The Ruando Podcast is an exploration of the unconscious in the game of life.
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It is Saturday morning,
Saturday 715 for me.
I've been waking up earlier,
Partly because I wanted to wake up earlier.
It's more something feels good about waking up with the sun or before the sun.
Also thinking like nothing productive ever happens,
For me at least,
After 9pm.
Also something I did last weekend kind of relates to waking up early,
But I'll get into that later.
As I mentioned in another episode,
They're building a meditation center right behind my place which is a really nice thing.
It would be nice to live next to a meditation center,
But they've been jackhammering every day at 8am sharp.
So I've had to,
Yeah,
If I want to record I have to do it earlier.
If anyone's wondering,
Yes the background behind me has changed yet again.
I took down the black African art.
I love the way it looks,
But I have to admit it doesn't go along with the other colors behind me.
Actually,
None of anybody cares.
If you're listening to this and not watching the video,
Like good boys and girls,
You definitely don't care,
But I ordered a bunch of black sound panels that should come in to be back to my favorite color which is black.
Today's episode.
Working title is 5.
5 Maxims for Life.
These are basically my personal morality which I codified last weekend.
I'm going to share them obviously with you.
They may or may not be your morality,
But if you do care to listen to this show,
You probably have certain values in common.
I'm going to share with you these kind of rules or maxims that I came up with with a friend that are kind of guiding principles for making major life decisions.
They're my personal ones.
I'm not saying they're yours of course,
But kind of maybe meta message of this episode is how you can create your own personal morality or I'm giving you an example of creating a personal morality.
In some ways,
This is the opposite of the,
Not the opposite,
But the other side of the Breaking Social Constructions of Reality episode that was more about getting out of other people's moral frameworks.
This is about creating your own.
Before we jump in,
Two quick announcements.
One's pretty random,
But I,
Naliya actually was contacted by this African herbal supplement company.
Herbal supplement company happens to be in Africa,
But they use these African herbs.
They're kind of being marketed to aphrodisiacs.
I think there's other benefits to them.
So anyway,
They sent us some samples.
We've been trying them.
Anyway,
I'm making requests because I've been looking at and speaking to different potential sponsors of the podcast.
I don't want to show something that I don't believe in or isn't useful to my audience.
I've been trying these herbs.
They seem to work,
But I'm curious to see other people's feedback on it.
So if you're listening to this show,
Basically what I'm asking is if anyone is interested in trying these herbal supplements that have been marketed as an aphrodisiac and have other benefits,
I could probably ask the supplier to deliver them or ship them to you at cost.
What I ask is that you send me some feedback and see if you like it.
I'm only going to promote it on this show if I get positive feedback from people.
No pressure.
I mean,
I don't care.
So if you're interested in that,
I could probably do this for a few people.
You can email me at hello at ruando dot com and I'll see about sending you the sample and you can tell me what you think.
If enough people like it,
I may start having a sponsor for the show.
The other announcement is that if you're in the Masculine Underground group or if you're a guy who wants to be,
We are running a men's group this Sunday in the Masculine Underground Facebook group,
9 a.
M.
Eastern Time.
It's the first shot at this.
We'll see how it goes.
We're going to use Facebook meeting rooms.
It will be my first time.
So if you're a men's group,
You don't know what a men's group is.
It's essentially a group discussion for everyone's betterment.
I have a structure.
I ran men's groups in New York for many years.
There's a structure I use that I think is very useful.
It makes it very fun and fulfilling for everyone and on points.
So if you're interested in that,
Just get on the Masculine Underground group around 855 or a little bit before 9 a.
M.
On Sunday,
Eastern Time,
U.
S.
Eastern Time.
You should get a notification that I'm starting a meeting room and then you can just hop in.
We're going to limit it to some number of people.
I don't imagine we'll have more than 10 people.
I wouldn't want more than 10 people.
It would get too noisy.
I'm going to shut it off at 905.
So we're not going to have lay-comers.
So check that out.
Just be online,
Be on Facebook a little bit before 9 a.
M.
Sunday.
So last weekend,
If you follow me on Instagram or if you just caught the last episode like the episode of a bit ago,
Last week I spoke about doing a David Goggins inspired challenge,
A 4x4x48 challenge.
The way David Goggins does it is he runs four miles every four hours for 48 hours.
Buddy and I tried it.
We decided to switch to kilometers.
Neither of us have run in many years and actually personally I thought I would never be able to run again because I messed up both of my knees pretty bad during a Spartan race like three or four years ago and I haven't been able to run.
My knees swell up real quick.
It's specifically my right one.
But when I was down in the islands last month,
I was training in locomotion with this guy,
Actually Ivan Zorich.
Shout out to him.
He's been on the podcast before.
He teaches natural movement.
He was working on my gait and how I was standing.
I actually want to see if I could actually run for the first time.
Long story short,
I can't run.
My knees swelled up again.
But the challenge was still useful because my buddy and I still walked four kilometers every four hours or 48 hours.
So it was like a sleep deprivation challenge.
It was still a physical challenge.
I didn't think walking would be tiring but walking without getting a full night's sleep.
