John Frum Movement: "GI Joe, The American... God?"

Transcript

No 2 days are the same in Irish sport. We go from the highest highs one day to fierce debates the next. There's always something new to talk about. So join Joe Mili every weekday for expert opinion and analysis on the InnoSport Podcast, available wherever you get your podcasts. Introducing OptionsCard, Ireland's new multi brand digital gift card. OptionsCard is perfect for employee and personal gifts as you can customize it with images and video messages. Send instantly by email or print it out to send later. And best of all, it's completely free of any charges or fees. Redeemable for Ireland's biggest retail brands, options card lives in your mobile wallet so you'll always know the current balance and you'll never lose a gift card again. Options card, buy now at optionscard.au. So, Jay, I have made many, many bad decisions in my life, and I've made some good ones. And, overall, I think it's worked out. But no one's gonna make a 100% correct decisions. No one's gonna make a 100% bad decisions, but you have to have some methodology or model for making many decisions in your life, or else you're just gonna be sitting around deciding things Right. Most of the time. Right. And so I wanted to talk about my decision making process in a variety of situations. But I know when we first discussed this, you said you had some questions about decision making. Yeah. Like, because I remember this is when I was really young. I was, like, gotta be 17, 18. I was dating a girl then. You were dating a girl when you were 17? Yeah, dude. Everyone started dating around, like, 17, 18. I think now, like In Malaysia? In Malaysia. Yeah. I did not have my first girlfriend until I was almost 19 years old. No. Yeah. I always wanted a girlfriend from 7th grade on, but I didn't really have what it takes. So I didn't start dating someone till I was almost 19. I think I started dating when I was 13, 14. But it but it's like a poplar. They call it poplar. But yeah. Yeah. Yeah. At 17, 18, I was dating this girl, And believe it or not, I was I used to run a choir. I used to be in a choir. And then I used to, like, the president of the choir club that she founded. But, you know, I'm like, I don't know if I would be, you know, qualified because I'm very bad at decision making because I try to make What do you mean you're great at decision making? You decided to work for the best podcast ever, and you became the podcast producer, the the producer of that podcast. After 20 years, after I mean, like, in 10 years, actually, after 10 years, after actually, after I worked for you for I think I recorded 5 episodes and then I decided, okay, I wanna work for you since then. But back then, she's like she's like this very controlled woman. She's like sort of manipulative, but, you know, that's that's another story. And she's like, what do you mean that you don't know how to decide how to make a decision? Just make whatever decisions and deal with it after. I'm like, I don't know if that's a good or a bad advice. That might be a good advice. Before I talk about that, I I actually wanna briefly talk about something completely unrelated Okay. Which is this theory that I just read about this morning that somehow Donald Trump is a time traveler. Okay. Okay. I heard about it when you heard about it. Yep. I heard about it 4 years ago. 4 years ago. Yeah. Okay. Right. Because in 2017, I had never heard about this till yesterday. But in 2017, apparently, a bunch of people started talking about how so there was so and I realized this. Yesterday, someone sent me a text of a book Right. Called the the adventures of little Barron Trump. Yep. But the book was written in, like, 18/89. Yep. So and there's another book, the marvelous underground journey of Barron Trump. And so, apparently, this guy Ingersoll Lockwood, he was born 18 41, died in 1918, was a real person, was like an ambassador, appointed by Abraham Lincoln, for instance. He he was, you know, a diplomat. He was a writer. He was a lawyer. It was all it was all these things. And he wrote this book that was kinda like you know, supposed to be like Alice in Wonderland Right. But it was about this character, bar this little kid, Barron Trump, who was the son of some rich person, and he would go on all these, like, amazing adventures and until eventually he would go home to Castle Trump, which AKA Trump Tower. And and then the next book that Ingersoll Lockwood wrote was called the last president, and he wrote this book, again, in the 18 nineties, and it was about the year 18 96. On November 3rd, there would be an election, and, essentially, it's about Americans are really upset. They think that the presidential election process had been corrupted and that some a fake president had been elected. And the president lives in New York City and people start rioting in New York City because everybody's afraid of the collapse of the United States once the transition of presidential power occurs. And they start rioting and and they're gonna attack where this person lives, apparently in a big hotel on Fifth Avenue, aka Trump Towers on Fifth Avenue. And so it's this weird thing where this guy wrote 2 books, one about, Barron Trump and the other about the last president, which is a president who is involved in some kind of scandal or, it's unclear to me because I haven't read the book. It's unclear whether it's this person was corrupt or the person he's protesting is corrupt, but it it ends up with this sort of riot happening in New York City on Fifth Avenue at this big tower. So you had heard of this before? Yeah. I heard of heard of it heard of this before, and then, you know, that was, like, 4 years ago when when when, you know, when Trump was president. And some of them, even talk about you know John Theodor, t I t o r? Okay. Yeah. That's another one Yep. Where but that's related to this guy was posting kind of predict he in in 2000, this guy, John Theodore, was posting some predictions for the year 2020 or 2030, and I haven't really delved into that theory. I was more, fascinated with this Barron Trump thing because that actually because the the John Titor one, someone admitted, oh, he made that up. Right. This actually was the the adventures of Barron Trump or Barron Trump's marvelous underground journey was actually written in, like, 18/90 by this guy Ingersoll Lockwood. Do you do you read the book at all? I I skimmed through it, and it's really, really bad. It's, like, unbelievably bad. Wait. Do you so so okay. So do you think Donald Trump is a traveler or the writer is a traveler? I don't know. It could be the writer. So here's the description. Oh, here's the description of from the last president, which is written in 18/96. Right. The entire east side of New York City is in a state of uproar. Mobs of vast size organizing under the lead of anarchists and socialists and threatened to plunder and dispel the house of the rich who have wronged and oppressed them for so many years. It's weird. So during 2017, this book became noticed, and people started thinking all these time traveling things, but it really reminds me more of 2020 when people were on both sides. Like, if Trump won, everybody was gonna say he manipulated the election, and there was gonna be pea and New York City police were preparing for, like, riots. Right. And, of course, Trump lost, and so the reverse happened, which is that, you you know, he said there was a whole corrupt election process, and there was all these protests. Right. There was January 6th. And, by the way, the election was on November 3rd in 2020, just like it was in 18 96 or 1900, whatever the the novel was about. And, so there's all these weird coincidences. Now do I actually believe there's oh, there's one more thing. It's an interesting thing. So we all know Tesla, the company, but, of course, many people have forgotten that Nikola Tesla was a real person. He was a a a competitor to Thomas Edison, the details of which are not they are important historically, but I won't mention them now. But he was this genius, this electricity genius. And when he died, the FBI he died in, like, I think, 1943. Yep. When he died, the FBI wanted to make sure that none of his papers were described any weapons because, for instance, Tesla was trying to get funding. He said he made this new weapon called the death ray that could kill anybody with, like, a wave. So the FBI wanted to do some due diligence. Was this true or not? So they asked a professor at MIT named John g Trump to investigate, and John Trump took all of Tesla's papers and went through them and said, oh, no. There's nothing here to look at. But do we real what does this have to do with Donald Trump? Well, John Trump actually is Donald Trump's uncle. And so there's another connection here that maybe, you know, John Trump, you know, worked with Tesla to come up with some weird technology that now Donald Trump is aware of. But I'm just saying I don't believe in any of these things, but there's just, like, all these weird conspiracy theories floating around. So so you think you think Donald Trump actually has, death rate in his process? Or maybe he's maybe John Trump actually created the time machine that that that Barron Trump went back. Because yeah. That that's a that's a theory too. Isn't Barron, like, his middle name or something like that? I could be wrong. Or that's his son's name. Yeah. It's his son's name. So so in the Barron Trump series and by the way, there's a picture of Barron Trump on the cover