In entrepreneurship, managing emotions effectively is crucial for success. Fear is essential for survival but can become a 'mind killer' if it controls decision-making. Shame differs from embarrassment—shame indicates moral integrity and should be embraced as a sign of honor, while embarrassment stems from ego and should be overcome. Anger typically stems from fear or frustration and should be managed through stoic practices to maintain rational thinking. Entrepreneurs should develop internal motivation, embrace failure as boundary-pushing, and maintain humility to navigate the challenges of building a company.
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Sandboxing and HostingerAdded:
Cyber call in.
Cyber brother, where have you been, man?
We've been missing you.
Yeah.
Hang in there, Colin. We got you, brother. We got you.
The whole world's going to hell in a hand basket.
Yet us Jeters, we survive.
All righty.
We'll give people a couple minutes to roll on in so they don't uh have to play too much catchup.
I'm going to maybe broadcast one more time.
Here we go.
All righty.
Uh, yeah, brother. We've been missing you, but you've been Hey, Ricardo. But yeah, you've been living with us in spirit because we've been talking about you quite a bit.
We were talking about your Substack, I think, uh, just yesterday.
Oh, it's all right, man. Yeah, I know everybody's got their own stuff going on. I'm just pumped that we're here to keep doing what we do, especially on a Saturday. I love it.
That's like true commitment.
People coming in on the weekend to get nerdy.
Oh, yeah. And cyber. I don't know if uh you know about this, but this thing right here, let me make it a little bit out of the way of the camera.
Here we go. This thing right here is this uh Oh, Ricardo, tell us, man.
What's the news?
Oh yeah, I'll explain the uh command center or control center that I've been building in a second.
I'm going to make it available to uh minimally to all of the admins and leadership folks on GTT and then once it stabilizes I'm going to open it up to everybody. Uh I'm going to keep it closed source but oh Ricardo this is awesome man. I I want to talk about what you got going on. So, uh, can you just for everybody else's sake, uh, remind us what the thing is that you're working on?
I mean, I mean, as much as you're allowed to publicly disclose, if uh, anything.
Hey, Amber. Amber, by the way, nice job on the testing out the stopping tyrannical Chrome and Google. Bad Google. Bad Chrome. Bad. Bad. I'm talking to you.
Um, just so you guys know, I'm I'm sitting here because I want to hear what Ricardo has to say. This sounds super exciting.
Like he's Is it a venture that you're JB? Yo, brother.
All right. Now we're starting to get a full house. Build the infrastructure, governance, security layer, audits, enterprise for MCP servers. Sweet, dude.
That is awesome.
Oh, wait, wait, wait, wait. Hold on. Let me back up. You've already built this.
You You already built this part.
That is a lot of stuff, bro.
You've been one busy guy.
Excellent.
Can you share the name of your venture?
Or is it Are you stealth?
I love it, man. This is what I'm talking about. The GTT crowd. You guys are like such ballers.
I mean, there's so many founders and uh senior technologists and musicians and man. Yeah. Yeah, and I got to tell you, as somebody that runs a VC backed company, landing VC money, that is not easy. I mean, it's probably one of the hardest things I've ever done.
And I've done some pretty hard things or hard for me.
The other hard thing that I did is that first marathon I ran with zero training.
That was hard.
That's just difficult. Goju being an idiot. Oh, I can run this. What? What are we doing again? Oh, wait. This is 26 miles. I just thought it was six miles.
Yeah.
Awesome.
Yeah. And from my experience on the venture path, and I think everybody's experience is different, and I by no means know what I'm doing, right? Like I want to be super clear. I'm a complete noob. I'm a noob in pretty much everything. So, it's not like I think I have anything figured out, but I went through dozens, maybe over a hundred VC rejections before we got awesome.
Yeah, 100%, bro.
I can we can do it live.
So, we're checking out uh some of the funding folks that Ricardo's in the process of landing.
And so, he's got a venture that he's running. And that's awesome. That's great.
Yeah, I'd be happy to help. Yeah. Uh, DM me on either go at merly or Yeah, 100%. Cat.
100%.
Yeah. I I mean, there's so much truth to this. I think a lot of people think of things in a very black and white way, right? It's like you win or you lose.
and that's sort of like the only two states that exist. I don't really subscribe to this philosophy at all. I think it's just shades of gray the whole way.
And at least for me in my journey with the VCs, uh I I think I had to go through a lot of those rejections because I didn't know what I was doing. I mean, I'm a scientist and I don't know how to talk to VCs, what to talk about. So, when I was first meeting with them, I just talked about the tech and I think I put half of them to sleep because I was just going through all the science and stuff and they're like, "Sweet. What's the business plan?" And I was like, "Business plan?
I thought that's like what you guys do.
And so, yeah, there's a there's a lot of good fun stuff going on, but I'm I'm a firm believer, as I think many of you guys know, in putting in the reps, the reps and the practice. And I think if as long as you're introspective and you're unrelenting, that is a killer combo because the introspection I think allows you the opportunity to grow and learn. And yeah, JB 100%. That like truer words have not been spoken. I JB's so on the money. I just want to repeat what he just said. VC money is a double-edged sword. I try not to fund raise unless we absolutely need to. Yes.
100%. 100%. And generally speaking, I think any kind of investment money is always comes with strings. So if you can get money in other ways, that's ideal. Now that being said, trying to stand up a company and getting money for stuff is like for products that don't exist is very hard if not impossible because Yeah. You don't Yeah, it's awesome. And Ricardo, I think that's the best way to go into it. I I think it's the people who come in thinking they've got it all figured out when they have no clue. I think those are the ones that are in the most trouble because they're kind of just like on the straight path and probably pretty unlikely right out of the gate you're going to know exactly what you're supposed to be doing.
So if you can stay nimble, right, if you can stay flexible and kind of just stay humble, really eliminate any ego, right? I think that's I see this happen all the time actually is people's ego gets in their way like an insane amount.
