Your Life is not for Sale: An Invitation to Being Human

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[00:00:11]Good evening, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to an invitation to being human.

[00:00:17]The human experience is not for sale.

[00:00:20]And I want to pick up where I left off last time when I was talking about life is not a competition. We don't live in a zero sum game.

[00:00:28]and extend that because I got some several very interesting comments that will flow hopefully theoretically will flow love very easily into this new uh new topic here and people said well what about excellence right excellence is competition excellence is being better than other people and therefore you know it's a competition only one person can win this kind of issue and I thought ah this articulates so clearly how the world is repackaged and delivered to us and I think it's worth pausing and and pondering this because I do think it's such it's such an apt question by the way and [clears throat] it get cuts right to the heart of this notion of being human is not for sale which hopefully we'll see in a second. So we think of excellence often within the context of best and this is I this is where we go wrong I would say I would say this is definitely an incorrect way to think about the world and what happens is we're continuously told not that be excellent we're talk that excellence equals you are the best but in most virtually any important uh area of our lives to be excellent see seems simply means to excel. That's in the definition. It means to be really good at something. And generally the choke point on being good, the limitation on being good is humans are human beings are finite. The world is incredibly complex. We have different sets of skills and ambitions and capabilities from different environments. And what this means is you probably can only excel at a very limited number of things.

[00:02:07]And it's not a matter of being better than everybody else. It's simply this that there is a finite capacity that humans have. And so if I decide I want to be really good at calligraphy, by the way, which is the most absurd thing ever because I can I can barely write my name. I have a scroll. My hands are moderately mangled. Uh and so it just I I just know my handwriting is just terrible. Uh but anyway, let's say I decide to do that. Well, I could spend a bunch of time and anybody who spends, you know, a fair amount of time and attention doing virtually anything will get reasonably good at it. In other words, they will become excellent at it.

[00:02:45]They will excel.

[00:02:47]My father who played the guitar used to say, "If you learn one chord, you now know more chords than 90% of the people on earth." Congratulations. You're you're you right. And if you think of excellence in those terms of simply being very good at something, it turns out that there's no limit on this in the sense of it's not scarce in that only a few people can have it. It's scarce in the sense that we have to select what we want to be excellent at or go with whatever comes easy to us or whatever is available to us. Because to excel at any given thing means, of course, we're not putting time and energy and effort and focus on other things for whatever reason. and therefore we're not going to excel at them. So this isn't the world saying there's only one or two or three best things. It's that oh there's an infinite opportunity to excel. We can only take advantage of a finite amount because we're finite individuals. And so this completely reverses what we're told right oh there can only be one best only one greatest of all time. as I talked about last time, these sort of, you know, what's the best novel, who's the best painter, what's the best restaurant, like all of this nonsense, as opposed to saying, well, you can excel at, you know, probably more or le not anything, but probably a lot of things that you put your mind to, you could probably excel at. You have way more opportunities to excel than you can take advantage of.

[00:04:15]Think of it that way. You know, we're we're overwhelmed with the opportunity to excel. The difficulty is not that.

[00:04:22]The difficulty is saying, well, what is it that I really want to dedicate myself to, spend my time with? What do I want to excel at? This is this is much more the problem that we face. But if you articulate it in the sense of excellent means better than everybody else, you've actually again reversed something that is super abundant, opportunities to excel, and turned it into something that is almost entirely scarce. So that then in whatever field you're interested in, people will say, "Who was the greatest rock band of all time? Who's the best football player of all time? Who's the best quarterback of all? Who's the best basketball player of all time? Was it Wilt Chamberlain? Was it Michael Jordan? Was it LeBron James?

[00:05:04]You know this. Well, these are utterly utterly because what it suggests is that well only one person can excel." No, lots and lots and lots of players has have excelled.

[00:05:17]And if you ask yourself, oh, how were they excellent? What's the nature of their excellence? What are the ways that one can be excellent playing basketball?

[00:05:25]And all of a sudden you the whole the whole question, the whole dynamic, the whole depth of the subject opens up. It becomes vastly more interesting and vastly more accurate because thousands and thousands of people have prepaid played professional basketball and played really really well.

[00:05:43]And that means that there's an unbelievable opportunity for people to be excellent. And then you can look at the college level. At the college level, you can, you know, it's just they're so good.

[00:05:56]I I had this experience when I was a undergraduate and graduate. I played a lot of pickup basketball. No, never formal basketball, but a lot of pickup basketball. And I was out playing one day with guys who were very much better than I was. And this this woman walked up and she said, "Hey, you know, can I play?" And we're like, "Yeah, absolutely."