We did walk 48 kilometers over 48 hours.
So it is quite a bit of walking.
My knees swelled up anyway even without running much.
I did run one leg.
It doesn't matter.
My knees swelled up.
I wasn't able to run further.
But it was very fulfilling.
If you have a friend who is into growth or challenges as a man or you feel like you've been getting soft but you don't want to do something super crazy,
I highly,
Highly recommend it.
I found it very rewarding physically,
Mentally.
Of course,
The fact that we did this challenging thing and completed it was useful.
But there were some side benefits that I wasn't expecting that were also very cool.
We spoke about honor and male bonding on an abstract level a few times on this podcast.
There was something about the fact that it really sucked.
After the first 24 hours especially,
If we're running every four hours,
You can't get a full duration of sleep that most of us are used to.
It was really uncomfortable.
It wasn't the worst thing in the world.
It wasn't like going to war.
It was very uncomfortable.
There was something in terms of especially at the 4 a.
M.
Wake-ups,
The only thing that really kept me doing it was the expectation that my friend was also expecting me to do it and same thing vice versa.
Honestly,
If I was trying to do this on my own,
I probably would have been very highly tempted to give up especially at 4 a.
M.
So there's a bit of honor there.
There's also something about suffering together.
It was like there's a dual expectation but also the fact that we actually endured it together.
It wasn't the worst thing in the world.
It wasn't like going to war together.
But given that we live fairly comfortable lives.
I'm sure most of you relative to male existence throughout history live a fairly comfortable life even if you don't think of yourself as a luxurious person.
So doing something like this willfully I found very rewarding.
And then there's something about the male bonding aspect.
We did have a lot of great philosophical discussions through our 48 kilometers of walking,
Some of which is the meat of this episode.
But there's something about suffering together because there's a line in my favorite book Shantaram which I've been quoting a lot lately.
I don't remember off the top of my head.
It was something like men build intimacy not through the laughs they share but through the suffering they share.
I'm not getting the words exactly right but there's something about when you deal with shit with other men you develop this real respect.
So did we do anything that serious?
Of course not.
But on some level and I don't mean to over dramatize it.
I feel like I can trust him when shit goes down.
I believe he can trust me because of the fact we actually stuck to a word through this discomfort.
The other thing with this is we ended up having a lot of discussion since we were walking.
We ended up speaking a lot.
I mean we walked for many.
It took us maybe an hour.
It doesn't matter.
A lot of philosophical discussion.
We spoke about relationships and family and legacy and life purpose and stuff.
And towards the last day or the last couple of walks we started like our ideas kind of coalesced into essentially a moral framework.
So I spoke about this in the social constructions episode.
Morality exists to get a bunch of disparate people,
Disparate identities to coalesce into something.
And in that episode we spoke about it mostly from a negative lens.
If you're born into a culture that doesn't fit your individual purpose,
You're born to a family or your social circle or you've outgrown your friends and you want to go in one direction but they're all like the crabs in the barrel trying to stay one way,
It can be very limiting.
It's a very challenging thing to try to greatly grow as a person directly against the norms of whatever group that you consider normal,
Your reference group.
But ultimately you can't go through – I mean not that you can't but it's not that useful to go through your entire life just floating around without any social reality.
You've heard this in other settings,
People need tribe.
Actually not just for whatever social needs we have or whatever soft stuff but when we speak about the king archetype for instance like becoming the master of your domain,
Whatever that is,
Whether it's your home or your immediate family or your business or whatever it is,
To be king of your reality,
It helps to have people who agree with that reality.
You can be – it's actually funny,
We were through our many walks.
We walked at midnight 4 a.
M.
,
8 a.
M.
,
Every four hours for 48 hours and we would see the same street dogs.
There's a lot of street dogs in Thailand.
I began to start to recognize different dogs and there's one dog in particular that I thought was really cool even though he's kind of a dick to us the first couple of times and he was kind of the alpha dog of not only our neighborhood but like many neighborhoods because every walk we would walk in a different direction and we would see this dog almost every – not every time but like many different times.
It was like,
Oh,
This is the alpha dog of like this entire section of Chiang Mai which was kind of cool and like he would kind of bark at us and growl at us at first.
The third or fourth time we saw him,
It happened to be during the day,
He came over and licked me.
I guess that was his way of being like,
Okay,
You guys have safe passage,
You guys are cool.
But then there were these other dogs,
Were also male dogs,
Who looked like maybe at some point in their lives when they were younger,
Maybe could have been an alpha dog or could have been a contender for the king of the neighborhood but they never left their little patch.
There were some dogs that only stayed on this one street and there were some dogs that looked like they were a little out of shape.
They were only on like this one little patch of sidewalk,
Like that was their little domain.
It's like every male tries to carve out the little domain that they're uncontested in even if they can't make it huge,
Right?
We do the same thing with reality,
Right?
Most of us don't care about the lines on the map unless you're a world leader.
But for us,
We do this with our reality and it's important that at some point in your life when you transition from the exploring warrior who's like just trying to take in stuff and take on challenges without owning anything,
Without claiming,
Without planting his flag anywhere,
Just adventuring the wandering ranger.
