Fluke or Fate? Embracing Uncertainty to Live a Fuller Life with Brian Klaas

which is where you come in. I'd love your input on what to focus on, how to talk about the book, even what it should be called. If you've got a few minutes and a couple thoughts on what would make this book most helpful for you, I'd be really grateful to hear them. Just head to oneufeed dot net slash book survey. You'll also get early updates, fun giveaways, and to behind the scenes look at what it actually takes

to make a book. Editing marathons, title debates, existential spirals, and me questioning all of my life choices at two am over one stubborn sentence. Again, that's oneufeed dot net slash book survey. Thank you so much for being part of this. Your feedback really means a lot to me.

just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf.

what make our lives matter so much. We get into how we all continue to worship at the altar of progress in the Church of We make plans, set goals, and these are good things, but we only have so much control, and Brian teaches that accepting this can be a relief because the point isn't to control everything, but to influence what we can. Brian also shares some wild stories, like how a cloud saved one city from an atomic bomb, and tells another that hit me especially hard, how a

family tragedy led directly to his birth. Without that, Fluke, he wouldn't be here and neither would this episode. I'm Eric Zimmer and this is the one you feed. Hi, Brian, welcome to the show.

things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandchild stops. They think about it for a second. They look up at their grandparent and they say, well, which one wins? And the grandparent says, the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do.

assert control. And a lot of what I'm arguing is that you have to change your worldview to accept that lack of control, to embrace the influence you have over the world, and that gets you closer to being the good wolf that you want to be.

And I think a lot of the misery that people have in modern life is that they keep trying to assert control over an uncontrollable world. And what I'm arguing is I'm taking the scientific concept of chaos theory, which will dive, I'm sure into more details but it's taking that notion of chaos theory and saying that even in a world where you don't have control, small changes can have big effects, which means that your influence over the future of the universe and the future of your life

is profound. And so it's changing the framework from one of control to one of influence. And the influence framework is both correct and also I think much more liberating and uplifting for us to navigate.

a mental breakdown at some point. We don't know exactly what happened, but she snaps and decides, in a moment of sort of tragic madness, to take the lives of those four children herself and then to take her own life. And she was alone at the house, but her husband came home and discovered this horrific tragedy, probably the worst thing that a human being can experience, seeing their entire

family wiped out. And the reason that I talk about this, and I mentioned it early on in Fluke, is because when I was twenty years old, my dad sat me down and told me this story about the man who came home who was my great grandfather, and the woman who killed all of those kids and took her own life was his first wife. He remarried after the trauma subsided a bit about ten years later, to the woman

that was my great grandmother. And so the first thing that I reacted to that story with was obviously shock, Right, that's just an unbelievably bizarre and terrible thing to learn about your family. But then the second thing that really hits you over the head is that your existence is

completely predicated on this story. That if those kids didn't die, I wouldn't exist because the lineage would be different, and it would not have led to me right, right, And so this is the stuff where when you start to think about that, I think about how my existence is predicated on this horrible tragedy. But then I also say to everyone that I meet, right that every conversation I

have is also predicated on this mass tragedy, every podcast interview. Now, people listening to this wouldn't listen to it if those kids hadn't died. So it really affected my worldview about how the tiniest things in the distant past even can really change the trajectory of our lives, even when we're oblivious to them.

go on holiday somewhere. And this is the kind of banal story that is very very commonplace in normal life, except for nineteen years after this vacation took place, the husband and the couple turned out to be America's Secretary of War at the tail end of World War Two, a man named Henry Stimpson, and so he ended up, by happenstance, being in a very consequential place when they were deciding where to drop the first atomic bomb, and

the Target Committee, which was a group of generals and scientists, picked Kyoto as their top location to destroy with the first atomic bomb at the tail end of World War two, and Stimpson, largely because of this previous personal experience with his wife, in nineteen twenty six twice met with President Truman and convinced him to take Kyoto off the bombing list, and so the first bomb was dropped on Hiroshima instead of Kyoto, and the second bomb was supposed to go

to a place called Kokura, which many people have not heard of because it was not bombed, and the reason it was not bombed was simply out of luck, which happened because there was a brief bit of haze or cloud cover over the bombing site when the B twenty nine arrived, and so it diverted to the secondary target

of Nagasaki. And so this is a story of an estimated one hundred and eighty to two hundred thousand people dying in two cities rather than a different two cities, because of a vacation that happened nineteen years earlier and a cloud that was just at the right place at the right time. And so when we think about why things happen, we never think about these tiny details. We think about the big explanations, and we don't think about,

certainly things that happened nineteen years earlier. And the point that I try to make to people is that Henry Stimpson had no idea he was changing the world. The people of Hiroshima had no idea that their fate hung into balance over this vacation destination. But it did. And that's the way that that sort of everything we do matters aspect of chaos theory is tied to influence. That every choice we make has ripple effects that we cannot foresee.