of this 18/90 novel, and it does look a little bit like the Barron Trump if you look at the cover. So I encourage people to to Google Ingersoll Lockwood and the Barron Trump novels, and it's just funny. Like, I find this to be funny more than anything. I do think the book The Last President that Ingersoll Lockwood wrote is a little bit more like Donald Trump, or it's just weird coincidence that he wrote that book and the Barron Trump series. I will state that he the Barron Trump, the way he writes it is spelled b a r o n because he's actually a Barron. And the this Barron Trump, Donald Trump's son is b a r r o n. And and, also, in the Barron Trump series, someone named Don gives Barron Trump advice on where he should journey to, but that was not a real name. It was like how it was like a Spanish person, so it's how Don is mister in Spanish. So So it's crazy how maybe Barron Trump is actually the the time traveler. And then, you know, he he he's forced he saw all this happen, and then he went back and write read it. And then, you know, maybe there's another theory that, you know, maybe all this could have happened. But, you know, let's call them a time traveler police that actually stopped all this from happening because it was so close of happening. Right? Like and then somehow, you know, it just didn't happen. Yeah. And what what TV shows have time traveler police? There's, like, Quantum Leap. Yes. That's kind of a time traveler police. Right? Is it called the messenger? Or Oh, and wait. There's no one with Bruce Willis? Looper. It's called Looper? Oh, no. Yeah. There was Looper, and I get that confused with Jumper. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Looper is the one with, Bruce Willis and, who is the guy name? Who is, like, the young Yeah. I can't remember. Oh, Joseph Gordon Levitt. Oh, yeah. I like him. Joseph Gordon Levitt. Yeah. He's great. Yep. I think there's a couple others too, but, and, obviously, Terminator is is a little bit under that. Terminator, is it is it police, though? Terminator, it's more like Terminator is like the evil robot police that go back to to get the person who who leads the rebellion. Right. Oh, great. But it's not like the correct Yeah. It's not it's not the correct problems in the space time continuum. Well, maybe maybe maybe it's not police. Maybe it's, like, 2 arrival. Right? Just like Terminator. He's going back and trying to create all this new timeline, and this the other person trying to go back and and, trying to prevent that happen. It's just like killing Hitler baby. You know? Baby Hitler. Killing baby Hitler. I will tell you, and then we'll stop this topic. But the best Star Trek episode ever of the original, series is do do you know the one? I I do I'm not a Star Trek fan. I'm all through and through Star Wars fan. I am through and through Star Wars as well, but City on the Edge of Forever was a beautiful, beautiful Star Wars episode from the Star Trek. Been a Star Trek episode from the original, like, 1968 series where, they do something that destroys the Earth in the future, and so the whole episode is about correcting what doctor McCoy accidentally did back in depression era New York. Beautiful episode. Such a beautiful episode. Dean Einstein has, like, this, time travel, theory is that, like, anything that change, you know, if someone go back and change a a timeline or the past, eventually, the time will fix itself. But I can't remember what is it called. I I don't know. I thought I will have to ask professor Brian Keating. Doctor Brian Keating, almost winner of Nobel Prize. We'll have to ask him about this. But I think in Einstein's theory, he basically theorized that it is possible to travel oh, I forgot what Brian said. One direction or the other, but not both. You can't Right. I forgot which direction, though, you could travel. In the I think to the future, not to the to the past, I think. Oh, yeah. Not to the past. I think. In any case, this is just a side note. If you wanna have a lot of fun, an afternoon of fun for the family, for everyone, look up Ingersoll Lockwood and the adventures of Barron Trump written in 18/89 and also the book, The Last President, written in 18/96 that describes very accurately, including a a mob riding at Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue. Go check it out. Was Ingersoll Lockwood talking to a time traveler or not? Yeah. We should one day, we should have some, like, like, a prophet come on to talk about all the all the time that Yeah. Someone has prophesied someone. You know who who would be an expert on this is our old friend, Jesse Michaels. We should get him back on. Oh. And, you know, probably he's probably an expert on this. I thought he's only, only expert on GFOs. Yeah. You don't think if okay. We can let's get Robert f Kennedy junior back on. And you're he's probably an expert. Yeah. So he's probably Tom Tavarazzo. Anyway, back to decisions making. Alright. Decision making. So it's very interesting because, again, I think there's a lot of bad things you could do with decision making, and think the the key with decision making is what what are the goals of decision making? Is, a, you wanna take actions that make your life better, and, b, you don't wanna waste too much time doing it, or you could spend all all your time trying to decide things. Let me ask you this. If, you know, sometimes you have to decide between which is less severe or less worse, will will you consider those, decision making as well? Absolutely. I mean, there's all kinds of decision making. There's long term decision making, like, should I take this job or this job? Should I go out with this person or this person? Should I have a baby or not have a baby? Should I buy a house or not buy a house? Like, there's these very long term decisions that one can make, and then there's everyday decisions that that you have to make on a daily basis. Like, oh, what should I wear today? What should I eat today? What should I do today? It's a free day. Like, so so there's very short term decision making. And and by the way, those whether whether you make good decisions or bad decisions on even very, very short term decisions, those the good and the bad add up, and they compound. So you don't wanna make consistently bad short term decisions or else, like, oh, I'll just eat another cupcake today because eventually, you weigh £500. Right. So so short term decisions could have just as much effect as long term decisions, particularly since you have to make them every day. If you if you don't have a process for short term decisions, your life could turn out very bad. And there's also there's kind of like creative decisions, like oh you have to be creative about something. How do you be creative? And you would think that well creativity isn't about having a system for decision making, that's the whole point of creativity is to be, like, thinking out of the box and and, like, going crazy a little bit and coming up with stuff you never came up with before. But there's actually a model and methodology you could use for creativity as well. And so I look at big decisions that I've made in my life and particularly bad ones, and, fortunately, I've learned a lot from them. So Sorry. Can I can I ask you what's your worst decision to ever make Well if you had to choose 1? Yeah. I think I mean, it's hard to say what's the worst because I don't have a way of measuring them. Right. Maybe you measure them by how unhappy you were later, or maybe you measure them by how much you learned later, or maybe you measure them by how much money you made. But what about those that you keep thinking about? You think you keep going back and, like, oh, maybe I should have, like Yeah. I definitely made bad financial decisions several times in my life that made me to go broke not once, but more than once, and I regret them. Like, a lot of people will say and I understand why they say I'm like, I have no regrets because I wanna be the person I am today. I wouldn't wanna change my life now for what my life was then, and I agree with that too. But I do wish I had made smarter decisions about money and and that my life still turned out the way it is now even if I made, you know, good decisions instead of bad decisions about money. So I do have some regrets. Maybe it wouldn't be possible to live the life I have now if I had only made good decisions about money earlier, And, you know, but also you you know, I've made certain decisions about, you know, partners, spouses, friends, all sorts of things that I regret later. And and again but again, though, full circle, there's obviously it's hard to have regrets, and this is actually this is actually a very important concept for short term decision making. Like, if you're thinking too much about something you regret regret from the past and so or something you're worried about in the future, even a decision about what to think about is a bad decision. So, like, if I'm think if I'm choosing to think about something I regret and I'm just wallowing in it or something I'm worried about it and I'm just, like, up at night thinking about it, I could be doing something better with my thoughts and better with my time. So one one good methodology I use when I'm deciding even when I notice myself thinking about a regret too much or a worry too much is am I living in the here and now? Because the regret, you're sort of time traveling to the past, and you're putting yourself in the past and imagining what if I you had made a different decision. And a worry, you're