At some point,
It's a natural progression to want to plant your flag,
Put up your walls,
Define these are your boundaries for what is yours and cultivate it,
Whether that means having a business,
Raising a family,
Physically building something.
So both he and I are kind of in that same life stage where we're settling down,
Looking at children in the near future.
And this is why creating a moral framework for yourself is important.
And I see this a lot of as like kind of an error in a lot of guys of my generation,
The millennials,
Where a lot of us have taken on this freedom of expression thing,
Which is really important when you're young,
Like that liberal philosophy of trying on a lot of things and not attaching to anything and this ultimate open mind.
I'm not saying you shouldn't have an open mind.
Please have an open mind.
But at some point,
You have to stop going into this divergent part of the diamond and then switch to convergent because if you don't go convergent,
You're never going to sharpen anything,
Right?
You're going to be in the realm of infinite possibilities.
At some point,
You have to collapse the wave function and pick,
Okay,
This is the thing I'm committed to because you're not going to live forever and you're certainly not going to be young forever.
This is not necessarily just a youth thing.
I mean,
I think most of us,
If our life plan blows the way that we basically intend,
We're divergent when we're young and then we pick what we like and converge when we're old.
But if you,
Let's say,
Got married really young or were really conservative when you're young and you get divorced and you're like,
Okay,
Now I'm back into a divergent stage.
I'm not trying to knock anyone who's maybe like on the dating scene for the first time as an older guy or starting a new business as an older,
Like I'm not trying to be an ageist or anything.
But that's typically how it goes,
Right?
Divergence when young is the whole diamond theory thing.
So it's important to draw your lines on the map,
Define the hills that you're willing to die on,
Define the values that you're willing to fight for because without that,
It becomes very hard to make major life decisions,
Which is kind of the root of this episode.
And just to nail this home,
If you really want to define your territory,
You can't be alone in it,
Right?
It's very fulfilling and the internet has allowed this where we can connect with people who share our values without being limited by location.
It's important to find people that think like you,
Otherwise you're going to feel crazy.
If you're the only person that perceives a certain value a certain way or perceives a certain thing that should be good or should be normal and everyone else thinks you're crazy,
You're going to eventually feel crazy.
So anyway,
Here are five and a half maxims that I'm choosing to live my life with.
Again,
This might not be yours but I'm obviously sharing them because I think it would be useful and perhaps you like it.
The first one deals with relationships and this is something I mentioned or shared in the Lover Archetype episode,
Which is in intimacy,
More polarity is always good unless it's harming the connection.
The general rule of thumb is in an intimate relationship,
Always increase polarity.
There are very few times in an intimate relationship where there's any benefit to having less polarity,
Otherwise you become roommates.
Someone started a thread on this in the masculine underground group like on wearing the pants.
I'm not saying that men should necessarily have to be a certain way or women have to be a certain way but if you're a guy who's attracted to feminine women,
For example,
Or if you like it when your girlfriend is in her feminine and taking on those feminine behaviors,
Then it's on you to polarize and be masculine.
If you can handle all the masculine traits really well,
It gives you the safety to be in your feminine and then you have that polar tension.
Relationships that have this unless they're huge dicks to each other typically have good sex lives as opposed to a couple that gets along really well but they're both doing the same thing.
They basically become the same person and therefore there's no sexual attraction.
My friend actually expanded this beyond the relationship and said,
Polarities always good between sexes unless there's a negative outcome to it and he was saying,
Outside of your just interacting with your girlfriend or somebody you want to sleep with,
There's a benefit to having some sort of polarity between yourself and a female friend or if you're a guy or yourself and even female relatives to a degree,
Your buddy's girlfriend or your girlfriend's friends.
There's often a benefit.
I didn't notice it in myself especially in the last couple of years,
Especially since I left one taste where sexuality kind of got mixed in with everything kind of in my subconscious.
I've noticed that when I want to be friends with a woman who I don't want to lead on or approach sexually,
I kind of depolarize which is kind of maybe a bad habit of mine.
After speaking with my friend about this,
I was like,
Oh yeah,
That's actually not useful right?
It doesn't help the interaction to be depolarized between a man and woman even if you just want to be friends but of course there's a limit.
I would actually,
To make this a little more clear,
To make it a very clear maxim that doesn't require a lot of nuance,
I would make the rule that to the degree that you want to be intimate with a given person of the opposite gender,
You should be polar.
With your girlfriend,
Your wife,
Your life partner,
You want to maximize that polarity unless it's somehow harming your relationship.
You don't want to go Stanley Kowalski and beat your wife necessarily.
That would be polarity with a negative outcome but for the most part,
Other than harming someone,
There's always a benefit to increasing polarity.
It will always make things more connected,
Sexier,
It will make you feel better,
It will make her feel better but with someone that is a female friend or your friend's girlfriend or maybe a female relative or an old lady,
You don't want to be that intimate.
You polarize the level of intimacy.
I have a friend here who is really good at this.
