Shaughnessy: But I love comedy.
1:01:37
My youngest daughter is a standup comedian, for example. Visakan Veerasamy: Nice.
1:01:43
Jim O’Shaughnessy: And all she does is make fun of me when she's with me.
1:01:46
She doesn't do me publicly yet... Visakan Veerasamy: Nice. Jim O’Shaughnessy: ...
1:01:47
but it's really great because it's so funny and laughter, I think, is a wonderful thing.
1:01:56
Norman Cousins, I think is the name of the guy who got a terminal diagnosis and checked himself out of the ...
1:02:05
It's called Anatomy Of An Illness.
1:02:05
What he did was he checked himself out of the hospital, took a really sweet, beautiful hotel suite, and back then, I don't even think he had access to maybe videos but anyway, he said I just want every video I watched to be a comedy.
1:02:19
All he did was sit in that room, watch comedies all day long, and he literally went into remission.
1:02:34
And so, the power of laughter is amazing to me.
1:02:34
But then, also, comedians. Right?
1:02:34
Ricky Gervais, Dave Chappelle, Chris Rock. Look at their eyes.
1:02:44
They sparkle with intelligence but they also, at least from my perspective, really, really funny people had a dark side because they're able to and I think with most of them it's been integrated but not always.
1:03:10
But the power of laughter, the power of not taking yourself so God damn seriously all the time. It's just like ...
1:03:21
I love the writer Robert Anton Wilson and he has a quote that's like you have no idea the power of cheerfulness and he goes when a cheerful person walks into a room, he or she brings the entire room up and conversely, when a very negative, puritanical tyrant enters the room, it just brings the mood way down.
1:03:45
And so, I completely agree with your view on that.
1:03:45
But a practical question. Right?
1:04:02
How do you demonstrate to others?
1:04:02
Because we can't change them. Right?
1:04:09
But how do you demonstrate to others that that's okay? Visakan Veerasamy: Yeah.
1:04:15
Jim O’Shaughnessy: Educate me.
1:04:17
Visakan Veerasamy: Well again, I don't think I'm qualified but I'll try.
1:04:19
It goes back, again, to the heroic thing is to not hate yourself. Right?
1:04:26
And it's to be willing to poke fun at yourself, basically, especially if you're higher status than the other person or of equal status.
1:04:31
So self-deprecation, I am not a fan of like 99% of the time unless it's really ...
1:04:36
The one example I point at is, I think, Jennifer Lawrence is an Oscar winner and she was speaking to somebody.
1:04:43
She was making fun of herself but it's obviously from a position of she knows her worth and she cares.
1:04:50
So from that point of view, self-deprecation can be great.
1:04:50
You take yourself down a bit. Everyone's equal.
1:04:54
But generally speaking, I think being able to poke fun at whatever it is that you're doing.
1:05:01
So anything that you're doing, it's always within some frame or within some context.
1:05:06
You're working really hard to do something.
1:05:06
So the game I'm playing on Twitter, sort of, is I'm a bit of a preacher man, a bit of a let's all be optimistic and golden and shoot for the stars together and be golden.
1:05:18
I really believe that stuff.
1:05:18
I believe it all the way in my heart, all the way down to my gut, everything.
1:05:23
But I can't be too serious about it.
1:05:23
I have to acknowledge that hey, Ozymandias, everything eventually decays into nothingness.
1:05:35
Every self-important preacher is also a clown.
1:05:35
Every crown is also a theater prop except that when the king or queen of England wears it, we take it seriously and when it's someone on stage we're like oh, that's a theater prop. It's the same thing.
1:05:46
It's just that we have a lot more people believing in that.
1:05:51
But similarly, to be able to say hey, my crown is a theater prop.
1:05:57
I don't take myself that seriously but I take my work seriously.
1:05:57
But you don't have to take yourself seriously. So yeah.
1:06:01
Being able to laugh at yourself, that's probably the main thing.
1:06:10
How else do you demonstrate?
1:06:10
I think you're just having fun.
1:06:10
It's an interesting question to think about.
1:06:17
How do you demonstrate it?
1:06:17
It's really in the little things. Right?
1:06:17
So the tricky thing is someone who's very uptight about wanting to not be uptight might put on this performance and then when people don't laugh, they get upset or something like that. It's tricky.
1:06:32
So it's not what you're doing, it's how you're doing it.
1:06:32
It's how you deal with failure.
1:06:32
It's how you deal with things not working out and that's hard.
1:06:39
I think a bunch of it is also just telling the truth, apologizing when you get it wrong, and yeah.
1:06:45
I think that's about it, broadly.
1:06:52
As simple and difficult as that. Jim O’Shaughnessy: Yeah.
1:06:55
It's one of those things that's simple but not easy. Right?
1:06:59
Visakan Veerasamy: Exactly.
1:07:00
Jim O’Shaughnessy: Like a lot of things in life.
1:07:02
When I was listening to you just describe it and the whole idea of people being stiff, there's an imagery from the Tao that essentially basically says stasis is death. Only movement is life.
1:07:20
Visakan Veerasamy: Right.
1:07:20
Jim O’Shaughnessy: Life is constant becoming. Right?
1:07:25
And it is a never ending movement.
1:07:25
I'm a huge fan of the Tao Te Ching and the metaphors they use in there.
1:07:38
By the way, it was not a single author. Right?
1:07:38
Lao-Tzu means honored one, old one, master, those things.
