Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] This is why rich folks do extreme sports, while childless retirees spend their days on make work projects of pretend importance. And why lottery winners very rarely quit their jobs. Everyone has this dream of a frictionless existence.
[00:00:15] Nobody seems to like it much when they get it. Infinity pools and bottomless margaritas are fine for a time, but eventually you start wishing the moles would pop back up again so you can hit them with a mallet.
[00:00:29] The best in bitcoin made Audible. I am Guy Swan and this is Bitcoin Audible.
[00:00:52] What is up, guys? Welcome back to bitcoin Audible. I'm Guy Swan, the guy who has read more about bitcoin than anybody else you know.
[00:01:01] And this article today is not about bitcoin at all, but I absolutely love it. And I think a lot of bitcoiners need to hear it, actually. I think just in general, it's a wonderful framing to take with you to go out in the world and think about what it is you do and why you love what you're doing or what that even means to love what you do. And I think so many bitcoiners, this is just going to resonate so beautifully with kind of a lot of the heart of bitcoin culture. And so if you didn't know about this is Adam Mastroianni. I think. I think it was Adam. Is that right? Yeah, yeah, Adam Mastroianni. And funny. He actually appears to read these articles himself. So there is actually audio on the article that you can listen to. So if you want to listen to it in his voice, I'll have the link so you can go check it out. And there's not really any reason for me to read it on the show other than the fact that I really, really liked it and I wanted read it. And it felt weird trying to talk about the article without actually reading it for you guys. And honestly, it's just kind of the way I've become so used to this. You know, we're a thousand reads into this, almost 1400 episodes, something like that. That this just feels like the way I'm supposed to do this. So I hope you guys enjoy it. If you do not have blue and green light blocking glasses, the nightshades from Getchroma co are a must. And my favorite thing about these is that they actually keep your circadian rhythm in balance the while still letting a tiny band of purple through. So you actually have quite a bit like me being on a computer and editing and stuff. I still have quite a bit of color depth where most of these just red wash everything, check them out. You get 10% off with code Bitcoin audible and of course we have Leden Ledn IO for Bitcoin backed loans. Bitcoin is literally the ultimate collateral and Leden lets you get a loan against your Bitcoin without selling your bitcoin. It's a must have tool if you're trying to save Bitcoin for the long term and or if you're on a bitcoin standard like myself or also if you get annoyed by the fact that you can't get some of the features, the simple features of the Internet that you're used to without being on a platform, check out synonym and the Pub key stack. This is a set of protocols, a set of tools to re decentralize the web and you'll understand why being annoyed by it is the most important part. And then lastly a shout out to the HRF and their Financial Freedom Report as well as the Oslo Freedom Forum which will which is a conference that they will be having in June 1st to 3rd of this coming year. Links and details will be right down in the show Notes so we're going to read this article whether it has audio somewhere else or not, and I think you guys are really going to enjoy it. So without further ado, let's go ahead and just dive right in and we will follow it with a guy's take. And the article is titled thank you for being annoying by Adam Mastroianni.
[00:03:51] Or Whack em if you got em.
[00:03:54] Do what you love is the most dangerous sentence in the English language.
[00:04:00] We send kids into the world with that mantra in their heads and then they return shell shocked and ashamed because they couldn't do it. Many of them end up believing that they are the one person on earth who just doesn't fit in. The sad SAP whose preferences and talents, whatever they may be, if they even exist, simply do not match the opportunities available. Like a puzzle piece that got mixed into the wrong box, some of them feel that way forever.
[00:04:27] Always a little unsettled and unsatisfied. A few of them turn into cynics, convinced that the idea of a dream job is like the all seeing Santa Claus, a fiction foisted upon children to keep them docile. The problem is that nobody ever tells you what it feels like to love something.
[00:04:45] Everybody thinks love feels like perpetual bliss. It doesn't. It mainly feels annoying.
[00:04:54] That whiskey feeling.
[00:04:57] I'm at the point in my life where I know plenty of people who have made it. People who have become the things that they always hoped they would be. Doctors, lawyers, academics, actors, entrepreneurs, etc. And the one emotion that best describes their daily experience is annoyed. They're annoyed they got exactly what they wanted, and most of the time it bugs them.
[00:05:20] When I call them up, they do not wax poetic about how achieving their childhood dreams has brought them deep and everlasting happiness. They tell me about their dumbass bosses, their crazy patients, the cases that are driving them nuts, and the prototypes that they can't get working.
[00:05:35] Some of these people are honked off because they've chosen the wrong career, but most of them will tell you that they love their jobs and they mean it. Which is weird, because if you watch them closely, they do not spend their work days laughing and smiling and saying things like yippee or wahoo.
[00:05:51] They are, most of the time mad about something. Same goes for me. I'm annoyed all day and yet none of us can stop when we say I love my job, we really mean my job. Pisses me off, but in an enchanting way.
