Visakan Veerasamy on what the good stuff is, getting stuff, done, etc.

I would say this one was hard to summarize, since we jumped around and covered a lot of ground, but I had a ton of fun finally talking to Visa from Twitter in realtime.

Transcript:

Divia (00:02)

Hey, I'm here today with Visa from Twitter. That's mostly, I know you're on other platforms too. You have essays, you're on YouTube, but that's definitely how I think of you. When I got back on Twitter in like 2019, I think of you as really the one that kind of created the Twitter scene that I then joined. I don't know. I don't know to what extent you see it that way, but like, you you really the guy that started with all the threading and like the...

Visa (00:10)

Mm-hmm. Yes.

Divia (00:30)

actually friendly norms and I don't know, maybe nothing ever starts, but like you popularized it in the corner of Twitter that I'm in anyway, so I'm super glad to be here with you today and get to actually talk.

Visa (00:43)

Yeah, it's nice. I still remember there were a couple of things that you responded to on my tweets that I remember thinking were uncommonly insightful. One of it was, I think it was I was asking my timeline to psychoanalyze me about why I like angry women, like my wife or my friends. And your answer, think, was one of the best ones. Something about them being able to express something that you feel like you can't express.

Divia (01:02)

Yeah, I remember.

Visa (01:11)

And that just struck me as so true. And all the other responses were so, I don't know, superficial. And yours was like, I think that it's correct. And I think it helped me shift my understanding a little bit. And so I'm grateful for that. And yeah, so.

Divia (01:24)

Yeah, thank you. It's definitely, mean, I don't know, maybe one reason I think of it is just because, you know, I'm female, I'm like five feet tall and you're, you you're a guy, you're tall, you're like browner than the other people around you. I think it's hard, I imagine, with the anger, right?

Visa (01:35)

Yeah. Mm-hmm. You become the threat. mean, it's like the beauty and the beast dynamic, Where, yeah, I am the danger when I walk down the street at night. so I don't fear for my personal safety around other people. But like, if there's something like, you know, if I'm in a random country and there's like a bar fight and like someone blames me, I'm not going to get the benefit of the doubt. And I think that's

Divia (01:51)

Yeah.

Visa (02:05)

Subconsciously, think that influenced my whole friendly game game thing, so that I have people around who know me and can vouch for me. think there's this bit from, I can't remember, it Chris Rock or Dave Chappelle. And they got into a traffic stop, and they were stressed out about it. But then the cop recognized them, and then they had a good interaction. And then they're like, yeah, being famous kind of, it sucks that that's, you know, it's.

Divia (02:11)

Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

huh.

Visa (02:34)

as a solution to that kind of problem that's not ideal. But it is a solution. yeah.

Divia (02:39)

Yeah, I mean, if you can swing it, right? And as you've said, also, I think it's different when you go around with a baby,

Visa (02:47)

so much. So much. It's like, man. And sometimes I remember, think I'm walking with my wife and my child. And then the world around me just feels so warm and open. And then let's say we're going to the park or something. And I'm like, I should go and get some water or something. And I'm like, OK, I'm going to go to the store. And I separate from them. And I cross the road. instantly, it's like, the warmth is gone. It's like people are like, you know.

Divia (03:13)

Yeah.

Visa (03:14)

And I get it, know, it delivers society, people have to make snap judgments and whatever, but like it's so striking. I think I might have been motivated to have kids sooner if I knew that, but I mean, and not knowing it intellectually as well is not, I don't know if that's helpful, but so my recommendation to a lot of young guys is try and borrow a baby, like you're like a nephew or a niece or something, like borrow a baby and like walk the streets with that and feel it for yourself. And I guess some people tell me that,

Divia (03:25)

Yeah, it's interesting.

Yeah.

Visa (03:41)

Having a dog is kind as opposed to having nothing.

Divia (03:44)

I think especially if you have like a little puppy, or at least this is my brother said, he goes around with his kid a lot, but he also, he said it was pretty similar when he had a puppy that people would just come up to him and like be really friendly.

Visa (03:47)

Yeah.

Yeah.

I can imagine that. Yeah, that makes sense. Maybe I might be likelier to get a puppy after my kids are grown or something like that. It is very addictive when people are so nice.

Divia (04:09)

Yeah, that makes sense. actually, know, I some other stuff, my most extreme story of this, because I don't really, I don't know, I didn't notice as dramatic a contrast. It's true that people are more likely to talk to me when I have my baby, but I feel like people are pretty warm regardless. But I would, so one time, this is when I just had one kid and my midwife had organized like a, I don't know, like a walk around with your baby type activity, so there were like five of us.

Visa (04:21)

All right, yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Nice. So important, yeah.

Divia (04:37)

with babies and our midwife and then I ran into this guy that I kind of knew and he had been climbing around in some off-limits area and he was wearing these like distinctive, they were like red or orange pants or something and the cops came over and then he started talking because I knew him, we were talking to him and the cops came over and they were like, you know, we heard someone was like climbing around in that area and they were like, and I think we heard, it was, and they sort of.

Visa (04:50)

Hmm.

Divia (05:03)

I think they picked up, were like, yeah, they said he had red pants or something, but they looked at him and they were like, but it obviously couldn't have been you, because he was standing with all these people with babies. And I don't know if they were like, I don't know if they were like, it was you, but like wink, wink, nod, nod, we can tell you're not actually dangerous, or they were just like, no, it couldn't possibly have been you, this guy standing with the babies. But either way, it was pretty dramatic.

Visa (05:09)

Yeah, moms, yeah.

Right.

think that's quite plausible. There's a bit in Modern Family that does that where, again, I think a bunch of people knock over some private property, but then there's a realtor and his wife and all the upstanding citizens around. So the cop comes over and when he sees the guy that he knows, he's yeah, everything's fine because of that guy. And similar, think one, I Chris Rock has a bit, which is like, if you're in...

If you're in some random city in the middle of the afternoon and there's a bunch of unemployed women around, chances are they are upper middle class, upper class strollers. And they're likely in very nice neighborhood because they can afford to do that. And whereas if you're in random city and there's a bunch of guys in the middle of the afternoon hanging around, are probably either unemployed, homeless, or druggies, whatever. Statistically, that's how it shakes out.

Divia (06:01)

Mm-hmm.

Right.

Yeah.

Visa (06:20)

And it is what it is. I don't know how deep you want to get into that, but it's just a thing that once you observe, think you can use it to your advantage, I guess. It's a thing that is worth trying to figure out. I not necessarily to your advantage, but I never thought about these things very much. How much your experience of reality is sh-

influenced or determined by like the meat bag that you're in, your height, your gender, your... and you don't realize the degree to which that is the case until you share a space with someone who's not like that and you get to witness their experience or like yeah I think one of my...

Divia (06:53)

Yeah.

Yeah. lot of, mean, trans people also, I think, tend to have really interesting perspectives on this. I feel like some of my most, some of the experiences that people describe that I'm like, okay, I better pay attention to that, is someone who's like, you know, I never felt like anyone valued me for me when I was walking around as a man, but then people start reading me as a woman, it was a whole different thing. Or the other way, the one I tend to hear the other way is something like,

Visa (07:14)

Mmm.

Right. Mm. Mm.

Divia (07:32)

People seemed to listen to what they were saying more and respect them more and take them more seriously when they start presenting as a man. And I'm sure it's all more complicated than that, but those are at least some of the things.

Visa (07:36)

Yeah. All right.

Yeah. Yeah. So it's very useful to have. I think, yeah, so there's like downsides to each thing, but we can kind of, if it's like, it's like a comparative advantage, something, traits, something, it's like in a friend group, like people can stand up for each other and kind of mitigate the worst of each. So yeah, make friends, you know, it always comes back to that somehow.

Divia (07:49)

Yeah.

Definitely. Okay, so one tweet you made recently, I was like, all right, we definitely have to talk about this. This is after we'd already scheduled this time. And it was, because I tend to be most interested in talking to people about the things that they haven't quite figured out yet. So I don't know, maybe you've figured out since, but what you said was a thing. So I'll read it out. This was like a brainstorm in response to a potential essay that you would really wish like you could figure it out.

Visa (08:12)

Mm-hmm.

Nice. I don't know. Let's try it.

Great.

Divia (08:35)

So something about smartphones, chaos surfing, information architecture, network scenes, Twitter, containers, episodic, incompleteness, focus on what you want, maniac thread, win loops, MVP, attractors, word magic. You wanna thread that all together. And you have a little bit more about it. Cursed artifact, memed into existence, strange loops. But you haven't quite assembled the mind city. You were like, no, not quite. So yeah, has that been percolating? You have any new thoughts there?

Visa (08:44)

Yeah.

Yes.

Yeah, mean, yeah, I mean, so I have thoughts about every one of those things. I have written about them. So it's not, you like I always am wary of like, you have these big ideas, but you haven't even started describing them. But I think I have spoken about each of those things in some detail on Twitter. But, you know, so the current way to get it to like internalize what

Like what does Visa mean by all of those things? Like if you follow me for a long period of time and you've read all of those threads, that's probably the best way to internalize it in general. But like very few people get to do that. So it's just our mutuals on Twitter who happen to be around for so long. they're yeah, I kind of like just seeing those words and seeing Visa's name, I kind of know what he's grasping at vaguely. Yeah. And I'm like, how do I talk about these things in a way that is relatively succinct that

Divia (09:47)

Yeah, it's like your dominoes are kind of similar.

Visa (09:57)

like kind of, I don't know if downloads is the right word, but just conveys a lot of that in a succinct way that people can relate to, I mean understand, I don't know, I'm still...

Yeah, I just want to not require such a large time investment to convey these ideas, even for myself, I guess. I do feel like maybe I haven't identified the precision points. If you see Picasso's bull, the drawings that he does, he made them progressively simpler and simpler. Or Steve Jobs has a bunch of quotes about how like,

and sophistication is simplicity is the ultimate sophistication where you can take away all the elements that are not relevant. But you don't quite know in advance what elements are not relevant. So even with both of the books that I've written, they are longer than they need to be. let's just talk about introspect because Sven was like a, it's not even finished. Well, introspect is also not finished.

Divia (10:56)

This is, by the way, this is friendly, ambitious nerd and introspect, right?

Visa (11:10)

In retrospect, it's like 100,000 words. And I don't want it to be. It's just that to include everything I want to say, that's how big it swelled up to. And I tried to compress, compress, compress. But there are some compressions that you don't know how to do until you've seen how people understand and misunderstand it and how it passes through conversations and stuff. So it's like I had to write the book.

in order to, and I don't think I've arrived at another better thing, but like, you know, that's like something like 50 sections. And I haven't figured out like, if I had to narrow it down to like 12, I'm not sure precisely. I know I was rereading it yesterday and I now know some of the things I would like set aside because some of the other elements imply some of the other, some elements imply other elements. So you can kind of identify the elements that

you know will imply the ones that you need so that the, yeah, you don't know which are the most load-bearing elements when all seem important, but even so, some elements are always more load-bearing than others. And it really takes time to identify what they are. So I need to circle back to the things that you're asking about. I think at the heart of everything, there's an understanding of dynamism and

attention. Those are probably the most central things and like frames, are all the same thing again. It's like, you know, that things change and what you see is not necessarily what it is. And a sufficiently advanced understanding of that is something that you can use to re-derive everything else. But that thing that I just described is very, very succinct and people who get it

They already get it because they've already synthesized a lot of things in their own experience. And they're like, yeah, that reminds me of this essay, or that reminds me of that book, or that reminds me of something someone said. And they connect the dots and they recreate the picture, sort of. I just, yeah, so what I just described does not solve my problem for me. I'm trying to, I guess I need to project manage this better for myself because the kind of,

like version 999, like final holy grail, not holy grail, but the really grand design is that, you can share this with anyone anywhere in the world, and they're going to get it very, very well, and they're going to be able to use it very, well as well. And to get to that point probably requires a bunch of prerequisites states that I don't currently influence. So I probably need to narrow it down and be like, I want to help this subset of people who

This is very helpful when you say out loud. So our current mutuals will get it already. So I don't really need to explain it to them. But if I did, it would be helpful anyway. And then there's another layer outside of those people who are sympathetic to these ideas, but they don't actually think about it very much. And elegant, succinct framing for these words would help them see what I see. And again, so I guess should say what I see.