He can flirt in a way that's totally not threatening,
He'll make women laugh and it's obvious that he's not trying to flirt,
Get in with them or get them to be attracted to him but it's just his way of being and it creates a lot of fun.
Anyway,
This is just the general rule and I've noticed this in this last week at least,
I've been putting some attention on how I speak to women that I'm not sexually connected to.
I'm monogamous with my girlfriend and it's actually just made our interactions more fun in small ways.
Maxim two through four is something my friend came up with and I think it mostly applies to work.
So,
Maxim one is in intimacy or in relationships always increase polarity or increase polarity.
Maxim two through four is that in work,
You should make your decisions to optimize focus,
Mood and energy.
So we'll go through each one of these things individually but these three kind of all apply to work and not just in your business work or your money generation work but in how you spend your time and effect in reality.
These are quality metrics to optimize for because when you optimize for certain other things that a lot of people just assume are the things you should optimize for like money or this abstract idea of productivity.
When we do that,
We don't take into account the costs or the opportunity,
Not just opportunity costs but the negative externalities of certain actions.
So for example,
The obvious one would be,
Obviously most people would rather have more money than less money.
Money in itself is kind of built to be an always scarce resource in the sense that you never get full on money.
With food,
If you're malnourished,
Obviously more food is better.
At a certain point,
There's a diminishing return where you're now nourished,
You're satiated and more food might not necessarily be better.
It might be neutral because it still tastes good but it's now not adding to your health is taking away from your health.
Of course,
If you keep doing that,
There's a point where you're fat,
You're super overweight,
You're still stuffing your face and the negative effect on your body and how you feel about yourself greatly outweighs whatever mouth pleasure you get.
That obviously is going too far.
It's very obvious when food becomes too much.
Money doesn't actually really become too much because adding a zero to your bank account by itself isn't going to make your life worse but what is the input required to 10X that at that zero?
It might be worth it but it might be not worth it.
If you're going from 50 hours of working a week to 120 hours of working a week,
For most people even if you double your salary,
That's likely a net negative.
If you don't get to spend any time with your family,
If you don't have to attempt any other hobbies,
If you're not sleeping well,
If your hormones are out of whack because you're so stressed,
That's probably not worth double the money unless you have almost no money in which case maybe it's worth the sacrifice.
We also spoke about this in the ambition aliveness episode where I myself was messing up my goals especially around fitness and sometimes around work because with weightlifting,
I would pick a number.
It's like,
Oh,
I want to increase my deadlift by 10% and I would do everything around increasing my deadlift and then I would end up hurting my back or hurting something else because I wasn't considering the other important metrics of how my body feels and whether or not I'm healthy and whether or not my joints are okay.
So whether you choose these three things,
Focus,
Mood and energy,
You want to pick metrics when you're making your life decisions,
When you're making your scheduling plans or like your programming,
Whatever it is for exercise,
For work,
For life,
For developing a skill.
You don't want to pick abstract qualities to optimize for.
Maybe it's important,
Obviously you start a business to make money or as one of the primary drivers.
It's important to pick a metric that will actually or at least have in mind metrics that will show you when – that won't come with negative externality.
So anyway,
We'll go through each one of these things because abstract quantities don't have inbred satiation signals.
Your bank account is not going to tell you,
Oh,
Hold on,
You're actually losing something by trying to add another couple of hundred bucks to this quantity.
So this first one is focus.
Focus is essentially this is cultivating attention if you think of attention as a currency.
This is one of the primary focuses,
Foci of the masculine archetype challenge.
Our first couple of lessons really focus on – cultivating focus or cultivating attention because your attention span as I speak about in the challenge is the raw material.
I mean in a sense it's the masculine raw material for creativity.
I mean we know this – anyone knows this,
Right?
Like if you're constantly flooded with media,
It's hard to think clearly.
The most creative ideas come in moments of silence when you actually stop filling your brain space and like to actually continue this food analogy,
Most media that is thrown at you are empty calories,
Right?
It takes up space in your brain stomach if you will but it doesn't actually nourish you,
Right?
I mean I've been kind of on this rant against social media lately but what's the last time like your Facebook scrolling or Instagram scrolling really benefited you?
Really benefited you.
Of course you could pick like,
Oh yeah,
That article I saw was pretty interesting or I didn't know this was happening or I found this tip.
You could have probably found that other ways.
How much time was scrolling,
How much did that take up space in your brain?
Like a doughnut has some – probably I don't know if it's true but doughnuts have some level of macronutrients,
Right?
A doughnut might have some protein.
You might go,
Doughnuts have protein,
Yeah,
But it's full of other shit and it takes up space in your brain that doesn't allow you to eat healthy food or takes up space in your stomach rather.
So the thing with focus is one of the most obvious things and for anybody who cares about having clear thoughts and good ideas and high value quality,
High ROI ideas,
You got to cut out your empty calorie media.
You want to be taking in nutrient-dense media which for me is high attention span media.
So books by people whose thoughts you actually want to hear,
Podcasts of people whose thoughts you actually want to hear,
Not just anybody.
This is kind of the switch also between in creating your own reality where social media is kind of built around slave morality.