sort of time traveling to the future, which you can't possibly predict unless you're Barron Trump, and and you're you're you're thinking too much about decisions that haven't happened yet that put you in some futuristic situation that you're worried about. And so, yeah, it's good to avoid some of the worries, and it's good to learn from your regrets and things that you did poorly in the past, but you don't wanna spend too much time time traveling to the past or time traveling to the future, again, unless you're a time traveler policeman like Barron Trump. So so that that's one good model of how to think. Another model for short term that's very important to me, and I wrote about this in the book, choose yourself, but when I had been on my worst moments when broke, I really as many listeners know, I really decided, okay. I can't change what happened, but I need to move forward, and I can't worry too much about the future. Like, at the time, I was really in a state of nonstop panic and regret, regret over the financial decisions that made me broke. And this was not just in 2000, but also in 2008, 2,009, other other times in my life, 2,004. Anyway, there was many times. And, I really decided, okay. I just today, the only thing I have control over is not what I already did and not what's gonna happen in the future, but can I make decisions that today improve myself physically, you know, whether it's improving my diet, improving my sleep, improving my exercise? Can I make decisions that improve myself emotionally, so improves the relationships I have? And that means, like, am I really cultivating this concept of you're the average of the 5 people you spend your time with, and are you doing stuff to nurture those 5 relationships and and and on and on? Am I doing making decisions in the short term to help myself mentally or creatively? And so that came to this, you know, I would write down 10 ideas a day and and so on. And am I doing making decisions that improve me spiritually? And that doesn't mean going to some church or synagogue or whatever, but am I getting used to the concept of surrendering to things that are outside my control? And so to some extent, that's a notion of faith, not in, let's say, the, you know, a mythical being, although it could be that, but also faith in myself. Like, if I do my best, do I have faith that the best things will turn out will will everything will turn out okay? Or if they don't, I did the best I could do anyway, and that's all I you know, that's kind of a spiritual way of looking a secular spiritual way of looking at daily situations. Now I remember one time, by the way, it's not so bad to have faith in a religion because it also helps you avoid worry. I remember one time, this was in 2000 early 2004, I was running my fund of hedge funds, or maybe it was 2,005 or I forget what year now. But I was running with my fund of hedge funds, and something happened that was gonna make this spiral out of control, and I would go out of business. And so I remember I bought all these books about the philosophy of Star Wars. You know, I watched all the movies over. I bought these books about the force, basically, you know, analyzing the philosophy of the force, and I totally devoted myself to surrendering to the force. And I actually think it is connected that my business did work out because having faith in something and surrendering to to something that was larger than myself, I don't think the force necessarily came in and saved my business, but I think it allowed me to not worry or regret so much, and it gave me faith that I was gonna try my best and and make the best decisions because it was gonna be, you know, natural, and I was I was trusting basically my personal efforts rather than trying to control the universe around me. I was trusting that the universe will respond accordingly if I did my best. Do you think it's could be some sort of bias? It's like, hey. I'm just gonna I'm just gonna let go of everything and just move forward. Like, I just trust this decision. Yeah. Because you might be biased. For instance, there's all sorts of biases that affect your decision makings. Right. Like, for instance, if I think I'm gonna fail, then I'm only gonna notice stories of people that failed. Right. And I would kind of attach myself too much to those stories, and I would start making decisions that reminded me of those stories, almost like self sabotaging myself so I would end up like those stories as well. That could happen in relationships as well. You, like, you want your relationship to succeed, but you start noticing all the relationships that are failing, and you start thinking, oh, that's just like me, and you start making decisions that mirror you you basically mirror what you're looking at. Like, your like, your brain has these mirror neurons. So if I look at let's say I've never climbed a ladder before, but I looked at but I watched someone climbing a ladder, my mirror my mirror neurons will will trigger, and I'll we'll we'll kind of learn by just looking at I'll learn how to climb a ladder myself. And so if all I'm looking at and all I'm noticing are you know, this cognitive bias is called the Toyota effect. Like, once you buy a Toyota, you notice all the other Toyotas on the road. You never know you never you never you never said to yourself, boy. I can't believe how many Toyotas there are. But after you buy a Toyota or a Tesla like, Jay, I bet you noticed all the Teslas on the road right now since you bought a Tesla. I'm not on the Spectro anymore. Right. So if you think you're in a bad job or bad relationship or you're going broke, you'll start to notice all the other stories that you see in your life or in the news or whatever that are like what you imagine yourself to be, and you'll start you only have those as examples, so you start to make it's almost like you won't be able to stop yourself like a magnet from making decisions related to these stories you're viewing. And, so so that's why it's very important to have this sense of surrender. Mhmm. And and, again, you have to be in good physical health, good emotional health, good creative health, good spiritual health to be able to do this, but you detach yourself from these bad stories. You just surrender, so you don't assume that any story that you're gonna or you could start looking at stories of success. Like, you could surrender, and you could say, I'm gonna do my best, and that's gonna be enough to to make me successful, and I'll trust that because I'm everything else is rolling smoothly, like my physical health, creative health, whatever, I'll trust that good things will happen. And so you start attaching yourself and noticing good stories. And I'm gonna talk a little bit more about the decision making of creativity in a bit, but go ahead, Jay. So what about the phrase like f f? Is that considered surrendering yourself? A a little bit. It depends it depends a little bit. Like, let's say you're like, oh, I can't pay my mortgage this month, so I'm gonna take all of my savings, and I'm gonna put it on I'm gonna go to Las Vegas, and I'm gonna put it on black at the roulette table. You know? Screw it. Like, I'm I'm screw it. Just do it, as Richard Branson would say. Yeah. Like, you have to be able to model risks also, and and you have to be able to understand the consequences of risks. Like, would you rather not make your mortgage and still have $3,000 in the bank, or would you take the risk that you're gonna have $0 in the bank and not make your mortgage? Like, so what are the consequences of that, And are there other choices you could have? Like, could you just stop paying your mortgage for instance? What would happen? Well, maybe it would take, 90 days to evict you. And during that time, you could have time to either find another place to live, or you could have time to make enough money to to make a new deal with the banks so they don't evict you, or you could have time to, you know, raise or borrow or make the money to pay your mortgage. So you have to understand all the risks of every decision you do. Like, let's say, again, I was gonna put all my money in one investment. Okay. I know that that investment decision might be good. Let let let's say I have a good investment decision making process, which I'll talk about my personal decision making process in a little bit. But let's say I have a good investment decision making process, a stock still could go up or down in the short term. Right. We don't know. So we know this. We also know the stock market could crash, and then the stock I invested in could go down. We know this. I also know that there are things I don't know. I don't know if there's fraud, for instance, in the business. So there are things I don't know, and there also just be some weird thing. Like, I don't know if a 9:11's gonna happen. Like, I I was I was a 100 like, the day before 9:11 is a good example. I was a day trader then. The market had just fallen something like 4 or 5 days in a row, and I had basically one of the first AI based trading systems software that I wrote to trade the markets, and it signaled. This is a huge, enormous buy. So I was, like, a 150% invested in the market on the morning of 9:11. Of course, nobody would have guessed a terrorist attack was gonna occur 3 blocks away from my house at the time, and so that was as Donald as Donald Rumsfeld once put it, that's an unknown unknown. Like, I didn't I had no clue that was gonna happen, and my system, of course, didn't know that that was gonna happen. And so