[00:06:13]and she proceeded to destroy us. And it turns out she was on the women's college basketball team. And I mean, we we couldn't get within she just destroyed everybody. She destroyed everybody on the court. And you're like, "Wow, you're so much better. Like, you are excellent." But then within the context of the guys that were playing before that, we were excellent, right? Some of us were better shooters, some were better as defenders, some of us could box out, some of it could pass, right?

[00:06:40]There's all this opportunity to be excellent environments to be excellent within and mostly notice that excellence is a competition with yourself and whatever your medium or your environment is. You're mostly not competing with other people to be excellent. You're competing with yourself to be excellent improvement uh capacity depth of knowledge depth of experience depth of all this. And so even something where again our opportunity to be excellent is overwhelmingly available, we try to rewrite or our culture tries to rewrite into oh no. What you need to be is better than everybody else on the planet who ever has existed in history or you're not really that good.

[00:07:26][laughter] Which is very scarce indeed by the way.

[00:07:30]Like think about that. like this is just the most absurd notion. Um and and so it just again this just destroys our logic.

[00:07:38]Ah but where does this come from? Not the only place does it come from but one of the significant places it comes from is the continuous attempt of our society capitalist society that most of us live in of trying to sell us back to ourselves. So we take something that is an innate human experience, explain it as if it's rare and unavailable and difficult to attain.

[00:08:03]Therefore, I can sell that back to you.

[00:08:08]If we read this as something that's an innate human experience that's readily available to people everywhere and therefore there's no reason to uh wall it off, then why would I pay for it or why would I pay any kind of premium for it?

[00:08:25]That's it's simply this much of this.

[00:08:28]This is this is the problem. If you're in a capitalist society and you want to sell people things, what do people want to buy? They want to buy the human experience. But the human experience again simply can't be bought. But they keep trying to sell it to us over and over and over again. And this is the same.

[00:08:44]It's the exact same mechanism as as excellent. So you take what do people, you know, what do people want? And and you go, oh, I want to enjoy a good meal with my friends. Ah, so here we go. Right? Like that's a very human. By the way, this goes way back in history. You can read ancient texts.

[00:09:03]They have this these have these experiences and they're like a dream.

[00:09:07]Well, what constitutes good food?

[00:09:12]One one of my friends once said, "Oh, I'll he's sort of a vague vegan, not like an absolute, you know, uh a fundamentalist vegan, but mostly vegan."

[00:09:21]And u but he said, "Oh, but if I go to somebody's house, I'll eat anything made with love."

[00:09:26]So, the best food I think the best possible food you can eat is food that was made with love and intention.

[00:09:34]But what happens is that desire to be with groups of people who are making food with love and intention for us like what a great experience or we're maybe sharing the process gets turned into oh here's a TV show where it's like oh there can only be what's the best restaurant in New York City and can you get a can you get a table and if you get a table like did you order the right thing and if you order the right thing, did they make it in the right way? And oh, if you if everything just goes perfectly, then then you have a good meal. And any meal that doesn't seem to meet those standards, whatever the hell they are, arbitrary, it's just not that important. Like, it's just not that good of a meal.

[00:10:23]And it's like, ah.

[00:10:25]And so what happens is the inverse of that, like then people go, well, what's the point of caring, right? I can't achieve Michelin star cooking at home, so you may as well just, you know, microwave something because what else?

[00:10:40]And it's like, oh, both of these are wrong. Nothing wrong with people pursuing excellence again in cooking.

[00:10:47]Nothing wrong with trying to make really spectacularly like artfully amazing food. That's this is wonderful.

[00:10:56]But the notion of that this is the only possible way and what people really want, what most people really want most of the time, not all the time, but most of the time is again to have food that was made with love that was take, you know, some time and some care and some thought about me or about us or about our friends was put together and then we can sit down and eat it together. This is spectacular.

[00:11:22]But again, I can't sell this to you. If I'm a company, I I I have to convince you that you need to not do that. That you need to come to my restaurant if I'm a restaurant and buy food from me because oh, we know that if you go out and sit with your friends and then people serve you then then now now you're having a good time. That's how people have a good time. You can't have a good time at home with your friends.

[00:11:48]That doesn't make any sense. And it's like, oh, wait a second. Again, I love going to restaurants. I'm a fan of restaurants. Like, there's not a criticism of restaurants per se. It's a criticism of how they're so often sold to us, right? They're sold to us as something as like, oh, you can't really have a good time with your friends. You can only go out. That's what a good time means. A good time means by definition going out. Can't stay home, have cook with your friends, sit around and eat it, and call that a good a good meal.