It's kind of built around let's take in everyone.
Everyone's voice is equally useful and I'm not saying that people's voices should not be heard by someone but I'm talking about your subjective perception.
Do you really want to listen to what everyone has to say?
Are they actually going to bring value to you?
I mean maybe when you're young,
You want to again at a certain point in your life,
Maybe you want to explore every kind of idea but liberality is important when you're young.
But at some point you're like,
Okay,
I have my values.
I know what I want to go deep in or I have the things I know I'm interested in.
I know the things that are resonant to me,
My skills,
My interests,
My proclivities.
I want to go deep on those things because knowing a little bit of everything,
Especially things that maybe even be like counterproductive ideas or things like that,
They're not useful.
So don't waste your attention on brain donuts essentially.
Useful tips here,
I mean obvious tips are like phones off in the morning.
That's been a big thing.
For me,
Phones just are designed to suck up your attention span,
Social media especially.
And this is something,
This next bit is from Cal Newport.
Finding maker time blocks.
Now you might not be someone who thinks of himself or herself as a creative person,
Right?
Like if you,
You might not write long form.
Most people don't write beyond a Facebook post in terms of length.
You might have a job where you're a laborer and like maybe you don't think that your ideas matter so much for your quality of life.
I would greatly challenge that idea because one of the things,
One of the main processes in the archetype challenge is basically giving yourself a lot of space and inspiration to basically hear your own intuitive ideas.
A lot of guys,
We've had guys who are construction workers,
Take the program,
Drivers of different vehicles.
I mean things that,
Jobs where they don't think they need their mind so much and by doing some of these exercises where they get to cultivate a higher attention span and really go introspective and listen to their thoughts,
You'll be surprised of what ideas come to you.
This guy,
He's a manager at a construction firm and for a long time he was like really upset with his relationship.
He did some of these exercises like to really focus on going high attention span,
Really listen to his thoughts and he found some very clear clarity pretty quickly about his marriage.
He's like,
Oh shit,
I should have divorced my wife X number of amount of time ago and it became very clear to him and he didn't,
Those prior years he'd been clouding his mind with all this media and he couldn't hear the obvious truth and he was like,
I can't believe it took me this long to realize this because he never gave himself the space to think clearly.
This is essentially the creative process.
It might not be for creating arts but it's also for creating your life a la magician archetype,
Solving any good problems and essentially we're in a war for attention.
I think I made my point here.
The next piece of this is mood.
So this is kind of my mystical view,
My quasi-mystical view but if attention is the masculine raw material for creativity then mood is the feminine,
Right?
Attention is mind down,
Mood is coming from your feelings and actually I've been reading this really interesting book lately.
I'm hopefully going to have the author on the podcast.
It's called The Hour of Wolf and Dog.
It's by this guy John Coates who was a Wall Street trader,
Became a neuroscientist and he ran a bunch of studies that are now famous and a bit controversial around testosterone and the market.
There are some stats that I think I've mentioned in other episodes about how you can often predict the success of a day trader based on his serum level testosterone that morning,
His serum testosterone levels that morning,
Something about testosterone associated with winning.
We probably talked about this in the winter effect episode.
There are also other metrics like how much testosterone exposure a person has when they're in the womb determines certain masculine behaviors including their appetite for risk as an adult.
Anyway I picked up this book to go deeper on his studies because I'm using his studies.
I'm referencing his studies in my history podcast on the history of masculinity.
It should be out later this year.
There's a bunch of stuff in the book that I found really fascinating.
One is about mood and how a lot of people think that mood is in some way conscious like we see something happen in events,
It makes us feel a certain way and then we interpret it.
He was actually saying that that's not actually how our nervous system works because we'll often see an event,
The whole reason why we have a brain,
This might be a bit of too much of a tangent but when we see events our muscles actually react to it long before our brain does.
I don't remember the exact numbers but I think it's like our muscles can react to a threat within like 30 milliseconds which is way faster than our conscious mind can process an event.
If you ever notice like your body tenses and then you're like,
Oh what did I tense about?
Oh it's this thing,
That's essentially the process.
Your emotions move a little bit faster than your conscious perception but your emotions are also slower than your muscles.
So like let's say there's a threat,
Your muscles react in 30 milliseconds but then your organs,
Your visceral nervous system rather which is attached to your organs has a reaction of producing different hormones and that's what signals to your conscious mind what your emotions should be.
This is all,
I might do another episode on that but this is all to say that your mood is tied to your hormones which maybe something everyone knew before.
So this whole thing and the reason why my friend brought up this metric,
This second maxim or thing to optimize your life around is mood which is that of course we know that if your mood is shitty,
Your quality of output,
Your quality of engaging with the world is worse.
In the book Our Wolf and Dog,
He defines mood as an ongoing set of emotions like persistent emotions that filter reality in a certain way.
I don't know if you use the word reality but something like that.
If you basically get stuck in an emotion,
Let's say a general emotion like negativity,
Everything that you perceive,
You filter as a little bit worse,
You cannot take as good action.
Your creative ideas might seem futile.