that's a risk I should've, you know, contemplated, which I didn't back then. And and this was when I was first learning trading, and and it was a very excruciating process to say the the least. But I just wanna emphasize again, these short term decisions, like, very, very important on a daily basis. Like, I even ask myself at the end of each day, and I tell my kids to do this, you know, did you make decisions that improved yourself 1% physically, emotionally, creatively, spiritually, and that will compound. And, you know, other, you know, short term models for decision making, there's something called choice overload. So let's say and Steve Jobs is very famous for this. Like, he wore I think he wore jeans and, like, a black turtleneck every day, so something like that. So he didn't wanna have to decide. I mean, he's a very smart guy. He could have decided every day, oh, I'm gonna wear a different outfit. He's certainly smart enough to figure out what outfit to wear and to vary it up a little bit. He decided, I'm not gonna use a single spare thought on things I don't have to. Every thought you could think of every thought as requiring some energy, and you start off the day with a lot of energy, and by the end of the day, you don't have any energy left. You've you've done your 60,000 thoughts. They people estimate they're you think 60,000 thoughts a day. I don't know if that's how they come up with that number, but he didn't wanna waste any of those thoughts. Mark Zuckerberg says something similar about his clothes, or you could just decide. You don't have to be so obsessive about it. You could just decide that if I have two choices that are roughly similar, it doesn't really matter what choice. So if I'm off in the store, I'm trying to decide whether to buy Kellogg's cornflakes or Quaker Oats cornflakes, well, they're basically the same. So don't try to make a decision. Just pick 1 or make a rule. I'm always gonna pick Kellogg's Corn Flakes. What reason? No reason because it just doesn't matter. So Steve Jobs made a rule. I'm always gonna wear this. So it it it simplified how he bought outfits, what outfits to wear, what outfits to clean, you know, and so on, like it simplified that whole process in his life. Or if someone eats the same meal, again, simplifies the whole process. I'm not saying you should do this, but I'm saying what things in your life do you put too much time thinking about? And Right. For someone like Steve Jobs, the clothes he wore, we don't know what other short term decisions he simplified, but try to simplify. If you if you're driving to work, oh, do you decide between taking the highway or taking these other roads even though they both take the same amount of time most of the time, or you're trying to say what lane to get into on the highway, it doesn't really matter. Don't decide. Just pick a lane and stick with it. And you might not be always happiest with Kellogg's cornflakes as opposed to Captain Crunch cereal, but in the long run, you you would have saved so much time and energy making having a process for making a simple decision that you'll benefit in other ways. So you won't you won't always make the optimal decision, but you'll make on average pretty good decisions using a very simple rule based technique to avoid what's called choice overload. Yeah. That's what I did, for my meals. Like, every day my breakfast is the same, and, same with breakfast, lunch, and dinner. And then if I go out, I I tell myself if I go out just by myself, I only go to Chick Fil A. Yeah. That that's a good or or, like, if you for me, if it's not easy for me to, you know, cook a meal, which is never easy for me, unless there's a meal already lying around, the house, I'll use Uber Eats, and I always order from the same place on Uber Eats. Yeah. Or if I'm trying to decide on Uber, you know, you already have a rule in place whether you're gonna do Uber you know, are you gonna choose UberXL all the time? Are you gonna choose the cheapest one all the time? Are you gonna choose the fastest one? These are simple rules that you don't have to think or decide because that adds up. Imagine if everything of your 60,000 thoughts, let's say 20,000 of those thoughts took an extra 3 seconds to decide. Well, that's 60,000 extra seconds you used. I I'm making these numbers up because that seems too high. But, even if every thought cost you an extra half a second, alright, it's just too much time. So so as much as possible, if you could simplify or or for instance, you can use the the the choose yourself model of the physical, emotional, creative, spiritual. Like, if you're deciding what to do next during the day, does it fall under one of those 4 categories? If not, then forget it. Like, if you're about to decide making to watch TikTok for an hour, that might not conform to the choose yourself model, even though it might be fun, so you wouldn't do it. But now, like I say let's say I'm gonna watch a YouTube video, and I say, okay. I'm gonna watch a YouTube video, but it's gonna be educational or it's gonna help me in some way, then that might fit into the mental, or if it's gonna make me feel better, it might fit into the emotional or spiritual. I I don't know. So you could use some model of how you wanna live your life. Like, let's say I'm gonna make a phone call to a friend. Well, is this one of the 5 people I wanna surround myself with? You know, you're again, you're the average of the 5 people you surround yourself with, or you're the average of the 25 people your 5 people surround themselves with. Right. And so you could call one of those people and improve your relationship with that person, or you could call someone you wanna have an argument with, and you could call them and have an argument. That might not improve you emotionally, and it might be a source of misery for you in life. You know, so so these are all again, again, we're gonna talk about long term, and we're I think there's 3 types of decision making. There's short term slash short term energetic ones, like, where you you have this physical, emotional, mental, spiritual framework of making most decisions during your day, and for other things you can use a bunch of simple rules like, okay, I'm not gonna wallow in regrets, I'm not gonna wallow in worries, am I living in the here and now, am I avoiding choice overload. One thing I I wanna say also, if if I'm saying you know, a lot of times people call me and say, hey. Do you wanna do x, y, or z? Do you wanna speak at this conference? Do you wanna go on this podcast? Do you wanna blah blah blah? I like the Derek Sivers model. If it's not a hell yeah, then say no. And so sometimes even after I say yes, if I realize later, oh, that wasn't a hell yeah, I'll say no. And it's very important. If I find myself wondering later, like, why did I agree to that? Just because I said yes earlier, I'm not gonna necessarily just do it. Just because I said yes earlier, I'll still say no, and, you know, you have to nurture yourself and take care of yourself. And you do that long enough, and you discipline yourself long enough to to be aware when it's not a hell yeah. Eventually, you stop saying yes. I say yes now to maybe I mean, I say no now to maybe 99% of the things I used to say yes to. So when I say yes to something now, I pretty much say hell yeah. But that takes practice. Like, you can't just do that overnight. That's like a muscle that you have to practice. So I would say that's the entirety of my short term decision making. Oh, one more thing, which is when I'm having conversation with someone, let's say I'm at a meeting or a party or whatever, before I say something, I usually try to think, is this more of a question or more of a me stating my opinion? And I would rather make decisions about saying questions than opinions. So, again, that's a very short term type of decision making technique. What do you mean by questions or or or Let's say I'm at a party and everyone's arguing about, I don't know, gun control. And I and I don't wanna enter the conversation, and I feel like I wanna say, well, you know, oh, we need guns to protect ourselves. Or if I'm if I feel like I'm saying, oh, you know, guns kill people, so if you were guns, let fewer people killed. Rather than stating an opinion, I'd rather say, hey. What's a country that eliminated guns, and then what were the statistics afterwards? So better to ask a question than to give an opinion. You know what? Because no one really gives a s**t about my opinions anyway. Sorry for the language. But I wanna better for me to learn more anyway. And then there's long term. Like, what sort of long term decisions do we have to make? Do you make, Jay? Financial. Long term financial. And then, like, buying cars or not buying cars. Where to live or or going back to Malaysia or stay here or, you know What? Are you thinking of going back to Malaysia? No. No. Like, or or or like, you know, should I start a studio? Or should I not build a studio? Or should I not, where do I want to live and stuff like that? Those are the long term, decisions. But let me ask you this, though. Yeah. Is voting for presidential elections or any elections considered long term or short term? That's a good question. I would say it's not short term because it's not it's not short term in the sense this is what I have to deal with every day. I don't have to vote for president every day. So it's sort of long term, like and you could argue it's long term because it's like, oh, what kind of political system do I wanna live in for the