Divia (14:30)

Yeah.

Visa (14:31)

The thing that usually, I think the best anecdote that I have to kind of open this is like a bunch of things people say about the internet and about smartphones and about media in general, I guess, is that, I I think the stereotype is like someone goes on the internet a lot and they just get increasingly deranged and crazy and like lose their s**t. And my experience has been the opposite of that.

It seems like the more time I spend online, I feel I get smarter. I get more well-informed. I make new friends. I make more money. Everything just gets better for me the more I do it. And so it's like, I'm looking to understand and convey, what is that? Is it something special about me? don't think I'm, I mean, I'm a bit different from some of my peers, I guess, but I don't think I'm like an alien, like a literal supernatural whatever. I guess I have some configuration of

Divia (15:24)

You

Visa (15:29)

how I filter information or how I respond to things, like some energetic posture that allows me to go into quote unquote, like the sludge, toxic sludge or whatever you want to call it, like like waste water or something, it's a metaphor I'm getting, and come out of it cleaner somehow or like fresher or healthier or happier. And...

Divia (15:48)

Yeah.

the pure all things are pure. I don't know, it's some quote. But I think there's something to it where like if you have a certain internal clarity then what you're saying like you can go into something and you come out and it's net like you weren't it didn't make you worse.

Visa (15:55)

Is that true? Do you think that's true? Yeah, don't know if... Yeah.

Yeah, so I think, you know, and like I've been kind of like testing this on the timeline. mean, testing. Testing sounds like I'm doing experiments on people, but I I share my experience and I've witnessed people saying, yeah, you the way you said this made me think about that. And then I changed something in my behavior and then that's a little bit better. And if these things can be condensed into some principles, some ideas, some, and I don't think

anybody learns these things from like a lecture about how to do it. So that's the tricky thing. know, and here I'm reminded of one of the, there's like a story I've told. It's like, okay, there's a subreddit for Zen, rzen. It's full of people like one-upping each other about being more spiritual and bickering with each other. It's so bad, it's good. But like, you know, it's like, if you go there for like spiritual instruction,

Divia (16:47)

Mm-hmm.

Yeah, it's weird. It seems like a pattern on my Twitter timeline that some of the most one-upping I see is among the spiritual path, like official I'm on a spiritual path people, right?

Visa (17:19)

Right. Yeah. Yeah. It's like, you're still stuck in stage three. How's stage four of you? And that sounds like Keegan stuff. in every tradition, there's people being like, you are still in this stage of enlightenment or whatever. Whereas on the other hand, one of the most beautiful, elegant, simple things I've read was from my friend who's into kitchen knives sent me a link from a kitchen knife forum.

Divia (17:25)

Yeah.

For sure.

Visa (17:47)

And the guy's like, and people are saying, how do I get the, what's the best kitchen knife? And this random poster, this red is very eloquent. Like, know, it's about, like, in your journey into knives, you're going to try a bunch of different things. And you're going to find that what fits your hand is the whatever, what fits your purpose. And I'm reading it, I was like, that's so, like, it's so spiritual. It's so like, there's this deep appreciation for yourself, for your tools, for your task. And I guess it's like zen in the art of motorcycle maintenance kind of.

Divia (18:07)

Right.

Visa (18:16)

But this guy wasn't trying to be spiritual or give instructions. Yeah, he was just trying to help some other guy manage his knives better. And so I think if I am to do what I'm trying to do, I cannot tell people, I cannot announce that this is what I'm doing and everyone come and let's do this thing. Because it's it's too on the nose, I think. And so I get conflicted about.

Divia (18:20)

was probably part of what was so successful about it, right?

Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Visa (18:43)

Should I even say that? Should I be talking to you or anybody else and tell them, I'm going to do this thing, but actually it's about that thing? I don't know if that works. But so my approach is, OK, let me do a thing that I actually want to do. instead of pretending to care about kitchen knives when I don't, I'll just pick up a thing that I actually do care about. And then because I have those things on my radar, that should come through. And so one of the things I think I'm going to do is media studies, media analysis, movies.

TV shows, that's stuff that I like to talk about anyway, and video games. And so that might be how I approach it. So maybe all the things I was talking about earlier about episodic thinking and whatever, that's. Well, so the episodic stuff is about form, right? So it's how you present information in a way that you can make it as a creator and re-

audiences can receive it as audiences. And so again, I think one of the more profound things similar to The Kitchen Knives was the rules of show running by some TV producer who produced TV shows. And again, it's remarkable what goes into producing a good TV show. You have so many different people, have the story, you have different interpretations, set design, and the project management of that is remarkable.

Divia (19:56)

Okay.

Visa (20:10)

And so a person who's good at it has some domain-independent insight. The insights from that domain can be translated into project management and lot of other domains, I think. So that's the kind of thing I'm interested in. And I don't know if I answered your question. I'm just going in circles.

Divia (20:28)

Yeah, okay, let me see if I can try to reflect back what I heard you say, okay? So there's something that, at least the way you've been thinking of it is you kind of, you have like a, there's something that your body of work on Twitter tends to communicate to people, or at least like tends to communicate to the sort of people that like stick around and maybe are interested in some of the same stuff and read a lot of your stuff. But what you're really hoping is that you could make it more, make it more of an elegant concept.

Visa (20:32)

Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Yes, more accessible to people.

Divia (20:57)

And one day you're, sorry, yeah.

Right, and ideally you want it to be sort of such a good concept or such a good conceptualization that you can communicate to almost anyone, regardless of any more like prerequisites or something like that. But then it seemed like you were like, but that might be a little bit of a leap from where you are. So maybe just like one, I don't know, like one circle out or something from the people that currently seem like they get it. Maybe with some context, maybe that should be sort of what you're thinking about next.

Visa (21:11)

Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Divia (21:31)

And then it seemed like you started to be like, look, there's some way of being that you have that's sort of like if you, where for you the internet can be a force multiplier. And probably not just the internet, probably like sort of regardless of what you expose yourself to, you can kind of like inhabit it and things will get better because you have more reach.

Visa (21:55)

It's happened. Yeah. I found some screenshots from like a WhatsApp group from like my early 20s where like all my, it's a bunch of my friends were all in a group chat. And then they were like, how do you guys, how do we all know each other? Like Visa was the one that introduced all of us. And like this person's dating that, but they're married now. And you know, it's like this person's in a band with that person. And it's just, I just introduced people to people and it works out, you know? And I guess, so when I say that,

Divia (22:02)

Mm-hmm.

Visa (22:23)

Someone else might then come along and be like, I tried that and it didn't work. And I'm like, did not realize that I did not think to include the fact that, OK, first of all, you've got to filter for a certain level of pro-social thing. And so it's layers and layers of that. And sometimes I don't know what I know. sometimes I don't know. Oftentimes, I don't know what is implicit until I encounter a misunderstanding. And I'm like, OK, that's because I assumed.

bunch of things. So I have good assumptions, which is kind of, you know, yeah, it's a strange, and I don't know what they are. So it's kind of, slightly, it's it's, guess it's because, yeah, I don't even know why, you know, like I can, I can like recite my like, words that come out of my head, that, you know, kind of say words around the thing. But if I really investigate it, I don't really know why. Like I have theories, right, like just like, okay, I,

When I was a kid, I wanted to be wiser because I felt unwise. And so I did a lot of reading. But a lot of people do a lot of reading. that doesn't quite. Until then, I'm like, OK, maybe it's something very particular to. So my current leading theory is something like my leading story that I'm still. my family runs a family business. And so I was raised a lot by helpers, domestic helpers, who left.

Divia (23:28)

A lot of people do that, yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Visa (23:50)

And I remember that, I think, from a very young age, that was kind of devastating. remember, and I forgot about it, sort of, but it was, I was never like close to my parents emotionally. I mean, we get along. It's not, you know, I wouldn't say they're like bad people or neglectful or whatever. And like a lot of Singaporean kids are basically raised by helpers who they don't know anymore. It's like a movie about it. And then, but yeah, so again, that's part of the story, but lots of other Singaporean kids also.

Divia (24:02)

Yeah.

Visa (24:19)

do that. So why am I different? Then there's like, okay, I remember reading. So I spent a lot of my childhood reading a lot about like disasters. And I didn't connect the dots that disasters and like, know, collapse of civilizations and stuff like that. It's like emotionally similar to abandonment, or feelings of like, you know, why is everything over? why, you know, so there's that. And then I remember reading about, so in school, when I was like 10,

Divia (24:31)

Okay.

Visa (24:49)

In Singapore, you learn about the Japanese occupation in World War II. And it's like a classroom thing. in 1945, this happened, and then the Japanese came, and then this happened. And everyone's just like, yeah, I'm like... And specifically, the thing that blew my mind was the currency became worthless. So the Japanese introduced a new currency, which they called banana money, and it quickly became worthless. And I was shell-shocked in that moment. I was like, what? Money can just become worthless? And everyone else turned to page for whatever. I'm like...

Divia (25:07)

Hmm.

Visa (25:19)

wait, can we discuss this? What's going on? And yeah, so I think it's something of those two things. It's like having that childhood experience, which quite a lot of people have, and then reading a lot about ancient history stuff and just having a lot of context, I guess, and then learning that that's also true in very recent living memory in my country. And yeah, maybe being a minority might have something to do with it.

Divia (25:19)

You

Okay, so sorry, I think I need to connect these dots for me. So how exactly the experience of being raised by the helpers and then they would leave, like, I think I don't quite, I believe you, but I don't quite see the through line from that to the sort of success that you're trying to put your finger on.

Visa (26:03)

Right, I think, and you know, there are a few other stories of a few other people that to me feels emotionally similar. So like one of the, like also in Singapore, one of our top diplomats slash foreign policy experts is this guy called Billahari. And I mean, people dispute whether, a lot of people don't like him because he's very abrasive, but he's like, the consensus is like he's kind of a genius.

Divia (26:12)

Mm-hmm.

Visa (26:29)

And one of his experiences, think, was that his father was in an embassy in Indonesia, I think, when there were riots and stuff. And he lost contact and something. It was a very traumatic experience, basically. And there's a few other things. If you look into like, where else do I want to tell stories about? There's something about having a rock. So I call these rock pool experiences, which I have a draft about.

And it's from crypto. So in crypto, say, run pool is when you lose your money or whatever. But I think it's an excellent phrase for just having your reality pulled out from under your feet. So you have some model of reality. this person, my mate, this lady who takes care of me will always be there for me. she's gone. And this money will always have value. it's gone. And when you have an experience,

Divia (27:00)

Yeah. Totally.

