Welcome to the rough and inaugural first episode of Doing Life Wrong. This is Danny Harmon. I'm your host. Today we're hosting a guy by the name of Cole Harmon. And if you happen to notice, he shares my last name. Odd, weird, I know. He just happened to show up at my house one day and here we are. Cole is such an interesting guy. You don't hear it in this podcast. You don't have any context around him, but he is 32 years old. He's a mechanical engineer. He did that young in life.
He dropped being a mechanical engineer after doing it for only like two or three years. And it's not that he lost the skill or anything, but he stopped working in the field and instead he traveled the world, went to Cambodia and Laos and Thailand. And during the COVID Pandemic in 2020, he got stuck in Thailand and stayed there for a year and a half. And he's got all these stories of health issues, girl issues, and traveling issues, all the things that happen. He's such a great guy.
And you can hear in this podcast how refined his thoughts are on these kinds of subjects and the kinds of subjects about how he should be doing life and what matters to him. So he's one of these people that not only think deeply about it, can really eloquently talk about it and get his point across. So I hope you really enjoy this podcast. He's one of my favorite people and I'm excited to introduce him to you all into the rest of the world here.
Hopefully we'll be doing more of a series discussing some of his other travel adventures and stories. But for now, this is Cole. When you consider yourself and your life, what would it look like for you to be doing life wrong or have done life wrong? Well, I have kind of like a thought experiment gut check that I have used in the past.
And that is essentially just to imagine myself on my deathbed, right? So if I was to do it right now, like if I was on my deathbed, maybe I find out I'm sick and I die next week, right? Or maybe I am imagining myself at 80. I don't know, I have felt when doing that exercise, if I'm honest with myself, like, shit, I would have regrets dying. Like, I never did this, I never reached for that, I never even tried to do this thing.
And to die with those regrets, like to have to face yourself, like, whose fault is that? It's your fault. You had one life, you do whatever you wanted and you didn't do that thing or like this or whatever. does different things at different times. Sometimes it kicks you in the butt. Sometimes it makes you feel sad. Sometimes, like when I was in the hospital and I was doing that, it was like, shit, there is a non zero chance that I die here.
And that would suck because I never even tried to do this. The one that came up for me there was, like the idea of doing some kind of podcast or book. But to get my ideas out there. I've spent all my life learning how the world works and growing and trying to make myself richer so that one day I can do some version of paint a masterpiece right, based on my rich understanding of the world. But I have never painted such a thing. Right. I have not created this kind of mark that I feel proud of.
So your opus is left out there. Well, like, I would die essentially having been useless, and it just hits the ego, which is not the thing is, I would still have lived a pretty good life, still have a lot to be grateful for, right? Like, my higher self is still satisfied and happy, but my lower self is kind of bummed here. Never even reached for it. That's kind of motivated me to do some things. I think again to that.
I don't know if you've seen The Seasons Are Master of Nothing, but in the end of season one, he's got a little bit quoting a Sylvia Plath home about a tree and all the fruit on the tree and each fruit as a young girl, I was looking at the tree and each fruit was like a path I could take. I could be a ballerina, I could be a writer, I could marry a rich baron. I could travel to the Andes, into India and study Sanskrit. But I'm paralyzed by fear.
Like, what will I choose? How will I know? What if I choose the wrong thing? And then as I anguished over this decision, I watched the fruit on the tree, like, wither and die. And now there were no fruit for me and I hadn't picked any. Right. And I think that would be another version of failing. Right. I definitely resonate with that idea of life being like a fruit tree with lots of fruit on it.
I think fruit tree is a very valuable metaphor, and you can basically make it fit to just about anything in life between seeds, roots, trees, fruit, branches, leaves. There's a lot. It's very powerful metaphor. I resonate with the idea of having a lot of potentials open to me. I could do A-B-C-X-Y-Z. Cool. I think a lot of people want they look at society scripts and pick a career save, be smart, be frugal, die. And I picked mechanical engineering because I knew I was smart enough to do it.
But I also already knew the math, but I also wanted to know how the world works. But I also knew myself well enough to know that I was going to get bored of any path, literally any apple I picked. I would be bored in three to four years. Right. Nonetheless. Well and at that point, I would want a different apple. Right. My life is not I don't want one. That is where I've only ever had one apple. Right. I want an apple, and I want what's a blueberry taste like.
How about them strawberries? Have you heard about these pineapples? They're completely different. They sound like apples. They're not. And I don't have to be a master. I much rather want to be like, a jack of all trades. And so I don't have to have a job where I make like, 300 grand a year. I'd be perfectly happy around 100. Right. And I don't feel the need to become an expert necessarily in any one thing when it's, like, against my nature to do so.