next 4 years? And voting is an interesting one because I, on purpose, have never voted in a presidential election in my entire life, and there's a lot of reasons. And before the 2020, election, I had written why I wasn't going to vote, and somebody invited me to participate in the debate. I wrote about this. Maybe we could put the URL, in the show links because I wrote about how this about this debate and how the person I was debating or the people I were debating did not they didn't really debate properly, meaning they just instead decided to use anecdotes or insult me personally or whatever. And, you know, again, I I'd rather get facts than opinions, and I'd rather, understand what all the facts are. But just to say, like, I have a rule, which is that if something prevents me from being neutral politically for the purposes of this podcast, then I won't do it. So going into the 2020 election, I had liberals, conservatives, libertarians, people of all political stripes on this podcast. Like, Tim Ryan was running for president in the Democratic primary. He's very liberal, but, you know, on the flip side, we've had on conservative campaign managers. We had on Barack Obama's speechwriter. We had on RFK Junior, although we didn't release that till recently. We had on Andrew Yang. I've had on Ron Paul, like, all angles of the political spectrum because it helps me, which I hope helps the listeners make a more informed decision. And so I feel like if I vote, that'll cognitively bias me towards one side or the other. It's like if you make a bet, you it's hard to be neutral after you've placed a bet. But, but Mehdi, argued otherwise. Right? Who who argued otherwise? Mehdi has what's what's his name? Oh, right. Yeah. Mehdi Haas, isn't he he has the MSNBC show. He's been on the Yep. Podcast. Yeah. And he's gonna come on again. I'm really looking forward to it. And, yeah, he said it's impossible for someone to be neutral. And, you know, he he wrote a great book, Win Every Argument, The Art of Debating, Persuading, and Public Speaking. Great book. Highly recommend it. Listen to my podcast with him, Mehdi Hasan, really nice guy, and, yeah, he argues that I can't possibly neutral be neutral. I don't know if that's true because I do think creativity plays more of a role in our lives than who the president of the United States is. Like, you know, and this is something I'll I'll ask Mehdi because I wanna know. Like, what has changed politically? You know, for instance, all the immigration rules, from what I understand, have stayed the same between Biden and Trump. I don't know. I don't wanna get into a political thing because I'm not just not that interested in it right now, but if if many came back on me, we could discuss this, and I have a bunch of questions for him to understand to try and understand what has changed that's affected our lives. You know, now you could argue Roe versus Wade has made things change a lot, but that was already you know, the court was already in place before Biden, but that's something that does affect people's lives is who's on the Supreme Court. You know? So there was a recent rulings on affirmative action, on reversing Roe versus Wade, and that's definitely probably going to affect people's lives. But it's something that, you know, I'm happy to talk about in another podcast. Right. But so yeah. So maybe voting is an important decision, but I think I can make better decisions with my political time for me personally by using the podcast as a platform for all sorts of opinions and and views that I so I could ask questions and help myself and other people learn. Most people vote without knowing anything, so better to vote with some knowledge, and I think this podcast is a platform for for knowledge and better for me to be unbiased, for me personally. So I'm not saying everyone shouldn't vote. I'm just saying for me personally. But, like, I would say for long term decisions, there's jobs, there's relationships, there's education, there's things like, should you start a business, and if so, what kind of business should you start? There's should you have a baby or not? There's, you know, all sorts of things like that, and I do wanna say, you know, people have all sorts of models, like, write down the pros, write down the cons, which list is bigger. But I would say there are situations where you can't really make a good or bad decision. For instance, whether or not you should have a baby, it's hard to know in advance whether you're making a good or bad decision. Right. Maybe you say to yourself, if it's not a hell yeah, then no. That would probably be a good framework for having a baby. But other than that, I don't think, you know, you could say, well, if I'm too if I don't have enough money, I can't have a baby, or if I don't live in a certain area, or if I'm not a certain age, or don't haven't achieved a certain area, a goal in my life, I can't have a baby. I think all of those are BS. Like, you can't use any of those to to in other words, in some cases, okay to just make any decision and not worry about it too much if you actually wanna have a baby. Don't have a baby if you don't wanna have a baby. That's the one thing. Yeah. Because, like, a lot of people wants to have a baby. It's all their view about baby have changed. Yeah. And and right. And, you know, but something like education let's look at education for a second. So there's there's education in the traditional route, like, what college should I go to, and should I even go to college or not? Or there's an education about how can I best I wanna learn something? How can I best learn? So that's 2 different types of education. One's about actually learning. The other is kind of a lifestyle choice. And I would say with decisions like that, and I talked to Annie Duke about this in our podcast, like, several years ago, you sort of look at what's important to you, like, it could be how much money you're gonna make, how much you're gonna learn, and quality of life. And you say, well, you you kind of just add it up. Well, what's the expected value? If I decide to go to Harvard as opposed to community college as opposed to no college, what's the odds that I'm gonna make more money? What's the odds that I'm gonna have higher quality of life? What's the odds that, you know, I'm gonna be a happier person? And we don't really know the answer, so you just have to figure it out, but you could but I would research it, like, oh, it turns out people from Harvard make on average 70,000 a year, and people who go to community college make on average 60,000 a year, but have zero debt whereas someone from Harvard might have $400,000 in debt. And so you could do research on the things that are important to you and make decisions that way. And then people could have arguments with you. Oh, no. You're wrong about this. Are you wrong about that? But if you do enough research, it's not gonna help you make a decision, but you'll at least you'll be equipped with more facts to to maybe make a decision. But, again, it's one of those areas, like, having a baby where, you know, it's gonna end up how it's gonna end up, and better to learn how to be happy than to regret any past decision, you know, whether you went to Harvard or vocational school or don't even have a high school degree, and I know many smart people, people who have been on this podcast, who don't even have a high school degree and have become very successful, and of course, we've had many Harvard grads or whatever who have come on the podcast as well. So, but I would say, like, if you're trying to learn something new, I wrote about a framework where I if I wanted to learn how to play the guitar, for instance, I asked myself, okay. What are the micro skills I need to learn? Well, I need to learn about music and music theory. Maybe I need to know how to read music. I need to learn how to actually make a sound from a guitar, and so these are micro skills I would need to learn. Maybe I could look up some of that on YouTube or whatever. And then very important for me is who's my plus, who's my minus, who's my equals? So plus is who's gonna be your teacher or coach, minus who are you going to teach because if you can't explain something simply, then you don't truly understand it, and who are gonna be my equals? Like, who's learning how to play the guitar at the same time as me that we could chain trade notes and study together and learn together and so on? And then with the coach, you sort of study what you need to know, The coach you you you do something, like you play a song, and the coach tells you what you did, you were wrong, and then you go back to the drawing board. You you study, you practice, you you do, and then you get some feedback and then repeat. And this is, you know, this is the way I learned. So microskills and then plus minus equals and then study, do feedback, repeat. And it's very important to do these things. You know, I will say for some things, though, you wanna have a process, like investing. If I am going to invest in something, and it might be a stock or it might be a private investment or it might be a house or it might be a car, or whatever. Here's my rule based model that I built up over many, many years of making bad decisions, particularly with investments. I basically asked myself, is someone smarter than me in this investment at the same basically, in the same way that I'm in it? So did Warren Buffett buy this stock at roughly the same price I wanna buy this stock? And then I don't need to then I don't need