1:07:47
I'm sure it was a collective effort.
1:07:47
But he uses the metaphor of water flowing constantly and yet, then he goes on to say water can wear away the hardest surface.
1:07:56
It can go right through rocks.
1:08:04
It can do all of those which also suggests persistence. Yeah.
1:08:11
I also think about the tyrant.
1:08:11
There's a great passage in the Tao Te Ching which is the worst leader rules by fear, is feared.
1:08:18
The next best tries to make everyone like him or her.
1:08:27
The absolute best leader is one where something is accomplished and the people say look at what we did by ourselves. Right?
1:08:34
And so, I just so believe that.
1:08:34
But then, for people who push back on me that are like oh, well that's easy for you to say O’Shaughnessy, you don't have to work for another boss. Well okay. True enough.
1:08:56
But I had to at least in one part of my career.
1:08:56
And so, I always joke my major effort in life was to make myself totally unemployable, which I think I've accomplished, by the way.
1:09:06
But the idea, some people get really kind of frightened by that.
1:09:17
And so, you write a lot about maintaining agency and sovereignty.
1:09:25
Again, you had me at hello on all of the stuff that you write and I think do a fabulous job of writing.
1:09:33
But how do you interact with people who mean something to you? Right?
1:09:33
Who do you love who are part of your life?
1:09:42
They start judging you and they start saying Visa, man, come on. What are you doing?
1:09:52
You're just asserting your agency and your idea that you're you. Right? How do you that?
1:10:00
Visakan Veerasamy: So it depends on the person but I often agree with their judgments. Usually that's the case.
1:10:13
I took dressing from this David Ogilvy who wrote, he's a fantastic writer with a lot of taste and charm and wit and everything... Jim O’Shaughnessy: Yeah. Visakan Veerasamy: ...
1:10:21
and he wrote a couple of things that I just admire so much.
1:10:21
One was when he broke up with his business partner. So they had a split.
1:10:28
He said something like, I'm paraphrasing, but he's like I trust that he will soar to greater heights now unencumbered by an insufferable wretch such as me. Something like that.
1:10:38
So there's a thing in which people who are judgy, they'll say things like oh, you're so, let me try to think of something people have said that actually that kind of actually hurt. Maybe.
1:11:00
There was a time where people would say things like oh, you take yourself so seriously but you're just a poster or something and I would be like no, I'm not.
1:11:03
I'm trying to do something great in it. I realized wait.
1:11:08
It's not what you were saying. Right?
1:11:08
There's some truth to it which is why it's distressing.
1:11:12
And I'm like what if you just agree?
1:11:12
So this conversational judo.
1:11:17
What if we just embrace them and be like yes.
1:11:17
I am just a street musician pastor and I'm busking on the internet telling people to be kinder to each other. That's what I do. It's simple.
1:11:28
It doesn't have to be dramatic. Yeah.
1:11:28
It varies depending on the judgment.
1:11:28
Some of the trickier ones are things like oh, you are hurting people with what you do.
1:11:34
I know myself well enough and I've had enough conversations with enough people to trust myself and I trust people to tell me if I'm doing anything really messed up.
1:11:46
But for the most part it's like well, am I really the worst influence you can think of on the internet? That kind of thing.
1:12:00
So if you agree too much with a really misplaced criticism, then it seems off. My mom will say things.
1:12:07
So my mom's always wondering when I'm going to go to university because I never went and I'm like well mom, I'm not going to do that.
1:12:11
I'm sorry to disappoint you and I am genuinely sorry because from her point of view, in her worldview, she's like oh, you got to go to university.
1:12:22
That's a life stage, that I've kind of deprived her of that graduation photo moment and I get that it's sad for her, for example.
1:12:28
But I can be like well, I'm trying my best and to do the thing that I want to do and that's kind of the vibe. The vibe is like yeah.
1:12:37
I mean do you want to get specific about other kinds of judgments or anything because I do think there's something that I was not skilled at before.
1:12:45
I became more skilled at it over time and people have taught me, sometimes, that witnessing how I kind of judo people who come at me belligerent.
1:12:56
Jim O’Shaughnessy: That was the exact reference I was going to make so keep going. Visakan Veerasamy: Yeah.
1:12:59
When people come at me kind of belligerently and I manage, I don't always do it perfectly but when I do it smoothly, people DM me saying oh wow.
1:13:04
That was so cool how you handled that person.
1:13:04
I'm stealing that for my bag of tricks the next time I get a heckler. Right? Oh.
1:13:10
There's this great conversation with Jerry Seinfeld and Barack Obama on Comedians In Cars Getting Coffee. Jim O’Shaughnessy: Yeah. I've seen it. I love it. I love it. Yeah.
1:13:20
Visakan Veerasamy: So Obama asks Seinfeld, what's your theory of hecklers?
1:13:22
And then Seinfeld says, I said, you know what? You seem upset.
1:13:22
I'm sure you didn't mean to come here and have ... like how are you doing? What's up with you? You seem upset. What's going on?
1:13:34
And sometimes, if the person is being belligerent, they're not used to being listened to, usually.
1:13:39
I think that's a common thing.
1:13:39
I think very often people who are like ah, you're not ...
1:13:43
They're complaining and they are used to their complaints falling on deaf ears.
1:13:49
So when you're actually like oh okay. Tell me more. What's going on? They're like what? What's going on?
1:13:52
And sometimes we even have a good conversation.