I see. Okay. So this is, this is when you were saying that you seemed like you had pretty solid assumptions. I think now you're like, because you questioned all of your assumptions due to some of these experiences.

Visa (27:35)

I think it seems like it. that's my leading current theory. People who have not yet experienced something of a Rumpool event, there's something different about, it's like you're trying to explain stuff to them and they will say they get it and they'll nod and be like, that makes sense. But they don't really, and it's, same for even, guess one of the most universal things is when people become parents, right? And then you think about,

whatever you've heard people say before you became a parent, and you're like, yeah, I get it. And then the reality of it, there's a certain reality shock where whatever the description of the thing is very, you know what mean? So it's like, do some people have a better time adapting to shocks than other people and why? I think that's one of the big questions that I don't know the answer to.

Divia (28:27)

parenthood thing, I think conventional wisdom is you can't really explain to someone what it's like to be a parent. They just have to experience it,

Visa (28:34)

Seems like it, yeah? And you don't agree?

Divia (28:35)

Yeah.

Visa (28:40)

You can prepare quite a bit.

Divia (28:41)

It doesn't seem right to me. when I, the way I, and I don't know that I'm right, but like on an emotional level, I'm like, no, I totally could have explained it to myself, but just nobody would explain it to me. Again, I feel like I was asking. Like when I was pregnant, I went around to everybody I knew. I go up to strangers. I'm like, okay, like, please tell me about it. Like, what am I missing? And like, might be fooling myself, but I'm like, I could have given myself.

Visa (28:53)

People are very, yeah. Yeah.

Divia (29:07)

Of course it's like, it's unfair to be like me and me, but still, I'm like, no, I could have explained it. Those people just didn't, and that's why I didn't get it.

Visa (29:09)

No, I, yeah.

I believe you. I think so and I think this is one of those things where we are both like kind of Both of us are a little bit strange, right? Like so like when I was asking people to psychoanalyze me I had like a hundred response yours was good. Everyone else's was meh and so, know that there's differences in quality of explanations and most people are really bad at it and like, you know, I look around and like People who are trying people who are parents who want to encourage other people to become parents

Divia (29:26)

Yeah.

Yeah.

That's true.

Visa (29:43)

try to sell them on being parents and they do it horribly. They're like, it's going to be the most meaningful experience. Nobody wakes up in the morning and be like, I want a more meaningful experience. Not in those terms, right? Like you have to describe. And I'm not even talking about explaining what it's like, but just selling things to people. just pitching and I can think of so many things that were poorly sold to me. I'm putting on my marketing guy hat. But I got into marketing in

Divia (29:46)

It's true.

Yeah.

Visa (30:12)

Part because I felt like some things were well pitched and some things were poorly pitched and I wanted to understand the difference and I wanted to get good at it. And it's like, you know, one of the best ways of thinking about meditation that I like is that it's like you stop feeling like a guest in your own body and you start feeling like it's yours, like you're a native. Right. And it's so welcoming and inviting and it's not, you know, I think people have some kind of profound experience and then they...

Divia (30:32)

I do like that.

Visa (30:41)

they want to tell you that it's profound, but that's not the nature of profound experience. So it's like the moment you decide, I'm going to tell people how amazing it is, the experience of amazingness is not, wow, how amazing it is. So it's to understand how to convey the thing. guess it's a kind of literacy. It's like a language management, storytelling skill where

Divia (31:04)

Yeah.

Visa (31:09)

The way to convey a thing is not necessarily to name the thing as the thing, but to give the, you know, I'm reminded now of Andrew Stanton, who wrote Finding Nemo. He gave a TED Talk when TED Talks were good. And he was explaining that, you know, like storytelling is like, you don't want to tell people, you want to put two plus two and let the audience connect and say it's four. You don't want to be like four. You you want to like present in a way that they can complete.

Divia (31:34)

Great.

Visa (31:38)

the interpretation and then it's Diaz. And yeah, I think that's true for parenting. It's true for like, so I've had so many people tell me that my tweets about my son make them look forward to becoming a parent or make them likelier to want to become a parent. I've had so many people tell me they love my wife entirely based on my tweets of her, which is like my intention. have intent, like it's on purpose that I want people to like her because she's kind of a loner and like I want her to friends and but like.

Divia (31:59)

Yeah?

Visa (32:08)

You can.

Divia (32:09)

It worked on me. I think she's cool. And the way especially you talk about like all the research she does and like the way she seems really tuned into all this stuff going on in Singapore seems really impressive.

Visa (32:14)

Mm.

Yeah, she is really cool. And the thing is, there are a lot of cool people who we don't know about because nobody's helping them tell their story in a way that's compelling. And that's really what decisively made me go from, I want to try and, so you can innovate, you can sell, and you can manage the invent. I think the quote was like, you build it, you sell it, you handle the money, or you keep the house in order.

like illegal accounting, HR, whatever. like, so build it or sell. And I can't do, I can't manage a checkbook or I'll go crazy. So my choices are either I build it or I sell it. And then I investigate. First, on one level, the people who build stuff, have, like, at the cutting edge of building, they have like a sensibility that I see it and I recognize that I don't have it to that degree. Like really that maniacal, I'm going to get all the details right, I'm going to trial and error, whatever. Whereas,

I can experiment with, let's try telling this story like 25 different ways and see what resonates with people. For some reason, I'm drawn to that of all the things. And also, I hear things like when flight was invented by the Wright brothers, it took years before people even realized that it had happened. people had seen it. Yeah. So right now, if you want to accelerate innovation or whatever in the world,

Divia (33:23)

Yeah, interesting.

I do think there are a lot of things like that.

Visa (33:45)

It's already here, not evenly distributed. And so you can actually just, and to the person who didn't know about a thing, the person who did it and the person who told them about it are almost equal in importance. Because if the person did it and somebody didn't tell them, then they didn't know about it. It's as good as if it never happened to that person. And then you multiply by everyone. Anyway, so the thing I.

Divia (34:06)

Yeah.

I mean, it just seemed like the sort of thing you're well suited to.

Visa (34:14)

Yeah, I mean, it's hard to tell. Is it that I was always like that? Was I innately like that? Did I optimize for it along the way? A bit of both, maybe. And yeah, if it...

Divia (34:27)

So, yeah, I think it's so interesting to think about like where.

where people's kind of like fundamental dispositions really come from. And I thought about it a lot this time when I was pregnant. I don't mean it in some mystical way, but sort of like what is a soul in the sense that like sort of the most fundamental parts about how someone is. Because obviously a ton of it's genetic, but I've seen a bunch of identical twins and they come out of, they're different. And what I've determined when I try to talk about it,

Visa (34:37)

Mm.

Mmm.

Divia (35:03)

to them or their parents is they come out different. And so I'm like, it's whatever it is, it's gotta be pretty early. Even though, yeah, like again, they really are pretty similar, genetics is a lot, but it's not the only thing. And some of these fundamental dispositions, I don't know, it really, it's the sort of thing that I probably keep thinking about it. Like in particular, one of my bigger updates, not even just from having my own kids, but like,

Visa (35:11)

Right. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Divia (35:31)

You know, ever since I had kids, hang out with more people with their kids. And I can't tell if I'm exaggerating or not when I say this, but the basic update is that babies are about as different from each other as adults are. And I think there's some, like some sort of overall cultural attitude and also some part of me that's like, yeah, but don't think some people sort of start out similar and then diverge. And I'm like, kind of, but also kind of the opposite. Like kind

Visa (35:45)

Yeah, I think so too. Correct.

Yeah.

Divia (35:59)

they're right there from the beginning and then they try to fit in and like I don't know.

Visa (36:01)

Yeah, yeah. Again, even before I had kids, I would show up at a nephew's birthday party, like two-year-olds, three-year-olds. They're so different. They all do different. Some will be running after each other. Some will be approaching adults. Some will be off in a corner somewhere. you look at them, you're like, these are people. They might be unskilled in certain ways, but their inclinations, especially, I think.

Divia (36:13)

Yeah.

Yeah.

Visa (36:31)

You can't change your... You can't... You know, you can... I don't know how much you can influence these things. My son is clearly more social even than me. He loves people. We go anywhere... And my wife is very much not. So she's like, god, what have I brought in the world? Because we brought him to this play area in a mall where you pay to go in and there's toys. And we kind of... Not forgot, but we didn't really think about how... there are going to be other kids there as well.

Divia (36:38)

Interesting.

Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Visa (37:00)

And okay, so we bring him in and Sharon's thinking, okay, you sit down on the floor and let him get used to you because we're in a new space and he's small and like let him get used to you first and let him watch you play and then he'll start playing. And so she put him down and he races off to go meet the other kids. Yeah. And he just goes right into it like, wow, that's fearless, fearless and

Divia (37:19)

To the other kids.

Visa (37:29)

so energetic and so and you look around other kids and there was at least one kid that's kind of just hanging out hanging out by himself and seemingly happy to just chill and like we can make some very you know he's it's unlikely that my kid and that kid are going to be the opposite like 20 years from now where right it's it's i mean you could have some major event that revises something for you you might whatever whatever but like i don't you

Divia (37:48)

This seems right.

Visa (37:58)

People will always, when you tell people, no, where am going with this? Whatever you become later in life, there's always a through line back. And it could be because there's many, many branching paths. So whatever path you take, there will always be a path back. that then seems like a very significant thing. And yet, just the fact that that exists, I think, is, and the same with my writing, for example. I have never written a good

Divia (38:26)

Mm-hmm.

Visa (38:28)

piece of writing that I did not already have like a proto-primitive version of like years earlier. Like every single one of my books, even so right now when I finally decided, okay, this era is going to be called frame studies, I can do like a from visa frames. I'm like, I've been tweeting about this for a long time. But at the moment when I do it, it feels like, I've got a new, like a fresh take on things or something. And which tells me that my next thing after this is also something that I've already done.

Divia (38:35)

Right.

You've been talking about it.

Visa (38:57)

Right? It can seem a little bit limiting from a certain point of view, like, there's nothing new. Everything's already done. But on the other hand, it's also exciting because you see it with fresh perspective and it becomes more activated. Like, you realize that, this thing that was set in passing is actually so much more to it than I initially thought. And that kind of makes

Divia (38:58)

Seems right, yeah.

Visa (39:27)

everything around you actually becomes so much more lively like like you can't write anything off entirely

Divia (39:33)

You can see it as like these are these things that I'm thinking now they're going to grow into more later.

Visa (39:38)

Yeah, as long as you're following your nose about whatever's interesting, there's always... You can't know in advance what will resonate with you later on. I feel like we've gone in a bunch of circles and there were some questions that we had that were interesting that we didn't finish answering. Was it?

Divia (39:56)

Yeah, no, it's so, that's okay. I wanted to ask you about the thing that you've sort of been circling around. So this is, it makes sense, but about like what you're trying to distill. one description of it that I heard was like, what makes it so that things work out for you basically? Like there's something, you have some kind of...

Visa (40:03)

Okay, cool.

Divia (40:20)

Visa magic and you're like, what is it? And you want to share it.

Visa (40:24)

Yeah.

Hmm.

Some of it is just not giving up, I think. But no, that's even that. I mean, that's like, well, yeah, like so if you give up, then it's game over. Then you can't stay in the game long enough to start getting the rewards. even like with, so part of it is try to do things that you enjoy doing that you can do for a very, very long time. Because a lot of the mainstream games that people play, all the rewards are like,

downstream and a lot of people give up early and so they get like the worst of both worlds which is very common.