And at my nature, I can just kind of coast through life the way I want to and pick up different things. And that turns your jobs into hobbies, and that keeps you interested. Right. It keeps you engaged. Right. Like, you're never going to be an expert, but you're always going to be enthusiastic. Right. I don't usually eat the apples down to the core. I want Pareto Principle. I want to eat the easiest 80% to eat with the 20% of effort, and then I want a different apple.
And maybe that's looking for a different tree rather than to stay at the same tree eating easy apples. It might be to look for a different tree. So as part of your answer to the question, then to have done life wrong would be to not have grazed the forest of possibility and instead stuck to one position and one yeah. I think, again, to me, the mark of failure would be regret. Right. need a variety of fruit.
It's that if I want one, if I want a variety and a variety is available, that I should have that, and that if I put some artificial limit on myself where I stick to this tree because it's comfortable and because I know it, but really, like, I want something else, then that's a mark of personal failure. I mean, because it depends on the tree. It depends. What we're talking about trees is such powerful metaphors, we could be talking about anything. But the feeling of it might not be a failure.
It might be a sacrifice. Like a sacrifice. It could be valuable. It could be more valuable. The stronger this feeling is and the more good that sacrifice does. But I think a lot of people impose artificial constraints on themselves, and a lot of times it's like through fear or some personal psychology or something that stops them from growing. Usually people's biggest enemy in that sense is themselves. And to be my own enemy would be a failure.
Now, I'd like you to take that same question, but apply it externally. No, I think I would have a stricter standard on myself for failure than judging externally because it's going to be based on values.
I think it only makes sense to judge someone as a failure when they fail at the game defined by their own values, right? So I think in looking outwardly at other people and it might not be the perfect litmus test, but probably the easiest quick glance litmus test that would make sense is like, are they miserable? Right? And if somebody is miserable, you can assume that they failed. Right. Like doing whatever they want. That would make them happy. Right. Because they're not there.
Now, that might be their spouse just died and that's the day that you're looking at them. Who knows? But somebody who's miserable, I think chronically depressed. A lot of people are nowadays. But I think that's a lot it comes a lot from poor nutrition and sedentary lifestyle. It's just like we weren't evolved to fit as much as we do and we weren't evolved to eat this processed food. We're not supposed to have this much wheat in our diet, or this much sugar or this much beer.
And it's hard for a body to keep up, right? And sometimes that takes a mental angle. Sometimes it's that, sometimes it's genetics or something you can't do anything about. But I think there's a lot you can do in terms of diet, nutrition, exercise, and a lot of traps you can fall into in terms of just a sedentary, having a desk job and sitting at a desk all day instead of doing a standing desk.
Right? Like the default is much more unhealthy then you have to be kind of weird to go out and change to a standing desk. And so it's just the default situation. So would you paint me a picture of when you can visualize somebody who's truly fucked it up in the world? Somebody who's like their life is jacked and everything is you can't find any good or worth in them. What do they look like? And I want you to paint it tangibly. Cool.
There's two versions, right? There's like the person who squandered all their potential and is miserable about it. And then there's the person who has very intelligently and rigorously and enthusiastically created a system that is doing harm to society. And those are arguably bad in different ways. I think the second one is much worse, right? So that would be like the real bad guy who I would condemn and stuff the person who just wonders their potential.
It's essentially sad but at the same time, I don't know. I don't think you have to live up to all of your potential. You just have to satisfy yourself and it can be like really daunting for a lot of people to even get started, which is where a lot of people lose that game as they just never start. But it's not a really sad story. It's not like genocide. It's just like he was a person and they were sad and they died. There's much sadder stories. It's not the happiest story.
I would wish something better for them, but that person essentially I just wish I could help them open their eyes to see where they're limiting themselves and what they could do instead. Or something like how to reframe the thing that looks daunting but actually doesn't have to be or something like that. But it's not really such a sad story either way. Worst case scenario, it's not too terrible. I don't want to be that guy. Right? Yeah. For myself.
But the thing is that it's really like living life. You don't realize you are that guy a lot of the time. It's only like as you're dying, I think that it's maybe like a couple of times throughout life and then as you're dying that you really notice and register and that it even affects you negatively in any way. For the most part, life is fine. It's not so bad. It's just to me, as I drift off to death, I would like much rather feel like I did it, nailed it and then I can die. Right.
And that's the goal. That's what you want to aim for, right? And it's going to be super specific to you, whoever you are. Right. I'm kind of fascinated. So from what I've heard so far, you're a very open person to say that you don't have any strict rubric by which you're setting things up, but you're saying it's a personal thing to each their own and everybody has to make their choices and satisfied for themselves.
And yet there's this one edge case that's tickling me because you're saying that there is an individual that you condemn in spite of this open idea of each their own sort of way. There is a piece of condemnation, sure.