[00:12:17]because we know it's not really you're not really that good of a cook. You're not going to do that great of a job. And so it also dissuades people from cultivating themselves. So you don't even have to be like a great cook, but if you learn to make three or four or five dishes pretty well, practice with them, make them a couple of times, spend some time with them. Hey, if you have friends over for dinner every two weeks and you have five different dishes that you're really pretty solid at making, I mean, they're not going to ever get bored of this, right? They have the same meal every what would that work out to be every like every couple of months you rotate back to something that they liked the last time they had it a few months ago. I mean, come on. This is not a problem at all. This will make people very happy indeed. And you can share it and you can improve it and you complain about it. You can burn it and laugh. You can forget an ingredient and realize you have to do something else, right? All these things are fun and and enjoyable and people love them. But ah no, no, no, no, no, no. Because you're not cooking at the level of a TV show, which is there to convince you that only people that cook at this level really matter.

[00:13:23]And they're trying to tell you that cooking at a high level is super stressful. and you know really you know like oh we got to yell at people and it's all h you know stress and dynamic and all when why like my grandmother cooked really well and she never looked like that she was mostly just drinking whiskey and making fried chicken that was to die for right she didn't look stressed at all in fact she looked pretty happy and we were all happy because she's making fried chicken so I was like wow this is a win for everybody this [snorts] is this confusing yes because the core of the human experience is constantly being stripped from us.

[00:14:00]Hey, there's lots of things I can excel at. Which one should I choose and turned into h if you really really want to do something then you have to suffer, you have to strive and you have to pay money and you have to enroll in a special class and you know you have to do all this stuff to be one of the elect, to be the selected, to be the one of the really really great ones. And even then, you're probably not as great as the greatest one who ever lived.

[00:14:30]You know, [laughter] you're like, "What?

[00:14:32]What?" Like, "What?"

[00:14:34]Ah. Like, no. Like, stop. Stop. Stop.

[00:14:37]Stop. Right. How can we can we give convince people not to do this? No, we can't because this is this is the the core of our culture. But think of just any innate human experience. We're told like, "Oh, this happens with tourism all the time." like some tourist location will be famous for whatever reason all of the sudden you know some star will go visit it or some event will happen and then it'll be all over the social media and then they know this is coming and then so like the next month some place that used to get I don't know 100,000 visitors a year will get 5 million because all of a sudden everybody has decided that oh if I can just go to that place that special place the place I saw then it will be great. And then of course these places are walled off and sold back to you.

[00:15:29]Not not even in an evil way sometimes.

[00:15:31]Sometimes often in an evil way, but sometimes just in in the most uh normal way, which is oh good lord, we're going to have a million people showing up.

[00:15:38]We've got to control this. Like we can't just have a open free free love program here because is you know when it was 10,000 people that was fine. And with 50,000 people, that was a lot. But if it's a million people, now we're now we've got to put up barriers and sell tickets and have people controlling and have police around because good lord, we're overwhelmed. So, not only in this case do they try and sell us back something that's very human, but they actually ruin it. They destroy it because everybody decides all at once that that thing they make something that's abundant and not scarce at all scarce because millions of people decide they want to see it all at once.

[00:16:13]And it's like, ah. And what they're striving for is they say, "Oh, I want to have a an experience that is meaningful to me and moving and powerful and I'm going to go on vacation." These are perfectly reasonable things. I've got a limited amount of vacation. I want to have a great, meaningful moving experience.

[00:16:31]At that point, you should ask yourself, what kind of things move me? What experiences in my life have I had that I found very valuable and enriching that I still carry with me? Now, this will be highly variable from individual to individual, right? I'm not saying this is going to be the same that there is an answer obviously, but if you ask that question, the chances that you'll come up with the thing that you just saw on Instagram or on the TV news or, you know, wherever in a magazine shockingly low because you might come up with something like, you know, I remember when I was a kid, I went to the lake with my uncle and went fishing. Maybe I just go for a little fishing trip on some little remote lake someplace. That would be cool.

[00:17:20]Or you go, "Ah, I've always heard about Italy." Italy is a big country, by the way. Lots of people visit Italy. A lot of people visit Italy. But there's a lot of Italy that people don't visit.

[00:17:30]There's a lot of every country that people don't visit. And so, you can say, "Well, I want to go to Italy. I don't know anything about Italy." But there's no reason to believe that the five places everybody knows about are actually all that much better than the rest of Italy because it would suggest that there's five nice places in Italy and the rest of the country is right? Which is of course absurd. It's like no, it's all of Italy is in Italy, [laughter] right? It's like a definitional thing. It's like, yeah, there aren't there isn't only three places to go.

[00:18:05]And people go, "Oh, I really, really, really want to see the Cyine Chapel."