When I'm starting to do the research for this and starting to change my philosophy of life and researching the book, I started to swap out what I thought was a really empty and constantly disappointing framework of understanding the world for one that is, on the face of it, really disconcerting because everything has influence, right, but also, in my view, really empowering and uplifting because there's not a moment that

we can just say is meaningless. Personally, I find that latter viewpoint much much more empowering than the sort of false gospel of control.

in ten years. And I'm using the word probably here on all of these things, and so that my actions, I'm directing them in a certain direction with a belief they're going to go a certain way, versus the idea that I have no idea? What filling up my water bottle at home instead of here at the studio today is going like what impact is that going to have on the world? And I think there are people who are anxious already, who are thinking that everything they do

is so important. And I think what you're saying is just let all that go. So how does somebody who still wants to influence the world in a positive way change their life in a positive way? How do we work with these ideas of influence and control? This is like a nine part question. The last thing I'll say is when we think about controlling nothing, the obvious question is did I not control what should I put on today?

have to still think probabilistically. So what I mean by that is it is possible that if I went out and planted a tree tomorrow, that in one hundred years a child could climb that tree and fall out of it and die, and I would have been part of that story. Right now, that does not mean I shouldn't plant the tree, because most of the time, planting trees

is good. So it's the same thing like I could step into traffic and it could be an epiphany for me where I have a near death experience that reshapes my life. But I'm not going to do that because most of the time you die, right Yes, yes, So I still make choices in a way that is based on what mostly happens. But I also recognize that there is something liberating about accepting the limits of my control. So for me persontionally, I have become less anxious over time,

especially since writing this book. And I had not like anxiety in a clinical sense, but sometimes I'm worried about stuff a little bit more. I sweated the details a little bit more, and the way I feel now is I just sort of feel like there's things that I can influence more directly, things that I can't influence more directly, and you have to just sort of accept some of that limit and enjoy the ride. And that's sort of, you know, the ethos of my life in a way

is you know, I might get cancer tomorrow. I really hope I don't, but you know, you sort of have to embrace that sense of enjoying the ride that you do have because you only have one, right, It's something that you have to really grapple with, and I think some people I talk to really struggle with these concepts. And I like to sort of just pretend that you have certain aspects of life that are noise, but you know, the interconnected nature of our lives is also really really important.

And even when you said the control aspects, so yes, you control what shirt you wear, you don't control how somebody responds to it, right, And like, how many times do relationships start because someone notices an item of clothing and then they say something nice to you, and then you either have a friendship or they becomes your partner. I mean, like all of these things where if you'd

warn a different shirt. You know, this never happens, and so even in those details, yes, we control the little things where we can make choices and have agency and so on, But our lives are, you know, a symphony of eight billion people, and some of them are much more important players in that orchestra, right, Like it's clearly the case that the people around you in closer proximity matter more. But on the other hand, all of us were affected by a pandemic that started by one person

getting sick in China. Right, So you know that aspect of sort of the short term influence being more close to you, more visible, more seeming, like the illusion of control, and then all of a sudden our lives are upended by something that happens thousands of miles away with someone will never meet on a microscopic level of a virus. That aspect of life is the push and pull where we get the glimpses of how a little control. I think we actually have a.

that I like to think about is backgammon. Backgammon is an interesting game because there is a certain amount of skill, but there's also a tremendous amount of luck, like the dice roll, and if somebody rolls all good things, they will beat someone who's far more skilled than them in backgammon because they just will. And I think that is a model for me that always makes sense, like there's an element of this that I can do something about, and I should do that.