If you're a writer or if you're a creative person or if you try to be a creative person,
You may have noticed like when you feel shitty,
It's kind of hard to take your ideas seriously.
It's really hard to be like,
Oh,
That's a good idea.
This is great when you feel crappy.
On the flip side though too,
When you come up with a good idea from having quality attention,
It typically uplifts your mood because what are we in this reality for other than to entertain ourselves on some level.
On the most basic level,
Mood can come down into two categories,
Contraction or expansion,
Kind of like the fear and love thing that you see in a lot of – in Donnie Darko or other like self-help things.
We spoke about this in Prometheus Rising,
In the Prometheus Rising episode.
Circuit one,
Our most primal circuit associated with our reptilian nervous system,
It's the circuit that is already developed when we're born.
It's a one-dimensional circuit,
Right?
It either opens to take in something good like nourishment,
Like breast milk or it closes to get away from something that will eat us,
Right?
Most of our emotions,
Almost all of our emotions are based in this primal survival circuit because it's not fair to say like – well,
In my interpretation at least,
Optimizing for a mood doesn't mean always being happy necessarily.
It might be but like if you're trying to be happy all the time and there's something you got to deal with or like give a common social example,
You have a problem with somebody,
Maybe a friend or a co-worker or whatever and confronting them would obviously make you probably not happy,
Would make them probably not happy.
A lot of people use this as justification to avoid confrontation but the net effect is that you end up feeling really shitty over the long term.
That will probably harm the relationship more.
You can't possibly be connected or intimate with someone who you have this resentment at.
It's actually a lot more useful.
It's healthier for your emotions and probably for the relationship with a person for you to tell the truth and be willing to deal with the negative,
The uncomfortable conversation let's say.
Optimizing for mood in my interpretation means being true to expressing what mood needs to be expressed which I mean I'll even simplify further which means going for that expansive feeling because when we think about different emotions,
Even emotions that most people consider negative let's say anger and sadness,
They are not necessarily contracted emotions.
If you are angry without action,
That will typically cause you to contract.
If you are sad but you're suppressing it,
That is contraction but sometimes you need to cry.
Sometimes it feels actually expansive and good to express your anger.
This is the whole predator and prey archetype thing.
If you're expressing anger in a resentful like,
Oh this person is controlling my life,
It's kind of slave morality stuff,
You're basically entering prey mode.
You're assuming that there's something beyond you that controls your reality or dictates your causes and effects.
You go into prey mode and as we spoke about in the predator and prey episode,
That actually depresses your hormones.
Prey animals are not healthy hormonally.
Their adrenaline to noradrenaline ratios are such that it's not very good.
I would imagine it's not very pleasant to be a rabbit who's constantly being chased as opposed to a predator animal who has a very different adrenaline to noradrenaline ratio.
The lion is essentially in a master morality all the time because a lion is an apex predator.
A lion knows,
Whatever level of consciousness a lion has,
Knows that he or she is in charge of his reality.
If he eats or doesn't eat,
It's on him.
It's not about what some other animal does.
That's just a healthier way to be.
Optimizing for mood is not necessarily sustaining a good mood but having a long term expansive mood effect.
It could mean getting angry,
It could mean getting sad,
It could mean having these other emotions that people shy away from but not contracting around it.
How do you organize your life?
How do you make your major long term decisions or your moment to moment decisions on how can I ensure that I have expansive emotions essentially?
How can I essentially welcome reality with that open aperture,
That open circuit one rather than contracting and resisting reality?
Because it doesn't matter what the circumstances of your life are,
If you're contracting and resisting you're not going to have a positive subjective experience.
So with social decisions,
With health decisions,
I've modified my coffee use because even though coffee does improve my focus,
Mood and energy,
There are certainly diminishing returns at a certain level of coffee.
It definitely is not good for my adrenal glands.
So making decisions based on that.
The next maxim,
The next metric we could say is optimizing for energy.
Very related to mood,
Energy in the physics sense is the ability to do work,
Ability to affect reality,
To do things in the material world and it also maybe in the material world,
Coming up with ideas is also work.
This should be also an easy thing to think about.
We spoke about this again in the ambition acceptance episode where I share my personal maxim I guess for overcoming this dilemma of like should I push and put in more effort,
Go hard David Goggins style or should I relax and accept and give myself time to recuperate.
Moment to moment it can be different of what the right thing is but actually if you just take a moment in that specific instance and think which action will increase my feeling of aliveness,
Is it rest or is it pushing harder,
I have found that the answer becomes pretty obvious.
Sometimes it means pushing harder,
Sometimes it means not.
Last night,
So I got up at five to prepare for this at seven this morning but I actually planned on doing this last night at seven pm because it just seemed like a more sensible time to record this.
I don't know why.
It made a lot of sense for my calendar to record this at seven pm but for whatever reason I just was not feeling alive.
The whole idea of recording at seven just kind of was making me feel a little bit depressed or a little bit contracted and I was like well this is obviously not good for my energy.
I don't know why it makes sense for me to do this at seven am rather than seven pm but this is what it is.
Even though it's uncomfortable,
Something about it makes me feel more alive,
Gives me a little bit more energy.