Yeah, absolutely. And the truth is, Colin, since he's mentioning this, the way I tend to think about things is, you know, and again, this isn't gospel or anything. This is just how I think about things today, is often times when you're when you're talking to VCs, and it depends on what stage, right? Because if you're in incubation stage, you're selling a lot on the vision and your fire and why you're the right person. Because often times the VCs the way they look at this is the ideal scenario for them as they've told me is you present them with a very compelling story and they become convinced that not only is it a really good idea but you are as the founder or the founders whatever are the best people in the world for this job in the world. Literally, they they want to come out of that meeting thinking this not only is this an amazing idea, there is nobody else that's better suited in the world to do this.
Now, that's really hard, right? And this is often times why they say uh if you're getting involved with venture capitalists in many cases it's like they want you to be famous and not like you know Britney Fear Britney Spears famous or Ryan Gosling famous. I mean, I think that still helps, but kind of like uh Yan Lun famous or uh John Carmarmac famous, right? People that are prominent experts in this area. And again, this is really hard, especially if you're just starting out, right? It's actually part of the reason why a lot of people, I think, get confused about this. But if you look at the data, uh, at least the data that I've seen, supposedly the average age for a VC backed company for the founder, for the CEO is 47.
47, not 23 or whatever nonsense that people try to tell you because I mean like those stories are really sensational.
Again, going back to why we created GTT, sensational news sells. Everybody is going to sign up for that and hear these one-off stories that like, oh wow, cool.
You can just be a 18year-old kid that knows nothing and you can go get funded and yeah I got distracted by cat's comments.
Absolutely. I think that again if we can just be real and I really love being real is most people in the world are inhibited from doing the things that like they really want to do because of fear.
It really is fear.
It's fear of the unknown. It's the fear of being laughed at. It's the fear of failure. It's just a lot of fear. It's really hard to put yourself out there in a space that you you don't know anything about and things can go totally sideways.
Uh and you being okay with that.
And a lot of people I think could do really really incredible things if they could learn to master their fear. Now again this is my perspective and it's actually it was on my list right of discussing embarrassment, anger, fear and shame.
So Sean, what's going on brother?
Uh I think that yeah maybe we'll talk about this just a little bit.
As I think I was mentioning before, I think that embarrassment and anger are mostly kind of useless emotions. And I have a full VA on this, but embarrassment and and I want to be super clear. My view is that embarrassment and shame are two totally different things.
Embarrassment is, you know, you're you're walking down the street and you trip, right? And you fall down and then everybody laughs at you and then you feel embarrassed and and then sometimes that leads you to become angry or you know you hurt your feelings all this stuff.
The other absolutely, Amber.
Yeah.
Incredible energy is really important.
incredible positivity that my experience has been that VCs have zero interest in people that are quick to resign themselves to failure because doing a startup I mean you're you're going to fail thousands of times.
I mean I at least at Merly we've failed thousands of times in the last four years and it's failures on the daily.
So you have to really just get comfortable with failure and and really be okay with it. And I think that part of the thing that helps me is understanding that when I'm failing at something, it usually means that I'm trying to do something that I've never done before.
And so if I fail at it, if I fail at something, especially if you know I'm putting forth the effort, that's usually just a sign that I'm pushing my boundaries. So when I fail, I don't look at it like, "Oh, Goju, you suck, right?"
I mean, some a lot of people may look at me like that and then they'll troll me in the comments or whatever. And that's cool. I I don't care at all. uh cuz at least for me my motivation is principally internal that I've really tried to change the space to not require external validation to bring me happiness or satisfaction or confidence, but instead have it all be internal.
Just knowing myself and what matters to me.
Because the truth is that the only person that really knows you, like really really knows you, is you.
And so you know if you're on fire and you know if you're kind of blowing it and these kinds of things. And so you can look at these individual cases where you don't quite succeed or everything doesn't work out perfectly what whatever the things may be. and you can assess them in a way that nobody else can where some people may give you advice on, oh, you should have done this, you should have done that. And that absolutely could be the case. But what I try to do is I'll certainly listen to all the feedback at least if the feedback is meant to be constructive or it's coming from people that I deeply trust that I know that their intentions are wholesome. I think one thing that also can really send people sideways is listening to too much feedback, especially bad feedback, right? And and there are some people I think they have the best intentions, but they unfortunately do like the Dunn and Krueger thing where they're an expert in everything even though they're not. And then they have opinions about everything. And usually those folks tend to have very strong opinions about everything and 90% of the time they're wrong. Uh at least that's been my experience. So understanding the whole feedback thing is really important. But staying open to feedback, I think, can be super helpful and help you grow, especially if one second, guys.
Yeah, especially if you have people that are trying to help you become better and you really know that they're wholesome people that are really trying to help you improve rather than uh hurting you.
Yeah.
So anyway, going back to this embarrassment and anger, I think one of the things at least that's helped me with VCs is I learned basically to think about talking with the VCs a little bit in reverse is not about like I need to land this VC, I need to get this money, I need to do whatever and ah so much pressure and if mess this up. Uh, we're all hosed.
Everybody relies on me. All this stuff, right? And all that stuff might be true, but that I think can create an incredible amount of anxiety.
And so I try to do a couple different things. The first thing is put myself in the shoes of the VCs. that VCs have told me that they say no to founders 99% of the time. It's probably 99.999 or something% of the time. So the the likelihood of the outcome of any meeting with a VC is a no. That's an overwhelming starting point.
So if you happen to get a yes, I mean that is fantastic. But I don't know that that necessarily is the goal with the VCs. At least this is the way I think about it. The first is that if you could even get a meeting with the VCs, like an actual Zoom call or meet in person or whatever, that's already a win.
Because I think as many of you know, a lot of the VCs, they're super busy and they have h they have hundreds, thousands of people that want their time cuz everyone's kind of asking them for money. So these people have to be really particular about who they talk to. They just don't have the bandwidth to talk to all the people that want to talk to them. So, if you manage to even get like an email response on stuff.