Divia (41:11)

think, yeah, so the thing that seems, and obviously you talk about this all the time, but if I had to say what seems most fundamental from what you've been saying is the part about focusing on what you want.

Visa (41:22)

But interestingly, came to me kind of late. I guess I was sort of doing it, it came in when I was like, I don't know, 28, 29? So my early 20s were not there. So this points at a thing I want to get to about, I call it blessedness versus wretchedness, which is like upward-downward spirals,

Divia (41:28)

Yeah.

Yeah.

Visa (41:51)

The wretched thing about wretchedness is that you try to help someone and it gets worse. And so then they don't get help. then that gets worse. Whereas with blessedness, it's like, you introduce a friend to another friend and you trust that they will take care of things. So you can just let them be and everything just gets better. And it's like, you, yeah, I feel like I've been in the wretched place before.

Divia (42:01)

Yeah.

Visa (42:18)

But then I have since heard from people who are way, way worse. I'm like, almost like, is this stolen better? When I was like 17, that felt true for me. Everything I was doing seemed to make everything worse. But I guess I was never truly down. I didn't go as far down bed as some people can, I guess. But I'm still contextualizing that.

Divia (42:38)

Yeah, I wonder. I think some of why that one resonates with me a lot. So something, I probably don't talk about it that often in terms of my main influences, but when I was in my mid-20s, this guy recommended, so have you heard of Holosync or Bill Harris? Probably not, but. So Holosync, I don't know how, it's Binaural Beats. And my impression is it's kind of a, yeah, and I think.

Visa (43:04)

OK. yeah, OK. I know by the orbits.

Divia (43:08)

it might even kind of scam me because I haven't totally ever fact-checked this, but I think the idea is that it has like slightly different sounds in each ear and it causes some like, I don't it's like a little trippy when you listen to it. But I think when the guys started selling it, was when like on a cassette where that couldn't even really have necessarily been true. I might be wrong about that. But anyway, so he introduced me to Holosync, but also he had these

Visa (43:19)

Yeah

Sure

Divia (43:37)

life integration courses, this guy, Bill Harris. And he never, I never really did the Holosync that much. I think the basic theory and he would, I also like something I still think about all the time is prig gene and disabative systems. I don't even really, I understand what it means more now that I did that, but his basic theory was like, look, you kind of just perturb the system a little and then it makes it like more plastic. And then if you learn better concepts, it's then then everything will be better. And he, so he had these, he was like a,

Visa (43:38)

Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Divia (44:07)

sort of hypnotist guy who was trained in like neuro-linguistic programming. He was a big marketing guy and he had probably had three courses, I say like 12 lessons each. And my friend gave me these MP3s. I used to listen to them. And that was just his top thing is you have to focus on what you want instead of on what you don't want. But he said it like 50 different ways and he tried to really drill down to the details and he's like, look, a lot of people have learned a shallow version of this. Some teacher told them to do that. So they started framing their sentences in positive ways. He's like, but you've got to.

Visa (44:20)

Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Nice.

Divia (44:37)

drill down to the actual mental representations and a lot of it anyway with a whole I don't know that's

Visa (44:44)

I see it. I see it. Yeah. It's, you know, it's like the inverse is like, so people say things like, I don't know if that could work or whatever, but like most people are doing the opposite all the time and it's clearly working. It's clearly working that like focusing on the worst things is making things worse. So.

Divia (44:58)

Yeah!

No, and I think there's there's some really wrong and cringey stuff out there, like, you know, the secret video or people are like, just focus on bills, you know, on checks instead of bills. And I'm like, no, no, like, like, of course not. Like, and of course the way this works is through people actually doing things. Like it's not, but the idea that on like a pretty low level, that is sort of how brains work is they're kind of like, all right, let me, this is what I'm picturing. Let me kind of try to.

Visa (45:09)

yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Divia (45:31)

it feels better when that kind of lines up with what I'm seeing. I think it's true.

Visa (45:34)

Yeah. Yeah, we are like pattern recognizing creatures. And again, if someone says don't look down, you don't process the don't very well yet. The don't has to, we hear the instruction and instincts is to follow the instruction before we, even though the first word is don't, right? You then.

Divia (45:43)

Yeah.

Yeah, no, and I remember this. I mean, I can notice it as an adult, but I also remember it as a kid too. this time, for me, the most distinct memory, I think it was my brother and he had this like some really sticky tape or something and he was gonna put something on the wall and he was like, don't touch it. And I just reached out and it wasn't like I was trying to do the opposite of what he said. It was just like a really, the way I remembered is like a really low level. heard something like touch it. I was like, like touch it? I don't know.

Visa (46:13)

Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So your brain is like, don't x is a very, you then have to, your brain or yourself, you have to do x and then process the don't. So don't touch it. like, this is the thing I'm not supposed to do. But you already start, you have to, you know.

Divia (46:38)

Right, and I think it is, I don't know, people go back and forth on this, but I think it is about the words and it's not. I think it's both that he said it that way and that he was probably imagining me touching it. So I think his whole vibe was kinda like, communicat- I mean, I don't really remember this very, in a lot of detail, but I do know that when I see parents with their kids, sometimes they're like, don't do that. And I'm like, okay, maybe there's some advantage to saying it in the positive, but like-

Visa (46:47)

sure. Yeah.

Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah

Divia (47:06)

I think the overall communication is pretty clear. Whereas then other times I see parents and I'm like, you just gave your kid like a hypnotic instruction to do that thing. Like, and I know you have some tweets about this, but like, I don't know. It's, I definitely sometimes think about it. And then I try, you know, I try to mostly not think about it too much because it's not really, it's, I think it's ultimately not my business what people are doing with their kids, but.

Visa (47:08)

Yeah.

Yeah, it's wild.

Sure. Yeah. Yeah, same. So same. Yeah, I also care about this. And I also don't want to intrude in people's lives to micromanage their parenting. But if there's something we could release into the cultural ether where they might encounter it at some point, and then they're like, hmm, I should think about how I'm talking with my kids. That would be great. And I think it's possible. I've had DMs with some guy where,

Divia (47:35)

But I think it's very interesting.

Yeah.

Visa (48:01)

He came to me to ask me for some advice for some I don't know what. And I was talking to him about relationships in general as like a metaphor for something else. And then he DMed me like six months later saying that he had had a shitty relationship with his younger brother all his life because he was always trying to tell him what to do and what not to do. And it was from a place of, he thought he was helping, but like his brother felt it as like an intrusion on his sovereignty. And he didn't see it that way until I spoke to him about something else.

And he said he shifted the way he talked to his brother, and their relationship is completely different now. I'm like, what? That can happen? The fact that these things can happen, I wonder why I don't wake up every morning going, my god, there's so much opportunity to do so much good. It just doesn't feel obvious, I guess. And yeah, so another one of my riffs is the most magical thing about reality, about the perception, is that it transforms.

Divia (48:32)

That's so cool. Yeah.

Visa (48:55)

the extraordinary in trans, it makes the magical mundane. Like we have a magical brain that makes the magical mundane. I guess to make things more convenient so we can understand, like we narrow our frame of everything so that we can function and go about our day. Because being in like ecstatic exaltation about everything might be not.

Divia (48:59)

Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, think it's then people sometimes end up kind of manic and it has problems, especially with like interfacing with other people and

Visa (49:27)

So then the kind of holy grail is like, is it possible to have like this soft mania that still lets you... I think it is, Yeah.

Divia (49:34)

Yeah, I think some people do it, yeah. I think so. But I think, so one of my, I don't know, feel like a relatively crack body talking about this, for me, and this has been on my mind recently, so I think one of the top things I have to figure out to sort of maintain the energy for the things I actually think are important.

Visa (49:45)

Another hit.

Divia (50:00)

is something like how to interface with some big societal force that doesn't really, that's like more like nah, people should be conventional, like whatever. Because I think it's a real thing and for me at least it doesn't work to just dismiss it. So I'm like I have to form some sort of relatively healthy understanding. I don't know if that makes sense, what I'm saying.

Visa (50:17)

Mm-hmm.

Wait, so you're saying that you have like a, like, it's kind of like a super-ego, like, societal representation that you have to get along with?

Divia (50:31)

So for example, like this is probably some of the most like, my God, these ideas are so cool. A couple of years ago, I was really into this, these ideas I found about animal training or whatever. And I do think they're good ideas. As with many things, I think I was like, I don't know, I thought maybe they would have more potential more quickly than they did, but you know, that's typical. But I remember, or especially looking back at it, I'm like, no, but just as I'm like, but this could be really important.

Visa (50:43)

Okay.

Divia (50:58)

There's some kind, like you know the meme that's been going around lot lately about like nothing ever happens? I feel like I have something in my head that's like, don't get too excited about that, because remember, nothing ever happens. Like who do you think you are to like think that something could happen? I'm like, well, but it seems like it's like, no, nothing other than, and like, it's not, I don't know, I don't wanna, I don't think I'm giving like a perfect description of it, but I think there is something like that that I feel like I have to contend with, because it's sort of out of sync with people if I'm like, nah, stuff can happen.

Visa (51:02)

Are you sure?

Aw man.

man.

Well, my... Sure.

Okay.

Yeah, well, OK, my kind of antidote to that. So first of all, would say that it's good to have some part of you be like, don't count on the change happening tomorrow. Don't count on it. Because if you're counting on it, then it's going to be a mess. But the other thing I would say is like, every change that ever happened, every significant change that ever happened seemed

Divia (51:44)

Sure, definitely.

Visa (51:56)

like it was never going to happen seemed impossible until it seemed inevitable. Now you take like the Berlin Wall for example, like the day before

Divia (52:04)

You know that, by the way, that is the first historical event I remember someone telling me about. I remember my mom being like, the Berlin Wall just fell. I was really little. I had no idea what it meant, but I feel happy that I remember it. Anyway, yeah, that is one of those things.

Visa (52:15)

Yeah.

Yeah, it was never going to happen. And then once it happens, it was always going to happen. Same for in Singapore, legalizing. So we had this archaic law that criminalized gay sex. I don't think they ever used it in court, but it was just this shitty vestige of people would use it to justify.

Divia (52:37)

Mm-hmm.

Visa (52:44)

like some bigotry, or they would say, it's not enforced, or it's not a big deal, whatever. But it's just this, I would say it's an eyesore in the legal structure, and it cascades out into culture. And people are like, that's never going to change. It's been there forever, and then it did. And then now, it just seems so obvious. And I would say even, I remember when I was just going to say that.

Divia (53:00)

So did.

And even gay marriage in the US, same kind of thing. Like all these, like Obama and whatever, they're like, look, civil unions, whatever, don't get too excited. But then that was passed.

Visa (53:13)

Yeah. I was just going to say that. Yeah. Like in 2014, if you had asked me when the US was going to legalize gay marriage federally, I'd like, maybe 2030, 25 maybe. And it's next, it's like, it's happened so fast. And the crazy thing is, as soon as the thing happens, people are very, very quick to like rearrange around it as if it was always the case. And I think, I think that actually contributes to the feeling that nothing ever happens because we are not

Divia (53:39)

Totally.

Visa (53:43)

You know, like, and so there is, I don't know you want to call it the man or Moloch or whatever, but like, there is some, in the social order, like this Hobbesy Leviathan creature, right? It's like, how does social change happen? It happens, or like, how does, you know, it happens because some group of people were very persistent in like being annoying, basically. And you don't, you generally don't want people to be annoying for no good reason or whatever. And so that, that

Divia (54:06)

Yeah.