[00:06:08] What's going on here?
[00:06:10] I think annoyance, like cholesterol, has a good kind and a bad kind. The bad kind makes you want to flee backed up traffic, crying babies on planes, colleagues who say they can use Excel when really they mean they've heard of Excel. But the good kind of annoyance draws you in rather than driving you away. It's that feeling you get when there's something you can and must make right. The way some people feel when they see a picture frame that's just a bit askew, except a lot more. And all the time, whenever I fix the thing that's annoying me. It does feel fun, I guess. But it's not fun in the way that, say, going down a water slide is fun. It's a textured pleasure. The kind of enjoyment, I assume, that whiskey enthusiasts get from drinking extremely peaty, smoky scotch. On the one hand it burns, but on the other hand, I kind of like how it burns.
[00:07:02] Good Annoyance is, I think, the only thing that keeps people coming back for more indefinitely.
[00:07:11] There is nothing that a human with a normally functioning brain can do for eight hours a day, every day, for their whole career that feels fun the whole time or even a large fraction of the time. We're just too good at adapting to things. And thank God, because if we never got bored, we would never have survived. Our ancestors would have spent their days staring doe eyed and slack jawed at like a really pretty leaf or something and they would have gotten eaten by leopards.
[00:07:40] Fun fades, but irritation is infinite. The right job for you, then, is the one that puts you in charge of the things that annoy you. And this is where we steer people wrong. We imply that the right occupation for them is the one that lets them float through their days in a kind of dreamy pleasantness, where in fact they should be alternating between vexation and gratification. Or we let them choose proximity over responsibility, perhaps prioritizing what they're working in rather than what they're working on.
[00:08:13] I had a lot of artsy friends in college who did this. After graduation they wanted to play Hamlet, but they instead ended up drafting marketing emails for a summer repertory production of Guys and Dolls. It's no surprise that they hated this, because being in the presence of your annoyances without being in control of them is a recipe for insanity. That's like working at the museum of Slightly Crooked Pictures, where all the frames are wonky but you're not allowed to straighten them.
[00:08:43] Tapeworm yum.
[00:08:47] Good annoyance is ultimately the recipe for greatness. It certainly seems that way, at least, because the people at the top of their game always seem kinda ticked off. You'd think that folks who were famous for being good at something would experience intense pleasure all the time from doing that thing. Otherwise how can they stand to do it so much? Plus, everybody's always telling them how wonderful they are, and that must feel great. And yet, when these people are candid about what's going on in their heads, it turns out to be a little complicated in there. For instance, the Nobel Prize winning novelist Mario Vargas Llosa likened being a writer to having a tapeworm inside you.
[00:09:28] The literary vocation is not a hobby, a sport, a pleasant leisure time activity.
[00:09:32] Like my friend Jose Marius, tapeworm literature becomes a permanent preoccupation, something that takes up your entire existence that overflows the hours you devote to writing and seeps into everything else you do. Because the literary vocation feeds off the life of a writer, just as the tapeworm feeds off the bodies it invades.
[00:09:52] Here's Andre Agassiz on I play tennis for a living, even though I hate tennis, hate it with a dark and secret passion, and always have. I slide to my knees and in a whisper I say, please let this be over. Then I'm not ready for it to be over.
[00:10:09] Marie Curie on Getting an education One never notices what has been done. One can only see what remains to be done.
[00:10:17] Billy Mitchell, one of the best Pac man players in the world, on playing Pac Man I enjoy the victory of it, but it's Pure pain. I don't know anything about a zone or getting into the flow. It's constant intensity and concentration. Nothing's flowing. You squeeze, squeeze a joystick in your hand for hours and it starts to feel like it's going to shatter your hand.
[00:10:38] And Meryl Streep on Acting God, I hate this. Sometimes every beginner needs to have their nose rubbed in this idea. When you're just starting out, it's easy to think that expertise will cure your doubts and conquer your frustrations. That you'll unlock a higher plane of pleasure where once you can play in tune, sync a shot or write a sentence that doesn't suck. Maybe I've just never gotten that good at anything. But this has never happened to me. I have never conquered my doubts and frustrations. I merely traded them in for newer models. I can do more with less effort, but nothing feels effortless. If anything, I'm more annoyed than when I started. That's why I'm still here. I wonder, is this how it will always feel?
[00:11:28] That's what I'm afraid of and what I'm hoping for.
[00:11:32] Whack em if you got em.
[00:11:35] How can something feel so good and so bad at the same time?
[00:11:39] Here's an explanation. According to the cybernetic theory of psychology, the mind is a stack of control systems all trying to keep things copacetic. In this model, happiness comes not from the absence of error in these systems, but but from the correction of error. That is, happiness isn't a full belly, it's a belly that's being filled.
[00:12:05] So if you want to feel good, you gotta let things get at least a little out of whack so that you can whack them back into place again. The whacking is in fact the fun part.