Yeah, for sure. I I I can totally uh see that, Michael.
Um, so if you manage to even get a an email response from a VC, you've already won. That's a victory because a lot of the VCs, they just delete the emails they get.
Look at it. Not interested. Delete. And that may sound kind of mean and like what jerks. But if you look at it kind of a little bit more empathetically and think about their position, if you're getting hundreds of emails a day, it's not actually possible or advisable to try to respond to each one of those emails. It's just you have to be particular about how you spend your time.
So if you email a VC and you don't hear anything, I mean yeah uh a lot of them are very much in the spray and prey mentality and it's well understood in the VC space that 90% or more of the ventures that they back are going to fail.
and they know in they they know this uh going in anyway the the when I'm when I'm trying to think about forward progress with the VCs a lot of this is starts in when I shift the way I think about it is one just getting email responses from them is a really big step forward then being able to actually have a meeting with them. That's a win. And so each one of these steps are wins. Win win. And when you start to look at it this way, I think you it can change your confidence and the way you feel about yourself because rather than looking at this binary way of, oh, I have no money or I have money. and there's nothing in between. There's no state changes between the these two points. This is like a wildly naive uh perspective in my mind because each of these conversations, keep in mind a lot of the VCs, they all talk with each other. And so as you're building connections with them, there is a very good chance that they're talking about you. And one of the worst things I think you could ever do is lose your cool in a VC meeting that I've heard like if you just kind of lose it and again even if they're being jerks like that's what's that saying that customer is always right in this case they're the customers because they're the ones that are giving you money. So, it's your responsibility, I think, to present the story and engage and do all the right things and have a really good attitude the whole time, no matter how aggressive and antagonizing the questions become.
And one, I think that that helps you build up really thick skin the more you can do uh do this type of thing.
The other thing that's happening each time you talk with the VCs is you're expanding your network.
In fact, almost all the VCs that we spoke with that ended up eventually funding us, the first conversations with them or like the first uh conclusion they came to was a no.
We're not going to fund you.
And you know, actually the story that I had with Greycraft is when we first started talking with them, they seemed pretty interested or or so I thought and we had some really awesome discussions and they came back I think pretty quickly saying which is very much how I take a lot of these things is they said you know we're going to pass on this round.
That's basically exactly what they said.
So, you know, you can you could lose your cool and you can say and I and some people do this, right? This is like really not great. Lose your cool and say, you know, thanks for wasting my time. You know, I spent all this, you know, all this effort and hours of work and, you know, for what? So, never do that.
Never, never, never do that, right? Even if those things are true, because you're actually building your network by knowing these people. And V VCs tend to be pretty well-connected people.
A lot of them are, for as much as it's not necessarily my favorite position to be pitching in front of VCs, I don't love this. I much prefer pitching in front of scientists and engineers. But every VC that I've met that's like a partner at any one of the VC firms, they're all hyper intelligent people. They're they're really smart people. And keep in mind that they're working across all these different domains and managing a bunch of uh balls in the air. They they've got a lot of things going on.
Speaking of which, that also factors into the decisions they make when they say no. It there's a really good chance it could have nothing to do with you.
It could be that you're amazing, but after deeper scrutiny, they realize that there's a company in their portfolio that would be in direct competition with you, and they can't do that. They can't fund essentially or it it's not a good signal if they do that because the existing portfolio company is going to be like why did you just pull this company into the portfolio when we compete directly with them? Are you do you think we suck? Right? Like all this stuff and and you don't know those details. In fact, I had a meeting with one of the top VC firms uh in the world and I was talking directly with one of their uh general partners. So, not just partner but general partner.
And uh in midflight of getting ready to have our meeting that was already figured out the the date and who was going to be there. They canled everything.
They basically said, "Oh, you know, actually, we're going to pass on this."
never even got a chance to present to them. And and we didn't do, to the best of my knowledge, we didn't do anything wrong. You know, we didn't uh make anybody angry, I don't think, and do anything that wasn't uh professional, but they just basically cut the conversation completely with us. Now, even in that case, that might not be super professional on their part. But again, like life's not fair. That's my view. And so my kind of take is I just won't let these things affect me in any kind of negative way. Just be like, "Okay, I guess that's where we are now and we'll go another direction."
Well, later on what we found out is that they were talking with another company that works in the space that we work in.
And that day, they had finally made the decision to fund them.
And because of that, it would make zero sense to fund us is because they would have two portfolio companies that are in exactly the same area.
So they didn't reject us because we were no good. Is there were these other factors that were completely outside of my purview that were going on anyway. So there's there's a bunch of stuff with VCs that it's it's a really tricky space to navigate.
It's super hard. It it's really intense, I think, when you're dealing with the rejections uh over and over and over, especially when you're in super fundraising mode and you're talking to the VCs a lot and you're just hearing no, no, no, no, no over again. A lot of people, I think, really can't handle that level of negativity because it's not like you go and ask the pretty girl or the pretty boy out at the bar and you get turned down. is that you did that, you got turned down. You went to the next one, you got turned down, you went to the next one, you got turned down. It's just all you see are all these uh things of negativity. And I think a lot of people break because of that cuz cuz that's a lot of negativity.
But I think this is where the optimism comes in is that if you are someone that is Yeah, it definitely takes a toll 100%.
If you're someone that I think has sort of un wavering levels of positivity, you can experience these things and just kind of brush them off and then keep going.
And at least for me that's been really critical. And not just with fundraising.
I think almost all the things that I have done in my life I try to follow this.
And if I were to give up at the first sign of failure, like none of the things that I've done would have been done. Not none of the hard things. So, it's a really good I mean I think there's so many life lessons to learn and amazing qualities you can build when you try to create a company.
And as I think any very serious owner of any company or any enterprise knows, it's not really about thriving. It's just about surviving.
That every day that the company is alive is a day that is a win.