Visa (54:12)

that information that people were being annoying until change happens tends to get like suppressed or you know, just like shrouded in whatever so that the next group of people isn't annoying for no particular reason or and Yeah, it's just that agitation is is misunderstood and that under theorized under appreciated, I don't know like

Yeah, I mean, I don't know how to talk about that, like nothing ever happens is a Psyop that such that the moment something happens, it then gets re, you know, the narrative gets rearranged around it such that it didn't happen. Yeah, yeah, we always knew that was, well, that was obviously going to happen. But other than that, nothing ever happens. You know, that thing was, of course it was going to, like, that's not, you you shouldn't, we are so quick.

Divia (54:54)

Yeah. We've always been a war with Eurasia.

Visa (55:07)

to rearrange the narrative such that we know what's happening. Even optimists, think. But everyone is afraid to acknowledge that we don't know for sure. And so I think there's this anecdote. I don't know how true it is, something about how people prefer, for a small electric shock that's painful, people prefer 100. If you press a button, you get it 100 % of the time. But since you press one, you get one 50 % of the time. People prefer, you know those shitty.

Divia (55:20)

Yeah, that's you.

Visa (55:37)

like silly science experiments, sociology professor experiments. But people apparently consistently prefer 100 % shock to 50 % shock. Because you like, at least you know it's gonna hurt. as opposed to I don't know, nothing happened. like, so that that uncertainty is hard to bear. So people actually prefer. It seems to me, I mean, I, I buy that it seems it's consistent with my experience of like, it's why so many people are so cynical and pessimistic. think it's like you have

Divia (55:40)

Yeah.

Yeah, it's interesting.

Visa (56:05)

certainty to orient around. optimism is very, something cool could happen. When? I don't know. Today might be the day I write something amazing that changes my life. Today? And I look back, it's like the tweet that I told that changed my life was when I, I mean, there have been many such tweets, but one of the biggest was me replying to Mason about libraries or something, like Patrick McKenzie was there. It's just something about.

Divia (56:07)

Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Visa (56:34)

spaceships and I think I tweeted something like, kids are starving for the feeling of someone who really cares about them and you know that's why that's what reading was about for me. I wasn't reading to so many so much text wow I want to read a book like no like the author gave a s**t and I'm yearning to be in the presence of someone who gives a s**t and I tweeted that and that was sufficient to like inspire someone to arrange for me to fly over to the the states.

Divia (56:50)

Yeah.

Visa (57:03)

And it doesn't really matter the specific details about the flight and the states and whatever. It's just being kind of people expending time, effort, resources to help someone else based on what they've said. I always vaguely believed something like that would happen for me sooner or later if I just persisted. But I could not have known when or how. So it's so, which is.

Divia (57:24)

Yeah.

Visa (57:34)

I don't think I appreciate the degree to which how, I don't think I appreciate how there's a level in which, there's a sense in which that's like tiresome. Like it's it's energetically costly, I think at some level, I don't know, like just choosing to remain optimistic and open to possibility that is, I'm not.

Divia (57:57)

I think it drains something, at least for most people.

Visa (58:00)

Yeah, I don't know if it drains me less or if I'm just committed to allowing that. Is this a priority? I feel like it's so important and it's so big that I'm willing to make that my main... It was my main...

Divia (58:04)

Or if you just do it.

Visa (58:17)

Energy sync? don't know. I mean, same for just interacting with people online. The history of my replies, even before Twitter, on Reddit, on wherever, I've always been like, you either put in the effort to give a good reply or don't bother. Why would you do a mid-mediocre reply that

Divia (58:19)

Yeah, that's where you want to put it. That's where it seems worthwhile.

Visa (58:43)

The person is just going to like, ugh, stupid reply. So yeah, so some people approach it with like, well, I'm just here to blow off steam. I do think that's probably one of the major things. That's probably a very major difference. There are a of people who go online to blow off steam. It's just the internet is a cesspit. I'm at work, or I'm on the train. I'm just pissed off. I'm frustrated. I'm just going to, what's this annoying thing? I'm going to respond with whatever. And I remember even at my most.

depressed and I hate the world and like that face. Even then I was like, can I make art out of this somehow? Like, can I grumble in a way that is compelling to someone and makes them go, wow, I feel seen? So that might have been another one of my early things was just exposure to artists and music and this sense of feeling welcome and heard and seen in that space, like reading. And so.

Divia (59:21)

Yeah.

Visa (59:43)

It does involve being disappointed a bunch where you put in time and effort to do a good reply and the person doesn't appreciate it. But then it's like a numbers game where like, if you, I think I have a tweet somewhere else as well. It's like, if you have to talk to a thousand people to find three truly amazing people, like maybe one's your spouse and one's like your best friend and one's like your best collaborator, and it's gonna take you 10 years to...

to talk to a thousand, like three people a day, every day for 10 years, or I don't know what the math is. And like, you're going to be disappointed by 997 people. Would you do it? And I'm like, of course, like, because if you do it by the time, by the time you're 35, the rest of your life is completely changed by the presence of those excellent people in your life. And yeah, even, even just like saying this, I think a lot of people who haven't thought about it that way,

Divia (1:00:22)

Yeah, of course, right.

Visa (1:00:39)

They'll be like, well, that sounds good, but, you know.

Divia (1:00:44)

Well, and I think maybe some people don't trust themselves to recognize when the people finally come along.

Visa (1:00:50)

Yeah.

That's true as well. think one of the saddest things is you have a connection to someone and it goes well and then it goes bad. My biggest grief is still all the friends, all my former friends, people that I used to connect with and then for some reason we just stopped talking and when we tried to reconnect it just goes badly. I'm still sad about a teenage friend who I want to talk to again but I don't even know how to reach out.

You know, like, yeah, like some people are surprised to hear that because like I have so many people competing for my attention. But yeah, that was very meaningful to me. And like, why did it go bad? Like, was it me? Was it something about, I don't know. It's just, it's a, and yet you have to like to do the thing that I do or like the way I see it, it's like you really have to persist through the heartbreak.

Divia (1:01:25)

Yeah.

That makes sense.

Visa (1:01:53)

So someone was just DMing me like, when I was young, I had a lot of trickster energy. And then now I've kind of lost it. Do you have any advice? I'm like, yeah, it's very normal for young boys for whatever to be mischievous and silly and whatever. And then you get responsibilities. You get bills. You make mistakes. You hurt people. You hurt yourself. And then it's just like, well, that sucks. I guess I'm not going to do that anymore. And so I think people, myself included, like we

Divia (1:02:16)

Yeah.

Visa (1:02:21)

We overlearn to not do things after something goes wrong. So it's like, well, if it's like, tried the thing. It went horribly. I'm not going to try it again. It's it's kind of logical. You tried the thing. It led to something bad. OK, don't do the thing. It makes sense. You could say the logic is watertight and sound. So it takes imagination. It takes imagination to be like,

Well, this led to a bad thing, but maybe there's another outcome. It takes that sense of possibility and yeah.

Divia (1:02:58)

Yeah, like is there a way to do it, but have the odds be good or can you mitigate the downside or like really strategize about it?

Visa (1:03:05)

Yeah, so there's like a math part of it feels like a math component part of it feels like a imagination component

Divia (1:03:12)

And this is related to what I was trying to say before. I think a lot of people don't believe they really have permission to think for themselves.

Visa (1:03:21)

man, is so... I remember... This reminds me of a tweet that made me so upset. And it's like, I know that the person was being silly, but it made me so upset like in a righteous rage way, where someone said something like, you know if you're doing tasks and you're like bored or whatever and like you can pretend you're in a video game or you can pretend something, you can have a little mental illness as a treat. Or like you can be a little mental... And I was like...

Divia (1:03:30)

Yeah.

Visa (1:03:51)

I'm so like,

just every, I completely co-signed the suggestion. Like you can do whatever you want to make your life bearable, right? You can do, and the idea that that's framed as like doing a bit of a crime or doing a bit of a, I'm like, that's, you know, it's what your brain is for, kind of, or like what's your, what your imagination is for, to be playful. It's like, I remember I got so angry, I was like,

Divia (1:03:59)

Yeah.

Visa (1:04:21)

I was using a GIF of like an Indian auntie with a sleeper, like, who's best do I have to beat? That, you know, we've gotten to this point. Yeah, we've gotten to this point where people being playful with themselves. And it's like, you know, it's almost like you think you take those devices that's like, you're not supposed to open it and your warranty is void or whatever. It's like you're doing that with your own thinking and your own feeling. Like, I'm not allowed to think or feel in a way that's different than like the prescribed.

Divia (1:04:29)

that put this on everyone, yeah.

So yeah. Yeah.

Visa (1:04:51)

know, formulaic thing.

Divia (1:04:52)

Yeah, I remember sitting around as a kid and looking at like some mattress I don't know if this is a thing in Singapore. In the US there's often something that's mattresses have these tags that are like do not remove or else whatever whatever But it's not for the person that owns the mattress It's like you're not allowed like the point is you're not allowed to remove it if you're selling the mattress until you've sold it But then people get understandably they get intimidated by these tags and then these mattresses still have these tags on them

Visa (1:05:09)

right. In the store. OK. All right.

yeah. I remember after a couple of months, I got so pissed off with all of the baby... So like, you know, my baby wearing thing, all the freaking, caution, hazard, like you're going to kill your child. I'm like, that's stressing me out. I know I don't need that. I don't need seven of these warnings in my house every time I look everywhere being reminded. And yeah, like cutting those tags off.

Divia (1:05:29)

Yeah.

I know.

Really?

Visa (1:05:46)

made me more chill which I think led to me being a better dad like this much like 1 % or whatever but like you know

Divia (1:05:54)

Yeah, no, think, okay, so also, this is, can talk about whatever forever, but one other thing I wanted to get to was you had tweeted about getting stuff done, now you are a dad. Your tweet said, I'm not precisely sure, but I think the main thing might be how do I containerize my work into packets such that I can do them in small chunks that add up coherently in the associated changes I have to make around.

Visa (1:06:07)

Mm-hmm.

Divia (1:06:18)

And I'm like, yeah, that, don't know. I mean, I think basically you have it. I think that's what it is. And this is something, not that I'm some like master of getting things done with my kids. I can do some things, but not other things. But I, well, like I said, I think it's that. I think, I think the top thing is to not keep a bunch of state and to think about like, what's the smallest loop that I can just fully complete.

Visa (1:06:29)

please, yeah. I'd love to hear it, whatever.

Mmm.

Divia (1:06:46)

And I have a bunch of different angles on this, but so there's this woman I follow, her name is Dana K. White, and she talks about cleaning your house, basically. And I've been following her for years. She's sort of one of my inspirations. And her algorithm for, this is like my metaphor for everything, is if you have like a pile of stuff that you're trying to figure out what to do with it. Cause she used to have to be like a total mess. Like often I think the people with the best advice are the people that really needed it themselves.

Visa (1:06:59)

Nice.

Yeah. Yeah. Nice.

Divia (1:07:14)

And so the thing she figured out, she's like, all right, first, if there's any trash, get rid of the trash. Then if there's anything you already know what you need to do with it, you just haven't done it yet, then do that. And she's like, okay, and then you find some object, you're like, what about this? Like it doesn't have a place. And she's, her strategy is you look at it and you're like, okay, if I needed this, where would I look for it? And then take it there. Which, and that's the part that everyone's like, no, but like, isn't it more efficient to like pile it up?

Visa (1:07:35)

Mmm.