one hundred thousand years ago, right, much worse. Also if I was born two hundred years ago, yep. Also who my parents were, and you have issues of how my brain works, right, if I don't have a mental illness or anything like that, that would constrain me. And also where I was born. So one of the places that I do some research in, for example, is Madagascar, where the average person lives on less than five hundred dollars

a year. And I think to myself, if I was born in that society, I don't care how skilled I am, I don't care how great my parents are. I am in a rough position. I'm not going to be on this podcast, right, I'm still going to be rural Madagascar, probably without electricity. So the things that I think have most affected my life trajectory, none of them were things that I had any influence over. So that humbles us in a way that I think gives you the freedom

to take less credit for your success. But also less blame for your failure, and to me, that's a much healthier way to live. Right. I haven't really sort of flushed this out, and I didn't talk about this in Fluke, But the more I've thought about the ideas in the book, the more I think that we live in the most

luck prone era in all of history. And the reason I say that is because if you take somebody who lives in complete isolation, right, so a hermit in the woods, luck has way less of an influence on their life because they're completely independent from the rest of society, right, Like, maybe there's some luck with what foraging they get up to or whatever, but like, basically other people have a

much lower influence on that person. If you take the modern world, in which it's the most interconnected system that's ever existed, where economics, politics, public health, all these things are affected by these massive numbers of people and we have limited control over them. I think our lives are swayed by things we don't control more now than ever before,

precisely because of that interconnection, right. And the logical conclusion of that is that we have less control over things that we did in the past, but more influenced because the ripple effects of our lives are much greater than that hermit. Right, the hermit might still have some influence, but it's going to be probably smaller and probably less

immediate if they truly are alone. Whereas you know, you can really make an impact on the world as a single person today, because the ripple effects can go global very very quickly. I mean, whether it's a social media post, a pandemic, or just you know, starting a movement, whatever it is, all these things are possible in ways that simply were not possible even five hundred or fifty years ago.

And so I think that the analogies you're using, they've dialed up the luck scale, which comes with the influence factor.

that we just don't know. And I tell this story about somebody who went through one of my programs because I just love this little story. So this person heard a lesson I did on generosity. So they were at their local supermarket. They were in their normal line. There's a woman who is the checkout girl. She never smiles, she always seems unhappy. And this woman goes up to her and says, hey, I always get in your line because you just get everybody through it so much faster.

And this woman just lights up like a Christmas tree, right, And then she says, oh, well, would you.

four hours he was missing. And you know, the overhall majority of times that people go missing in the ocean for twenty four hours, the outcome is very very bad, right, And this guy, as he was about to drown, a soccer ball popped into view on the surface of the waves and he clung onto it. It's still an air in it, and he was able to use it to float to survive. And so already this was one of these stories of like, wow, this this amazing thing happened.

The soccer ball arrived at just the right time. But as they were recovering this on the Greek news, this woman was watching it and I sort of like to imagine her dropping her coffee or whatever, you know, she sees this report. But the reason she was astonished by this is because she recognized the soccer ball and her kid had kicked it off a cliff ten days earlier. Eighty miles away, and they had thought absolutely nothing of this, because this happens every so often. You know, you lose

a ball, it's fine. They went out and bought another one, but it turned out that on the waves it drifted at just the right moment and saved this guy's life, right, And so like these are the kinds of things where when people see the story, often what the takeaway they take is what an amazing coincidence? Right? My takeaway is

that is how the world is working. One hundred percent of the time, you just don't know, and every so often you get these glimpses like this person did, where it's just so obvious and it pulls back that illusion of control. The other very flippant thing that I sometimes

say is can you name Albert Einstein's great grandmother? And everyone says no, of course not, and I say, well, she didn't realize she was very important, but she was, yeah, because if she didn't exist, Albert Einsteinism exists, right, right. So I think there's this aspect where every individual matters. They might not know that they matter in the short run, they might not know they matter in the long run.