So again it could be nutrition decisions,
Scheduling decisions,
Taking more breaks.
It's moment to moment but this is why this maxim is useful.
The final maxim,
The final thing to optimize for is negative entropy.
This is the first one mainly focuses on intimacy,
Optimizing for polarity,
Two,
Three,
Four,
I guess we could lump them together,
Optimizing for focus,
Mood and energy,
Regards mostly work.
This last piece is the big picture.
In life,
Optimize for negative entropy and what is negative entropy?
So entropy of course is randomness and if you remember the second law of thermodynamics,
I think it's the second law.
Empathy of an entire system is always increasing.
The entire universe is becoming more and more random,
More and more entropic but it becomes the physical matter.
But there is an aspect of reality that is constantly becoming less entropic,
Constantly moving towards higher complexity and less randomness and that is life.
In the book Shantaram which I mentioned earlier,
It's my favorite fucking book,
The mentor character in that book shares his theory of morality and God and stuff like that.
Basically he said the universe is moving,
I mean he was speaking about some part of the universe,
We'll say life,
Life is constantly moving to more and more complexity.
If you think about the very first replicating bits of matter that became the first organisms,
That became the first multicellular organisms and so on,
You know how evolution works,
It's constantly getting more and more complex and humans are themselves making the world more and more complex and ideas are getting more and more complex and singularity and all that stuff.
Life is constantly moving towards higher and higher complexity,
Towards some level of infinite complexity.
The character in that book,
Kottabai Kottakhan calls that infinite complexity God.
So in his religion,
In his world view,
In his morality,
Anything that guides you towards infinite complexity is good,
Anything that reduces it or slows down that progression,
That evolution to infinite complexity is bad.
So how I've adopted this and this I mentioned in the magician archetype as well,
If you just take on this idea,
Just for fun at least,
And you think that okay,
All of reality or we should say all of life is moving towards more and more complexity,
There's a certain part of life that you can control as an individual,
Whoever you are.
That is your life,
That is your immediate touch,
Your immediate slice of this piece of space time.
For the years that you're alive,
For the amount of space that you take up in the world,
You can affect that,
Whether it's your being,
Whether it's your doing,
Whatever.
Your role,
If there is a spiritual role,
And I guess I am turning this into moral code,
Is to maximize the complexity of your slice of space time.
Essentially this is what Jung called individuation.
If you think of life as an RPG,
It's you maxing out your stats.
Because as Steven Pressfield spoke about in the War of Art,
We are not born as blank slates.
Each one of us are born with certain tendencies,
Certain interests,
Certain traits.
It's like this idea that you can be anything or you can do anything is a ridiculous idea and it's ultimately on some level damaging.
I'm 5'6",
There's no amount of effort or positive thinking that would have put me in the NBA.
The thing is,
What's cool about that or what's okay about that is that I haven't had an interest in being in the NBA.
So that's great,
Perfect.
But there are certain things personally that I have been drawn to.
Writing for instance,
Doing stuff like this podcast,
This happens to be my thing.
I don't know why I've been drawn to this stuff,
But I have.
In my moral code,
If I'm not progressing to max out my stats in this set of tasks,
In this simulation of life,
I'm not failing.
I'm not doing my part.
So if you don't care about this spiritual moral framework,
You can take the more individualistic point.
The best,
The most amount of happiness and probably material growth or material acquisition or opportunities or control over reality or fulfillment of your character will come from maxing out your stats.
Taking the things,
Taking your initial conditions,
Because you were born with certain strengths and weaknesses and more important than strengths and weaknesses because very often weaknesses turn into strengths,
It's focusing on the things that you happen to be interested in.
If you're interested in something and you cultivate that interest,
You'll probably become good at it or find something in that.
You might not be the best basketball player,
But maybe your obsession with basketball makes you the best basketball coach or something like that.
So this is actually why it's one of the first lessons in the archetype challenge of doing an inventory of all of your random interests,
All of your proclivities,
Anything that seems to be preconscious of like,
I have no idea why I'm into this thing,
But I'm into it,
That's the thing.
That's part of your archetypal portfolio that you will get so much benefit out of maxing out for whatever reason,
Even if it's not clear how you're going to make money doing that thing or how you're going to make it productive.
Forget about that.
Just in that,
If you just think of reality as a simulation or RPG,
That is your path.
That is the next step in the video game.
So I mentioned for me,
I've had these random interests and I only benefit from putting myself into them as opposed to thinking,
Oh,
It would be very useful to get into this thing,
I should get into it,
But it doesn't stick.
Which is why I think,
Not that I know anything about children or raising children,
But I have my theories.
I think one of the most important things,
Obviously there's certain skills kids need to learn and be educated on when they're young,
Reading,
Writing,
Etc.
But beyond those basic things,
Which should be solidified,
At least reading an arithmetic let's say,
Should be solidified by seven or can only really be solidified by seven.
From then on until adulthood,
I think the most important thing is cultivating interest because if a child is interested enough in something and sees it as a thing they're eager to do,
They'll become good at it.