[00:12:17] This is why rich folks do extreme sports, while childless retirees spend their days on make work projects of pretend importance. And why lottery winners very rarely quit their jobs.
[00:12:29] Everyone has this dream of a frictionless existence. Nobody seems to like it much when they get it. Infinity pools and bottomless margaritas are fine for a time, but eventually you start wishing the moles would pop back up again so you can hit them with a mallet. This out of whack back in whack cycle is not a source of motivation. It is motivation.
[00:12:51] Annoyance is the only truly renewable resource known to man.
[00:12:56] When people try and fail to increase their productivity, it's because they miss this point. There is no system that can conjure up annoyance where there isn't any. You cannot trick yourself into caring about something by putting it on your Google calendar. If you have a productivity problem, you're either not annoyed enough, you're annoyed by something you can't actually control, or you're annoyed in a bad way, the kind that makes you want to skip town rather than dig in.
[00:13:24] It's easy to get stuck on the wrong problems because we have such strong theories about the things we should care about, but we don't really get to pick the things that bug us. Why are some people annoyed by crooked picture frames while other people get annoyed by securities fraud or bland chicken parmesan or inefficient assembly lines? I don't know man. People are crazy. There's one guy who's so annoyed at people using the phrase comprised of when they actually mean composed of the that he fixes it on tens of thousands of Wikipedia pages. Link provided no amount of to do lists, Bullet journals, Pomodoros, Kanban's, Moscow Methods, Eisenhower Decision Matrices, or frog eating can rival the power of one dude who is pissed off in a very specific way.
[00:14:09] The Cold Pricklies Human motivation didn't evolve so we could show up to work on time.
[00:14:17] This irritation reduction system drives everything we do, regardless of whether we get a paycheck for it. That includes even the most selfless acts, the ones that we're supposed to do despite our motivations.
[00:14:30] Recently, some of my friends were swapping stories about surprisingly kind strangers, and I couldn't help but notice that every good Samaritan had acted out of annoyance. A construction worker spotted something amiss with my friend's bike chain while she was waiting at a red light, and he came over and knocked it back into place, telling her, I just can't bear to see it like that. Another friend was moving into an apartment and their new neighbor spotted them struggling with a couch and came over to help, muttering, I can't watch you guys do this on your own. A third returned an envelope of cash they found because they would hate to be the kind of person who kept it for themselves.
[00:15:05] I think this is actually the way most good hearted people work. They're motivated not by warm fuzzies, but by cold pricklies. They help because they can't stand the sight of someone in need. The golden glow of altruism comes later, if at all, when they're walking home and thinking about what a good person they are.
[00:15:22] The causes that we stick with then aren't the ones that do the most good, nor the ones that align with whatever we think are our most fundamental values.
[00:15:32] No, we stick with the causes that give us the same perverse pleasure that you get from popping a pimple.
[00:15:40] We'd do a lot more for each other if we acknowledged this fact. Altruism doesn't need to feel like pure self flagellation or pure self congratulation a lot of the time. If you're doing it right, it'll feel irritating. Not all heroes wear capes. Some of them wear an exasperated look of are you seriously trying to lift that couch by yourselves?
[00:16:01] The day Vanessa got dumped what if love itself is just another instance of good annoyance? I had this friend in high school. Let's call her Vanessa. I ran into her once a couple years after graduation while she was living with her boyfriend and madly in love with him. I was skeptical of all things love at the time, so I asked her, how can anyone ever truly love someone else? What about when your boyfriend has diarrhea? Do you still love him? Then Vanessa scoffed. When her boyfriend has diarrhea, she said, it doesn't really have anything to do with her. Their relationship is about the nice stuff, not the nasty stuff.
[00:16:39] A year later, Vanessa came home from work early and found her boyfriend in bed with another woman. It turned out, unfortunately, he did a lot of nasty things that didn't have anything to do with her. I think Vanessa and I were both wrong. Yes, it is your business when the person you love has diarrhea. But no, you don't have to be happy about it. You can be in love and still be annoyed. In fact, love may require a certain amount of frustration because, as Ava of Bookbear Express puts it, closeness is fundamentally annoying.
[00:17:12] Closeness is annoying because it's about the surrender of control. You're trying to fall asleep, and beside you your partner is snoring. You lightly push their jaw to the side so it'll stop. Two minutes later, the snoring commences again. You lay there in the dark, wondering how you got here. Oh, right. Three years ago at a party, you saw someone and thought that they were beautiful. A lot of people who are confused about love are actually waiting for permission to feel annoyed. They think love is supposed to make you crazy in the cartoon sense, where the mere presence of your bow will make your eyes turn into hearts and go awooga.