At least that's the way I think about it. And I think I think Jensen Wang uh yeah, Jensen Wang from Nvidia, I think he talks about similar things. And then there's, you know, Andy Grove's whole thing about like only the paranoid survive and this sort of thing. But I think it's basically a healthy level of fear is I think very useful as long as you can control it. Which brings us back to these four emotions. So one of the first things that I I really started to focus on that I think has helped me a lot is to stop being embarrassed. I used to get embarrassed when I would make mistakes and then I'd feel very self-conscious about it and I'd beat myself up about it and say, you know, dang it, Goju. Like, how did you make that mistake? you know, you know this stuff and you you stalled or you froze out or you were so uh intent on these other things, you missed this other thing completely and then you end up beating yourself up and telling yourself how much you uh are no good and that really messes with you. I mean that that kind of negative self-talk it really does uh affect you. You you are what you think you are. And if you sit around thinking all these terrible things about yourself because you make a mistake and you get so embarrassed by it, uh that's really going to hurt your self-confidence. And so this is a really bad thing. This is just being able to just not be embarrassed. Like if you trip and fall, like you know, do a pirouette or something. Be like, "All right, you know, hey, it happens.
Happens to all of us, right? Or you the other night I was talking about the that movie I want to see and I was like, "Oh yeah, Back channels. Uh, you guys got to see it." And then Sean jumped in. He's like, "Uh, Back Rooms, I think. Is it back rooms?" Something like that.
Anyway, um, in cases like that, I I maybe in the past I might get embarrassed. Today I don't because I I'm doing so many things. It's impossible for me to keep all these things in my head and get it all right. And then I try very hard to just be very receptive to feedback. And so Shawn is right. And then my immediate response is not one of defensiveness to try to defend my position, which is totally wrong. It's the opposite. It's like, "Oh, Sean, thank you for helping me. That's right.
Uh that's the movie we need to see." and and you're lighthearted, you can laugh about it, you can grow from it, and then this whole thing of embarrassment can just start to dwindle away is that you can start to get a bunch of things happen and not allow it to impact you in these ways that you will have negative self-t talk and then you will actively hurt your self-esteem.
So that's how I feel about embarrassment.
And when I first started doing the streaming thing, even this even after, you know, like spokesperson at Intel and given hundreds of public talks, all this stuff, I uh I would get pretty anxious uh doing live streams just because of the interaction and I talk about a whole bunch of stuff and I'm not the knower of all things, but I try very hard to not get things wrong. And there were a couple times where I got some stuff wrong and and I figured out that I got it wrong in the live stream. Like I said, "Oh, I think it's this thing." And then I learned I was wrong about it right then and there. And I I'll be honest with you guys, I had embarrassment. I got embarrassed. And then the this is I think part of the reason why this embarrassment is so bad is then you start to go into this uh spiraling is you feel very self-conscious and you're like oh shoot I'm stupid and oh everybody's laughing at me and then suddenly you're Yeah.
100% Amber like I I feel exactly the same way. I love laughing at myself. I am the first one to laugh at myself. I'm the last one to laugh myself. Like absolutely having a lighthearted disposition I think is critical for self-growth.
Uh and so Yara what's going on brother?
So after having done this embarrassment thing on GDT several dozen times, I finally got to the point where I was like, you know, this and being embarrassed is not helpful. I need to just know that I'm not going to get everything right and be okay with that before it even happens. Knowing that you're going to go into areas that are uncharted.
And when you do that, you will make mistakes.
And it shouldn't be something that you feel bad about. It's expected. And anybody that is going to laugh at you and make fun of you for getting something wrong, those aren't people that you would even want to like associate with anyway. I mean, like I think about the people that do that type of thing where they laugh at other people and make fun of them. like this is bullying behavior. This is not super great. So why would you even care if the that's the group of people that's doing this cuz the good people out there, the people that are kind-hearted and stuff, they're not going to laugh at you when you fail. They're going to cheer you on when you're failing.
They're going to look at them and be like, "Wow, you know, you're you're doing so great. This is super hard. I'm there to support you." And it changes things right away, right?
Because then you start to look at it from this different thing about like if you really get deep into the psychoanalysis of this stuff. If you think about the people that troll people on social media and you start to think about the effort that that takes, that's a crazy amount of time that people are spending being negative. Like, is that really what you would want to do with your life? That's not what I'm going to do with my life. My time is far more important than to sit around and make fun of other people. I have actual things I want to do. And what I find is most of the worldass people in the world, they never make fun of other people when they make mistakes. One, cuz it's a demonstration of them growing and trying like we're talking about. And second, they've got things to do.
They don't have countless hours in the day to just go on Twitter and troll people. It's like that's that's not a great life. Or at least I think that's not the life for me.
So anyway, once I kind of figured that out, then I think my ability to get far more comfortable with like the live chats and talking with other people where I can make a mistake in a big executive meeting or whatever. It just became all so much easier. And what I also found is that it actually helped my communication significantly because I stopped spending so much time worrying about am I going to say all this right?
Am I perfectly uh manicured and super proper and everything's great.
I instead spent my time far more focused about what I'm actually doing. And then it unlocked my ability to think with significantly more clarity because you just aren't getting distracted by the things that don't matter. Right? You're not spending those cycles of the neurons thinking about, "Oh my gosh, everybody's laughing at me.
I made that mistake." Blah, blah. just like you've moved on to something that actually matters.
Absolutely.
100% JB. That's like I I love this.
Yeah. So, he's he's saying a few different things, but this last thing that he says is living life for strangers makes zero sense. Absolutely.
I I'm gonna live life for my inner circle and the people that matter to me, not uh other folks. Love it.
Uh anyway, so that's how I feel about embarrassment.
Now, I want to be super clear. I I have a strong conviction that embarrassment and shame are two totally different things. Okay? Embarrassment is mostly about your own ego.
is when you're embarrassed, it's more just your own self-confidence and your ego that is being hurt. You know, you strike out when you're at bat or you shoot the basketball and it's an airball, right? Those are embarrassment things. That's not shame.