Aww.

Nah.

Divia (1:07:42)

And she's like, no, actually. She's like, it's true that if five things need to go to that location, that could be better. But in that case, once you're going to go there, look around. What else needs to go there? And find that, and then immediately go there. Because I think everything is kind of like that. And also, I think there's some sort of cultural artifact of, I don't know if you think in terms of spiral dynamics or modernism or so. But I think there's something.

Visa (1:07:45)

Yeah.

this.

Divia (1:08:12)

that has to do with our developmental stage as a civilization right now, that doesn't acknowledge the costs of things that are, like, there's a lot of weird accounting going on where it's very common for people to be like, no, it's more efficient to make a pile. And it doesn't even really make sense, I think. They don't really under, they're like, well, because, and I think it introduces fragility into the system that really shouldn't be there because,

especially with kids, because I'm like, okay, so, but then if my kid needs me, then I have this pile and then I come back to it and I'm like, well, now I have to like, re-figure out what even was this pile. And that's assuming that my kid doesn't start playing with the pile, like moving everything all around, which increasingly as, mean, you know, they become toddlers and then most kids like to play with piles and then eventually they lose interest in their parents' piles. But that's kind of my metaphor for everything is like, okay, that thing where you...

could just finish it, but then some part of your brain is like, no, no, but let me like make some stack of things and then like batch process. It's like, okay, well, do you want to batch process it now? That's my two cents on this.

Visa (1:09:22)

Yeah, that's funny when you said that. It's what struck me was that is what I do with my tweets. When I see a tweet that I want to remember, I ask myself something that's like, if I wanted to find this, where would I look for it? And sometimes it's like, I would put it in a thread or in a reply to something that is not quite obvious that, like, it doesn't fit in a big picture, not big picture way, it doesn't fit in a...

Like, in a, in a, yeah, it's not, it's not like orderly, you know, in a, a logical way, but it just, this is, this is the friend of that thing. You know, this thing goes with that thing. And so I put it with that. Like, so then I know, you're frozen as well. Both our videos are frozen, but I can hear you. Yeah. Yeah. I was just saying, like, I, I,

Divia (1:09:54)

Look, it might not make sense to someone else.

Wait, no, you froze. What happened?

Okay, I think we're back now.

Visa (1:10:19)

If I tried to organize things top down, I don't think it would work. Like I wouldn't know where to look for things, even though like there's a system or whatever. But I just, I'm like, what tweet does this tweet want to be friends with basically? And then I put it with that.

Divia (1:10:32)

Yeah. Yeah. And I think there are a lot of things, like another one, I got this, it's maybe a little bit of a, I don't know that anyone else would read this and get the same thing, but my friend, Scott Garibrand wrote about geometric rationality on less wrong. I'll plug it because I think it's cool. But part of what I got from that is like another one. had this moment where I, so I have since dealt with this, but for a long time, this is probably a common situation. I had a box of like some old hard drives and like old laptops that I had deal with.

Visa (1:10:59)

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Divia (1:11:01)

And it was one of those things where I was like, okay, this is kind of like never gonna be the most important thing to do. And yet I don't wanna never do it. That doesn't seem right. And maybe there's some kind of accounting where I could be like, no, but it is the, but I think it's sort of like a tortured accounting to try to be like, no, but it is the highest priority. And instead the thing I switched to, which again, it to me is like the same principle as before is sometimes I would think about it and I would be like, that box.

Visa (1:11:09)

Same.

Divia (1:11:31)

And in that moment, there's something where I mean, it's a little bit of like focus on what you want to. I'm like, okay, I think what I would reflexively do is to be like, okay, now I'm going to spend like X amount of energy dismissing this thought and be like, no, not now. I can't do it. And so what I tried to tell myself now that I'm perfect at this is be like, okay, look, there's some amount that's allocated for like addressing this thought. You could use it to dismiss the thought or you could use that amount of energy to make progress.

And I try to switch to using, and often it's really not very much, because all I was gonna do is be like, no, it's not a good time, whatever. And instead I'll be like, all right, I'm gonna take literally five seconds to visualize what my next step would be.

Visa (1:12:13)

Mmm.

Divia (1:12:16)

And usually the part of me that was like, the box is kind of like, all right, well, that's better than what I would have gotten before. So like, it's an improvement. And so then when it comes back around, I'll kind of be like, all right, how can I like lock in a little? And of course it's better if I can actually like, I don't know, look up the place that I need to do data recovery on or like check to see if I have the right cord to connect the hard drive. Like something like that's better. But if I don't have time for that, at least be like, all right, well, what would the next thing be to do? And like, like another one.

I don't know, and this, I think I really am better at this, but like years ago, there was some kind of, this is something I wanted to be writing about or doing or whatever, and I was like, I managed to sort of notice myself in real time being like, well, that's strange. Whenever I think of it, I'm like, no, why haven't I done it yet? Which is kind of like, no, no, the thing that happened is I just thought of it. Like, of course I haven't done it yet, that's fine, that's why I'm still thinking about it. I don't want every thought of like, now I want to be like, yeah.

Cool, now I'm thinking about it. This is like an opportunity to think about it, instead of being like, well, I haven't done it yet. I don't know. that's, anyway, I could say a lot, but that's some of my, like, if you really have small chunks of time, I think that sort of stuff can make a big difference.

Visa (1:13:18)

Mmm, right. Yeah.

Mmm.

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.

Yeah. It's funny. Yeah, and I anticipate that once I figure that out, it's an ongoing thing. But I do think it'll probably be better for me, actually, in terms of as a working style. It just reveals to me that my prior working style was so...

I would use so much time and space to do very little. Very little in the end. like it's just... But it's a kind of... It's like... I mean, it worked for what it was, which is fine, I guess. I don't know if I could have arbitrarily constrained myself to have a more efficient process, but...

Divia (1:14:11)

That's everyone,

Seems right.

Visa (1:14:33)

Right, it's like, yeah, I've always been wary of like, try and force yourself to do more and less. I'm like, I can't persuade myself to believe in the lie. I mean, sometimes there's like a creative, there's an interesting creative challenge. It's...

Divia (1:14:45)

Yeah.

mean, if you can imagine, like, okay, what if, but I agree if like the only way it works is if you really try to lie to yourself about it.

Visa (1:14:53)

Yeah.

Yeah, so that whole game space is interesting. It's like, if you can frame it as something interesting and exciting, like, you call a friend. And I guess conversations are one of the best ways to it. Like, as a forcing function, you have x amount of time, and you've got to go afterwards. subconsciously try to say whatever is most interesting. And then you compare that with, I spent the whole day trying to write something, and then I talked to a friend for like 20 minutes. I'm like, yeah, that.

So that works. And there's a bunch of other things like that, I think, where you try to summarize something. You give yourself a playful, interesting constraint, rather than, for the sake of productivity. When I start that, there's another voice in me that's like, f**k you. I'm not going to do that. So how do I not upset that guy? It has to be genuinely fun. having a kid now, think, is reintroducing me to that sense of, is this actually fun? Are you actually having fun?

Divia (1:15:48)

Right.

Visa (1:15:57)

It's such a... It's so primal and we are so trained out of it and it's a... Yeah.

Divia (1:16:05)

Yeah, no, it's a lot. like another maybe another half of what I, of how I think about doing things is, so there are a lot of things that when people, and obviously like, I don't think having kids is like the only thing in the world like this. People have different types of jobs and other types of caring for other people. but so in my life, even though I had jobs and stuff like that,

Having a kid, was more the case that there were a bunch of stuff that I kinda needed to function that I wasn't even really aware of, because I would just sort of get it by default in my everyday life. And then I had this kid and I'm like, I sort of can't function. I would like, I'd be like, what am I missing? Because I didn't even, and then I'd have to like be a detective and figure out what like nutrient that I didn't even realize.

and now I had to get it on purpose. my clearest example of this, so this probably sounds silly, but after I my second kid, whenever I had a little bit of spare time for a while, I would go play the Sims, and in the Sims, I would be taking care of like multiple children. And I'm like, what am I doing here? I'm like, it seems like I'm trying to recreate the exact same stress of my regular life in this game. Like why do I think this is relaxing? What's going on?

Visa (1:17:25)

Interesting.

Divia (1:17:28)

And finally, I was like, I think a friend of mine maybe helped me see this, but I was like, because in The Sims, I can cue up like four actions and then they'll go do them. And that's like, I think what I was missing because especially with the two kids, I'd be like, right, I'm gonna do this and this and this and that. And it just didn't work. Like I couldn't figure out how to do it. And then I'm like, all right, well, I guess there's some sort of, and I don't know.

Visa (1:17:41)

That's so funny.

Right.

Divia (1:17:52)

You know, I could go deeper. could be like, why does my brain need that? What's up with that? Is there some way to like get it more efficiently? But once I was like, okay, I seem to care about being able to do four things in a row. Then it was sort of like I could recalibrate. And that's that my friend of mine early on, she has 10 kids now, but I think at the time she had like seven or eight. And she said something on a forum that made this click with me where she was like,

Visa (1:18:03)

Interesting. That makes so much sense.

Divia (1:18:13)

Yeah, you sometimes I kind of just need to like stay up till two in the morning doing a creative project, even though like the next day I'm going to be kind of grumpy and like kind of take it on my kids and it's like kind of worse for everyone. But if I didn't do that creative project, then that's even worse. And so like once I know what the priorities are.

Visa (1:18:28)

Yeah.

Yeah, that's always been very clear to me, for me. And it's funny because, it's like, so when I started writing Introspect, for example, like, prior to writing it, I was like, emotionally, like, in a beautiful place. was like, shining, well-rested, know, just great. And then I started writing the book, and it was such a stressful process. Like, I started to get worse. And it's like, you know, I think I would have this conversation myself, like, you know, don't actually have to do this. You can just like...

Divia (1:18:41)

Mm-hmm.

You

Visa (1:19:01)

not do it. You can do more marketing for your first book. You can make more money that way. There's all kinds of other things you could do that's easier, less annoying, blah, blah, blah. And you'll be healthier and happier. I was smoking cigarettes when I was writing Introspect. When I'm deep in the weeds, I get into this red bull and cigarettes habit. So everything about that process was on the surface level bad for me. But then when I was done with it, it was so satisfying. And then I think it's true that

Divia (1:19:01)

You

Yeah.

Visa (1:19:31)

In the period after that was done, I was better off than before I started. But in between, I had to go into such a shitty place. I look back on it, and I smile, and I'm proud of myself for being able to project manage the meta of all of that. So in between, I was grumpy and frustrated, and I might have snapped at my wife at some point and apologized, and all those things. But being the person that completed that, like,

Divia (1:19:35)

Yeah.

Visa (1:20:00)

shifted something for me at a deeper level, I think. And now that the book is live, every week or so I get some feedback from some reader who's like, this book changed my life and it made me a better person. And that's like, it's an on. Yeah, it does. I have not reached any kind of diminishing returns on hearing about how someone's life is better. That's just always.

Divia (1:20:14)

That fuels you too, right?

Visa (1:20:25)

I mean, conceivably, that may be when it's like 100 people a day or something, then you start to, I don't know. But I get like one a week-ish, and it's always very refreshing and very reorienting and very, yeah, this is why I do what I do. And probably like one or two a day is where, I don't know, but it's always thinking ahead. yeah, it's, I don't think it necessarily needed that reward for me to have felt good.