[00:17:45] Love does drive you crazy like that, but it also drives you crazy in the sense of my spouse only likes three songs and insists on playing them over and over and over again. On our road trip, if you're looking for the person who will never annoy you, you'll never stop looking. But if you find someone who annoys you just right, you'll never stop loving them. Nor will you ever get to hear a song in the car that is not Go youo Own Way by Fleetwood Mac.
[00:18:14] Buggin I always thought that negative emotions were bad.
[00:18:19] Negative is right there in the name.
[00:18:22] Whenever I felt sad or upset or whatever, I'd be like, oh no, a bad feeling. Something's gone wrong. I need to speak to a manager.
[00:18:29] Every foul mood felt like an emergency, like the forces of darkness had breached the keep and were killing my dudes and smashing all my nice things.
[00:18:38] I know that half the world has beaten me to this realization, but there's no such thing as an emotion that's purely bad or purely good. Emotions aren't solid tones like a middle C ringing out at exactly 261Hz.
[00:18:51] Not the interesting ones anyway. Nobody pops in their airpods to listen to four straight minutes of G major chords. The music that holds our attention has overtones, dissonances, dynamics and syncopation. It has bits you like less, bits you like more, and bits you didn't think you liked but you actually do.
[00:19:10] Same goes for any emotion that's strong enough to hold our attention. For a long time, all of my fixations have centered around my irritations that squeeze and release. The indignation and the elation, the rage and the rapture. It feels good and it feels bad and mainly it feels necessary.
[00:19:31] So maybe the question we should be asking young folks is not what do you love? But what bugs the hell out of you? What can't you stand and what can't you quit? People say do what you love and you'll never work a day in your life.
[00:19:46] And they're right because you'll get bored and go home. If you find the job, the calls and the partner that annoy you in exactly the right way, you'll never know peace again.
[00:19:58] Nor will you want to. Please let it be over. I'm not ready for it to be over.
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[00:21:21] I tell you what, I pair drive and file, getting files and working on the stuff on the computer and like my workflows and my content creation, there is nothing that annoys me more.
[00:21:40] Like I, I do nothing. I mean you, you've probably listened to me like the, the amount of. If you ask me why I'm building Pear Drive, the bitching never stops. Like I will just, I will just bitch and moan about exactly why I am so annoyed that something like Pear Drive doesn't exist. I could go on for hours of the problems of the pains of the annoyances with all the quote unquote sol.
[00:22:08] This is why I'm already two years in the hole and quite a bit of money, quite a bit of bitcoin in the hole on this project and I'm still going. And I refuse to let this fall by the wayside without actually having completed what I think this project needs. Granted, I think I'm in this for the long haul because I think I can make this way cooler than just the thing I need to solve my problem. But I am working on Pear Drive and I am trying to solve that problem specifically because of how much I hate the problem.
[00:22:40] Not, not for love or happiness. Like, I'll. I'll tell you right now, there's most of my days working with this stuff is absolute frustration. And ask my wife, she will tell you that that's all. All she gets from me is how pain, how annoying it is. And the days of just like nothing's moving Nothing's working. I'm so sick of this crap. And that's kind of been my relationship with film now for. I know a lot of y' all probably know, but. And I mentioned every once in a while, but my background is actually in film. I wanted to be a movie director when I was in high school.
[00:23:16] And I'll tell you that's just because there were so many movies that I saw so much promise in. But I hate it there. And. And there are. There are a few things.
[00:23:26] Bitcoin is one of the only things. Paradrive and like the file sharing and, you know, getting stuff from one computer to another. Those are the only two things that I can complain or just be as annoyed. And both. Both engrossed in. That is on par with how much I can hate a movie for making me want to like it, but sucking really bad.
[00:23:53] And the ones that my wife will immediately roll her eyes and be like, oh, my God, please do not bring that up.
[00:24:01] Are the Last Airbender, the movie by M. Night Shyamalan. Because I was a huge fan of that anime, the cartoon series. I thought. I thought it was incredibly well done and led itself or lent itself to an inc.
[00:24:15] Just could have been such a good series of films. I think it'd be four films. I even literally. Okay, let me give you a hint of just how much this frustrated me.
[00:24:26] I actually have a script. I have a movie script of the Last Airbender of the first movie, or I guess the first season, because I was so mad at that film, at how much that film sucked and how complete, completely non existent the character arc and the actual character story was. It was literally just kind of a series of arbitrary events with the worst dialogue imaginable.
[00:24:52] I was so mad at this. I'm. I shit you not. I wrote down and I wrote, or I sat down and I wrote 200 pages of a script to fix that movie. And I actually really like my character arc. I broke it down. I talked through the entire thing with my brother, and he even gets like, all emotional when I'm like, breaking down the end of the movie and how the character arc closes. And you know what. What it is that Aang realizes as a character in the film, like, what I think the first film ought to be in his recognition, like, what's his. What's his misbelief that he finally recognizes as. As the truth? And there's just such a beautiful story there that's completely untapped. And there. There are a few things that can piss me off as Much as that.