So is there a line? Is there a rubric that you can judge strictly against it's? A little wiggly aligned would be too difficult, I think, for me, for the way I view things, it's very hard to do like a proper definition of evil and that's essentially what we're trying to point to and avoid.
But essentially we as a society, our society will there are certain people who have as social tendencies, right? Like it might be based from schizophrenia or like bipolar, which personal feelings expressed outward or misunderstanding the world because of hallucinations or some altered brain chemistry.
Or you could have sociopaths where it's just a lack of default empathy and especially with these people sociopaths, and I think I might be a sociopath, right, so there's just people and you want some of them in society, they protect cavemen from the neighbor's sociopath. And it's something like 10% of people are sociopaths. And in society they'll rise to be CEOs a lot of the time, right. They're very charismatic.
They learn the social rules and they crave attention, especially narcissistic sociopaths. But they have the problem that the feedback loop of the herd mentality, where most people have a default empathy, where if they see someone suffering, they feel they're suffering. And it happens as an automatic response. With a sociopath, it's not an automatic response. They can engage it if they choose to, but they don't have to choose to.
And so if nobody ever teaches them and ingrains in them and builds in them this closed circuit to engage empathy, then you could end up with little psychos who could build organizations and systems that are terrible for society. And maybe it's like for their personal gain, maybe it's because they want to watch the world burn, but they say it's objectively terrible yeah, at some point.
And that's the maybe you've got a sociopath who makes a corporation and they're a bank and they're hyper aggressive and they have arguably questionable sales tactics or something, but they stay in the lines. And this is run by a CEO who's a sociopath, but they're staying in the lines. And I think that's fine. It's when the organization is doing measurable and detrimental damage to the society that it should be supported or at least being neutral towards yeah, right.
In that systemic quality, it multiplies the harm because it makes it a recurring harm, which is why organizations organizational negative systems are so much worse than a bad person or a person with squandered potential, systemic and repeated bad. It's just that much worse. Right. you're asking our laws valuable? Should we throw out all the laws and kill all the lawyers? I think we need them to some extent.
The question of how well do they work should be open for debate, but it's going to vary country to country. Personally, I have the theory that our legal system could do with a revamp based on because it's essentially based on the Magna Carta from 1260 and it was like cutting edge at the time. But we know a lot more about the way our neural structures work and our personal human psychology and our models of the brain and crime, punishment, reward and behavioral systems.
It's much more complex now. I think it would be a really worthy project for some country to kind of build a new law system from scratch, but based on modern sciences understanding of the brain to really try to use law and the punishments to dissuade criminal behavior and to rehabilitate people rather than putting them in places where nonviolent criminals have to join gangs to survive. And then it perpetuates this system. Yeah, I think we could do a lot better, but we're also nailing a lot.
A perfect system is impossible and the judges and the juries and being judged by your peers goes a long way. But we don't have a perfect system, right? I don't know. individuals who are like a danger and harm to the society, to themselves and others. I don't want to get thought crimes, but at some level, right, like you can't just have a guy going around, like murdering people. There needs to be some organization like, hey, there's a guy going around murdering people.
We're going to go get them and lock them in a cage. He doesn't do that and maybe we're going to kill him based on what the judge says or whatever the system is. But at some point you need something. And I think we're struggling a lot because essentially because we're still on the Magna Carta system instead of redesigning the law based on our existing understanding, we have an insufficient ability for our police and legal system to deal with mental health, and we know it.
But we also are not building the system that is sufficient to deal with our mental health problems. And I think that's probably how you could be a decent way to define the problem of where we're at. but I would say that the judicial system shouldn't be about condemning at the core, you're just essentially protecting society from antisocial individuals, the antisocial behavior. It could exist in them for circumstances that are outside of their control. And that's a bummer.
The government could overstep that boundary and start saying that people who don't agree with everything the government says are antisocial. That would be too far. That would be way too far. But at some level, yeah, you've got to protect society from the violent people at the edges. I don't know, but Alan Watts has a thing on that, too, that essentially police should only deal with violent crime, thefts and traffic and that everything else is a waste of the police time.
It squanders public resources and is essentially enforcing of moral codes that are they essentially come from different religious traditions but shouldn't apply to everyone. There shouldn't be one moral code stemming from religion that then gets applied to other people. And in doing so, in enforcing drugs and enforcing prostitution laws, the law brings the police into a position of public disrespect because the public knows that smoking weed is not a big deal.
But when the cop arrests the kid for smoking weed, now the cop is in a position of public disrespect but the cop is just following the law, which is his job. Right. The law has brought him here and so it's a bad law. The thing is we should get rid of the law and the problem is the law doesn't work that way. Once you put a law in place, the tendency is that the law is going to stay there forever. And so we have these archaic laws and they're not all good. It's a decent system.
