ThePrimeagen: Programming, AI, ADHD, Productivity, Addiction, and God | Lex Fridman Podcast #461

0:00 the following is a conversation with Michael Paulson better known online as the primagen he is a programmer who has entertained and inspired millions of people to have fun building stuff with software whether you're a newbie or a season developer who has been battling it out in the software engineering trenches for decades in short the primagen is a legendary programmer and a great human being with an inspiring roller coaster of a life story this is Alex Freedman podcast to support it please check out our sponsors in the description and now dear friends here's the primagen what do you love most about programming uh what brings you Joy when

0:46 you program I can tell you the first time that I ever felt love in programming or felt that Joy or that excitement which was in college it was the second class data structures and the teacher that was teaching Ray Babcock he was talking about linked list now you you have to learn Java at Montana State University when I went and so he's off there kind of explaining this whole linked list thing and all that and then he shows code and in the code it's like abstract class node or whatever it was I can't remember what it was and then it had a private member and that private member was of type node and I've never seen that before it is a class that is called node with a member that is of itself and for the first time ever I was like oh my gosh like there's no end there's no way to iterate this is not

1:32 like a set of 10 items this is a set of infinite items and so like my mind kind of like exploded in that moment like there's actually you like the what you can express is huge I can see what memory looks like like I can see this kind of hopping through space and I just remember being just so blown away because up until that point everything was just all right I have a list of 10 items I have a list of 20 items right it was very rigid and small and the things I built were really small and trivial and all of a sudden I felt like I could build like anything in that one moment and it was so amazing I just remember sitting in class for what I don't even remember how long those classes were or anything but I just remember being just completely like profoundly impacted by this notion and so I just sat there and I watched I had the exact same experience in Heaven's forbid by

2:19 software engineering class when we talked about The Decorator pattern where you can keep on constructing these objects in this recursive way not that I think that's actually a good idea to do but just watching that and realizing like there's so many weird and unque ways you can solve problems and like you can just anything your mind can think of you can just create that and I just remember getting just so excited about the possibility that anything is possible yeah let's uh wax philosophical about a link list it is pretty profound for people who don't know a node in a link list doesn't know anything about the world it's in it only knows about the thing it's linked to its neighbor maybe that's symbolic it's a metaphor for all of us humans there's billions of us on this planet and we only know about our local little Network yeah and it's kind of beautiful

3:06 and you realize like in that little simple data structure you can construct arbitrarily large systems and they they're like roots that go through memory and then of course that's where you get all the programming languages that allow you to uh dump junk into memory and have memory leaks and that there therefore create infinite pain as you try to figure out where that uh unfreed memory is uh for me yeah probably so it's so beautiful the way you put that link lists are indeed beautiful recursion also for me when I finally wrap my brain around what it means to write a recursive function what was the what was the thing what was the

3:51 like the one that taught you cuz I think we all probably you probably did factorial where you like you know just do like a quick factorial of it it just doesn't hit home what was the thing that kind of made it hit home I don't remember the first I remember my first how do you not remember your first it was magic I've had so many that just I me you are a lisp guy you're probably pretty used to the recursion yeah all I remember is just surrounded by sea of parentheses I mean that's that's really probably when I uh in high school I think it was either Java or C++ wow how do I not remember that it must have been C++ and then College it was the generic bullshit software engineering classes were uh Java but then the the Renegades

4:40 the cool kids were all using lisp that's that's when you're doing the AI the quote unquote AI at that time that's that was lisp if you want to write a chess engine you would use lisp and so for me probably the moment I really fell in love with programming was was lisp and writing like aell programs and uh chess engines all kinds of engines that play a game and then I could play against that thing and that thing would beat me the joy of being destroyed by the thing you've created and oh um game of life too cell aoma that's when I I built that you all kinds of programming languages that's less about programming language and more about the system you create and that

5:26 just filled me with infinite Joy uh having now similar to the link list situation creating a system where each individual cell only knows about its neighbors and operates under very simple rules but when you take that system as a whole and allow it to evolve over time it can create infinite complexity so I I just man those are many pothead moments where I'm just like looking at the beautiful complexity that can be created with cellometer that's that filled me with just infinite joy for sure but yeah the all I remember is parentheses so my first memories of my first are drowned in a sea of parenthesis oh man mine is I have well

6:14 first off mine was in Java so my first was a little bit more rigid kind of a corporate you know a corporate experience but cold meaningless yeah I was in a lab everyone was using sentos at that or sent Os or however you say I always call that sentos the fresh maker and so it's just like I'm in this very cold that's nice thank you I'm in like this cold rigid environment uh with my Microsoft keyboard programming away in Java and I still I have just such this memory of Despair because I love programming this was after the linked list and I cannot figure out recursion and so I go to you know the university store and I buy a book and it's Dell and Diel learn Java and it has a section recursion so I open it up and I start reading it and it just doesn't hit home