[00:25:36] And I think that is my favorite part about this article because it rings so beautifully true.
[00:25:43] Like, like I said, the other one is the Last Jedi. But I haven't gone and spent the time to actually fix that Star wars movie.
[00:25:52] That one, that one you can hear me talk about. Like, I could, I could write a review for. I could write a 200 page review about how garbage that movie is. But I think this just rings so true from, from this piece. It says, you know, why are some people annoyed by crooked picture frames while other people get annoyed by securities fraud or bland chicken parmesan or inefficient assembly lines? I don't know, man. People are crazy.
[00:26:16] There's one guy who is so annoyed at people using the phrase comprised of when they actually mean composed of that. He fixes it on tens of thousands of Wikipedia pages and he's got a link.
[00:26:29] I said link in the show notes. Just because there's a whole article on NPR of this dude making this change.
[00:26:39] And I love that. But the rest of the quote says no amount of to do lists, bullet journals, Pomodoros, Kanban's Moscow methods, Eisenhower decision matrices, or frog eating and can rival the power of one dude who is pissed off in a very specific way.
[00:26:56] And oh man, that just.
[00:26:59] That is the truth. That is such the truth.
[00:27:03] You know, I started this podcast on an annoyance.
[00:27:07] I wanted to. I was working as an Internet and networking technician at the time.
[00:27:15] And so I was in a van with tools driving around fixing people's stuff, you know, from job to job, 8 hours, 9 hours, 10 hours a day, depending on how crappy the jobs were that day. Which meant that I listened to tons of audiobooks, podcasts, like, I would just clear. I would love to be able to go back and see my hours of listening and consuming of content during that era of my life, because it is unmatched. I would, I literally would clear through a book in four or five days. And, and this was, this was in the peak of the audible credits era before when they had started the credit system, but they hadn't worked out some of the kinks. You can actually buy credits in bulk because they would offer. There'd be a ton of credits that you could get for like authors and producers and a bunch of system little systems that they would offer out credits to people within the audible itself, but you can actually gift them, you could reassign them to a different account.
[00:28:24] And so they would have tons of these and they would literally, literally sell them in batches that they had gotten for free on ebay at like two or three dollars a pop. And I was doing the $15 a month, you get one credit. So I'd clear through my book, you know, and in the first four or five days of the month, and I need to buy more books. So I found out about this and started buying them off ebay. And I'd buy them in like, 20 or 50 credit batches.
[00:28:54] And then the. They basically closed that loophole after, I don't know, six months or so, or at least from. From the point that I found out about it. And it was funny to watch. This was from an economic. Me being a bit of an economics nerd. It was funny to watch the prices of them slowly rise. Like, every time I went back to ebay, you could still get some of them, but it started to be like, you have to create a new account to get the credits or you have to shift this over. Like, there was like this small transition of like two or three weeks where it went from like, that $2 per credit price all the way up to 10, 11, $12 per credit. Like, it started to just match the price that you could get it on Audible because they were closing up this gap and ability to trade the trade credits that were given away for free. And honestly, I really wish I had just invested like $1,000 and gotten like 400 credits because, I mean, I did get probably 200 over the entire lifespan of this thing. And I still clear through stuff pretty quick, but, I mean, it's. It's horribly slow in comparison to kind of that era. But so, you know, I was doing all of this, and one of the things I would. I would just clear through stuff so quick. And there was nothing to listen to about Bitcoin.
[00:30:08] I. There was like, the Plan B podcast at the time, there was a bitcoin knowledge podcast, a couple other, you know, kind of OG shows that mostly went by the wayside. I don't think any of them are really still going.
[00:30:22] And.
[00:30:23] But I would clear. It's like they're like four major podcasts maybe, and I'd clear through them in no time. You know, they publish on a day and then it's gone that day.
[00:30:32] And I had so much stuff, like, so many articles saved, so many papers saved, so many books and, like, lengthy reads and blog posts, like, you name it. Just stuff on top of stuff on top of stuff. This, like, huge. In fact, I still have a bunch of my links from back then stuck in notion because you can't you export them and they do a notion so link, even though I saved it as like a normal HTML link, they refer you back to the notion board. I. Man, that pisses me off. That's another one of those things that annoys me so deeply that I used Notion for like two years and I created this huge database of stuff. Now I can probably actually go through Claude now and do like a wget or some sort of a function to actually go and get those links. And I'm going to do that finally.
[00:31:22] But that's like one of those things that makes me want to build a whole competitor notion just to F them in the A. Because I cannot believe that they, they, they brag about, you can export this stuff and this is all your. This is your notes thing and you're all going to have all your stuff. And I took them at their word and said, okay, I'm gonna invest all of my. I'm gonna build these spreadsheets of my links and database and I'm gonna organize all this shit and then I can just export it and take it wherever you I want. Nope, nope. Soon as you export it, they turn from your link to the Internet, to their link to Notion, so to the block in the spreadsheet on their website. They have trapped it into their platform anyway. That pisses me off. Paid those people money. Lying sons of bitches. But I couldn't get through any of it. I saved.