[00:18:09]That's just marketing. This is not rubbishing the Cyine Chapel. But there's so much beautiful art. There's so many beautiful churches. There are so many amazing landscapes in Italy amongst other countries that you go oh like you know where you know go other places where there just aren't any people and you'll have a much better time maybe but you won't get the thing that when you go home you can say where'd you go oh I went to Sistine Chapel everybody goes oh you went to Systeine Chapel how was it uh it was packed I keep talking to people who go to Systeine Chapel they all say the same thing is a mob house and they rush you through and it's crowded and you don't go through in the right direction so you're not seeing it and you know it's just it's like madness and I'm going okay yeah but I'm like there's a lot of beautiful places everywhere that aren't the five places that every places is advertising and what happens is they sell it back to us and then we think I need to spend my time on my vacation waiting in line because there's only five good things to see in Italy but it turns out that if you Go just about anywhere in Italy, you'll see something amazing.

[00:19:19]There is an infinite amount of amazing villages, incredible churches, art everywhere, beautiful seaside locations, mountainous I mean you name it, Italy has it has a lot has more than you can ever visit in a lifetime [clears throat] and you're going once. So don't worry about it.

[00:19:38]But this is this is the continuous capacity to say, "Oh, what are the five greatest novels ever written?" Like this is again stupid question. As opposed to saying, "Oh, what kind of novels do I like to read? What kind of reading experience would I like?"

[00:19:59]You know, what kind of movies do I like?

[00:20:02]The these sorts of questions reverse everything. lots and lots and lots of movies have been made.

[00:20:10]The number that will appeal to you specifically that you can track down will depend on your capacity to understand the kind of movies you like.

[00:20:19]And so you think about it, if you if you watch a really resonant movie once every two weeks, that's pretty impressive. I mean, but still that means in in a year what you're going to two years you'd watch 50. Four years you'd watch a hundred movies. Well, you've only watched some infotesimal amount of the movies that are available. And so this is why the the streaming services reverse this. Instead of saying, look, there's 100,000 plus movies out there. A lot of them you're going to like. So many good movies for you to watch that you're never going to be able to see them all. That's our problem.

[00:20:58]They've reversed it. Ah, these movies are leaving the streaming service, so you better watch them now because they're scarce and they're going away.

[00:21:07]You see how weird that is? Not like here's a 100,000 titles, you know, good luck watching all the great ones that you would really enjoy.

[00:21:17]No, no, no. Hey, this is scarce. Better watch these now because if you if you like them, you might like them and they're going to be gone. And I was like, "Oh, well, I better watch that."

[00:21:26]and they go, I didn't like that. I didn't like that one. Didn't like that one, but they're going away, so I'd better watch them.

[00:21:32]And so, again, it is continuous uh reversal of the human experience of saying, "Oh, there's so much for us. There's so much abundance, so much opportunity to experience all of beauty and joy and love and flavor, but we're finite. And so we're overwhelmed with that. Now, that's not allowed. So again, the continual reversal. And I I can't even think I was trying to think of an example where this isn't the case.

[00:22:07]But everything is this way. Bottled water may be the single single greatest example of all time. That's the one that kind of popped into my head when I was thinking about this earlier. I'm like, "Yeah, they even took water, which in most places for by all historical standards have achieved phenomenally clean drinking water. In fact, most places have achieved drinking water that is actually bottled." So, so I think it was PepsiCo had to settle a lawsuit because they were just selling uh New York City water in one of their bottling facilities. They were just putting tap water from New York City into bottles and selling it as like I forget you know mountain spring water or something or they're implying that was mountain you like mountain fresh or some name like this and so they're selling making you know hundreds of millions of billions of dollars because of course you're selling something that's virtually free for a dollar or $2 a bottle plastic bottle hello environment and yet and yet all of a sudden everybody's like oh I don't want to drink that tap water something that's totally abund abundant most places, not everywhere, turned into something scarce, like you need to pay a premium for Fiji water, like Fiji water. Think about they're taking an island where water is scarce and shipping it to people around the world because hey, your water is scarce. Like, what are you Ah, like stop it. Stop it. Even water, they'll do it with air, by the way. I'm convinced at some point they're going to make it so that we're buying premium air somehow.

[00:23:40]uh you know what it just is that kind of notion because otherwise they can't sell it to us. They can't just stop and go oh wait in fact here's perfect example you know mentioned in other contexts is that the in Spain has been so successful with renewable energy wind and solar that at times they have more they they're generating way more energy than they can use and so the price because it's in a stupid price system ends up dropping to zero or negative and so now all the investors don't want to do this anymore because they're like well we don't make any money so the only way they can keep energy as being something worth investing in is to make it scarce. So they want there to be some energy but they don't want there to be too much energy.