But if it's not you it's someone else, and that changes the universe in some way, sometimes good and sometimes bad. But the idea of meaninglessness, which I think a lot of people feel in the twenty first century, is in my view, scientifically nonsense. It's not true.

not Hahn called it inner being. And you know the classic story he tells is, you know, in this piece of paper I have here is also the sun and the rain and the clouds, and the person who cut down the tree, and the person who made the lunch of the person who cut down the tree. I mean, I could go on and on. I don't need to, but that all of that is right here, and to

your point, that's the universe all the time. There's a line from someone who studies the Tao that I love, which is that basically life is consumatory relatedness, right, That's all it is. It's countless causes and conditions that we can't even begin to imagine that have come together to create this moment. And what you're pointing us at is that if you can let go into that, then you're part of sort of a sparkling, mysterious, amazing thing.

sort of idea. What I'm dabbling with is ideas of chaos theory and what are called complex systems, which actually are much more i think amenable to ideas that underpin a lot of the religions you're talking about in Eastern philosophy, right, And that's because the central idea in complex systems is interconnectedness. It's that one change in one part of the system affects another part of the system, which is very much

at home in a lot of Eastern philosophy. There are some, you know, more top down Western ideas in religion, especially when you overlay it on individualistic culture like the United States has in spades, which give you this idea of what I call the illusion of control, that if you just do things to sort of bludge in the world the way you want it to be, then you will eventually create the outcome you want. And I think a lot of the philosophical ideas that underpin things like that

is are talking about the interconnectedness of literally everything. I mean, one of the problems is that when you start saying these sorts of words in traditional scientific communities, you sound like, you know, sort of a mystical figure. I think what you're just trying to do is say, like, how do we apply these ideas in a context from my perspective as an academic, where we can test them or sort

of theorize about them. But it's not a million miles away from the philosophical underpinions of religions, certain religions, and so I think to me, it's also obvious, right, like, well, I don't think it is possible to truly believe that we are individuals who have control over the world. That idea does not make sense to me when you scrutinize it for more than a second. Yeah, So I'm very amenable to the idea as you're talking about.

science moves forward in two ways, right. It moves forward often by isolating something, reducing it down, figuring out how this little thing works, and that can be valuable, and it only becomes more useful when you realize how that thing fits into a bigger system that, as you're pointing out, is hopelessly complex.

thousand people in one city versus another. If the timing had even been slightly different, if he was appointed the Secretary of War six months later, he would not have played this role. Right, So you can't say that if we just replay this exact same sort of scenario but we only change one or two things, that it will play out in the same way. The idea of chaos theory is that if anything is even a tiny bit different,

it can play a very very big role. And so when I think about these concepts about how they fit in with science, the lab is not as interconnected, not as complex. It's deliberately designed to avoid all of those things that many people treat as noise. But actually, I argue, noise often is the stuff that dictates outcomes. Right, these tiny little details of a split second change, or all

of us have experienced this in our lives. I think at some point where you have these moments where you sort of realize, ah, I just on that one thing, none of this would have happened. And of course the crucial point is not that you dwell on that specific decision, it's that you're aware that that is happening. All the time,

and you're just oblivious to it. Right. That's the much more profound idea that I think chaos he tries to convey in a scientific literature, but actually it applies a lot to humanity as well.

psychology could be really different by then. And so there's so many things that have changed in the broader world and about how people view the world that of course those things may come out differently.

the same study that have the same reaction. Right. There's a lot of psychology literature and I would argue a lot of social science literature where it's not done that way, and it's relatively small numbers of people, relatively contingent on the context, and then we conclude that it is a

big finding. And so the reason I'm a disillusioned social scientist is because I think there are some of these findings we have which if you did repeat them and you did take into account context, you might find something different. And so it's not to say that we shouldn't do the research. It's just to say that you have to be so careful about context and all those other parameters that might change.

it's going to come out the same way. And that humility is important to recognize that there are things we can say probabilistically, I'm going to give you a better chance of this or that. But everybody's different. And I've often said that one of the mysteries that haunts me I'm a recovering heroin addict, is why some of us get sober and others don't. And I look for a

reason or reasons. And after I read your book, part of me just relaxed a little bit and went, maybe there's not I mean it's not to say that there aren't any reasons or there aren't contributing factors, but that in an individual case, there just may be no answer. Like you just never know. It's not like if I got to talk to God he would be like, oh it's because X Y z A right. You'd have to unravel the entire universe.

So I'll tell the short version of the story. But basically, one of the people who I had the pleasure of meeting after I published the book and wrote about him a little bit was a man who went to New York City for a conference and he was delayed in his flight and his coworker was supposed to meet him for dinner, and they ended up meeting for breakfast the next morning because he had gotten in so late, and she provided him with a gift that was a money tie.