1:13:58
I've had friendships develop from ...
1:13:58
So not every time but maybe one in a dozen times when someone is being kind of disagreeable and belligerent at me online and I'm like what's going on? Let's talk about it. Maybe you're right.
1:14:09
Tell me more and then we become friends afterwards because they had assumed that I'm someone that I'm not and then I surprised them.
1:14:13
I don't think that's realistic to expect everyone to have the patience to do.
1:14:19
So probably, if it's some random stranger online, just ignore them.
1:14:24
If it's a loved one, that's trickier. I would say yeah.
1:14:24
Try to assume that from whatever their perspective is, which you don't have full insight into, from whatever their perspective is, whether or not they're right or wrong, they think that doing what they're doing is the right thing to do. Right? So that's a puzzle. It's interesting. Okay. You're yelling at me. It's not fun. But what's going on? Why are you saying that?
1:14:52
I think if you can find a way to bring curiosity to that interaction, which can be very difficult if someone's yelling at you, but if you can find a way to be genuinely curious, I think it's quite disarming.
1:15:03
Jim O’Shaughnessy: I agree.
1:15:04
And I was thinking of so many things as you were talking.
1:15:04
There's a meme that I often put up with the guru sitting on top of the mountain and the guy comes up to ask him the question.
1:15:12
He says how are you so peaceful and he goes never argue with idiots.
1:15:18
And then, the next panel of the meme is the guy says that's stupid.
1:15:27
That's wrong and then the guru says I agree entirely which I think is great.
1:15:35
Visakan Veerasamy: It's perfect. Yeah.
1:15:39
Jim O’Shaughnessy: And so, I also think the other reason that we are so simpatico on this is I agree with the idea that when you look at somebody who's coming at you aggressively, you need to open your mind to the fact that there's something bothering them. There's something.
1:16:00
You used a good term, they feel like they're not being heard.
1:16:00
And so, sometimes, what I normally do, if you can tell pretty much from phrasing whether this person is just a troll and we're going to get into assholes later because you write very convincingly about that.
1:16:17
So if it's that case, I ignore.
1:16:27
Do not engage because they're psychic vampires.
1:16:27
They want to suck the energy out of you.
1:16:36
I view that as just stunted development and some other things.
1:16:36
But you bring up the great point. I don't know.
1:16:44
Maybe they just had a horrible day and maybe they had a series of bad things happen in their life and they see whatever you put up online and they lash out at you.
1:16:58
And so, if you remain open-minded about the idea that let's see, right, and then you engage and you're right.
1:17:09
Maybe it's one out of a dozen times.
1:17:09
But I, too, have had situations like you described where the person came at me really, really hard, and you're wrong. This is stupid.
1:17:15
Why would you ever do that?
1:17:24
And then, I had heard of this person and I'm like yeah.
1:17:24
I think I'm going to engage on this.
1:17:30
One of the things that I've found that works really well is just ask questions. Why? Why do you think that?
1:17:36
And then just keep going down. Just keep saying why. Visakan Veerasamy: Yeah.
1:17:46
Jim O’Shaughnessy: What's really interesting about that is A, you've been actively listening to them and they can see that but B, they're being heard and so many people have this idea that they're unheard. Right?
1:18:02
Just leaning into, and I love the akido reference there or martial arts reference ...
1:18:15
I really dislike judgmental people and I just admit that freely.
1:18:31
But one of the things that I find is I look at it, I use a photographic metaphor. Right?
1:18:31
So is your aperture open, wide, or is it closed?
1:18:40
Is your aperture really closed?
1:18:40
If your aperture is opened wide, you become much, almost by definition you're less judgy because you're open to the fact that maybe I'll learn something here.
1:18:58
Maybe I'll be able to synthesize something I have taken from this conversation.
1:19:05
There's always a way to interact, in my opinion.
1:19:05
Excluding loathsome assholes. Right?
1:19:15
Visakan Veerasamy: Right.
1:19:17
Jim O’Shaughnessy: The whole thing around, I actually wrote it down as I was preparing for you.
1:19:19
The amount of pages of notes I have on you man, you are amazing.
1:19:23
But it was a quote from a show that I like on TV called Justified. The protagonist is a U. S.
1:19:33
Marshall and his name is Raylan Givens.
1:19:41
They give him the best lines and everything and one of his lines is if you run into an asshole in the morning, you ran into an asshole.
1:19:48
If you run into assholes all day long, you're the asshole.
1:19:54
Visakan Veerasamy: That's true.
1:19:58
Jim O’Shaughnessy: Any more hints on how to, helpfully, either engage or disengage?
1:20:00
What do you do when you decide you know what, this is one that I don't want to jump into this dark hole?
1:20:14
Visakan Veerasamy: So a thing that I do, and I love your idea of the aperture, and I have a couple of riffs that fit perfectly with that.
1:20:17
One is that there's always a move, same thing you're saying.
1:20:23
Other thing is that if you to play longer games.
1:20:27
And again, if the only game in play is this immediate interaction, then you can feel like oh, I'm either going to win or lose or ignore it.
1:20:33
But if you zoom out and you see the big picture and you're like oh, I am pursuing this interest for decades.
1:20:38
It's a thing that I care about and I want to communicate.
1:20:43
Then, I'm going to encounter misunderstandings repeatedly.
1:20:48
So I have a tweet that's like all my haters are my collaborators which is that they don't realize because they're in a moment of anger, their aperture is small.