[00:24:26]And you think about the notion of all the material constraints in the world, people always say, "Oh, energy, energy, energy." And it's like, "Well, maybe, but maybe like maybe it turns out like in Spain for instance, like, oh, uh-oh, wait a second. They're they're they're kind of giving the game away that it might be that hey, like no, we can actually do this. We can do it so much that it's not worth anything at which point we really don't, you know, then we got to stop that. We have to keep it scarce." And so, you know, you can it's it's easy to see with commodities, but it's so frustrating for me when you see with the rest of the human experience, because they're always trying to sell it back to us. You can only experience joy when you're in the happiest place on earth, Disney. Of course, this is entirely the Disney world, right?

[00:25:13]Where's the happy? I want to be happy.

[00:25:14]That seems reasonable. Let's all be happy. Yay. Happy. Good. Nice. Disney.

[00:25:20]Oh, happiest place on earth. Well, I want to go to the happiest place on earth. Don't you want to go to the happiest place on earth? And notice happest.

[00:25:29]This is the best. Any other place you go is second happy, not as happy. Less happy. But is that really how we experience it? I don't think so. I think we feel like, oh, I feel good. I feel happy. I'm enjoying myself. That's great. There's a million ways to do that.

[00:25:48]No. The only way to do it, if you're really going to do it right, is to give Disney all of your money because it's going to take all of it. And then the I just don't understand how people do this, but that you read the experience that they have, you know, you hugely long lines, incredibly complicated ticketing systems, blah. I mean, it just goes on and on and on. Overpacked parks, overpriced everything, you know, blah, and they tell you that you're happy. And people believe it.

[00:26:17]People actually believe this. They believe that that was that was great.

[00:26:20]That was happy. And I'm like, really?

[00:26:22]You stood in line for 2 hours. You like standing in line. No, no, no, no, no. I don't like standing in line. Oh, no. You do obviously cuz you paid a lot of money to stand in line. No, it was a ride I liked. So, for a a one or two minute ride, what rides are about that long, which is shocking. Say a two-minute ride. You stood in line for two hours.

[00:26:43]So, you had 2 hours and 2 minutes of what? like two minutes of fun for two hour like no that that ratio at least for me looks nightmarish. But it turns out the people at Disney have done the math on how our brains work and our brains have this bizarre memory pattern which is we we remember peak things and we tend to blur out the rest. And so when people look back on their trips and they go, "Oh no, I I rode this incredible ride and I rode that incredible ride and I rode that incredible ride." I'm like, "Okay, you spent $400." Literally, you can do the math. will turn out to be something like this. If you do one of those all day or two day passes or something and spend the night and travel there, you know, you spent, you know, you got six minutes of rides and you spent, you know, $400 a minute or, you know, $400 a ride, so you spent $1,200 for six minutes of fun.

[00:27:31]Like, really? That was And they're, oh, no, no, no, that does. But you do the math and it's like, oh, yeah. And so, but this notion that I can only that's the only way to have fun. Everything else is just no good. Everything else is just boring.

[00:27:46]It's not fun. It's not valuable. It's not meaningful.

[00:27:50]And any any real family, right? Any real parent is going to take their kids? And I've talked to parents about this and they're like, well, I don't know if I really want to go, but you know, you got to take the kids. I'm like, why?

[00:28:01]Why? Actually, I've asked parents this.

[00:28:03]Why do you have to take your kids? Well, you know, other kids are going and they hear about it and they want to go and so it's just like, right. So you you just perpetuate the cycle like Disney has convinced you if you don't take your kids to the happiest place on earth, you're a bad parent. Because of course you're a bad parent if you don't take your kids to the happiest place on earth. Because if you're a parent and you have that opportunity and you tell the kids, you know what we're going to do? we're going to go to the third happiest place on earth or the fourth happiest or the least happiest as opposed to going, you know what, there's an infinite amount of fun things you can do with your kids and there's no limit on that. There just there's so many great things you can do with your kids that the fact that they can try to wall it off and sell that to you is amaz it's like water. It's amazing. It's quite the spectacular achievement.

[00:28:56]>> [sighs] >> The slight downside of that is it's absolutely poisonous to the human because we feel like our whole all of our normal healthy uh I mean just human desires are walled off are on the other side of something that that that they're they're restricted they're you know it's like oh if I want to go to a good restaurant I need to look up and see what are the best restaurants around me. Now, by the way, there's nothing wrong with doing research and going, "Oh, that looks like a good restaurant. That looks a good restaurant. That looks like a good restaurant. That's perfectly reasonable."

[00:29:33]But but this isn't what people are doing. People are going, "Oh, well, we're going to go out. I need to know what is the best restaurant."