It's probably the best system we've ever had but you could do better at the same time. So you don't want to throw it all out and start from scratch. But I think you do think of it as a tree, right? This just overgrown. There's a lot of weird branches here. We need to take some shears and prune it up. Right? Make it pretty again, get rid of the stuff that doesn't make sense, make room for the new fruit and this new branch. Give it a chance.
This component of adding scientific and medical understanding of psychology and grafting neural anatomy and grafting that onto the tree of law. Right. And giving it a chance to grow into as much of a pillar as separation of judge, jury and executioner. Right. What is the purpose of a unit of life? I think it should be self defined. Like what's the meaning of life that's up for the life to decide for itself. Right.
So then it becomes like a personal challenge and struggle and essentially it comes down to you get what you put into it. Right. So if you bite off a big chunk of life and you manage to chew at all good for you and you had a very worthy life and people are going to be envious of that and if you keep your ambition smaller and do smaller achievements, that could be just as satisfying, just as good.
I think somebody like Elon is maybe morally one of the best people because he sacrifices so much of the fun time in his life to work on systemically good rate as opposed to systemically bad. So it just says systemic bad is bad because it multiplies every time the cycle repeats. Systemic good is that much better because it multiplies every time the cycle repeats.
So he's creating systemically good companies that are leading the world to clean energy and solar and automation and robots that could potentially free us from labor and all sorts of internet, global internet anywhere in the world that I think can be really good for people in geopolitically repressed regions and the internet that the government can't turn off or censor. He's crushing it, not single handedly.
He's organizing large teams of people but they're really taking the wheel of the giant ship that is human civilization and they're turning it and slowly changing the trajectory that the whole ship is on in a positive direction and so I think that's like the most worthy. At the other end of the spectrum, that's like as good as you could possibly conceive of doing.
So if you were to give advice to the next generation of people that are coming up underneath you, my kids, for example, what would be the thing that you would say to my kids to help them be their best selves or have the most impact? What advice would you give to them or contact everybody? These kids are also related to him. I mean, Jordan Peterson has a thing where the fastest and best and most organic way to grow.
So you grow the fastest right at the sweet spot where something is hard for you to do, but it's not too hard that you can't do it. It's the thing that you struggle with at your given ability and that's in struggling against that thing, you'll grow the fastest. It's the perfect challenge for you.
So if you take this idea, combine it with curiosity, and then essentially constantly follow your curiosity and refuse to accept that there are things that you can understand, you are always building your knowledge base in the direction in which that it will grow the fastest. And because it's driven by your curiosity, you'll care more and you'll retain it. When you find the answers, you'll learn faster and farther than people who don't do it this way.
And then what you're building is a tree of knowledge, and you want this it's kind of like a memory palace, but it essentially has structure and it's like everything you know about the world, but it only makes sense when it's all connected to itself, right? So if you learn something new, you have to figure out where that fits on your memory on your tree. It can't just float out in space or you'll forget it. It has to land somewhere on the tree of everything you know. you're going to know a lot.
The other thing, if your kids, I would say definitely do sports and get really in touch and in tune with your body, especially as kids, especially as teenagers, that is a great habit and it sets you up very well in life. I had this idea that essentially, no matter what you're doing, no matter what is your dream or your goal in life, you want to make sure that your mind, body and spirit are aligned and essentially all trained and honed and sharp.
So you don't want to focus on your minds and ignore your body. You don't want to focus on your body and ignore your mind. If you ignore the spirit, the things that really drive you and animate you and get you excited and make life worth living, it doesn't matter if you're the strongest and smartest person. You're not going to know how to make yourself happy. So you need a combination of all three of these things mind, body, spirit.
And when you combine that with this tree of knowledge that you build for yourself, you'll do whatever you want. Crush it, right? Something like that. Amazing. Thanks. Thank you. I hope you enjoyed that conversation. Cole, everybody. I had so much fun with it. We talked a lot more. It was not on the microphone. And things that I wish we could have in here. We'll catch them eventually, but for now, that was just the long, unedited version.
Hopefully, in the future, this episode will be edited and spliced and have proper intros and all of that jazz. That's the intention. Most of these episodes should be pretty concise and pretty edited. So for those that like this, well, hold onto this one, because it'll probably be dropped soon and replaced with something newer and fresher. So if you're still hearing us say congratulations, we wanted to select few.
Thank you for joining this show and listening to us and being a part of thinking about your life, of thinking about what you want, what you need. So thank you for that. Thanks. Thank you for being here. Thank you for having a care. And please go out and do your life wrong all day, every day.