Shame is when you've done something that you know you shouldn't have.
That's what shame is. At least in my mind.
And the thing about shame is, and by the way, this is not me saying this. I read this somewhere, but I absolutely loved it. Is that only people of the highest honor feel shame.
People that don't have incredible amounts of honor, they're the ones that don't feel any shame.
So if you feel shame about something that you've done, that in and of itself actually says that you're a good person. Because if you weren't a good person, you wouldn't feel guilty or bad about something that you've done.
And so this is also why embarrassment and shame, at least in my mind, are two totally different things. And if you're feeling shame, shame is not something to be avoided. I think shame is something that you should lean into and try your best to basically not make the mistakes that would lead you to feel shameful. But I don't think that shame is in any way something that you should avoid.
That it's actually a sign of nobility.
It's a sign of honor. It's a sign of ethics.
And I'm sure all of us can think in our head that there are certain people out there that you're like, "Have you no shame?" You know that saying. For the longest time, I didn't understand what this really meant. You know, have you no shame? Oh, I fully get it now. Like it it actually is saying, at least from my perspective, the have you no shame. It basically means like do you have no honor?
Do you have Yeah.
Yeah. So JB, you might have missed it, but what I was just explaining is the way I think about embarrassment is you do something that kind of hurts your own ego, but it's really only Hey, Sean. Yeah.
Peace, brother. uh it's only something that is related to your uh personal self-confidence.
So you feel embarrassed because you you got a B minus on the test or yet you struck out at bat, right? It's it's all just your own ego. You tripped in front of a whole bunch of people and fell down, right? That kind of thing. I think that's the way I think about embarrassment. Whereas shame, I think, is something where you did something wrong that you believe in your heart of hearts is wrong and you feel a sense of regret or or shame from it. But hold on, I want to hear what uh Cat has to say. She's been given some good comments here. Uh so first 100% people are seeking a discussion to understand things from a more experienced source so they will come to learn as well. Yeah. And then she's saying shame is a double-edged sword. For example, I was told to feel shame if I didn't adhere to uh Mormon women rules. I lived my life uh this way till 13. My own honor uh overrode the shame. Yeah. And and so that's I I absolutely agree with this. Um the way that my shame works is I try to live through my own moral compass.
I decide my own set of ethics and I follow those ethics and if I violate those ethics then I feel shame from that. But I don't let anyone else tell me what is ethical or not. I certainly don't let institutions tell me. And I know that that may not be a super popular opinion, but I could really go down some major rabbit holes here.
And absolutely, I think that that that is a very very unfortunate thing is so I think both Cat and Colin are saying something similar, which is there have been religious influences that are trying to make people feel shame. And I think that that's probably very true.
Which and I feel like what that is, guys, from my perspective is that is manipulation.
That is indoctrination.
That's not real. That's someone trying to control you to get you to follow their model.
So then you will do as you're told. And I had a very similar thing is when I was growing up, I was raised to be part of whatever institution and I was asking questions on things that I thought like, you know, didn't make sense and eventually they didn't like that. But they would try to make me feel guilty about stuff like, you know, you weren't there for Sunday mass or you know, all these things. And I just wasn't having any of it. I was like, yeah, I had better things to do.
I, you know, and so, but that can be very hard purely from the social pressure, right? And it's unfortunate to see.
Yeah, I have some very very strong opinions about this which I'm mostly going to keep to myself because I generally have a rule that there's two things I don't talk about which is religion and politics.
And so, uh, I'll leave this out of our stream, but I will say that that what you described, Cat, and what you're talking about, Colin, I don't think that's real shame. I think that's brainwashing.
That's what I believe because you never agreed to that ethical charter.
That's their charter. That's not yours.
And so no one else should be able to make us feel shame.
But if we feel shame for something like you know that you betrayed your best friend for whatever you did or you know that you yanked the dog too hard on the dog walk like those moments of shame. I think those are pretty real and I think those those can be very good thing good good things to have because I think they can help you grow or at least for me they've helped me grow significantly. So I I definitely try to not avoid the shame. I try to really lean into it and understand what did I do, own up to it, become very accountable and then try to like not do that again.
Uh mostly because I do live my life with a pretty high ethics code, but my ethics are mine and mine alone. And I have encourage all of you to do the same, right? Whatever it is that you want to believe, believe that thing. And yeah, absolutely, Ricardo. Yeah, this isn't limited just to things uh with religion.
I mean like we can get really to a core thing is this happens in relationships a lot like a lot of people are in relationships not because they want to be in those relationships but because they're manipulated they're brainwashed into being in that situation.
And often times people will even know that they're being manipulated and controlled, but they just can't find a way out. And so I 100% agree with you.
I think that manipulation and indoctrination and control stuff can happen in any facet of your life.
And I think trying to just be cognizant of it and not letting people do that I think is a really good way forward. Yeah.
Uh okay. So let me talk about these last two real quick and then we can start to look at hostinger and sandboxing.
All right. So these last two anger I think is often times what we know about anger or at least I think at least the articles that I've read from psychologists that are far more knowledgeable about these things than I am. They generally will say things like anger almost always stems from something else. That anger in itself isn't a primary emotion. It's something else that then turns into anger. Like oftentimes fear will transform into anger. And I think they talk about this like in Star Wars, right? I think Yoda is telling Luke Skywalker like your anger is because you're afraid afraid of the dark side or something, right? I can't remember exactly what he says, right?
But he I think he talks about this and I used to be a pretty angry guy. I would get angry all the time and I think that a lot of it was from fear is I was just afraid of a lot of things and I couldn't really face my fears. So I just turned that into anger and I was just not a great person. just not a great person to be around and constantly just I don't know uh making some bad decisions. But as I got older, I think I started to really look at this and think about like what am I doing here? Why why am I so angry all the time? Right? I think many of us probably know that one person or those people that's like they're constantly angry. they're always angry about something and it makes it really hard or uncomfortable to be around. Like why do you just hate everybody? It's uh kind of strange. But anyway, so what I started to realize is that a lot of the anger stuff uh happens from fear and fear is so you know as someone that practiced stoicism I try very hard to never let myself get angry. I'll I'll feel it right often times the anger that I feel feel today is not from fear because I don't let my fear transform into anger.