1:20:53
They're in a moment of anger or frustration.
1:20:56
They're going to say a bunch of stuff and I'm like well, how can I use this volunteer to just flesh out information that I can then use later on?
1:21:07
And so, I have written stuff that's built on answering, addressing the misunderstandings that people have.
1:21:14
So I know that I might not convert this particular person at this particular point in time but whatever issues or grievances or interpretations they have, they are probably not the only person who has it.
1:21:24
Maybe even more reasonable people have similar concerns and grievances. So I list out.
1:21:27
One of the things I got from, there's a period of time I had a parody account dedicated to me which was fun.
1:21:33
He was around for eight months and he would rephrase my tweets in absurd ways and it was interesting.
1:21:39
I was actually enjoying it because he was paying such close attention to my stuff and he was like distorting it in a very specific way and he was revealing his own biases in his distortions.
1:21:49
He assumed that I care about money to a degree that I don't care about.
1:21:56
He assumed just a bunch of stuff.
1:22:01
I actually took screenshots and I made a list of notes.
1:22:01
So I didn't want to engage with him moment to moment because I knew that it would just be a messy fight and I wouldn't be happy. He wouldn't. Whatever.
1:22:09
But I kept tabs on everything he said and I reworked some of those things where I would address.
1:22:14
It might be like some people say X and some people say Y, and my answer to that is X, Y, Z.
1:22:19
So instead of responding to that one angry person, you kind of use it as an educational opportunity and not necessarily direct anger at that person and I do find that there's an emotional search when someone's coming at you and you feel an urge to defend yourself.
1:22:33
I like to think of it as, again, I'm transmuting that energy.
1:22:37
I'm not going to win this guy but I can win the next 50 guys like him by writing the relevant thing so that next time when someone says X, I already have a thread about X, and so on.
1:22:43
I find that very gratifying.
1:22:50
Now that I know that that's my style, I can feel a lot more at peace, the next guy that comes along. Jim O’Shaughnessy: Yeah.
1:22:58
That's great advice and it kind of figures into your thread on good reply guys, which I love.
1:23:08
I actually wrote a thread on Twitter about how not to be a reply guy.
1:23:17
I consider Twitter a confederacy of duchies. Right?
1:23:17
So there's Fin Twit, there's Film Twit, there's Art Twit.
1:23:22
If I was going to barge in on architecture Twit and say all modern architecture is bullshit. It sucks. It's awful. Well, okay. It's not my passion. I love architecture.
1:23:33
But these people, it's their true passion and they like to have great in-depth conversations about it and it's you driving a car right through their front door and it's very destructive.
1:23:56
My solution was have good manners.
1:23:56
I never thought that I would see a day where having good manners was an asymmetric advantage.
1:24:06
When I was young, my mother beat manners into me. It was just like no. No. No.
1:24:14
And even around things like humor, my mom took me aside.
1:24:14
I was very funny when I was younger and I was interacting with friends and she kind of did it perfectly.
1:24:21
She waited until all my friends were gone and then she goes come here for a minute and I went sure.
1:24:30
She goes I overheard what you were, you are really funny Jim.
1:24:37
You are really a funny kid and I'm like well, thanks mom.
1:24:43
She goes I just want to ask you to think about something. I said what's that? And she said...
1:24:46
Jim O’Shaughnessy: And I said, "What's that?"
1:24:48
And she said, "You often use humor as a weapon."
1:24:48
And I'm, "What, what do you mean?"
1:24:48
And she goes, "You know, humor...
1:25:01
," and then she went into the thing we've just discussed a bit about Mark Twain.
1:25:07
And she was just so switched on.
1:25:07
But I'll never forget that conversation because yeah, as I reflected on it, I was, "You're right."
1:25:16
And one of her rules was, if you're telling dirty jokes, if it's funnier than it is dirty, you can go ahead and tell it.
1:25:31
If it's dirtier, then it's funny, shut up.
1:25:31
Then, she was, "Learn to be a little more gentle in your humor."
1:25:41
She's, "You're good at teasing.
1:25:41
But back off, because," she said, "You're really good at going for the big red button on the person and pushing it, and maybe you shouldn't do that."
1:25:57
The reason I thought of that was your reply, the way you engage with people and everything.
1:25:57
Have you ever found that there's...
1:26:04
And by the way, I love the thinking, don't think about that specific person, think about the group, the longer term, the longer advantage.
1:26:12
But are you ever confronted by people who come after you because, "I want you to, Visa, I want you to teach me and you're not teaching me."
1:26:27
Has that ever happened to you?
1:26:27
Visakan Veerasamy: Not that specific flavor.
1:26:34
I think you probably get more of that when you have higher status and capital and all those things.
1:26:41
But I have had a kind of similar where they're requesting something, and the way in which they are requesting it makes me not want to do it.
1:26:58
Here's an interesting one.
1:26:58
Somebody once said, "It would make my whole week if you did a video call with me."
1:27:05
And here's someone who hasn't actually replied to any of my tweets before. And I could do it.
1:27:10
It's a small thing to do, but I didn't feel like doing it.
1:27:15
And I have video called random people for fun now and then, but there was something about that thing where he was, I guess my interpretation is that he was pedestalizing me and he wanted that access to someone else that he felt was something.
1:27:29
And I could have used that as a teaching opportunity, but I didn't want to. I just ignored it.