[00:32:09] I saved 50 links for every one or two that I got through. Literally, I was saving everything that I could get my hands on. And that this is actually all part of my reasoning for Pear Drive too, is I want to be like, I. I need like a system that I can access from all of my devices where I can jointly.
[00:32:31] I can basically put everything and organize everything. And I'm building an AI system on top of this to automatically sort through and. Or I'm gonna have a treasure trove of old history, old Internet history. Probably tons of dead links, which sucks. But there's a massive amount that's still just untapped that I would like to save or be able to explore and dive into again. And that's part of the concept or reasoning behind Paradise Existence is I want to be able to organize it and have it available and save everything from every single device into the same place. But I couldn't consume any of it. I could not. I had too much stuff that I could not consume. And I was just annoyed. I was annoyed. I. I was so frustrated with not being able to consume any of this content and I desperately Wanted someone else. I was like, somebody out there has to be doing these in audible like that, making an audio version of these things.
[00:33:31] And I tried a bunch of, you know, speech or text to speech things back then, which is. It wasn't even referred to as AI at the time because ChatGPT hadn't even happened yet. And they were all garbage. Most of them still are. They're not, they're not bad, actually. This one, I think the author actually reads this himself.
[00:33:54] Yeah, yeah, yeah, this is. This one, if I'm not mistaken, is the actual author reading the actual article, doing the voiceover on this thing. So you can actually listen to this on the article. So there was really no reason for me to actually read this out loud on the show other than the fact that I really liked the article. And I, I get way more out of it now, being able to read it myself out loud. I just, I just like this way of consuming content, honestly. But I started this show, this whole idea, because I, I didn't know nobody else was. Nobody else would do the thing that I thought would be really cool to do and I thought would be really useful. I wanted it. I wanted it. I was annoyed that nobody else would make it. I even mentioned the idea probably a dozen times or something on like Reddit and just talking and interacting with people like, man, I just wish I would read this shit. And that's why Bitcoin Audible exists. And a lot of my motivation now is just about how difficult and suboptimal it is to dig into ideas or get the clarity on some issue without a long form conversation to like, try to get this on Twitter or Nostr, even like, it just.
[00:35:11] Social media does not lend itself to healthy exploration.
[00:35:16] And the network that I've gotten from this show, like the ability to just reach out to people and then have a conversation makes this task so much easier and more fun. It's just more engaging to ask people a question about something rather than, you know, go ask Google and then try to figure out which article or which publication isn't just full of crap. Like, this show is basically how I break down an idea. It's how I explore something that annoys me that I can't figure out or that I'm bothered by the fact that I can't square the circle. You know what I mean? That, like ideas, ideas that don't fit together. There's so many ideas, there's so many concepts, there's so much logic and quote unquote reasoning that people give or excuses that people give for things that. It's like most of the time they look like they fit together, but it's like those two puzzle pieces on. In the puzzle that the colors match up and everything like, looks like if you just look at the.
[00:36:25] The, you know, the, the male end and the female end of the little connectors, it looks like they're perfect. And then you put them together and they're just like a little bit too tight or they're just slightly out of sync and you're like, no, it's. This has to fit. But it definitely doesn't. I feel like there are so many ideas and there's so many claims or supposed explanations or values or human rights or whatever it is. These things that are claimed that, oh, they, they're definitely this way. But then when you actually try to fit them together with the other ideas, you know, a lot of other very universal and obvious truths that we know are the fact or are the case.
[00:37:04] You. You try to put them together and it's like they kind of look like it, but as soon as you start pressing them together, they don't. They. They're just too much friction. It's too tight that they're bumping into each other. There's. There's too much dissonance there. And that is one of the things that for the life of me, for my entire existence, I have hated ideas that don't fit together. Because you know what? The world doesn't contradict itself. There is nothing in the universe that is contradictory. If you hold a contradictory idea or concept in your mind, then you are simply holding a false belief. Period. End of story. Or you don't understand it deeply enough in order to actually make out where or why it sounds like there's a contradiction. You know, that mechanism in our brains that. That system that says things must be. That reason must exist, that there must be a coherent relationship between all things in the world. This is why I always go back all my economic explanations with like two people in a house, right? Is because every economic theory that can or ever could possibly be true must be true in a situation with two people. And if the. The only time in which it could ever actually exist is when it's like huge and there's millions of people and suddenly money doesn't matter or you can just print as much as you want. It's like all bullshit. If you can't explain it with two people in a local economy and relate it to what the money and what the actual production, the lumber and the house and the time dedicated to actually producing those resources.