I just keep it as fear and then I just try to control the fear. But I the anger that I sometimes have, it comes from frustration as like another base emotion that then uh has a derivative transformation into anger. And I I see that very clearly is I'll be frustrated with something and then I'll get angry and then I'd be like, "Go, you're a stoic, bro. You don't do that." So stop letting your frustration turn into anger.
So I think that the reason so there again there's many different ways that I think anger can surface but what I found is that uh again at least according to the psychologists and uh cognitive neuroscientists all those folks is there seems to be a direct correlation between the I think it's like the shutdown of the preffrontal cortex basically like your system 2 thinking when you are in a strong overwhelming emotional state of either fear or anger.
What that basically means is that and I'm probably getting the the names of all these things wrong but what it breaks down to is that if you have overwhelming fear, you have overwhelming anger, you lose the ability to think rationally.
you no longer can actually think in a rational way. And it kind of makes sense, right? Is that if you see things where people are extremely angry, they do stuff that it's like is insane. And it's not really them.
It's that their brain has turned off.
They they have no functioning brain anymore. its full reptilian mind and I think of oftentimes like I think almost all of the cases of things like road rage yeah absolutely fight or flight you nailed it JP is right like the the fight is the anger the flight is the fear those are the two things and if you look at certain things like road rage road rage I think is a great example of almost all the cases that happen.
They logically do not make sense.
That if people were if they had the ability to remain calm and in control of that their emotions, there's no way things would have gone in that direction. But because they're controlled by their emotions, because they're controlled by their anger in this case, they lose the ability to think. And when they lose the ability to think, they then start making very, very bad decisions. Bad decisions that could end up with them being unalived, right?
And so these are like some of the things that I have spent an enormous amount of time thinking about and studying with like stoicism and stuff.
And part of the reason why I'm so keen on being a stoic is I I I think that Marcus Aurelius's teachings were some of the most profound of any of the things that I've read. And I think that there's a a large misconception of stoicism, at least from my perspective.
Stoicism is not in my mind saying you can't have feelings or emotions. It's not that's not it at all.
It would be impossible for you not to have emotions as a human. I I think anyway uh I don't know any human that has that doesn't have emotions.
But with stoicism, the goal is that you have these emotions, but you don't let those emotions take over your actions. That you never become reactionary based on an emotional response. is like one of the core things is you feel the emotion, you let it in, you have that wave of fear or anger or whatever and you take a deep breath.
Just really let yourself have it. And then once you felt it, you then just dissolve it and then you make a decision and then you react.
And my personal experience is and I do think that stoicism is like it's a sort of it's like a zen state and it's something that takes decades to master and so I don't think in any way shape or form that I've mastered stoicism and I love that. I don't intend to actually master it. uh I don't know that it can be mastered but I have seen that my ability to not let myself be controlled by anger and fear has increased significantly by just practicing stoicism and I love it because what it allows me to do is it just allows me to have my system two thinking running at all times and and honestly guys that's a superpower when everybody else is kind of losing their mind and losing their ability to think and you're the cool one that actually still has the ability to be like, "Okay, um it there's a very simple answer here. We just do this, but everybody else is kind of just in such panic mode or so angry or whatever, you know, yelling and fighting and like that's it's really easy to go down these paths of like group think.
which is super bad. Uh and and other many other types of things. So anyway, that's my take on it. And then the last thing is so again embarrassment I think in my mind pretty much totally worthless that if you ever catch yourself feeling embarrassed just be like why am I embarrassed? Who cares?
The only people that are laughing at me are people that are like not kind people. Would I really even care what they think? Probably not. And then everybody else is not laughing at me.
They're they're like feeling good for me. So I don't need to feel embarrassed.
Uh and then with anger, I think anger is mostly uh a bad emotion is like I think it's something to avoid.
And fear is essential.
I I'm a I'm like totally convinced that fear is actually a very healthy thing, but you just can't let it control you because our fear is what has allowed us to survive as a species. If we didn't have fear, the human race wouldn't exist. It's the stuff that told us That's a bear.
I could be eaten. I'm going to run away now. Right. And so, like, fear can be super healthy just to give you a sense of what you're getting into. But I think it's just critical to not let it control you because I do think that fear is the mind killer. As they say in Dune, it is the mind killer that if you are are having too much fear and you let it control you, your mind will not work. It just won't work. At least that's been my experience.
And then shame is great as long as it's I think shame from you, not not from other people uh telling us to feel shame. Like screw that, man. I at least for me I'm Yeah, I'm going to be shameful, but I'm gonna just be shameful for the things that yeah, I feel bad about.
Uh let me let me take a quick look at the chat and then maybe we'll take a short break and then we will actually get into sandboxing and uh hostinger.
Because I think this is this is clearly becoming super critical for us given what Google is doing now is you can't even really use these AIs on your local machine because then it's going to like Google has become a virus. I it's so strange.
Uh okay. So Colin saying for me it was intrusive thoughts but it's let them be present but then to not let them control me in a sense they exist kind of as you said in uh which our feelings exist. Yeah. I fear which capstone project I will choose to determine a different outcome for my future.
Yeah. I love this. Yeah. Maybe we could do this. This is actually like super cool. I'd love to hear what you guys uh Oh, that's awesome. Cat, what quote is it? Is it fear is the mind killer?
Uh, but I love this. I would love to hear you guys say what fears you have.
One of my biggest fears is at least the fear that I I used to have is that I will be giving a lecture and I'm not prepared and it's just like I have nightmares about this.