[00:29:40]According to who? According to 500 random reviewers on the internet, like, am I am I closely related to 500 random people? I like to think I'm not. In fact, I know I'm not because I've been to restaurants that they've, you know, sort of had good ratings and you go in and it's like either really loud. I don't like loud places or the or the decor is like shockingly un unpleasant.

[00:30:00]I'm like I I don't care what they're serving here. I'm Yeah. No, you know, or other things. You're just like, which is just me. Like other people like loud music, other people like crazy decor.

[00:30:10]Like good for you. Like knock yourself out. But for me, not so much.

[00:30:15]And but but that's what we're told. And notice that when you narrow things down, what it tells you is if you do not like certain things, you're wrong. If you don't think Disney is the happiest place on earth and you don't take your kids there, you've misunderstood the world.

[00:30:35]If you don't think this highly rated res uh res, excuse me, that has a big waiting list and cost a lot of money isn't good, then you're something wrong with you, right? you misunderstand the nature of the world and and so on and so forth, right? Like this this this constant argument. It's like, oh, if you're just drinking tap water, you know, you could, you know, tap water like tap water. Actually, the tap water is often just what's in the bottles, but [laughter] you know, oh no, you're like that tap water is like like Yeah. Well, it's like like what? Like tell me what it is. And all like what are you talking about? One of the great achievements of of health in the world has been you know portable city delivered water like this is talk about extending life expectancy and then somehow we've decided to sell water to people anyway and that yeah so it just becomes this total alienation package. That's why I love libraries. Libraries are filled with books and you can go check them out. I mean how stupid rich are we?

[00:31:40]And of course, all over the United States, they're closing libraries because people are like, "Well, that's no good." Not that people don't buy books, but it's like, "Oh, checking out books." Like, I think I want to own it.

[00:31:50]Like, why? You You have it. It's right there. It's at your local library. Just keep it there. Like, they store it for you. They organize it for you. How great. I mean, what a great great great thing this is.

[00:32:03]But no, we want to make it scarce. We want to make it unavailable. That's so library is a bad bad model because that just means lots of people have access to lots of things and they don't have to pay for it. Well, that's no good. Can't have that because you can't have a good experience that way. You can't read libraries have no good books for instance. We know that all the books that are in libraries are the bad books because all the good books are difficult to come by. And this is in a world of mass production. And this is one of the most bizarre elements of this, right? Is in a world of absolute absolute mass production, they're trying to convince us of scarcity to sell us things at a premium that actually can't be produced or sold. In any case, it's it's like a triple paradox double backflip that they land incredibly elegantly somehow and we fall for it.

[00:32:59]And so this is Yeah. So again, this is the the continuation of not only is life not a competition, life is not that we're not living in this world of scarcity generally. Sometimes we are. So I don't want to say there's never scarcity. That would be wrong. But generally speaking, for for our core human needs and and desires, the scarcity is that there is is often imposed on us from the outside through conviction.

[00:33:25]And then those things that we really need and lack, you know, love, understanding, human compassion, kindness, community, you can't buy them.

[00:33:36]That's, you know, just full stop. Like, well, there you go. Unfortunately or fortunately, those things aren't for sale. They can't be delivered to your door. And so you go oh but as long as you think that everything that's good and worthwhile and valuable in the human existence can be purchased then you pursue a functionally you p you pursue a losing strategy and thinking about and acting in the world because you go well I feel lonely um but everything I see that shows me that well people who have jobs and make money well then they can do things and you can do the kinds of things that allow you to make friends and it's like Look at little kids. They don't have any money. They make friends at school.

[00:34:20]They don't do it with money, right? They don't go around and give kids $5 and say, "Be my friend." They They hang out with people, they interact with people, you know, and you go, "Okay, like, all right, here we go." But no, we're convinced that ah, you know, if I had a couple of million dollars and I was really cool and I had a nice car and I went to the right places and hung out the right bars, then then then what? I mean you might have money, you might have a car, you might be in a bar, but this does not make you have friends.

[00:34:48]Isn't neither. It does not correlate with or cause friend.

[00:34:54]This is it just doesn't right. It's like it's it's you know what some people say it might be an impediment because now you don't know if they're either friends who like you because of your money or for other reasons or because they actually genuinely like you.

[00:35:06]And so you know it might even be detrimental the strategy of pursuing this. In any case, it turns out that the money is not the thing. Is finding people who, you know, kind of resonate with you, who kind of are sympatic uh for for for your for your character.