1:27:37
So, this is almost like level two or level three kind of thing where, okay, we already know all the right moves you can possibly make or all the best possible move in each situation.
1:27:50
Now, you also have to sit back and look at your life.
1:27:55
And I have seen certain instances where I could probably help this person, but it would take me three hours, and I don't have three hours today, and I'm sorry, I have to spend time with my spouse, I have to spend time with on my main thing.
1:28:05
So, the unfortunate limitations of time and space mean that I can't devote myself entirely to every single person who wants help.
1:28:15
And one of the ways I addressed that was I have a blog post. I have two blog posts.
1:28:15
One blog post on how to ask for help, and I'm, "Let's start your considerations," blah, blah, blah, blah.
1:28:20
I have another blog post on how to get my attention.
1:28:24
So, it's, if anybody is actually interested in actually having a conversation, I've laid all my stuff out.
1:28:30
It's very easy to navigate and find.
1:28:34
So, if someone's bypassing all of that, to me, it's, oh, you just didn't meet my filters.
1:28:34
And it's not like it's a secret obscure filter.
1:28:41
You just didn't care at all.
1:28:41
So, I basically just ignore those people.
1:28:49
And I'm pretty lucky that I haven't yet encountered stalkers or people who are just very persistent and fixated, apart from my parody account, which is funny.
1:29:01
But if someone wants me to...
1:29:01
I have also encountered people who, they were nice to me at first in my mentions, for example, and then, when I don't recognize their brilliance, they turn on me and then they get mad.
1:29:10
And I've also seen it play out long enough that some people I've seen they've turned once, and then they turn back in a year or two years.
1:29:21
And I have a weirdly good memory for this kind of thing. I just recognize people.
1:29:21
I'm, "Oh, this guy used to say nice things to me, and then he used to be mean, and now he's nice again."
1:29:27
Okay, that's, whatever you are dealing with, bro.
1:29:31
I'm the same guy I've always been since I was a teenager, but I don't know if I have any good suggestions for that.
1:29:37
It's just, you have to roll with it.
1:29:42
Jim O’Shaughnessy: It also comes into your assholes idea where you say, assholes are maybe 1% of any group.
1:29:45
Most normal people, I've certainly experienced.
1:29:55
And this really resonated with me when I read it because I'm, "Yeah, you know, he's right."
1:30:00
It's, assholes are generally a tiny part of the population, but then you go on to say, but they cause 75% of the damage in the group, and they ruin the experience for everybody.
1:30:13
It's like the old cliché because it's true, one bad apple spoils the entire barrel.
1:30:19
So, how do you have that no-asshole rule, and for being a non-authoritarian like myself, how do you enforce it? How do you enforce it?
1:30:37
Visakan Veerasamy: Yeah, it's very tricky, it's very tricky.
1:30:37
So, if you are starting your own group or, again, if it's your house, it's the easiest.
1:30:40
Just don't invite assholes to your house. That's very easy.
1:30:45
But as you scale up and up, if you're talking about running a community club or you have a scene where there's an open air scene, and you can't control, it's so tricky. There's layers to it.
1:30:58
My first principle is, make sure you have people around you that have healthy norms and can look out for each other, eyes across the room.
1:31:08
"You guys are seeing this, right? This is kind of weird."
1:31:08
So, at the very least, if you can't do anything about it, you can retreat to the good people.
1:31:20
Then, there's this concentric circles of increasing escalation.
1:31:20
So, you may have to tell someone off sometimes, and in that case, try to be neutral, try to be firm.
1:31:34
So, I have a rule for myself, which is that, I swear with my friends.
1:31:34
If you see me saying, "You fucking guy," in the replies to someone, we are definitely friends, because if I don't like someone, I'm going to be clinically polite so that any problem they have with me cannot be on the basis of how I'm talking to them.
1:31:51
You have to earn my swears by being friends.
1:31:58
So, I think that's a useful rule to have, to be polite with your enemies.
1:31:58
And when you frame it's...
1:32:04
So, some people are, "Oh, no, I wanna swear.
1:32:04
They deserve a few harsh words," true.
1:32:08
But if you game it out and you've tried a few different people, once you've gone down to their level, then they are justified in name-calling back, and then it gets messier or whatever.
1:32:19
I think generally speaking, the asshole problem is a coordination problem.
1:32:19
It's not any one hero's job to fight an asshole one v one.
1:32:24
It's really about educating bystanders to coordinate a non-violent response.
1:32:30
So, if you Google things like "bystander training" or "good bystander" things, there's a bunch of interesting videos and stuff.
1:32:40
So, let's say, you're on a train and you see someone harassing an immigrant or a minority or someone, the thing to do is not to point at the person who is the aggressor and tell them off, because they want to fight.
1:32:50
What you want to do is, you want to disrupt the frame by going to the person who's being harassed and literally disregard the person and be, "Hey, how're you doing? How's your day? How's the weather?
1:32:58
Do you have kids," whatever.
1:33:03
Then, you create this new frame where the asshole is not a part of. And there's one I love.
1:33:03
There's a video of two people fighting on the train, and you can see they don't even really want to fight.
1:33:13
It's two macho guys bump into each other and they're, "Hey, what, what...
1:33:13
," and they're going to fight.
1:33:17
And this third guy, who's bigger than both of them, he's eating chips, he just quietly walks in between the two of them and he starts eating his chips, and they both back off and the whole situation deescalates.
1:33:27
So, it's about deescalation skills, I think, addresses...