I wanted to do a big thing and be done. And yeah, I think when I was a kid, I felt so much gratitude towards authors for writing books. And so I always wanted to participate in that process. authors write books for me. I want to write for someone else. And if one person said something, that would have been. So yeah, I think I have a tweet from 2018 where, like, if I write one book and one kid likes it, I'm done. Life complete. From there, it's all victory laps.

Divia (1:21:10)

Right.

Yeah

Visa (1:21:25)

And it does, you know, I can't get back in that state. I'm like, yeah, you know, I did it. It's a thing that I did. And yeah, like my relationship myself used to be not that great. And I would say like day to day right now, it's not like it's at the best it's ever been, but I can bring it back to that state if I want to. And it's generally great. It's generally good, you know. And I see people talk about it, about their own relationship with themselves, or, you even like,

Divia (1:21:30)

You did it.

Visa (1:21:54)

A thing that generally annoys me is seeing people in their early 30s complain about their back pain as if it's inevitable. I'm like, you know can just do stuff, right? You can just do your hamstring stretches and your hip stuff. And it's just so, I guess it goes back again to the thing about permission to tinker with your mind, tinker with your body, tinker with the way you exist. And it's like, I don't know. It's a...

Divia (1:22:02)

Yeah.

Visa (1:22:22)

There's layers and layers to it, guess. Some people prefer to be with everyone else, and the companionship that comes with that, I think, is soothing for some people. And I've been tempted, I think. I do remember after making some progress. So this happens in Waved, I guess. And it's probably what...

eventually drives me to do whatever my next thing is. It's where right after I do a thing, I'm like, man, that was exhausting and emotionally taxing and I just want to vegetate and like, let me enjoy that I had done the thing and like not do anything for as long as possible. But eventually that gets frustrating as well. And it's funny because I was recently met my friend and law and she just finished her PhD and she's like, just published a book. So she's like,

She was very, very much in the focus zone of like, every day she wakes up, I'm working on this PhD thing, I'm working on this book. she got to the point where that was like, frustrating, like unpleasant. And so she's done and she's experiencing relief from the end of that. And I'm on the other side where the last time I shipped something substantial, OK, there's the book. And then there was a really good essay last year. And the year since, I feel like I've just been like f*****g around.

Divia (1:23:42)

So you're more like itching to have another project.

Visa (1:23:45)

Yeah, mean, I have to be making steady, clear progress. So the analogy we came up with was, I guess, it's like sunlight, right? someone who's in the dark or in the cold, they can't wait to have sun and get out. They're like, my god, sunshine. But you take someone who's been in the sun in the tropics for all day. They're like, my god, I need to get out. I'm sweating. I'm sticky. I'm gross. And so much discourse is.

son, good or bad? know, like good, bad, good. You know, like, and if you can see that things are contextual and like, what is the best thing for you right now might be the worst thing for someone else. Like just being aware of that dynamic and carrying that dynamic with you, I think instantly makes you like just more responsive to people, like just better in navigating media, navigating people and

Divia (1:24:13)

Right.

Sure.

Visa (1:24:41)

That's one of the things I'm trying to convey. you know, like I keep seeing people call each other stupid online, and it's implied that it's the person is dumb. And the thing that no one ever seems to bring up is that, people are scrolling past a lot of information, and everyone looks stupid when they are responding really quickly to complex things in, you know. And then are you dumb? The thing should be, you know, no, I'm busy or I'm surfing. I mean, I don't want to

Divia (1:24:49)

Yeah.

He

Visa (1:25:11)

There's a funny response somewhere there. And the other thing is that people are often actually scared. That's a separate thing entirely, but it's interesting how many thought-terminating dismissals have to do with intelligence or stupidity. It's like, you're dumb, or I'm dumb, I'm so dumb, I can't do this. Is intelligence even actually the bottleneck? It probably isn't.

Divia (1:25:35)

think it's not, I mean, I think it helps basically if people have more horsepower and all else equal, it can be a big force multiplier. again, I think people don't usually, I think people are usually capable of thinking in some sense. I don't think people's intelligence is so low that they can't think, but then often they don't, they do a different activity instead.

Visa (1:25:41)

Yeah.

Yeah. And it's usually that they did not even think. So are you going to say the matter that, you're stupid because you didn't think? I would assume that stupid means you tried to think and your thinking was bad. most people haven't. think sitting down to think about a problem for a few minutes can just. I have been shocked sometimes. I think I have some issue that's been bothering me for months. And I didn't realize that I never stopped the

Divia (1:26:07)

Yeah.

Visa (1:26:30)

think about it. Like, okay, what should I do? What's the problem here?

Divia (1:26:35)

Yeah, I think it's an interesting puzzle. Like, I don't know. I sometimes, it's been, I sort of saying this before, but it's been on my mind recently. I'm like, all right, look, I am busy. I have a lot going on. Sometimes I don't have enough energy, but like, why? From some angle, I look at it and I'm like, okay, but every time I have like a couple minutes, why don't I just like think about my problems? Like for real though. Cause like think about, like, and I'm like, because it would pay off, right? Like I'm like, okay, maybe I don't have enough like.

Visa (1:26:57)

Right.

Mm-hmm.

Divia (1:27:02)

time to do it, but what if I just thought about how to get more time? And maybe I sound crazy, like saying, but I'm like, no, but I think it's really, it's like more powerful. And I try, but then again, some angles still exists where I'm like, but why am I not doing this more? I don't know. And I have guesses, like I could get into it and whatever, but it's a point of curiosity for me still.

Visa (1:27:07)

No, it makes sense.

Mm. I know that, that, yeah.

I mean, so one of my equivalent versions of that is like, why don't I just chat with people more? Because every time I talk to people, I get more energy and I get more just everything is better when I talk to people. And I guess, yeah, I have some legacy issues for why I flinch from talking to people. It's funny because I guess it's like the slob, Dana, like people who used to be messy. We give the advice that we needed.

Divia (1:27:48)

Yeah.

Visa (1:27:53)

needed to... I I always liked people, I think, and then I kind of psyop myself or internalized family, teachers, whatever, saying, why are you wasting your time with friends? And I had some bad experiences with friends as well. And so it's like, I need to actively remind myself to enjoy the companionship of my own friends. And I spent so much time and energy building this network of people who really like me. I made it, I de-risked it so much for myself. And now that...

Divia (1:28:14)

Mm-hmm.

Visa (1:28:22)

I can pretty much talk to anyone at any time. There's so many people that I love who would talk to me, and I just don't. And I'm like, what? It's free alpha slash money slash real estate. But I guess there's really that. There's something like a micro movement of, once you decide, or once you think, or once you just, there's a tiny space where you switch into it, and then it seems to be easy.

Divia (1:28:30)

Now it's your turn.

Visa (1:28:51)

And I guess people say as well, like with writing or whatever, the hardest part is starting, like the first few words. Once you've started, and with so many tasks, once you've started, it just keeps going. And it goes longer. So I have a kettlebell in my bathroom, which I use when I shower. I do bent over rows. And I was making great progress in strength gains for the first three months of the year. And then I had some military commitments. And then I had to stop working out. And then I started.

I mean, I had to stop working out because I had to train for a run and like, so I lost some weight. So was building a lot of muscle mass and then I had to train for a run and because I was getting heavy, I switched up and I lost a bunch of weight to run better. And then I got like a little bit sad about losing my gains and then I lost some strength as well. And then just stopped doing it entirely. And then I'm like, okay, I used to do like eight reps or 12 reps or eight reps or 12 reps. And I'm like, I'm too tired to do that many or something or that just seems, I don't know. But.

At some point, I'm like, OK, you know what, let's just do three. And every time I start doing three, I end up doing eight or 12 anyway. So it's like, if I just commit to the small thing, I do more. So it's so funny. And I'm sure there's versions of this all over my life where, yeah, just text a friend. Just say something. And maybe you'll end up having a conversation. Maybe you won't. There's something about expectations and.

Divia (1:29:54)

Yeah.

Yeah, do you know like what your, what your hesitation is? I mean, not that you always need to know, but do you know? Yeah.

Visa (1:30:23)

with friends? Again, think this is also the issue with my essays, actually. It's the same thing. It's like, I have gotten to a point of over-theorizing.

that I should have a plan or I should, you know, like not that I plan a conversation, but like I should, hey, let's talk about this thing and that thing. and, you know, like, like I want to make sure that it's worth your time. So in this case, it's very easy to say yes to a podcast because it's like, you are kind of holding the frame, right? Like you're the one that's like, like, I'm going let's do it. I'm like, it's so easy for me to say yes. But like, for me to like pitch something to someone.

Divia (1:31:00)

Yeah.

Visa (1:31:08)

Yeah, I seem to have this hang up where I overestimate what people want in a pitch. And for a lot of my friends, it's just like, Visa wants to chat, cool. And I'm like, but no, wait, let me come up with a good, you know, like, let's chat about this thing, and it'll be interesting because of that thing. And yeah. So I think a lot of my essays get

Divia (1:31:20)

Yeah, interesting.

Visa (1:31:33)

Even just a couple of days, I wrote a thread that a lot of people liked. And I muted it because it's getting retweets and stuff, and I don't like notifications. But it started with a story about tweets from a long ago. And then I freestyled somewhere interesting. I can't remember the specifics. And people were replying with, I need to read this carefully. I need to think about this. Wow, thanks. And all of those nice responses came from something that I did not plan and did not start.

So the reality of my life is when I improvise, things go really well. I mean, most, not every time. OK, actually there's nuance here that I guess I must be skipping over. I think of the times when I improvised and things went badly. But all of the best things I've done involved, there's like a mid-width thing here, where all the best things I've done have a quality of improvisationalness to it. And I've never done anything great that was like, OK, I'm going to plan every single thing. So I think I have a tweet to a.

Divia (1:32:01)

Yeah.

Visa (1:32:29)

Michael Kersey that I reference a lot, is that, and it's just me giving advice to someone else that I needed to hear, which is like, planning is great, but plans are worthless. So like write an elaborate plan and then throw it out and just do whatever. And then like write another elaborate plan like a month later or whatever. So each time you're planning, you're thinking through all the stuff, but like you're gonna fixate on certain things that might not necessarily need to be that way. So just think through the thing and then discard it and just improvise. And I'm like,

Divia (1:32:40)

Right.

Visa (1:32:59)

Yes, that's what everyone should do. Not me, though. I should make sure the plan is really, good. And yeah, it's silly. I would say, like, probably that's, if I'm honest with myself, like, that's the area where I seem to lack humility. Like, thing, yeah, like, I'm not sufficiently accepting that my best stuff happens when I'm not.

Divia (1:33:01)

You should follow the plan.

about plans.

Visa (1:33:28)

quite in the room. There's that relationship between creator and, so like Dave Chappelle has this great riff on comedians in cars getting coffee with Seinfeld. And he's saying like, the idea shows up in a car at your house, haunts, like get in, we're going, and you're like, I'm not dressed properly. It's fine. You'll be fine. he says sometimes you're shotgun, sometimes you're in the trunk. And then you have a great experience, and then you're like, hmm, I should drive, but there's no idea in the car. And so you're like,

You try to make whatever plan and whatever, there's no... So the humility for the creator, think, is to recognize when the idea wants to drive versus when you are imposing your... Almost authoritarian, this is how it should be and this is how... And you forget to ask, am I having fun? Is it cool? Is it great? And yeah, I think every time I reach some new threshold of...

followers or a new threshold like I've just finished a book or just whatever some kind of success like the the cheeky fun playful energy gets diminished and I start kind of feeling this is proper and important I should try and do a proper thing and then it goes to s**t and then I I go through like a long period of that and failure after failure after failure eventually I get pissed off and I get frustrated and just like to hell with this s**t I'm just gonna do nonsense and then the nonsense is good and yet you know like to some degree

Divia (1:34:41)

Yeah.