to wonder anymore. Like, oh, Warren Buffett put 1% of his portfolio in, let's say, you know, IBM stock. So I'll put 1% of my portfolio in IBM stock, knowing, of course, that Warren Buffett's in a different financial situation than me, so I take that into account. But I always say to myself, I'm never gonna argue with Warren Buffett. Like, Warren, why did you buy IBM? Are you an idiot or something? Like, he's smarter than me as an investor, so I like people smarter than me to do something. So another thing is if I am buying a house, I'll look at well, okay. What town should I pick? Well, I can't really I don't really know enough to to predict that, you know, suburban Denver is the right place to buy a home because the real estate market's gonna explode there in the next 10 years, or the middle of Kansas City or Cincinnati or Atlanta or Miami or whatever. But I'll look. Okay. Where are smart investors buying houses? And, you know, I'll try to figure out what does it mean to be a smart investor in a house, and then I'll look. Like, oh, is BlackRock buying a bunch of houses in suburban Atlanta? Oh, yeah. They are. So that might be an interesting place to to buy a house. That would be the beginnings of my research. This works better with stocks or private investments, but it could be used for other things as well. Is that how you buy, your current house? Yeah. So with my current place by the way, I've always been against owning a home. I still might not have changed my opinion on that, but I do own a home. And what I did was I looked at all the change of address data coming out of New York City. So New York City, there is a net outflow of people the past 3 or 4 years, and I looked at what cities they were moving to. And and I also talked to we even had on the podcast a guy from a home do a home moving business, a house moving business, and where was everybody moving to. And that gave me an idea of what cities to look at. And then I found, you know, I looked at houses that seem to be undervalued given the size of the house or where or the location or the size of the property, and I had to ask why is it undervalued, And and then I made a decision based on that. So I looked at several cities. I nowed in on Atlanta and outside of Atlanta, and found a place I thought was sufficiently undervalued. And so why is something undervalued? Like, isn't that a bad sign? Well, no. Maybe somebody needs to move because they just got a divorce, or maybe they owe money to the IRS, so they're paying a debt, or maybe, you know, they had a business that just went out of business, or or maybe they they have a a parent that's sick, and so they need to move to where the parent is. So there's reasons why some place might be undervalued, and and the person might be eager to sell. Other than that, the house might be bad. So I think there's something called the 5 d's, disease, debt, divorce, death, maybe something else. So Jeff. Well, what do you call models, like, for big decisions like this Right. People have done a lot of work into coming up with models that are easy to remember, like the 5 d's. Or, like, if I'm writing we've had a podcast about, like, copywriting, that there's the the 5 or 6 u's, urgency, uniqueness, ultra specific, user friendly, blah blah blah, that are models for doing writing good copy. Or, you know, what's a model for writing a good novel? Oh, the arc of the hero, and we've talked about that in podcasts before. So lots of types of decisions, there's really good models for already. Investing, there are many models, whether you're a value investor, a growth investor, an arbitrage investor. Value is a very, very simple one. Is someone smarter than me making this investment? And then I know at least that whatever amount of work I could do to determine if this is good or bad, someone's done more work than me and smarter work than me. And so that's a good way at least a starting point for me. It's often an endpoint for what kind of stocks or private businesses I should invest in. Another thing, like, relationships, I think that's, like, the baby decision. Like, oh, should I stay with this person or break up with this person? And I think there's no easy there's no decision model that really works other than looking at extremes. So I think of 2 things. I think of, is there some line that this person has crossed over? Like and what is that line? So I decide in advance what those lines are. Like, has someone physically beaten me up? What just happened in the past? What? I ended up they ended that relationship. Or is is someone verbally abusive to me? Or is someone being very secretive or lying to me? Like Someone beat you up? Well, let's just say someone physically abused me, and I I had ultimately and I stuck you stick with those relationships because you don't know how to decide. Like, now with experience, I know that this is, like, a really bad thing and nothing would tolerate staying with that person, but it's hard when you're in the the moment to end it. So you have a line, and that's a good reason to break up. And then the other extreme, I always imagine I'm writing the acknowledgments of a book. And if I'm not willing to put someone if someone's my spouse and I'm not willing to or or or partner in some way, and I'm not willing willing to put them in the acknowledgments of my book, then that's usually a bad sign. And if I put them in the acknowledgments of the book, what would I say? So I've I study people's acknowledgments. Like, everybody who's ever been on this podcast, I've read all of the acknowledgments they've written in their books. So I'm I know how people thank their spouses and thank their partners and thank their friends, and and I think, would I say this about my friends and my partners and so on? And that helps me make decisions. It's like I picture, what would I say about this person? I might not even have an acknowledgment, but I picture if I did have an acknowledgment, what would I say about this person in my acknowledgments? And if it's generally a lot of positive stuff, then, oh, okay. This is a good person to have in my life. 2 very important models I wanna talk about are kind of life goals, what are good goals versus bad goals, if you could say such a thing, and also, jobs. So let's talk about jobs first, and this is very much related to the choose yourself mentality that I've tried to develop for myself sometimes successfully, sometimes not. Let's say you're trying to decide whether you should stay at a job or not. Here's an important model that I use, which is have to versus want to. So here's what you should do. Every day for the next 2 weeks, 3 weeks, maybe 4 weeks, at the end of the day, write down what percentage of activities that I do at the job that I had to do versus wanted to do. And if it's both, obviously, then you want wanted to do takes precedence. So if you wanted to do it and you had to do it, that's a good thing. Mhmm. So you put it under that under the wanted to do. And so let's say 60% of the things on Monday, you had to do and 40% you actually wanted to do. And write that down every day for 3 or 4 weeks. At the end, ask yourself, am I am I okay with this breakdown? Like, if 90% of the things I had to do, only 10% of the things I wanted to do, that doesn't sound very good. Well, then you ask, did it change over the 3 weeks? Like, let's say the 1st day was 90% versus 10% had to, want to, and by the end, it was 80 20. 80% had to, 20% wanted to. Well, that's a good trend, so maybe you stay at the job because it's trending over time towards things you wanna do, you know, that that you you're doing as part of the job. And that's an important thing to look at. So I very early on, I was working at HBO, and I got another job offer. And I kind of, without thinking about it, did this process. Like, the other job offer was almost double what I was making at HBO. So financially, everybody, like my parents, my friends, everybody was encouraging me to take the new job. But at HBO, I really wanted to do a TV show, and was I more likely to do a TV show or something creative at HBO or at the new job? And my oldland answer was, at HBO, I'd be more likely to do what I wanted to do, so I chose to stay at HBO. And and then that helped me negotiate a better salary and so on because I really wanted to stay there, but I still had room to negotiate. So that's a good model for whether you should pursue a job, stay at a job, continue at a job. You know, let's say your your trend the trend is bad. You're moving towards more things you had to do versus wanting to do. You Might not leave the job, but you could negotiate. Hey. I'd like to do this, this, and this. And Jay's gonna call me later and say, James, I really don't wanna do audio engineering anymore. Blah blah blah. But but in general, you can figure out this helps you figure out what you wanna negotiate. It's not just about money. And by the way, here's a good negotiating model. This was taught to me by doctor Larry Brilliant, his real name, who, eradicated we should get him on the podcast, but I don't know. I haven't spoken to him. He he was head of Google Charities for a while. He he helped eradicate smallpox in India in in the seventies. But, anyway, he he told me always have a bigger list than the person you're negotiating with. So it shouldn't be just about money. It should be about quality of life. It should be about had to versus want to. It should be about, you know, you could have health care benefits, vacation bedtime. Just make sure you have more things than the other