I think it's partially because I'm just so uh awesome cat. I love that I I'm I'm I try very hard to be responsible and I have this incredible amount of fear that I'm going to show up one day and I'm supposed to be lecturing about something and I have no idea what I'm going to be talking about. Uh I'll feel ashamed later in life. I don't have time for it now. Yeah, that's awesome. Yeah. And by the way, I I just to be clear, I'm also not advocating that we feel overwhelming shame that it controls us. I think that that also would be bad. Does anybody else want to share things that they feel fear of? I just was really enjoying this honest moment.
An alpha grizzly. I like I totally hear what you're saying. I I actually had a fear that my dissertation topic was going to be something that would directly impact the future of my entire life. And so if I picked the wrong dissertation topic that I'm cooked Yeah. Oh, Yara. Um, I don't know if you saw the the the live stream from yesterday, but we'll we'll get circle back to this in a second. Cat's saying that she fears physical pain like burning alive or drowning, nothing else. My partner passed in the pandemic and it took a ton of fear out of me. Wow, man. Thanks for sharing that, Cat. And I'm really sorry to hear that.
Yeah, I have no knowledge of this obviously, but I've heard that being burned alive is literally like one of the most painful things. I'm not talking about like dying in a burning building because oftentimes, as I understand it, you die of the smoke inhalation. You die that much faster. But you know, like if you're a witch in the 1800s and you're outside on the steak, like the smoke doesn't kill you that in that way because the smoke's going up. You actually like are burned alive and it supposedly takes the reason why it's so bad is it takes a long time of excruciating pain before you're unalived.
On the other hand, I've actually heard that drowning is after that initial panic, it's pretty fast. Uh, so anyway, not that that's something any of us should should experience. Also, the dentist I fear that I I fear the dentist 100%.
Uh uh JB is saying I I'm afraid of the day I look have to look back at bridges I burned people cast aside. I keep justifying it with it's for a greater good for everyone. Yeah, that's tough.
Um, I yeah, I definitely had some of those moments in my life.
And and that that might have been one thing that I had a little bit of shame of is when I was younger, I used to let my anger control me. And I did a couple things that it's like questionable whether it was right or not, but I treated some people poorly and burned bridges with people that I don't know that I needed to. The Gojo of today would not do this, but the Justin of yesterday, I think, would. And I do have some regret on some of those that I Yeah.
So I try really hard now not to burn bridges with people.
But it can be tough, man. I tell you some people it feels like they are actively trying to get bridges burned with me.
It's like there's only so much patience before even I cave. Uh, okay. Yara is saying that he'll check out the um the Google thing uh later, but he's saying it's hard for him to feel fear since he already died uh myself. Like, do you mean like a um near-death experience like this type of thing?
That's cool. But he's saying, "But if there's anything I would fear, it would be not being able to control my own anger."
Yeah, that's a good one. Like that a lot.
Yeah, I I I get a little nervous flying, too.
I I used to have a lot more fear of it, I think. And now I'm Get your own fear. Call it.
You guys are a riot. It makes me laugh.
Uh I'm afraid of spaceships.
Uh I don't know, Cyber. I kind of think that we're on the path to start to build some of those uh spaceships. Anyway, Yara, the the Yeah, it's kind of the best way uh to put it. Fear of not getting back to the younger version of yourself. Um yeah, in a nutshell, Yara, what happened is earlier this week, it was figured out that uh if you use Chrome and you do anything related to AI, maybe not even anything related to AI, it will automatically download a small language model, uh Gemini Nano, I think, to your device and then it could be starting to use this thing. Now what makes this a little bit strange and unusual is this is happening without any requests from users. So there's no request from somebody to get this small language model and also it's done in a completely silent way. So when it's happening, you're getting no indication from Google or Chrome that it's happening. There's no opt out.
You're opted in in a blind way.
So it it's really not super great. And a lot of people are I think getting a little concerned because that's definitely crossing a line that I mean we think there's many legal lines that they've crossed by doing this. Like this is to the best of my knowledge again not a lawyer but I work with a lot of lawyers.
I understand a little bit of the legislation around software and I think that that's illegal. Yeah, I think you cannot do this and I can't imagine that Google doesn't know you can't do this. I think that it it has to be intentional.
I mean, like there's too many smart people at Google that their general counsel certainly knows the law for software. And I that makes me believe this has to have been a decision on purpose probably to, you know, stay in the game and all the things in the AI race, but at what cost?
Like going back to shame, Google, you should feel some shame for this one.
This is a shame moment because there's I don't know that there's another way to slice this. Uh uh question for another day. For those that dream of inventions that impact the future, is this time travel or woowoo stuff.
Um, inventions that impact the future.
Interesting.
Uh, I'm not sure I understand exactly. Cat, can you explain some more? I mean, I think I think I have a little bit of an idea.
And for me personally, it's definitely time travel. Like, I just land in the future and then imagine what it looks like and like, "Yep, that you'll need that. You'll need that. You'll need that. Okay, cool. So, we need to invent this stuff now so we can have that stuff in the future." That's really I mean, I think you hit the nail on the head, Cat.
Is Almost all the inventions that I have are literally me in living in my head thinking, what do we need to do for this thing to happen and then I kind of like start walking it back and then I think, oh well, I think I could invent that.
And so yeah, I I literally live in the or my mind lives uh in the 25 to 50 years out or I think it does. I I I'm I'm sure I don't actually know what the future looks like 25 to 50 years out, but I kind of do the one thing leads to another, it leads to another, and then I end up in this state of like, yep, interplanetary species. Got to do it.
Uh okay. Uh, let's take a short break, guys, and we can stretch our legs, all that stuff.
Or at least I'm going to do that and take a have a quick bio break and be back in three minutes and then maybe we'll get into sandboxing.
I hope.
All righty.
Interesting. Cat, I do think that for me, cat, I I'll figure a lot of these things out in my head, but I'll get stuck and then if I get stuck and I go to sleep, almost always when I wake up, I have the answer.
It's really fascinating. Like I know people have said this is like a thing.