So it's a tie with a painting of a mona, and she knew that he loved this, So it's just a nice gesture from a colleague, right, And he decides that he's so touched by this gesture of kindness that he's going to go back to his hotel room change his shirt so he can wear the mone tie with something that isn't hideously clashing. And so she goes up to the conference and he goes to the hotel room

to iron the shirt. And while he's ironing the shirt, he sees out the window as the first plane hits the World Trade Center in New York, right, because the conference is in New York City, and this is it's held on like the hundred floor, and so in this moment, she dies as a result of this, and he survives because of this tie and changing his shirt. And you know, I had written about this, I knew his story, he'd

spoken a little bit about it publicly. But when I met him, the most profound thing he said to me was that the crippling guilt of survivor's guilt that happened afterwards, which really upset him and affected his life in a very big way for a couple of years, was because everybody said the same thing, everything happens for a reason. And he said the birden that put it on him that his coworker Elaine was supposed to die and he was supposed to live, was so crushing, right, really upset

his life. Whereas if you just say, look, you know, she was in the wrong place at the wrong time, she did something nice for you and you survived by an accident, that in a way, you know, was liberating for him. And so I think, to me, it's one of those aspects I haven't had, you know, such a close call with death like that. But I think for many people to get that sense of the constant search for explanations and reasons can really really derail your life.

And accepting that you are in some ways just an accident the way I feel very much to be an accident because I'm derived from a mass murder. To me, it takes a weight off my shoulders. You know, Accidental things happen, Arbitrary things happen, and that's why I say, you know, the enjoying the ride mentality is sort of the best and most liberating way you can deal with that.

because they seem to have a comfort in things. If I could believe it, I think I might, but I can't, right, so I have no choice but to sort of operate on the other What I think is interesting about this, there's a companion phrase to everything happens for a reason, which is that everything happens for the best or something like that, right, And I think that is also nonsense. I think you can invert that phrase, though, and get something useful out of it, which is that you can

make the best out of everything that happens. I don't think it's the thing that happened has meaning in and of itself, but you can make it meaningful with how you choose to respond. I don't know that me being a homeless heroin addict at twenty four, well, ever, we don't know why. There's no real thing there, and I don't believe it happened for a reason, like I was

appointed to some higher purpose. But I do believe that I was presented an opportunity in which I was able to give that thing meaning by what I did in an ongoing way, and I think that's the more actually compassionate view of suffering, because as soon as everything happens for a reason, you reference the secret in the book, which drives me crazy, because if you follow that thing

to its end, everything happens for a reason. You have to come to terms with the fact that, as you and I are talking right now, like some child is being hideously abused for a reason, and the child somehow attracted that to themselves. I find to be sort of morally repugnant.

you can just say everything happens for a reason. If you say that some things are the culmination of an arbitrary set of forces, or that some people are inflicting harm on a child and we need to stop that, then those things don't have some sort of grand moral art to them, and they require action, right that you need to save the childe One of the most interesting interviews I did around the ideas that I was grappling with in writing the book was actually with a Christian

podcast that I was talking to a person who's a very devout Christian and I'm personally not religious. But what was striking about this was that he was actually much more okay with some of the ideas I had said, because his idea of providence in which everything does happen for a reason, because in his view, God was dictating things meant that he would never know the reason, right and because it was completely unknown to him, he sort of just said, I have to just try to do

my best in life, you know. And I was thinking to myself, like, Okay, I have a very different philosophical framework from this person. But I'm thinking from chaos theory that due to the fact that these tiny little tweaks in life can culminate in really big changes over time, I will never know or understand some of the reasons why things happen to me. I also feel like I should just try to do the best in life because

I don't have control. And so there's a weird sort of horseshoe right where the origin for me is the big bang in physics. That's where I'm thinking about the sort of framework of how these things you know work for him. It was a sort of divine presence dictating everything in the universe. But the acceptance of a lack of control ended up with us at the same point, right, And so this is where again you both operate probabilistically.