person on your list of things to negotiate so you could give up the nickels for the dimes. Mhmm. And I've always thought that was a very good negotiating model. So that's, you know, again, for everything, whether it's jobs, relationship, education, starting a business. Okay. Let's talk about starting a business for a second. Is an idea a good a good idea or a bad idea? Should I start this business or not? So given the fact that you might have a full time job and so it's hard to start a business because of your lifestyle, that's a different sort of thing. But I like the Jim McKelvey model of starting a business, which is so I wrote about this in Skip the Line, 3 different models that you could use to start a business. The Jim McKelvey model, which he wrote about he's the founder of Square, and he wrote about it in his book, The Innovation Stack. There's the access economy model, and there's the humans versus data model, but I won't talk about that as much. Matt Ridley wrote about that in the evolution of everything. Matt Ridley is a great friend of the podcast, and it's been on several times. So the Jim McKelvey model for starting a business is, am can I do something is there an industry that doesn't service the needs of the bottom 1 third of society? So he determined, oh, mom and pop stores, like he ran a mom and pop business, they can't accept credit cards. They couldn't accept credit cards, so he started Square to service all the small businesses that weren't big enough to accept credit cards, and he made it possible for them to accept credit cards. So boom, great business, made 1,000,000,000 of dollars. The access economy is the model of there's 3 categories. There's people who who have a lot of something. There's people who want a lot of what other people have, and there's the intermediary, the software platform in the middle. So Uber is an example of this. Oh, there's a lot of people who have empty car seats during the day. There's other people who want to use empty car seats to get from one place to another, and Uber is the software in the middle that helps e that helps the 2 sites find each other, pay each other securely, deal with customer service, deal with, you know, reviews, and and all sorts of things. So that you know, Airbnb is in that model. Even newsletters are in that model. Oh, somebody might have a lot of knowledge about stocks. Another person might want some knowledge about stocks, and then a newsletter is kind of the access helps people access one side access the other people. So that's the access economy. And then the humans to data, oh, if something's done by humans, is there a way to automate this? And we're seeing this a lot with AI right now. Like, AI has unleashed this model, a new generation of this model, just like the Internet did before that. So just like crypto sometimes does and so on. So I guess what I'm trying to say with all of these long term models is there's no one set of rules, but with each thing you do, there's a model for doing it better. And I hope I described I described how I the model I use for different things, and some of that might make sense to people. Others might say, oh, I have there's other things, but that's my long term sets of decision making models. And then the final thing I wanna talk about is creativity models. But, Jade, did you have a question or anything? I'm gonna I'm gonna use all those model. Because, like, starting starting business is hard. Right? Like like like, I always want to start a a studio, but but you're right. Like, if I start a studio, is my studio is gonna serve another one third of of the populations? Or or what's the purpose of my studio? Is it just my need? Or is it just I want to do? It could be that you wanna do a higher percentage of of what you what you wanna do versus have to do, so you're fine starting a me too business. Like, oh, there's not other studios all over the place, but there's such high demand that I know I'll at least make a living, and I get to do what I wanna do all day long. Right. So, you know, whether or not you should start a business, you know, it depends what your your goals are. And, oh, I did wanna talk about goals. So it's great to have goals, and there's a saying, you know, it's the journey, not the destination that you should value, which I don't know if that's true or not. But I do wanna say that if you have a goal, make sure your goal is consistent with your happiness. So Right. Here's here's a mathematical formula to think about happiness. Happiness is expectations divided by reality. So let's say, you you have a weight loss goal. Let's say you're £500. I'm just making this up. Let's say you're £500, and you your goal is to weigh, you know, a £150. So happiness, you know, is ex expectations over reality. So so expectations, those are I'm not gonna be happy till I have a £150. That's my, you know, that's my goal. And reality is you're £500, and you're not doing anything to lose weight. Well, your happiness is gonna be very small. It's, like, it's 150 divided by 500 is almost, you know, like, 1 between 1 third and 1 fourth, so it's not very high. Whereas, let's say you have a financial goal, and let's say your financial goal is to make $1,000,000, and you actually have, you know, or or let let's let's say I don't know how to describe this. So essentially, make sure that your expectations are not out of whack with reality. Right. And you could you could still say your goal is to be £150, but today, my goal might be this is where the process is import it's not that the process or the journey is more important than the goal. They're equal. It's just that the goal and the journey are the same thing. So if your goal is to be a £150, then your happiness is determined not by whether or not you're a £150 versus the reality of 500, but just today, I, you know, did inter intermittent fasting. So I only ate, you know, a a plate of vegetables for lunch and then a plate of vegetables a few hours later, and boom. That that was my you know, chunk down your expectations so that they're so that they could be favorable compared to your reality, to so that you're as happy as possible while you're achieving your goal. So this is very important. Like, if if I wanna be a better chess player, I can't say, oh, my goal is to be the world champion because there's no process that will make me the world champion chess player. That's not an achievable goal for me. And, you know, so this way I could be happy and just enjoy the game even if I'm not the world champion because, you know, I know that I will work hard and seek to improve today, and I I have a set of things I do to improve. I could judge myself against that versus a final goal. Right. I could say, well, did I study my games that I played today? Did I study some classical games? Did I, you know, work on some puzzles that improve my calculation? Oh, I did all those things? Good. Now my expectations in reality are in line with each other. But isn't there, like, a saying that, like, always aim aim higher than where you you want it to be? Sure. So I can aim higher. By the way, I instead of aiming for a certain ring, I can aim to to play higher than that, but the process will stay the the same. If I focus on the process, I'll be happy with the goal. So if my goal is to to be you know, again, I can't be world champion. That's ridiculous. But I can maybe aim for slightly higher than my goal. You know, my real goal for myself right now is to achieve a higher rank than I achieved when I was 25 years old. It's a long time ago. It was 30 years ago. And, you know, that's achievable, but really, what does it take to achieve that? And did I do that today? Am I respecting the goal? And as long as you're respecting the goal and you do the right things, you don't you don't, you know, you you treat your goal with respect. You don't just, I don't play just 1 minute chess all day long, and then say, oh, I'm trying to get better because that wouldn't be respecting the goal. So my my my expectations won't be in line with my reality. But if I do the right kind of studying, I could expect, you know, high achievements, and then that's in line with reality. Is that, oh, if I the reality is if I do these things, I will achieve my goal. I don't know. That one didn't make as much sense, but let's go with it anyway. And then the final thing I wanna talk about is creativity. So everything we've talked about involves creativity. Like, Jay, let's take your example. Let's say you wanna start your own audio studio. Right. Okay. Well, other people have started an audio studio. What are you gonna do differently? Well, so, like, the one that I envisioned ideally is the combinations of a music studio, podcast studio, and a post production studio. So it's like a it's like a multi multi sort of like a multimedia studio. And then what I would do, I would link all the room up, and then I will have one room that large enough to have a live event. So people want to shoot something or we want to do, like, a live podcast or live show, they can do that and then I can link all the room together, and create, like, a multi room experience of recording and mixing. So I think that's a great idea. And what you did uses the, creativity technique that I call idea sex Right. Which is that you take 2 ideas and you combine them. Like, okay, you don't wanna just do a music studio, but but since you have all the equipment there, you could it could be a music studio and a podcast studio. And if you wanna throw in a third thing, you can you also have