Visa (1:34:57)

all of that annoying preparation and all of that overthinking this and it does come through in the subsequent thing. if I think of, I don't want to be like, I do think there's a better, I don't need to like torture myself about it to get the result. Like it's just, it's yeah, I think where I'm coming around to is like, okay, if the nice art eventually comes out or whatever, cool. But like the process itself,

Divia (1:35:01)

It does help,

Yeah.

Visa (1:35:27)

is also an art in itself, if that makes sense. I'm trying to get to the point where I appreciate the way I do things just as much as I appreciate what I've done. I'm trying to get to that point.

Divia (1:35:30)

That's right, yeah.

Yeah. Yeah, no, mean, I think it's more robust if you can do it that way, because if you're focusing on things, then you have more control.

Visa (1:35:46)

Mm-mm, very much so.

Yeah, and you're less likely to get whatever the equivalent of an injury is. And I'm quite lucky in that I've never really had any seriously major injuries that put me, mean, physical and psychological or whatever. But yeah, I've seen people push themselves too hard. So YouTuber burnout is always fascinating to me. It's so common where someone...

Divia (1:35:56)

Yeah, it seems true.

Yeah, interesting.

Visa (1:36:17)

works really hard to build a huge audience on YouTube over like a three to five year like intense period and at the end of it they're done they're like they can't do anymore and they just quit and I'm like that seems less than ideal like and my instant and so actually I was noticing this about local bands in Singapore when I was a kid teenager and like there's this music festival called Bay Beats and a lot of bands and Bay Beats is like you know like if you're playing at Bay Beats like you're a real like you're a

You're not just a hobbyist band. You've made it. But a lot of bands make their way up to babies, play babies, and then never do anything ever again after that. It's because they wanted to make it, and so they made it. And that was their goal. Their goal was to make it. And like, ha, I made it as a musician. And I think Murakami has this in his book about novelists as a vocation. It's like a lot of novelists who just want to write their first novel, which is fine. It's like if you have a goal is to write a novel, and you write it, you're done.

Divia (1:36:47)

You made it.

Yeah, interesting.

That was their goal.

Visa (1:37:16)

From his point of view, the real good s**t happens over a lifetime, right? As you dig deeper and deeper and you learn more and more things and synthesize more and more things. So there's this whole, there's this like, yeah, there's the first novels in the giant blip here and then it decays and decays and decays. if you can last, any novelist who's been writing seven, eight novels over 30 years, they're probably very interesting in some way that you may or may not be interesting to you, but.

There's interestingness there as long as they are not mindlessly doing the same thing over and over again. If they're actually exploring and trying, the interestingness accumulates over time. And yeah, I try to have that in mind. And again, it's like, if you burn out in five years, like you're... And really, you calibrate this conversation to depending on who you're talking to. Because for some people, doing anything for five years is like a stretch goal that they can't even imagine doing. But if you can...

Divia (1:38:13)

Yeah.

Visa (1:38:14)

So it's like there's phases to it. But if you can do things for years, then having a decades-long orientation, think, is where the real... That's where you go from the nothing ever happens to, at the decades level.

Divia (1:38:28)

of course, yeah, what that thing that happened is, of course it was inevitable.

Visa (1:38:33)

Right. yeah, anything you can do for, if you can stick around for decades. It's like, I have noticed many things crossing a seven year cycle. And it's interesting that it also fits the, most of the, like all the cells in your body are different after seven years, something like that. I don't know if that's precisely true, but yeah. And it's the same for like, you know, if you've been posting on Twitter, on a forum or Twitter or whatever for seven years, after that point,

Divia (1:38:53)

ship of Theseus style yeah

Visa (1:39:03)

it will seem like you were there forever because the bulk of the people who are there at the end are lot of newcomers. A lot of the newcomers don't look back further than... Same for at a company, if you've been at a company longer than seven years, all the new hires have come and gone and you're like, this person was there forever. So forever is about seven years. And you can use that to your advantage in some ways.

Divia (1:39:06)

Seems true, yeah.

Right.

You

Visa (1:39:33)

You know, year podcast has been podcasting forever.

Divia (1:39:35)

Yeah, I think, I hear you. I definitely think it's very underrated to play a long game. also, like a tendency in myself that I often want to really be mindful of is I think for me, some sort of like grinding without even like really paying, I don't know, like I wanna be process oriented on the one hand, because I think it's a better optimization target.

something like that, think it's more robust for all the reasons I'm saying. But then at the same time, I think often for me, it's more comfortable to just keep doing something that's not really working. So I'm like, well, you know, I'm doing it. I'm trying it. And then, you know, it's like five years later and I'm like, well, okay, I guess that was kind of interesting, but like I didn't really do anything.

Visa (1:40:16)

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I feel that so much. And when I was a kid and I used to play video games, that was all how I did it. just failed at the thing and somehow find it kind of fun and just keep failing it. So you have to unlock a new... In fact, the way I think about it, it's almost like you're playing different games within the game. So you have a game in front of you, but initially you're playing bang against the wall. You you're playing...

Divia (1:40:32)

Yes, same.

Yeah.

Visa (1:40:51)

If you play like, think Grand Theft Auto, I didn't know there were missions or whatever. I thought it's a game where you go in, you steal a car, you bang into things, you get killed or arrested, and that's the game. you know, it's, didn't know. And yeah, same for, you know, like, in fact, I think I was writing my, I was journaling to myself yesterday, so it's like a draft where I seem to complicate things for myself and...

Divia (1:41:00)

Yep.

Visa (1:41:18)

I challenge myself to do things that are too far beyond my comfort zone. So it's not just a nice, gentle little bit. I go too far. I try to do eight things at once, and it's not going to work. And I was like, at one level, this is obviously not working. And then when I was reflecting on it, well, the fact that I'm doing it means that it must be serving some purpose for some part of me. And then I was reminded of Inception, the movie.

Divia (1:41:40)

Right.

Visa (1:41:45)

Cobb asks Ariadne, can you make a maze in two minutes that takes more than a minute to solve? And it's like, well, the point of having like, there's a level of complexity that when you introduce, it means that you get to be like immersed in that simulation or the dream or whatever such that it's not, you like you add variables and I some people do this with talking and they gish gallop, right? They just like say so many things that.

Divia (1:42:11)

You

Visa (1:42:12)

You can't process what's being said. so you get to kind of, I guess if you're enjoying it, you're like, well, I like to just hear what they're saying. I don't need to think precisely. I can't think precisely what they're saying. They're like overwhelming me. And I must be doing some form of that with the tasks that I give myself in writing. Because there must be some part of me that enjoys, I'm struggling to write, but I didn't publish. I'm struggling to write, but I didn't publish. And I've been, you know.

Divia (1:42:21)

Mm-hmm.

Visa (1:42:40)

If someone was doing this at the start of their writing journey or career, I'd be like, well, you're avoiding, do you actually like writing? Are you just avoiding whatever? But I've published so much stuff and I still do it. It's like, it's a kind of a safety ritual maybe or an avoidance ritual or like a way to enjoy writing and thinking without facing the consequence of people are going to look at it and...

Divia (1:42:40)

Yeah.

Visa (1:43:08)

I feel like I've learned to not worry about what would people think, but I guess, yeah, I've given myself this, I want this great outcome to happen. And if I publish a post and people kind of like it and they say some nice things, whatever, but it isn't moving the needle towards the outcome that I want, that'll be sad and upsetting and annoying and failure. Whereas if I'm struggling,

and I didn't ship, well, know, it's still there's still the possibility that it's like six months from now there'll be an amazing something like that. When I say it out loud, it always feels silly. I'm like, bro, you know, you've been through this before. You just got to, you know, like you got to write the shitty versions in order to get to the better versions. Like I know that intellectually, but emotionally struggling is, you

Divia (1:43:43)

Yeah, you think there's some dynamic like that that can draw it out.

You know, something that was, we're talking about video games, something that was really kind of, I don't know, kind of powerful for me to see. the first, not the first Zelda game, but Breath of the Wild, right? That was what, like five years ago or something at this point? So my son was probably five or something. He was pretty young.

Visa (1:44:14)

Okay, I'm familiar.

Divia (1:44:21)

And I was playing it and I had some whole plan where I was like, all right, well, in order to go to that place, it'll be better if I have this armor. So I need to get these ingredients and I had to do whatever, whatever. And then my son over there, he's just like, he doesn't care. He's like finds these like rare ingredients that have these few cook them, whatever. And he's in, he'll just go into the battle and he'll just eat them and whatever. And like naturally he beats the game while I'm still trying to make this armor. And I'm kind of like, okay.

Visa (1:44:45)

yeah. Yeah.

Divia (1:44:49)

This faster than I really realized, if you actually think.

Visa (1:44:51)

Right. I like to play video games, like RPG type video games. I like to blunder through my first playthrough where I like, like if there are side quests that like, I will go a little bit out of the way to do a side quest, but not like all the way. And I mostly try to get to the end of the narrative. I, but I'm not like.

Divia (1:45:00)

Yep.

Visa (1:45:15)

speed running to the end. I'm like, I try to, like, you I don't really, I like upgrade whatever happens naturally in route to that. do that. And then if I like it, then I will, I'll do a second playthrough at some point where I really go through every single thing.

Divia (1:45:16)

Yeah.

You can go back.

That's also how I'm with books. I remember, so I didn't, not necessarily with these days with books I read for pleasure, sometimes I'll just give up on it, but like in school, I think it happened with, what's that book? It's in the best of times, it's the worst of times. Tale of Two Cities, yeah, it was that. I remember it was a sign for like summer reading or something, and I kept reading it and being like, I really can't follow this. I really can't follow this. And I kept.

Visa (1:45:31)

Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah, same, You skim, right?

The tail of two cities.

Yeah. Yeah.

Divia (1:45:58)

trying to like go more slowly and understand. And finally I was like, you know what? I'm gonna finish it. And then if I really want to understand it, I can read it twice. And it was, it worked way better for me. It probably depend on, you know, on the person in the book, but it was far easier for me to understand it by reading it twice than by reading it carefully. I think a lot of things are like that.

Visa (1:46:05)

Yeah.

Yeah, I think a lot of things are like that. Because when you're reading it carefully the first time, you don't know what you're reading it carefully for. So you might read a lot into a detail that's not actually important, and you might miss a detail that actually is important. And you only find out what is and is not important after you've gotten the first sweep all the way through.

Divia (1:46:38)

Yeah. Anyway, also I could go forever, but I think my kids is getting to be a little late. I think I should go check in with them. But thank you so much. And if you have any final things that you want us to hit, now's the time.

Visa (1:46:42)

I should also run, yes, same. Yeah.

I mean, so my main thing in my life right now, apart from my wife and kid, is my essays. yeah, drop by my sub stack, I guess, and challenge me to write more. And yeah, I think leaving comments or asking questions or whatever, that helps me move faster if anyone wants to help. Yeah. OK. We could talk for hours.

Divia (1:47:09)

Sounds good. All right, well, thanks so much for coming on. Everyone can find Visa on Twitter in particular, and I'll link it. I'll try to post this pretty soon.

Visa (1:47:19)

Awesome. So much fun.

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