1:33:32
It doesn't help for the worst 0.
1:33:32
001% extremely egregious predator kind of asshole, but for the disagreeable, annoying, that kind of asshole.
1:33:40
Yeah, you can coordinate...
1:33:49
So, if you see someone being mean to someone else in a tweet, you can show up and just talk at the first guy, and then just try to have a normal conversation, and then it makes the asshole look unreasonable and weird.
1:34:01
And again, one of the people's biggest fears is being ostracized or being...
1:34:10
If you're an angry guy and people are fearing you, the theatrics of that drama production is, the angry guy has the power.
1:34:17
But if one angry guy is ranting and two other people are having an interesting, pleasant conversation, now, the angry guy looks silly and he looks weird and awkward. They'll tend to go out.
1:34:27
So, that's one possible play.
1:34:34
And the tricky thing is, you have to adapt to the situation.
1:34:34
So, if you're trying that play and it's not working out, if you keep forcing it, you might look stupid.
1:34:39
So, there's a few different things like this you have to try.
1:34:45
And I hesitate to give simple instructions, but it's things like, you really have to return to the norms that you want.
1:34:53
And if someone is name-calling or insulting people's appearance, or whatever it is that is unacceptable behavior, I think it varies so much depending on the context, but generally I try to...
1:35:19
It's what I just described.
1:35:19
I try to reorient the conversation in a healthy way.
1:35:19
And sometimes, if you can lock the thing or turn it off or switch it to another thing, if that's possible, that's great.
1:35:30
Like the equivalent of if there's a bar fight, you turn on the lights and you turn off the music, and whatever, that kind of vibe, and then you try and bring it back.
1:35:40
So, my favorite band is Paramore, and they do really great.
1:35:44
The way they stop fights is very nice. So, Haley is the singer.
1:35:44
She's, "Y'all are at this show and you're fighting?
1:35:51
This is a place for love.
1:35:51
Don't make me be like a lecturer.
1:35:56
I don't wanna be like a school mommy, discipline mistress, or whatever.
1:36:01
We're here to dance and have fun."
1:36:01
Then, it takes some confidence to direct people around, like, "You guys, make sure that person's okay.
1:36:06
You, come on, get to the other side of the room.
1:36:11
All right, we're here to have a good time, okay," and then it continues.
1:36:11
So, there is a skill to that.
1:36:14
It takes some confidence and assertiveness, but I don't know if that's enough. But it's a big problem.
1:36:20
It's- Jim O’Shaughnessy: That's actually great advice.
1:36:22
I love the idea of deescalation.
1:36:29
I think that that works really well.
1:36:29
I especially your idea behind, do not go to the person who's causing the problem, go to the person who they're harassing.
1:36:36
And I've done that many times, and it's got a pretty good at- batting average, because you can recreate the scene, if you will.
1:36:54
But it requires, as you say, you have to be pretty confident to be able to do it, and you have to also have a healthy appreciation for the theatrical.
1:37:03
Visakan Veerasamy: Yeah, that's true.
1:37:04
Jim O’Shaughnessy: When people would say to me, "Damn, you're good at Twitter, man.
1:37:04
You're so good at it," I'm, "Twitter's performance art, man."
1:37:13
Visakan Veerasamy: Yeah, it is.
1:37:15
Jim O’Shaughnessy: And if you don't understand that, that's going to be the thing that's going to really knock you off.
1:37:24
The other thing you mentioned there though, which I like very much because I totally agree with it, and that is this idea of putting people on a pedestal.
1:37:29
And I really don't want that.
1:37:39
Visakan Veerasamy: Yeah, yeah.
1:37:41
Jim O’Shaughnessy: It's like, if you meet the Buddha in the road, kill him because he's not the real Buddha.
1:37:42
And it's all the zen, don't look at my finger, look at what it's pointing at.
1:37:48
You also had a great solution, or a comment, and then I'm going to get you to explain the idea, but you referenced Times Square here in New York.
1:38:04
And I hate Times Square.
1:38:04
I hate Times Square, but you made me rethink it.
1:38:10
And I'm going to go back there after reading what you said.
1:38:16
Because you were, "Look, Times Square, if you're looking at it from a surface, it's glitzy and it's loud and it's annoying and obnoxious."
1:38:23
And that's my feeling about Times Square.
1:38:31
It's like, nobody who lives in New York actually goes to Times Square.
1:38:37
Then, what you said, which I really liked, is, but if you go there, take the time to check out because there's a lot of really cool things that you got to search a bit for, but you'll find.
1:38:52
Talk about that for a bit, because I love that.
1:38:52
And you're actually going to drive me back to Times Square.
1:38:56
Visakan Veerasamy: That's funny, I haven't actually been to New York yet.
1:38:58
I've been wanting to go all my life.
1:38:58
I'm finally coming later this month, and I intend to pop by Times Square.
1:39:02
At least from halfway across the planet, you have to check it out.
1:39:08
And yes, I was using Times Square as a metaphor really.
1:39:08
So, it's not really about Times Square itself, but- Jim O’Shaughnessy: Of course, yeah. Visakan Veerasamy: ...
1:39:16
about algorithms and the internet and whatever is loudest and most garish and anywhere gets most of the...
1:39:23
So, just assholes cause most problems, whatever is loudest gets most attention.
1:39:23
And I think I was saying more of, be willing to check out what's next door or one street down or two streets down.