everything set up to do live events, like, so you get a big enough space that you could do live events. And the purpose of live events is to not only make money through ticketing, but also so people are exposed to your studio. Yes. I see. So this combination is very powerful creativity technique. Let me talk about, like, some ways, And I wrote I I wrote about this also in Skip the Line. I call it the secrets of idea calculus, which I talk about ideas subtraction, idea multiplication, idea division. But and I talk about idea sex. So idea sex is what you did there was, you know, merging 2 ideas into 1. Or let's take let's take, Harry Potter as an example. Let's say I wanna write I wanna write something let's say I really enjoyed Harry Potter, and I really enjoyed the TV show friends, and I wanna make a new TV show. Well, I could have a bunch of wid wizards after they graduate from some sort of wizarding school. I'm I'm not JK Rowling, so I can't use Hogwarts. But Right. So I have a bunch of wizards who graduated from wizarding school, and I put them in an expensive apartment in New York City. And while they're dealing with their daily lives of being wizards in New York City, they're also having relationship issues with their friends who live in the apartment or live in the apartment across the hall or whatever. So that's, you know, combining, you know, using idea sex to make a new TV show out of out of the components of 2 things that I love, Harry Potter and the TV show Friends. I actually hate the TV show Friends, but How did the how did SNL haven't done this already? I know. That would be a great idea. Yeah. So but I bet you that's how comedians do come up with ideas. I I know this because I've been a stand up comedian. Like, oh, let's take Amazon reviews and combine it with satire, and there's all sorts of things you could find in Amazon reviews that are just insane. But or or or look, Music does this all the time with sampling. Like, remember when the Fugees we've had Wyclef Jean on the podcast from the Fugees. Remember when the Fugees did a rap version of the song the disco song by the Bee Gees, Stayin' Alive? Right. That was such a that was automatically gonna be a bestseller. Like, Stayin' Alive was the top disco song of all time. A rap the Fugees was the top band at that time, 1996, 1997. Of course, a combination between the 2 was gonna be a number one hit. So and that's I would encourage you to listen to the song, we tryin' to stay alive. It was a great song. Or think about Stan Weston. He wanted to make a doll for boys, but the only dolls out there were, like, Barbie dolls. So he made GI Joe. It's combined military, like, all the boys like military stuff with Barbies, and you had GI Joe. So that's combination is a very powerful technique. Another one is what I call idea subtraction. Idea subtraction might be take something, a good idea. Like, let's say you wanna write a book and publish it, and now subtract something from the and but then you say to yourself, well, I can't do it. Like, it's 5 years before I write a book. I get an agent and find an editor and get a publishing house, and they have to publish it and so on. Well, let's subtract part of that process. Maybe you don't have to use a traditional publisher. Turns out self publishing, paperback, hardcover, audiobook, Kindle on Amazon, on average makes people more money anyway than going through a traditional publisher. So 50 Shades of Grey, which was a horribly written book, was originally a self published book and sold, you know, a 100,000,000 copies or whatever it was. So that I say horribly written book, but who am I to judge? Sold a 100,000,000 copies, more copies than I'll ever sell probably in my lifetime. So subtraction is often an effective way to get creative things done. Another thing is not subtraction, but substitution. So let's say I wanna I loved Harry Potter, but I wanna I wanna do I wanna write my write my own version, but I can't write about a little boy with glasses who is sort of abused by his family who then discovers he's a wizard. Or can I? Because I don't know if we ever talked about this before. You ever read The Books of Magic by Neil Gaiman? No. But I did I think I saw your post on Twitter. Yeah. So if you look at the cover of this comic book written in the early nineties by Neil Gaiman, who's a famous comic book writer and movie writer now, it looks exactly like Harry Potter, and the plot is exactly like Harry Potter. I don't know if JK Rowling read the books of magic, or maybe she read it and forgot it or heard about it, but it's the exact same concept as Harry Potter. So but okay. For that aside, because you can't do similar ideas over and over and over again, but that aside, let's just come up with some substitutions. What if Harry Potter's a girl instead of a boy? What if Harry Potter or or your what if your your wizard is an old man versus a young person? What are what are other substitutions? What if What if Harry Potter in space? Yeah. What if it's Harry Potter, yeah, on on Mars? Or what if Harry Potter is evil and Voldemort is good? Yeah. So I think there was, there was something like that snickety lemony snicket was sorta like that, or I don't know if that's a What about, like, the Harry Potter where he has to decide you know, he's a good wizard, but because he had cancer or whatever, he has to find some way to support the family, so he has to become sort of like a wizard drug dealer or something? Oh, yeah. Yeah. What if there's a wizard who has become a drug dealer to get because he's, you know, trying to raise money to get his mom cured from cancer or something like that? Yeah. Like, great. And that's like a little bit of combination, little bit of substitution. Or you could substitute or, let's say, adapt, with the time. So what if Harry Potter is not a wizard, but is the same story, someone who's being, you know, verbally or physically abused by their family, sort of a geeky looking kid, but someone comes into him and says, hey. You're a mutant. Like, you know, professor x comes and says you're a mutant. Or someone comes to him from some top secret organization and says, look. We genetically bred you to be a super scientist. Like, you we if you go to our special school, ScienceWarts, you'll be a super scientist of of phys the best physicist beyond Albert Einstein and everything. Whatever it is. Like, oh, we're gonna take you out of this bad situation that you're in because we realize you're the best secretly the best investor in the world, and we're gonna you're gonna study at our hedge fund and turn into the best investor in the world. So you kind of modify other things. Or I I don't know if you remember when I did the subway talk show. Yeah. So I took the format of a talk show, which is a late night comedian, does some stand up, and then sits behind a desk, has a musical act, and interviews celebrities. So I took the set the the format of a late night show, and I substituted, hey, stage with subway. So I did stand up on a subway. I interviewed AJ Jacobs inside the subway. We had a musical act, which is a sky banging on trash cans, and it was actually really good music. And I actually videotaped the whole thing and pitched it as a TV show, which was rejected, but that's when you substitute just one element of a very common format, it's a very potentially creative thing to do. So, basically, even though creativity feels like it should be without rules, there are very common ways, and these are just a few of them, combine, substitute, subtract, or another thing is adapt. Like, let's say I I wanna do Friends, but I don't have a $70,000,000 budget. Okay. Maybe I could do it on YouTube with my Friends. So, you know, adapt to what you have, like, you know, set set restrictions and boundaries on what you have. Robert Rodriguez, the movie director, he originally made movies in the early nineties. Now he's a huge movie director, but he did his first movie, El Mariachi, for less than $20,000 because that was his budget, and he couldn't spend more than that budget. So he made, though, a huge movie. He made 1,000,000 of dollars for him and start watch his career by putting boundaries and restrictions around what he could do. So he eliminated things. Oh, we don't need to have 70 different camera angles. We don't need to have a 1,000,000 different settings where we film a little bit in the desert, a little bit in an apartment building, a little bit in the Super Bowl. We're just gonna have one setting and and on and on. So he eliminated things that normally happen in movies to fit a movie within his restrictions, but he kept the arc of the hero. So these are some rules of decision making around creativity, And, if people have questions, I'm happy to talk more about that. But, Jay, this has been a long enough episode. I think we could probably divide this into 2, don't you think? I think I I think it would be great if people can just listen, you know, once through, through, you know, so they can take notes and stuff like that. You know? And then if you want don't want to stop and listen to it. Yeah. Good decision. And since it doesn't matter so much to me whether it's 1 episode or 2, and you're the expert, you're the producer of this podcast, I will bow to your decision, and we'll do it as one episode. So I don't have to think about it anymore. Great decisions. Thank you, James, for, you know, asking me to ignore my advice from my ex ex ex girlfriend. All the time. I will always be happily to recommend people ignore advice. Alright. Thank you.