So presumably you listening are an adult and maybe you've been cultivating your interest or not,
But I think that's the big picture,
That's the thing.
When it comes to the big picture life decisions,
What should I do,
Where should I go,
It's like what am I really interested in?
And then let's see what we can do with it.
Because you may or may not turn it into a career.
Anyway,
These preconscious proclivities,
As we can call them,
They almost always will return positive,
Will have a positive return if you put time and stuff into this interest.
So those are the five,
I mean maybe there are three.
In intimacy,
Always increase polarity.
In work,
Optimize for focus,
Mood and energy.
In big picture life,
Seek to increase negative entropy or decrease entropy let's say.
And I actually turned it,
I mean I'll share this with you,
It's kind of like sharing a part of my journal,
I actually tattooed this on a new notebook,
Had this printed on a new notebook,
Q equals BPE over S,
Which is kind of my nerdy physics,
Q being quality of life,
B being the physics symbol for magnetic fields,
Polarity,
The stronger it is the more attraction a charged particle,
Or the more attraction something has in a charged particle,
This is B,
That's polarity.
P was focus,
P is power,
Power is how much force you can apply,
How much energy over time or how much force times velocity.
Anyway,
For me it defines focus and energy is referring to both mood and energy,
S being entropy,
Which is why it's down there,
It's inversely proportional,
You decrease S,
You will increase Q.
I don't know if anybody cares to see that,
But I did say there's five and a half maxims here,
The half one,
The last one is optimize for good poops,
I'm not a nutrition expert,
But I do find if you're having good poops,
You're having a good life,
I think.
I've been optimizing my eating around having good poops,
And actually I will admit,
Even though I went almost a month without coffee,
I've gently reintroduced coffee and I enjoy it.
It's actually a lot easier to be motivated to do things and write and think clearly on coffee.
Obviously coffee enhances mood,
Caffeine rather.
I do have to admit though,
It has reduced the quality of my poops,
So I would imagine my digestive system is not so happy with that.
Optimizing for poops is that half one.
Don't have to say much more about that,
But we all know the satisfying feeling,
The primal satisfying feeling of having a perfect consistency poop,
It just comes out,
I'm not going to describe it,
But you know what a perfect poop is like,
Something great about it,
It's just like man,
When you have a perfect poop,
You kind of just nailed the day.
When you have a perfect poop,
It's like you're almost always in a good mood,
You almost always have great energy levels,
You don't have distractions,
I think there's a lot to poop.
I'm not a neuroscientist,
I don't know much about the gut brain other than the pop science books I read,
But I think optimizing for poop is one of the best things you can do.
Recapping the announcements,
Sunday,
Sunday 9am Eastern Time,
We have a men's group.
If you want to be a part of the men's group,
Be on the Masked Underground Facebook group a little bit before 9am Eastern Time.
I'll probably be on at 8.
55,
I'm going to start at 9 and we're going to close doors at 9.
05.
Men's group is an opportunity to connect with like-minded guys,
I know especially if you're in a place with lockdown,
It's probably more needed than ever and maybe other places,
You know,
Ideally this group will not be a hodgepodge of people in the sense of like,
Anyway I'm not even going to get into that.
Finding your like people,
You know that's the fun,
Everyone will have an opportunity to share a little bit about what's going on in their life,
What they're working on,
What they care to talk about,
We're going to have a discussion,
I have a structure for discussion that make them particularly useful,
In my opinion at least.
We'll also have an opportunity to hone certain masculine social skills like truth telling and speaking concisely,
Not in like a high pressure learning way,
It's not a workshop,
But you know,
Just in a natural way.
My ideal for how men's groups should be run and how men should support each other is kind of like recreating the fireside chat where you're just like spitting truth,
You're spitting truth at the fire and everyone's sharpening their brain tools.
Yeah,
And yeah,
That is the last kind of random thing if you are interested in testing out these African herbs that have been sent to me,
I'm curious to get a couple people's feedback.
Both men and women actually,
There's a men's version and a woman's version,
I've only tried the men's version,
So men and women who listen,
Feel free to reach out at hello at ruwano.
Com.
For a couple people,
I can get them to send you the herbs that cost and I just ask for you to share with me your feedback before I decide to show this product on my podcast.
And finally,
The Archetype Challenge,
Again,
Still comes with a free one-on-one call,
Video call.
I might drop the video part at some point because you know,
But anyway,
That's neither here nor there.
That's available at ruwano.
Com slash archetype.
It's a great program,
In my opinion,
Of course,
And it comes with a free call to speak with me,
Which is the most cost-effective way to have a coaching call with me.
We're going to zoom out.
What do we have coming up?
My friend Andy is coming on.
He is,
Yeah,
He's going to come on the podcast actually tomorrow.
He's a bow hunter among other things,
Although that's not what we're going to talk about,
But there's a great analogy he came up with from life,
Or a great metaphor I should say,
From bow hunting into life,
Which we're going to speak about.
It's probably going to be called target panic in that episode.
What else do we got coming up?
I think that's it.
Anyway,
If you want more announcements,
Check the Facebook group.
Adios.
See you next time.