[00:35:23]Well, how do you do that? Well, you have to spend time around people. Well, how do you do that? Well, there's an infinite number of ways to do that. But notice, we're finite. And so, you have to say, "Oh, okay. I need to spend some time with people if I'm going to make friends. How should I do I what how do what do I want to do with my time and what other people are doing with their time and how do I interact with them in this case and once you start thinking of it this way it's it's a very different sort of notion but you again if you think like oh if I go to the right kind of resort and I spend a bunch of money or I go to the right kind of you know uh curated dating site or if I go to the right college or if I go you know there's always got got to be this external barrier that you pay or an otherwise clear and then then whatever your basic human need is you'll arrive. And my final example is this is what I talked about earlier in I think the second episode about beauty is so many times I've talked to beauty who people who just think oh well I'm going to have beautiful things and do beautiful things and live in a beautiful place later right like beauty is a fundamental human need I I have no doubt about this to surround yourself with beautiful objects in a beautiful space or lovely people or a lovely environment whatever it is like beauty makes people healthy and makes them feel better.

[00:36:50]And people will actually say because I I talk to people, oh, you know, came back from Europe or it's so beautiful or so.

[00:36:55]It's like, well, why don't you do something in your house like that? Ah, no, no, I'm not keeping this house. I'm going to move to a better house. That house is going to be beautiful. And it's like, but you live in this house now or this apartment now or you are in your space now. Why not make where you are, you know, not perfectly beautiful, not absolutely beautiful, but at least strive to increase the beauty in your world a little bit? It's a real human need. They're like, "Oh, well, you know, at at if I got a private house on a golf course, well, that that would be beautiful. Of course, going to be really expensive. Or if I could get the, you know, iconic place in the mountains or the beautiful short seaside house." Now there's nothing against places and mountains on the sea, golf or whatever.

[00:37:40]People do what people do. But the notion is that I can't live in beauty. I can't have beauty until I achieve. And then the thing that's supposed to give you beauty is so expensive and scarce.

[00:37:55]That basically what you're saying is, well, you're not going to have beauty.

[00:38:00]And this is, by the way, this is one of the things that drives me crazy when you see uh public housing. Europe has a lot of this. America, not so much. But even Europe, people go, "Oh, yeah. Europe's got public housing. Yay. Yay." And it does, you know, yay. Yay. Yay. Yay. Is very soft. Yay. Conceptually, yay.

[00:38:16]Functionally un beautiful. So they think people should have space, but they don't think the space should be beautiful. And they clearly don't spend very much time even thinking about making the space beautiful.

[00:38:31]And it's like, ah, come on now. You can do better than this. Doesn't necessarily have to cost a bunch of money. Just like think about it. Let's how can we make these spaces more beautiful so that people feel better and they have a better lives.

[00:38:47]No, that's if you're in social housing, you don't deserve beauty. Beauty is on the other side. That's for other people.

[00:38:54]And because it's limited and scarce, it would be expensive.

[00:38:59]I was like, look, no, beauty is not limited and scarce.

[00:39:04]It's it's not on the other side of a payw wall. It's not a subscription service you need to sign up for, but they try to convince us of that. And then when you see some modern building areas and all this and you think, "Oh yeah, maybe beauty really is scarce," which is terrifying. This one time I get frustrated in some areas of some cities where you're like, "Oh my god, they're doing everything they can. They're spending so much money to make things so awful for the humans that then it does feel like beauty is scarce and it does feel like oh it there must be some magic place in the planet where it's not awful and someday I'll get there. It's like no no no no it's it's you know when reimagining to you know there there's lots of it available. It's a super abundance of it.

[00:39:56]But but your local scarcity, your local blight was done on purpose at great expense because it's hard to make stuff awful. It's hard to make stuff that evil.

[00:40:11]And this so that to me is the huge disconnect.

[00:40:15]And so back to where we started from with with this notion of uh excellence being rare and that we're in competition that we have to surpass.

[00:40:25]Oh well ugly is just the norm and then if I want to get some of that non ugly space then I have to do something special. I I'll travel to Paris and I'll spend a week in Paris and I'll spend a bunch of money and Paris and by the way Paris much of Paris is really quite stunningly amazing. And then you go, "But then I'm going to go back to where I live, and of course, where I live is ugly." Why? We're built by humans at great cost.

[00:40:52]They start making it beautiful, you know, and it's going to vary dramatically on where you live. And a year, this is going back, I don't know, probably 25, 30 years ago, there was some in the southwest, I want to say in Texas, I don't, but I don't remember. It was somewhere in the southwest. And this is, you know, this these young guys are kind of hippie architecture students.