It's you know you're trying to solve a bug or figure out some hard thing and you can't figure it out and then you take a nap and then suddenly the you wake up with the answer.
This has hap I have done this dozens of times on like things that I've ended up uh publishing or have patents on or something like that.
I think there's some amazing things that happen in our brain when we sleep.
And I personally have no idea uh what it is exactly, but I think that my subconscious mind has figured out more things than my conscious mind in in many cases.
It's almost like uh it's it my subconscious mind doesn't have to adhere to the restrictions of reality that my conscious mind has to. And because of that, it can figure things out in ways that are like grander. this this type of thing or something like that. I'm mostly basting right now because I don't actually know.
Uh if you think it does is because it does. Yeah. It's all mental construct.
Yeah. I don't know.
Um not just catching up with some stuff Yara is saying. That's how I feel about even using anti-gravity especially now with the deal with the Pentagon and anthropic is definitely intentional.
Yeah, it's getting it's it's getting murky out there, guys.
Getting very murky.
I'm not loving it. But I have hope that we're going to turn some corners and make some better decisions and get this under control.
But I got to tell you, it's definitely the wild west right now. I mean, this is literally the wild west. Anything goes.
And There is no law in town.
It's almost just like who has the the most guns. And in this case, it's the most money.
So, the wild west of the 21st century.
Hey, Musa.
Oh, I'm catching up on the other chat.
Ah.
Uh, will AI robots appear better as droids or humanoid? Interesting.
Yeah, humanoids freak me out a little bit. I'll be honest.
I I actually would prefer if the AI robots would be droids rather than humanoids.
Especially because I think as we get further with the tech, I think it's going to become possible to make the AI robots look, feel, all the stuff almost identical to humans.
And if we go down that path, then I can almost guarantee you we're going to get into some morally ambiguous spaces real fast.
Going back to Cat's comment about for the inventors, do they live in the future? like my mind already jumped to the future where we've got this and the first thing that I think of is people that want power and control and certain humans are not adhering to what they want and they get replaced by the humanoid AI robot and so that person gets vanished but not really because they're there but not they're not there it is the robot that's there and other wacky things.
Interestingly though, um I almost don't even want to say this, but I mean, what the heck? I'll say it anyway.
I think that if the AI robots take humanoid form and the humanoids start to look very very much like humans, I absolutely think that certain humans will marry and have romantic relationships with the AI robots. 100% it's going to happen. I just like absolutely it will happen and there will be like marriages between humans and humanoids or things of that nature. I I can I literally can can see it because already people are doing this with AIS is their AI becomes their best friend. And like I'm I'm very conflicted about this because on the one hand, if somebody really needs attention and they're super lonely and maybe they're having some really bad thoughts, having the AI there to potentially console them could be really good, right?
On the other hand, it is just a mathematical model.
Yeah, totally. I never saw that movie, but I think I get the gist of of what it was.
Anyway, yeah.
So guys, what I think I'm going to do is I think we should end the stream now.
Uh, I've got a couple things that I need to take care of and then I might create another stream later tonight and talk about the sandboxing and the hostinger stuff or I might just postpone that to tomorrow.
But I my short version is I have started to lift weights again or do the resistance bands since my shoulder surgery. And so I did some pretty intense stuff with that yesterday. And then today the doggy and I went and ran.
And I'm actually loving the fact that I'm on the downward slope of exhaustion.
It's it's refreshing to actually feel that again, but it's also kind of rocking me.
So, uh let's let's plan on that and I'll let me drop the Discord just because uh in case you guys are not on it, we've got the Discord and it's amazing.
Uh or at least I think so.
And exactly. Yeah. Alpha Grizz. Exactly.
Just R R2-D2 is let's keep the AI robots that way. or uh very clearly a mechanical type of thing that not in any way trying to be a Bladeunner situation if you if you get me. And if you don't get me, ignore that comment and go watch those movies.
Oh, hold on. There's a comment here from Lucas.
There is a design idea that is functionally driven. Functional driven.
Uh, I think it's great when a robot looks the way it needs to in order to make its task easier. I don't get the idea of copying human body and robots.
Yeah. And human body has many limitations. Yeah, absolutely. I so I think about this quite a bit. I think that this is a great way to look at this. Uh I I realize that the generalists out there, the people that are like, well, I want my robot to do everything, so it needs to look this way. And sure, I that would be great to have the multi-purposed uh robot, but I do think that, you know, we have robots today, right? If if you look on the inside of any Amazon factory, those little ground robots are cruising around and doing stuff and we have our uh robot vacuum cleaners and all the stuff. But yeah, I I very much agree with that comment, Lucas, that when you have a very specific task for the robot and you know that it's going to be super well suited for this, uh, cultivating the design so it's optimal for that task or those sets of tasks makes a ton of sense to me. In fact, there was that robot company that I maybe it doesn't exist anymore, but they were creating the the they were like had a humanoid shape, but they were very clearly not humans cuz they're like in a cloth or something.
But one of the things they had in their robot that I thought was really on point was they were really lightweight. That the robot itself I think it weighed something like 70 80 lbs and that was absolutely a design choice. They did that because uh they wanted to la to have the battery last a very long time or something.
There were a bunch of reasons, but it didn't. The more weight obviously is going to slow it down and drain the battery more. On top of that, the tasks that it was meant for were mostly light chores around the house. It's not meant to lift incredibly heavy objects or things of this nature. So, they were considering that in their design decision. I forget the name of the company, but I feel like they owe me a robot because I ordered one on their early adopter thing and no robot has arrived.
Anyway, you guys are awesome. This was super great. I I love it. No matter what, we'll keep doing our live streams every day that I can. I try not to miss any days. We may hop back on later tonight. If we do and you're on the Discord, you'll get a notification.
So, check out the Discord.
And if not, we'll do it tomorrow and we have to do we have to talk about sandboxing and uh hostinger.
All right, for everybody else, I will see you guys probably on the discord.
So, thanks everyone. Keep going. Keep growing.
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