7:00 and I'm like I'm spiraling into this like kind of I maybe I'm not a programmer maybe I'm not worthy enough to enter into this circle of people who can figure out what what the heck recursion means and so Dil and Dil is like I still remember this their phrase their exact phrase was every young budding developer solved this recursion program and it was the Tower of Hanoi and guess what I don't know if I can solve the Tower of Hanoi to this day it's it's like a very hard recursive problem and I just sat there and thought Oh my gosh I'm not going to make it and I sat there in the lab for 8 hours 10 hours doing these things so worried it's the week of recursion we have to do a lab assignment I'm not going to be able to do it and I just remember being like genuinely worried about that uh and then

7:47 because I always my big problem was is like okay do factorial why not just use a for Loop okay what about Fibonacci Sequence why not use a for Loop right like I don't understand what's the purpose of recursion I don't understand it yet it's so powerful why it looks like a really complicated for Loop and so I just could not understand it and then lab came that day and it was I'm going to give you a 2d array you have to read from a file this is what a starting position looks like this is what an ending position looks like this is what a wall looks like I want you to find me a path through the Maze and so I just sat there I like okay I guess I can just go up and I can create a like a visited grid that so I know not to visit these places anymore and all a sudden just started clicking like well wait a second I don't know the maze but if I just go up right down and left and hop back every time

8:34 I've been to that square don't visit it like I can just it will just go forever and I realized in that moment I'm like I actually understand Rec I've understood recursion this whole time I just never had a problem in which it actually made sense to use and that was like my big downfall is that I I was measuring my understanding with the problems that I had available which were just you know list traversal which is not a good use of recursion and so I just I just remember that freeing oh man recursion it was a great moment in my life I mean it does require to be fair a leap of faith like because people will tell you those uh conformist dogmatic Java instructors will tell you that this is you know um that's important to understand uh recursion but it takes a

9:20 leap of faith that this is something this is a different way of looking at the world and it's a powerful way of looking at the world actually remembered when I think I first I think I remember my first now okay uh I think it was uh dub first search for one of the games maybe a fellow something like that and for that implementing recursion understand that you can search trajectories through the the space of states and do that recursively that was mind-blowing just imagining like you can just see possibilities yeah just like numbers flying was like the beautiful mind and then um and that's

10:07 when I also uh discovered conspiracy theories that and I just saw I saw the truth uh okay yeah so what were we talking about oh what was the most painful aspect of programming for you and like what what Memories do you have of uh deep profound suffering in terms of programming in the early days uh I would say the biggest one that I can really hold on to had to be one of two experiences the first experience was when I was at a place called schedul listi and am I not allowed to say the place I'm not sure if they're even operating still at this point but they're in both there something funny about the name I'm sorry oh schedu listic yeah they actually the name was so bad that when you looked at their

10:53 like paid for Google ad terms that they would make sure that they're at the top of the list the spellings were just insane cuz no one knew how to spell the word Schedulicity and so it was just like the Google optimizing for that is just hilarious uh but okay go back to the thing and the the thing that kills me the most about programming what I actually considered the worst aspect of programming is when you know everything and so when I was at this job it's just every single day I'd come in there were no surprises there was no questions I didn't understand the code base sure that's that's fair I didn't understand all the things about the codebase but I knew I was going to go I was going to generate some sort of object from the database I was going to take that object from the database and I was just going to map it over and just display it on the web page there's no creativity there's no there's nothing to

11:38 it it's very like almost Factory line kind of work and that was a very kind of difficult moment for me which is I didn't enjoy programming because like I knew everything about it I already knew exactly what I was going to do that day I knew all the hurdles I was going to have to go over there was no unknown unknowns if you will it was just knowns at all times and it's just that is for me that is the worst part about programming is when you already know the solution and it's just a matter of how fast you can type and get it out from your head to your hands so the absence of uncertainty the absence of challenge was the pain yeah that's pretty profound Prime I'm more than just good looks I want you to know that it's a low bar what do you identify

12:24 as I'm enjoying asking the general question 38 male uh male husband of beautiful wife okay you stream about all kinds of programming uh but what kind of programmer Are You Are You full stack developer web programming uh and maybe can you lay out all the different kinds of programming and then Place yourself in that in terms of your identity sexual identity as well yeah I can get it we can put it all in there okay uh plus I mean obviously those two are very very tightly coupled I have seen you like on the border of sexually aroused by certain language is I think you got real excited about o camel Orel let's go thank you Dylan mroy where okay wow yeah I did not expect that that