You don't know what the right strategy is necessarily going to be, even if you think God is testing you. So you just try to do the thing that you think is best. And that's what I do, right, I try to do the thing that I think would better, and then I hope the ripple effects of my life play out in a good way as opposed to a catastrophically bad way. But I will never know. And that's the interesting aspect of accepting the limits of control. I think that can exist in multiple world views.

over the head. I think with messages that if anything bad happened in my life, it was my fault because I am the master of my own destiny, and if I just have a setback, I should just work harder. I also think that this discount structural problems in society, problems with things we can't control, like mental illness, setbacks from other people doing harm to us, et cetera. That you continually sort of beat yourself up when something goes wrong, and so I do think there's almost the sort of

devotional disciple aspect to this. What I think is a myth that were masters of our own destiny what I call the illusion of control or the delusion of individualism. And to me, it was liberating to get out of that mentality and to start to think about the things that I have influence over the role my life plays in changing the lives of other people, but also accepting that I don't need to pretend that those things are

true anymore. Something that you've said before it really made me think of this is that when you were talking about coaching people, right, I also look back at my life and all the things that I was told I was supposed to want, and I can imagine that I was, you know, going to go to someone to say how do I get there? And there's been loads of times in my life where the things that I thought I wanted were not the things that actually were good for me, right,

And so you know how did I discover that? Well, often by accident, right like where I didn't try to do something, I stumbled into something and found that I loved it or that I was passionate about it. And you know, I often have written about ideas around what I call the false gospel of stuff and status, where the road to happiness is paved with more stuff and higher status. I had not found that to be true.

I find personally that there are things that I care about in the world that are intrinsically valuable to me that other people might not find value in whatsoever, and chasing those things has made me much happier. So that's the other flip side of this sort of disciple aspect of searching for control is that it's often what other people think you want, and that is, to me, is just another one of the myths of that sort of cultural aspiration.

what has come before. And I think that it's really tricky to get that balance because I use myself as an example just because it's the easiest thing to use, right, But if I were to have believed that my genetics and my family and my upbringing and all that meant I was destined to die as an addict. That would have been a problematic view. At the same time, had I believed that I was just a bad person because I was doing this and didn't see all those other

factors would have also been a harmful belief. And so somewhere in there is this triangulation on this idea of well, there is some amount of control in here, and to your point, there's a lot that's not under my control. And I just love the line that you've used a couple times, which is like, how do I do my best?

But I think if you can hold both those views at the same time, it allows you to go a little bit easier on yourself, to relax a little bit, but also stay in sort of the driver's seat of your own life.

going to hit us. And the difficulty is that I think a lot of people respond to that middle ground that is life by thinking if I just got closer to the order, then everything would be okay, right, but

it's never going to happen. That's the point that I say, is like, yes, you just you know, personally, I think that the times where I've felt the worst in my life are when I've been trying to impose order on something I can't, And the times that I felt sometimes the best is where I've sort of accepted that disorder and just enjoyed the moment. You know. There's an example. I took this from very good philosopher I like his

work a lot called hartmut rosa sociologist. He has this phrase called resonance, which I think a lot of people would sort of recognize this moments where you just feel sort of just wonderful in the moment. And the point he makes, which I he has a little line where he says something to the effect of, you know, even in life's planned celebrations, it's the unplanned flourishes that we remember the most. And so I think about, you know,

those moments of celebration. It's like everybody thinks about like their wedding day, the birthdays, anniversaries, all these sort of big milestones, and then you tell stories about them, and it's usually the stuff you did not expect, where somebody did something really funny or just really heartfelt, and that stands out, whereas if you just try to say that you know this is going to happen at ten o'clock, this will happen at ten oh five and so on, it sucks the joy out of it because there's no

unexpected uncertainty. And so, you know, I think we would be utterly crippled as a species if we were fully certain, and if we were fully uncertain, both things would be terrible for us. But living in that middle space is actually where you have the best of both worlds. And so that's where I really do disagree with a lot of the people who just say you have to control your life. I think a world of complete control would

be dystopian. I think it would be horrifically terrible. Yeah, And I like the uncertainty that I have to navigate, even though uncertainty brings tragedy sometimes it's the price of a life that I think is enjoyable and exciting.

but who knows what it would be like. But it wouldn't be like this, right, It wouldn't be like this, And this is kind of what is and I think that's a really good place to be. I want to go back to what you said a minute ago about what'd you call it? The gospel of stuff and success?

many copies it sells and all of that. Right, So I know that if it sells ten thousand copies versus twenty five thousand copies, I'm not fundamentally going to be a happier person because if I sell twenty five thousand, I'm suddenly going to be like, well, why didn't I sell fifty thousand? So I see through this illusion. Goodness gracious, it is persistent, and it just comes roaring right back in why do you think.