[00:41:12]and they realized like they lived in the desert and they lived on this blighted street and they're like, "You know what we're going to do? We're just going to take the gray water from our house, the shower water and the sink water and we're just going to replplum it and run it out into the yard and we're going to plant a bunch of trees." And they did that and slowly over the years they actually got a bunch of their neighbors to do this. So there's some places there's they got over like 10 years they got this neighborhood where it was like 15° cooler in the summer. There was shade, there was trees, everybody loved it. And but they were in constant battles with the city cuz he's like, "Oh, you can't do that. You want blah blah blah." Anyway, but they made this phenomenal neighborhood just by planting, you know, appropriate trees, you know, generating shade, using the water runoff from their roofs and everything to to any water that came in actually went into the the the wildlife and the and the foliage and all that.

[00:42:03]And they just transformed it at no cost.

[00:42:05]and they made it something beautiful from this tracked home neighborhood that was hot and sort of miserable. And they're like, "Oh, we can do this. We can do it if we care." And if we think, "Oh, it's not scarce. We just need to try a little bit. We just need to put our minds to it. We need to think about it. Change how we approach things." And then it can be, you know, fill in the blank, whatever your human experience is. And so, as a thought experiment, I'll leave you with another thought experiment. I love thought experiments.

[00:42:32]I But I I run these on myself. So, so don't don't think I'm just uh throwing these at you. I'm a I'm a hopeless I'm a I'm a monkey in my own laboratory. I'm constantly or a white rat in my own laboratory constantly running experiments on myself is anytime I think you know oh there's something I want need I go okay what's the core first ask yourself what's the core experience like am I do I want to be inspired do I want to be loved do I want to feel community do I want to feel less lonely do I want to feel uh do I want something tasty or delicious or you know what is it like what's the real core of that and then where is the where is that abundance like where is it where is that whatever that core thing is or things where is it abundant and then look there because it may be that maybe it is scarce right where you are but it might be abundant someplace else and go oh I'm just going to go over there where it's abundant or you're like oh you know I want to get you books I want to read these history books but boy they're expensive you know who has a freaking library abundance a library is a space of abundance all these books all for free I just go there and they give them to you. It's a miracle, right? That kind of experience of the world. Where is beauty abundant? How can I make beauty abundant in my life? And so when you start thinking about it this way, you realize like not only is that this that not only is it not competitive, not only do we not live in a world of scarcity, we live in a world generally, not universally unfortunately, but generally where what's scarce is the mortal capacity to take advantage of all of our opportunities.

[00:44:11]Right? That's our limitation. There's so many wonderful and amazing ways to excel, but I only have so much time and capacity. I'm mortal.

[00:44:20]There's so much beauty that one can experience, but I'm a limited I have a limited life and I don't like to travel that much. There's so many great books to read, but uh you know I only can read in two or three languages and you I only have so much time and you know there's so much great music to listen to but I you know I'm spend too much time reading you know and so it goes right just you go down the list there's lots and lots and lots of great great great food to eat. much of it is very simple to make, but I only have so much time that I want to spend cooking. Um, you know, and just, you know, down just keep going down the list or or I'll end with one of the favorite sayings where I used to live, which was it's great to have a friend friend with a boat because there were lots and lots of people with boats where I used to live on the water and I mean lots and lots. is a huge huge huge boating community, world famous boating community and but you realize like having a boat now that is a pain in the ass like expensive time consuming maintenance you got to do it but when the weather's nice and they're like hey you want to go out sailing in the islands for a couple of days you're like yes I do cuz you've got a boat I'll just help you out I'll buy you a little diesel we'll you know put some food on board it's going to be great but do I want a boat no I just I got other things to do would not that would oppose having a boat. I just don't have time to deal with a boat. Don't have the energy, don't have the head space. But that's another wonderful way if you're in a place with boats. That's another wonderful way to go, right? And so it just that this is the endlessness of life. This is the lack of scarcity um in so many ways and in so many opportunities that we have. And when we start thinking about it in that inverse way and start recognizing that they're just trying to sell our human experience back to us at a premium when it just doesn't need to be that way and in fact that damages us.

[00:46:19]This this is the key. So I would say the human experience is not for sale and one of the invitations to being human is to recognize that trap and if we can escape it one hopefully relieves some of the money pressure because this does generate a sense of you know we you know that money is underway pressed and we're short etc etc but it's like oh yeah not only is it not short it's just it's irrelevant often and when you can start thinking of money as being irrelevant to your experience experiences. Ah, now now you're starting to break that cycle.

[00:46:56]Now you're starting to have that sense of, oh yeah, wealth and well-being and human experience is just often, not invariably, but often irrelevant for money. And so, wow, I'm liberated.

[00:47:10]Absolutely liberated. It's the super abundance that I'm struggling with, not the scarcity. Thank you very much.