13:11 escalated quickly anyway what do you identify as okay so first you let's let's do the previous or the in in between question first which is the different kind of archetypes I think that's a really interesting kind of question because if you go on Twitter or you're new your thoughts are probably that there is just web programming and maybe there there some other stuff yeah like game programming but you do like game programming in JavaScript and on the web you know like there's this very kind of very myopic view of the programming world and I bet if you ask a lot of people these days like what is the most popular form of programming they'd probably say web if you said what contains the most amount of repos how many percentage of repos on GitHub our web base they probably say 90% or some huge number but the reality is that there's an entire embedded robotics world you know you're familiar with the

13:57 ml side of things there's networking there's going to be just like performance operating systems compilers there's just huge amounts of variation of all these different type of programming verticals that you can be and so we often talk about programming in perspective of web or something that's pretty narrow and I think that's just a social construct of Twitter more than anything else that it's actually I don't believe it's that representative of of the entire kind of programming world out there and I think a lot of programming is really really fun there's some really great stuff building a your own language is just a very fun experience to do every programmer should just do that once just to have a completely different you know perspective on how things work in life but as far as what do I do uh I've always looked at myself as a tools engineer so at my time at my my jobs

14:42 typically I would start off on the UI and then they'd be like okay well hey we need a library for this thing so then I'd be the one writing like the library so in 2012 2013 I was writing a UI library for the web that can behave just like an iPad so you can pinch and zoom on it but it's still web page cuz we didn't have any of that stuff back then it was a canvas had to do all the like matric operations and all that stuff to kind of you know it felt like you're on an iPad but it actually wasn't on an iPad and this was iPad 2 by the way so this is a long time ago and so every single time I got into a job it's like okay hey we need to do a library hey can you work on a build system so back then there was no grunt there was no gulp there was no any of those things so I had to handroll my own JavaScript build system and so I always fell into these

15:27 positions of building tools for developers to be successful and I've always really enjoyed that region so as I went on to say Netflix uh spent 10 years there I'd say the majority of my 10 years were building things for developers to use that they could be successful at their job and so I just I've always really enjoyed that aspect because your share your stakeholders and the people that use your program understand programming and they're going to say like hey I need this and typically the thing that they need they actually want whereas with people people want stuff but what they actually need versus what they actually want often are kind of like this weird separation people you know that's like the old Henry Ford quote I just want a faster horse he's like no what you actually want is a car and so it's like this like you have to play this game of

16:13 trying to really figure it out whereas developers it's like I know you know what I'm doing I know what you want let's figure it out together that's actually that gives you a really nice big picture view of programming in general so I love the idea of just kind of starting at the interface like you need to pinch and all that kind of stuff and then figure out the entire thing that requires to make that happen incl including maybe the side quest tooling how to make it more productive and efficient all that kind of stuff so the entirety the entirety of the thing that's really cool okay so that mean that would be full stack by the general definition of full stack meaning like perhaps yeah versus like systems engine like starting at the bottom and trying to optimize a certain kind of specific thing without seeing the big picture of like what the the

16:59 resulting interface would look like and a lot of people you know in web programming they never go beyond the front end of how the thing looks they kind of always assume there'll be somebody some some uh Grunt in the shadows in the darkness of the basement that will implement the back end some Gil foil out there will be doing the backend yeah like I like to call myself a generalist um just to kind of give some ideas is you know at at one point at Netflix I built the websocket connection so for TVs how websocket works is code I just wrote M and so I you know built the framing thing and before that I was doing stuff with memory and before that I built the UI for a tool right it's just like I can just do the thing you just tell me the thing to do and I'll just go do the thing I don't worry too I don't try to get super good at one specific activity

17:46 like I don't want to be a kubernetes engineer who's the world's greatest deployer but if I had to go learn kubernetes I'd go learn it and learn how to deploy some things and then hopefully move on to like the next thing if that makes sense uh I posted about the fact that I'm talking to you on Reddit and there's a lot of wonderful questions uh somebody mentioned that I should ask you about devops can you explain what devops is is it a kind of special ops of programmers is SEAL Team Six of developers what's devops can you define what are you a devops engineer well people keep telling me devops isn't real there's actually you want platform Engineers Cloud Engineers infro Engineers uh I just often think I think the easiest way if we're doing like just kind of like some basic nomenclature it's just devops are the people that make sure that when you launch a service and all that it doesn't just disappear