1:39:36
So, even if you go to whoever is the most famous Twitch streamer or the top a 100 most famous Twitch streamers, their chats are so overflowing with responses, nobody's reading it. It's just a phenomenon. It's like noise.
1:39:51
But at any time in your life, if you're feeling lonely, you can just go to Twitch, look for a streamer who has no views, be their one and only viewer and say, "Hey, nice stream.
1:40:00
How is it going," and you will make their day. They will be so happy.
1:40:06
They will stop playing to chat with you.
1:40:06
And I sometimes do this kind of, "I'm not feeling... Let's just go."
1:40:14
Then, I say something, they are so happy, I get infected by their happiness, I'm, "Wow."
1:40:18
So, the idea there was really, instead of complaining about whatever you think is terrible and gets...
1:40:22
So, when you complain about the thing that's getting too much attention, you are contributing to the amount of attention it's getting.
1:40:31
And the best thing you can really do is, "Cool, cool, cool.
1:40:37
Let me tell you about my favorite book.
1:40:37
Let me tell you about my favorite movie."
1:40:40
And when I was a teenager and I was in the local music scene, I was so frustrated at how much everyone was complaining all the time about pop music, like, "Oh, the radio only plays pop music," and I'm, "Well, you're talking about it."
1:40:51
So, again, it's the same thing.
1:40:51
And I came to realize that my frustration with those people about their frustration, it continued in this loop where I'm still not doing what I want.
1:41:02
And you know who solved this? Nietzsche.
1:41:09
He figured it out in the 1800s.
1:41:09
He said, "I will only wish to be a yes sayer.
1:41:09
No longer will I negate the things that I dislike.
1:41:16
I will not even admonish those who negate.
1:41:16
I will simply look for things to say yes to and I will just make that my prayer or my affirmation."
1:41:29
Just look for things that you want and celebrate and what you think is deserving of attention, and then just focus on that.
1:41:33
So, my bio on Twitter says, "Focus your time and energy on what you want to see more of."
1:41:40
And if you just think of everybody's utterances and their tweets and whatever, everything that we do...
1:41:45
I think Patrick McKenzie @patio 11, he says something like, "Every dollar you spend is a vote for how you want the world to be, whether you realize it or not."
1:41:54
And same for everything you say and everything you direct attention to.
1:42:00
So, if you spend your time quote tweeting saying, "This person sucks. Oh, this is so terrible.
1:42:05
No, I disagree," you're still feeding attention to those things.
1:42:05
So, everyone should do a personal audit, go scrolling.
1:42:12
I know we're all humans, so we all probably once in a while get annoyed. It's normal.
1:42:16
But I recommend everyone scroll through your own timeline for a bit on your own tweets and be, "Are these the things I want to be recommending?"
1:42:26
And if it's no, then you've got to sit down and ask yourself why.
1:42:26
What flames would you rather be fanning? Yeah. Jim O’Shaughnessy: Yeah. I love that.
1:42:34
One of my mantras is, I like to look for things to root for as opposed to against, because I am a huge believer that you are what you pay attention to, what you surround yourself with, what you continue to assert, that you create that reality.
1:42:51
And again, Robert Anton Wilson, one of my favorites, and he stole it from Timothy Leary, it turns out, or we stole it from someone else, but this idea of reality tunnels or reality goggles.
1:43:05
You have to understand that what we think is reality is not reality.
1:43:15
It is our semantic response to the very limited perceptions that are hitting our filters.
1:43:22
If you even think about the idea that we are horribly, woefully inadequate in seeing colors, we're humans.
1:43:28
Then, you start thinking, well, certain animals only see black and white, so thank God that we can at least see some of the colors.
1:43:40
But if you try to change the frame of reference, a lot of really cool things can happen, I think.
1:43:47
Now, I knew that I would run into this problem because I have not even covered half of everything I wanted to talk to you about, and so I'm going to invite you back.
1:43:54
I hope you will say yes- Visakan Veerasamy: Wonderful. Obviously, yes.
1:44:01
Jim O’Shaughnessy: I want to get into, you have a great thing about culty bullshit.
1:44:04
I love talking about that.
1:44:04
It's, look up how to know if you're in a cult.
1:44:04
I think that's such great advice.
1:44:10
But we're going to save that for later.
1:44:10
So, first off, I was right, I knew I was going to have so much fun with you. Visakan Veerasamy: Yeah.
1:44:19
Jim O’Shaughnessy: I love what you're doing.
1:44:20
I love the fact- Visakan Veerasamy: Thank you so much. Jim O’Shaughnessy: ...
1:44:23
that it makes an impression.
1:44:23
So, sometimes you can feel, oh, not so great, not so great, and then all of a sudden, boom.
1:44:31
And that requires long-term thinking, that requires a long-term plan.
1:44:39
And I love the fact that you have and you've thought about all that.
1:44:39
So, much respect from me.
1:44:48
Your second time through, we'll talk about all these other really cool things because they're really cool, and I love your ideas on them.
1:44:53
Visakan Veerasamy: Thanks so much, Jim.
1:44:55
Jim O’Shaughnessy: But one of the question things that I always do at the end, and you're going to get a chance to do it twice at least, is that we are going to make you emperor of the world for a day.
1:45:04
You can't do anything authoritarian, you can't put anyone in reeducation camps and you can't kill anybody.
1:45:11
But what I'm going to do is hand you a magic microphone, and you are going to be able to say two things into that microphone, and you're going to incept the entire 8 billion population of earth.