[00:38:33] If you can't explain it in that environment, then you can't explain it, or it's just nonsensical. You're relying on complexity and abstraction to fill in the blanks so that it's too big to actually think about, so that you can just like kind of hand wavy a bunch of claims and use a bunch of jargon and kind of gaslight, whoever it is that you're talking to, so you can sound smart, like you know what you're talking about and you got an economic degree or some shit, but the reality is that you don't actually know what you're talking about. And you're just kind of hiding behind your credentials and then belittling people who try to get you to explain it in a simpler context. That's why my favorite physicist is Feynman, because he talks about that all the time. And that was like one of his points that he just always harped on is if you can't explain it something simply, then you just don't know what the hell you're talking about. And this is actually why for everybody who just shits on podcasts and you know, it's like, oh, well, he just listens to Joe Rogan and Joe Rogan's not got a PhD or whatever it is. Why is it that so many people still go to that? Why is it there's still so much value in just listening to the history podcast as opposed to the historian with the PhD working in academia? Why? Because the person in academia may very well just be there for the clout. They're there self referentially to just be important and because they're the, they're the master of their field and they're the ones with the more. You know, they've been in academia their whole life. They went to school and then they decided to teach. They never did anything. And that's not to crap on teachers either. My family is full of teachers. My mom is a brilliant teacher. What I do right here is basically teaching. But I don't do it for clout or for credentials. I do it because it annoys me when people get it wrong or when the explanations for things suck, or they don't actually.
[00:40:20] The, the analogy doesn't complete the story or give me an image that I can actually work with that makes sense and actually applies to the relationship in real life. And that's what I think this whole kind of alternative or the huge piece of this alternative media era actually is, is finding those random individuals that are Annoyed by those random odd off, like one off type things. And then they spend thousands and thousands and thousands of hours to try to correct it for themselves.
[00:40:58] That's going to be, that's going to be a million times more valuable than a degree or, you know, some academic congratulations or pat on the back from somebody in the establishment that says you learned all the establishment things and ticked all the boxes and passed all the multiple choice questions that prove that now you're going to regurgitate all the things that I told you were true. And this is a big test, this is a really, really good test for someone for picking a lawyer or a doctor or something like that. And this is something that I always do is I always ask, I ask questions. I want to know and understand if you ask a doctor why something happens or what they think, you know, causes this or why this relationship exists, blah, blah, blah, you know, like, okay, what, what is this thing and why does this matter to this situation if they don't like really get into it and give you an explanation? They don't kind of have that like, internal reaction that, oh, like, like if somebody asked me why the Last Jedi sucks as a movie or whether or not I like the movie, if I don't see that spark in them, or worse, they're just incredibly dismissive or they just kind of, in a, in a very subtle way, in a very polite, you know, you're the customer sort of way, they condescend me or, or dismiss the entire notion and just give me an offhand a hand, wavy explanation or just, just a thing to end the conversation be done. And if they're overly like out there about the fact that like, oh, you looked up something on Google so now you think, you know, I will never use that doctor I want, I want to be away from them immediately. And that's not to say that like, because you look up something on Google that that's correct, that's not true at all. I completely understand that sentiment. But belittling someone because they're trying to figure something out is a sign that you don't actually care about what it is. You're not there for the reason it doesn't irritate you enough to actually discover, understand or explain that is someone you should never trust. At least that's not some, that's the person that I don't trust. I do not want to be under their care and doubly so for my children and anybody else that I love. That need to fill in the blank, to close the circle is what I trust to know someone is actually trying to do something, is actually trying to figure something out, and they're not just looking at a list. Otherwise, I can just talk to chat. GPT.
[00:43:32] Now, this is probably my favorite section, or at least one of my favorite sections, and this will stick with me because this is actually the point that I got to. Because I was just kind of casually reading a bunch of stuff. I think this is actually one of the ones that I. I think this is one of the ones that Jimmy Song actually sent me, or I at least got to it from that, because I have a few of those articles that he. He recommended.
[00:43:57] Actually, he recommended a couple after. Like, we continue talking after the show a little bit. But this particular part of the article is when I got to the point where I was just like, I'm gonna read this on the show because I absolutely love this idea. And this.
[00:44:13] This hits. So this. This rounds out so many circles and fills so many puzzle piece things in my mind that fit perfectly together with the rest of my worldview and the structure of reality that I have and life in general.
[00:44:31] This was so perfect that I was just. I. I stopped and I was like, oh, my God, Brianna. I went and got my wife. I was like, you've got to listen to this. And here it is. According to the cybernetic theory of psychology, the mind is a stack of control systems all trying to keep things copacetic. In this model, happiness comes not from the absence of error in these systems, but from the correction of an error. That is, happiness isn't a full belly. It's a belly that's being filled.
[00:45:06] So if you want to feel good, you got to let things get at least a little out of whack so that you can whack them back into place again.