son or their father or a friend. You cannot understand whether they have a deep satisfaction from the fact that they really enjoy woodworking or walking their dog. Right, And so when I think about this stuff like I have had a tremendous amount of joy from going for hikes with my dog, with loved ones, etc. And there is absolutely no metric that is tied to that, right, but I feel good? And so what does that culminate towards what am I striving towards? You know, that's the other

aspect of really striving creatures. We try to always embtter our position, and you know, walking the dog doesn't do anything on an objective level to quote unquote better my position in society. It might fulfill me. But the thing is so funny about this to me is that it's so obvious when you put it in the framework of a finite life and the idea of death and so on,

that you're going to look back on your life. I mean, I have never ever encountered someone who has been asked the question of, like, what did you value most of you know in your life in old age? And they say the moment I got the promotion and the ferrari, you know what I mean. It's just like, those things are not if you really love them, if they make you happy. It's not saying that you shouldn't chase things

that are important to you. It's that you have to make sure that you're motivated, in my view, intrinsically, which means that if there were no other people on the planet, would you still value this? And for me, a lot of the things that I've started doing more of the answer is yes, And a lot of the things I've started doing a lot less of the answer is no. Other people care about that, but it doesn't really make

me happy. And that's extrinsic motivation or external motivation, right, So all of society is built around external validation, and all of what makes us happy is built around internal motivation. And that's the paradox of how to navigate it, because obviously the ability to do things that you like is tied to being able to have enough money, for example, that you're not stressed. So it's not that they're completely separate.

It's not that it's important to just jettison them and all of us should live in the woods and be subsistence farmers. It's that you have to calibrate it so that you understand which thing is a means and which thing is an end right. And if your entire life is means where you're trying to get somewhere and you never enjoyed the end, then you've basically mortgage your life

for a goal that never comes. And I worry that there's a lot of people who are doing that because they're on the gospel of stuff and status and they never understand what it's for. They're just playing the game until they die. So it's a bleak way of saying it, but I think there are people who are living that life.

whatever it is for you. You like writing, or you have a message you want to get out to the world, or whatever the intrinsic thing is, and you're going to measure it extrinsically. I talk about this podcast all the time. I can get caught up in it's not as big as X, and it's not as big as why and is it going to pay the bills? And because those

are all realities when I live in that world. Though, I'm not happy when I reorient and say, oh, I do this because I get to talk to really interesting people, right.

But some people set some really mean stuff, and the mean things sort of stuck with me, of course, and I had to sit with it for a little bit. And the two things that were important to realize that have totally made me immune from this. One of them is realizing that I would have written the book if no one read it, because I cared about it and wanted to do it. And it was a profound experience and sort of understanding what I thought about the world. So that's the first part, right, that I would do

it if no one read it. That's intrinsic motivation. And the second thing that I think is also important and does go to a lot of different domains, is you don't write a book or whatever it is that you do professionally, personally, whatever. You don't write a book for the person who hates it. You write the book for the person for whom it's going to change their world. And if that person experiences this in a positive way.

I will take a thousand people who think I'm an idiot and hate the book because I didn't write it for them, you know. And so there's an aspect to this where I think that parable really applies to lots of other parts of life. You can't make something that is going to be universally celebrated or universally affecting in the same way if it's creative, whatever it is, but you do it for the people who it empowers and changes their worldview and makes them think differently, and that's enough.

And so, you know, I think there's so much of that aspect where we're trying to be universalizing. We want it to be one hundred percent of people. It's impossible, but it's still it's still worthwhile if those things make a difference, and also if you find them personally fulfilling.

And it's made me a lot more comfortable with the horrible comments that people make online when you are an author, because you know the majority of them are actually very positive, and those are the people for whom I was spending time, you know, sitting in front of a laptop and really trying to get this right.

do more of this in your own life. So we'll see what happens in the post show conversation listeners if you'd like to get access to that conversation all of the other post show conversations special episodes that I do just for you and you want to contribute to the podcast because we can always always always use your support. Go to oneufeed dot net slash join Brian. Thanks again, I've really enjoyed this. I loved the book. I think your substack is outstanding.

we can spread wisdom one episode at a time. Thank you for being part of the one you Feed community.