1:45:31
They are all going to wake up whenever their morning is, the next morning, and they're going to think, "I just had these two fantastic ideas, and I'm going to start acting, doing, pursuing that today."
1:45:43
What two things do you think you would incept in people that you think would make things a lot better off for all of us? Visakan Veerasamy: Wow.
1:45:55
Well, I have my list of talking points, but I feel I shouldn't just go with that.
1:45:55
I should feel out what I want to say.
1:46:03
So, my default talking points, my big one is, I've said already, focus your time and energy on what you want to see more of, which I don't know if it has a megaphone, bumper sticker quality.
1:46:13
I might pick something else.
1:46:22
Megaphone, all 8 billion.
1:46:22
The thing I would start thinking about that question is, one of the things that people kind of already know, but the problem is that there isn't consensus, meaning that the reason progress is slow is not because people don't know it, but because people don't know that everyone else knows it.
1:46:38
So, I'm tempted to be, "School is bullshit."
1:46:48
Everyone needs to know, just to get consensus.
1:46:48
I would want to think about it a bit more and try and phrase it in a clever...
1:46:53
So, the underlying intent is to get everyone to rethink education.
1:46:58
And I don't know if "school is bullshit" is the best way to say that, but I would workshop that a bit.
1:47:04
And maybe the next one, next call, I'll come up with a nice phrase. But school is bullshit.
1:47:09
And the other thing that I think I would want everyone to do is something like, let...
1:47:19
So, I want people to be more creative and I want people...
1:47:19
My thing is that if you think someone isn't creative, look at their excuses.
1:47:24
So, we are always making up excuses all the time.
1:47:30
We're super creative when it comes to staying exactly where we are.
1:47:33
Homeostasis is not supernatural.
1:47:33
It takes work to remain where we are.
1:47:33
We have to say no to opportunities that would change our lives so that we stay where we are.
1:47:40
So, I don't know if that's the phrase I would use, but the second thing I would want to get people to think about other than education is, I just want to invite everyone to consider that the existing configuration they're in is not necessarily the configuration they have to be in.
1:48:04
And I've seen this, every marriage is like this in some way.
1:48:04
And my funny story that I like to tell to explain this is, I have this coffee shop downstairs from my house, and every day I used to get the exact same coffee, which is less milk and something, so it's a specific order.
1:48:15
So, we keep having that order.
1:48:20
And one day I'm, "I wanna try the different..."
1:48:20
So, usually it's condensed milk, and I want to try the other milk.
1:48:25
And in trying to have that conversation with my coffee lady, it was confusing because her English is not great.
1:48:30
So, I was, "Auntie, I don't want that, I want that," and it's just a bit of a mess.
1:48:35
And I was just amused because that must be the case in so many configurations that we have a default setting and we just don't try something different.
1:48:39
So, I want people to question defaults, and more importantly, give each other space to screw around and try something different.
1:48:52
So, it will be something like, tomorrow when you wake up, tell someone, not necessarily a secret, but it's...
1:48:58
I'm awestruck at the scale of the opportunities.
1:49:10
But I'll just go with the principle.
1:49:10
So, the first one is rethink education, school is bullshit.
1:49:16
Ask yourself what you really want to learn and know.
1:49:16
And the other one is, give yourself and your companions, your peers, the gift of presence to just allow each other to be different, allow each other to...
1:49:33
Okay, so it's, share with your friends and family and your long-term friends, or whatever, a crazy idea that you've been carrying but have been shy to share because it doesn't fit your default narrative.
1:49:45
So, it's a lot of words for both. It's a great prompt.
1:49:50
I think I'm going to be thinking about this for a while and see if I can condense them into a couple of tweets, because it will be so great if I already had a tweet.
1:49:56
But those are the things, so- Jim O’Shaughnessy: I love them both. And I always say...
1:50:02
The only reason, by the way, I barely have a BA was because my mother said, "You know, you can do anything you want, but just please get a degree, please."
1:50:16
I was, "All right, all right."
1:50:16
And I used to say to my mom when she was telling me this, I used to say, "Mom...
1:50:26
," and this turns out it was a famous quote, I didn't know that at the time, but, "Why do you want me to let school get in the way of my education?"
1:50:36
Visakan Veerasamy: Oh, yeah, I remember that.
1:50:38
Jim O’Shaughnessy: So, I still believe that. Learning is lifelong.
1:50:41
It is not, "Yeah, I'm, I'm done.
1:50:41
I got my little sheep skin here.
1:50:41
I know everything there is to know," because we don't know half of 1% of everything there is to know. So, I love that.
1:50:57
And I love the, "be open to letting people change their default settings".
1:51:03
It's the only way growth happens, right? Visakan Veerasamy: Yeah.
1:51:06
Jim O’Shaughnessy: And I'm huge into this idea that movement, we are becoming.
1:51:07
All of us, not just me, not just you, all of us are becoming, we are motion. Stasis is death.
1:51:17
And if people understand, "I know I've got to stay in my lane," I hate that phrase.
1:51:26
I always reply to it with the car doing this, right. Visakan Veerasamy: Nice. Yeah.
1:51:34
Jim O’Shaughnessy: So, this has been just tremendous.
1:51:35
Thank you so much for being my guest and for giving me your time.
1:51:39
Visakan Veerasamy: Thank you so much for having me. This was wonderful.