[00:45:15] I thought that was just such a clean and amazing way to put it, and literally rings true with my entire existence. Like, everything that I think I know and I can relate to in my life, that feels like about as fundamental a truth as anything else that I can think of. Happiness isn't a full belly. It's a belly that's being filled.
[00:45:43] And so if you're asking yourself, you know, you're still asking that question, like, what do you love to do? You should do what you love. What is that? Or you're telling your kids that. That same. That old trope. Maybe it's time to reframe that.
[00:45:58] Reframe it for yourself, reframe it for your kids, reframe it for the people that you know. Who are struggling or thinking about that in their life. Like what do they want to tackle? What do they want to do with themselves now because their kids moved out of the house, or they finally graduated college, or they finally left high school and they're trying to figure out what to do in college, or whether or not they get a job? Where do they work? What do we want our side gig to be?
[00:46:23] Don't do what you love.
[00:46:25] Fix what annoys you more than anything else and keeps you coming back to another thing that annoys you so that you can fix it too. For me, apparently those things are stories.
[00:46:40] I hate crappy stories or stories that miss a beautiful opportunity and that could be great.
[00:46:48] It's ideas that don't line up, it's systems that are incongruent and self contradictory and the difficulty of navigating the truth around those things. Which is exactly Those are the exact two things that led me to wanting to do film and having done film and content creation and Bitcoin audible because there is nothing more self contradictory and retarded in retrospect than our monetary system. And then my other great annoyance, love, was the pain of moving. Of working with all of that content and moving files from one computer to another. And this feeling like we have this beautiful, amazing Internet and everything is just a touch. It's just a button, it's one link one click away from anywhere in the world. I can group message anybody, I can text somebody halfway around the world, I can share a post and millions of people could see.
[00:47:48] But my Linux machine, which I can touch at arm's length right here, I'm touching it right now. This big ass computer with 64 terabytes on it, I'm touching it. And my MacBook I'm also touching with my left hand. There is less than 3ft of distance between these two machines.
[00:48:05] But getting all of my video editing elements from my Linux to my Mac so that I can edit, getting all of my archived and compressed podcast episodes and videos and content and AI crap that I work on. Like everything. Like my endless film content creation black hole that I dig into from my Mac to my Linux.
[00:48:35] Why or how that process, how these two computers are, can feel like they're in two completely different universes. But from both of these computers I can very easily publish some shit. I can spout out my dumbass opinion on Twitter and have tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people see it. But if I want to move 3 gigabytes from my Linux machine to my Mac, good luck, I'm going to be annoyed for 40 minutes. Why? How it is 2025. How in the hell could that still be the state of this and thus my third project Pear Drive quote this out of whack back in whack cycle is not a source of motivation.
[00:49:23] It is motivation.
[00:49:26] Annoyance is the only truly renewable resource known to man. End quote.
[00:49:33] Amen. A shout out to Adam Mastroianni the the author. This was my first introduction and now I'm digging into some of the other things that he's written. I've got an article actually, I want to finish it. I might listen to it actually, while I'm working with other stuff because like I said, the author actually reads. I'm not sure if he does this for every single article, but he's done it for this one as well. The rise and Fall of Peer review and I love that because I've been digging into that quite a bit lately and I've this idea of like oh, is it or is it not peer reviewed has always been this.
[00:50:06] How do you say it? It's.
[00:50:09] I'll put it this way, it's treated exactly like the PhD credential at the end of somebody's name. It's a perfect example of are we talking about the idea or are we talking about the supposed authority of who gets to say which is true. And I'll say also that I don't even know what his conclusion is. I haven't listened to it and or read it yet. But I'm interested and he seems like a really good writer and I really like this article. So I will have a link to his substack so that you can check him out if you would like. It's experimental-history.com and if by some chance he listens to this I just wanted to give him a nod and say well done. A shout out to Leden for their bitcoin backed loans. A shout out to synonym and Pub key the pub key stack. They have incredible open source easy to work with tools for re decentralizing the web to chroma if you work on screens late at night and you do not have blue and green and blue light blocking glasses literally do yourself a favor and get some 10% off with code Bitcoin audible and then lastly the Human Rights foundation and their incredible financial freedom report on the news and the tools around financial freedom and autonomy all around the world. Shout out to all of these both for just being amazing resources and products but also for supporting my work.
[00:51:23] So my last shout out to everybody is do what annoys you. Don't try to find that thing that you can't live without. Try to find that thing that you can't live with and then spend your time figuring out how to whack it back in place better than anybody else can. And for your own twisted satisfaction. And I'll keep doing that here for all things bitcoin and money. And I'll catch you on the next episode of Bitcoin. Audible until then, guys, that's my two sats.
[00:52:05] If you can't explain something to a first year student, then you haven't really understood.
[00:52:12] Richard P. Feynman.