18:32 right it's all the kind of backbone of being able to operate something at scale like you really don't if you think about if you're just writing a mom and paaw like website people that do PHP that are doing WordPress and all that they're going to build something they're going to hand it off to I don't know Leno digital ocean some company they don't really need a really complicated build deployment all this it's just someone with a simple website so they can sell their goods and so they don't really need that and so that's kind of how I think of a devops is when things need to scale that's kind of the person you hire yeah those people are actually amazing yeah of uh the time I spent on Google it's like oh yeah yeah there's all these fancy machine learning people but the the folks that are running the compute the infrastructure basically that make sure

19:19 the shit doesn't go down they're like Wizards very incredible like vertical of job and obviously I'm using a very broad term to describe I'm sure like a bunch you know because making sure stuff doesn't go down you could also say that's like an Sr right site reliability engineer whatever you know the ones that were the the bomber jackets at Google and so when we say devops I think people get very particular about terms specifically in this category they're like well actually you're mentioning infrastructure engineer versus you know versus site reliability engineer it's just like okay yes I hear you but generally when someone thinks devops they think somebody that manages the servers and their life cycles and the reliability there's devops is it real I'm not sure okay did versel Kill devops question mark question mark wow

20:04 that's you're almost a journalist that's a headline uh let's go back to the beginning all right baby Prime so you mentioned Netflix youve uh oh I worked at Netflix by the way for people who don't know uh who uh the primagen is he mentions uh the fact that he has been very successful and has worked at Netflix and basically every other sentence correct o almost as much as I mentioned neovim oh great tell me more about neovim no please don't so baby Prime at the very beginning you've had one hell of a life and I think it's aspiring to a lot of people you've you've gone through a lot of painful low points and like you mentioned you've come out of that to

20:51 become a successful programmer and a person that inspires a huge number of people um to get into programming and just to find success in life so maybe I would love it if you laid out just your whole life Journey from the beginning so I guess if we're going to start with this whole journey I think it's probably best to start when I was about four or 5 years old that was the first time I was ever exposed to pornography uh and it's kind of just ear wormed me for a large portion of my life and so I don't think there was a day that didn't go by from when I was a very young lad all the way up until I was 20 some years old where I didn't think about porn on the daily basis and so it's just like every single day even at that young and so it's just a very mind

21:37 consuming time consuming thought consuming thing that kind of plagued me from a starting at a very young age when I 7 years old my dad died um that was kind of a really tough period of life I I still think about this time that I went over to China and there's kind of some rules that we were given and one of the rules was just like hey don't talk about God and if you do use the word Dad instead and I was just like okay Dad it was like the first time I said that word in like 17 years or some amount of time like it was like so weird to say that phrase and I was just like oh that was just the strangest thing I've ever said in my entire lifetime it just felt so weird so kind of rewind as I got older

22:23 obviously was very good at computers good at accessing porn of course uh played uh video games on the internet fun fun kind of like side quest story I think the guy's name is Lord talk on Twitch I can't quite remember his name but he built this game called Grail g r a a l and Grail online and when I was a young lad that it was just like Zelda except for it also had a level editor and it had like a se-like language and that's how I discovered how to program is I looked at these symbols and figured out what they meant and then I was able to make things happen in the game and that was like a that's my introduction into programming so thank you that guy whatever your Twitch name was but all right so keep on going as I got older I was super bad socially I was

23:10 not a very great social person I high school was brutal got made fun of a lot uh really didn't enjo I wouldn't say I had a great time during High School uh definitely felt very out of place or offset or maybe misplaced if you will I'm not sure what the right word is and so of course at that point I just always want wanted to I wanted to be accepted to fit in and all that I did forget to say one side story after my dad died my brother older brother he got and I started getting into drugs and along with that he exposed me to pot so at 8 years old I was smoking some marijuan uh for a while there till like maybe 11 or 12 and took a break and then again did a lot of that as I got a little bit older but so I kind of got a lot of these exposures fairly

23:56 young 16 15 through 18 a lot of drinking and all that when I graduated or as I was graduating high school it's just like I had such sadness if you will I was very sad about how everything went tried to commit suicide um obviously it was a very poor attempt and I'm still here today I'm very happy about that aspect I'm glad that I didn't follow through with anything had to go to the hospital and all that and when I was done I just still remember kind of coming out of the hospital and at like that moment it's kind of like something broken you have you ever read the book uh Wheel of Time It's 14,000 Pages or something like that but right around page 12,000 Rand has to intentionally kill a girl the main character and that's like the moment he breaks and he gets into like hard Rand uh uh quindar

24:43 ran if you will for those that know whe of timeo will appreciate all that uh for those that don't very confusing and I understand not the Amazon movie show not that not that Wheel of Time so now that we kind of go back onto it at that point it's just like something kind of broken me it's just like I just didn't care anymore so all the kind of social awkwardness if you will all that kind of just died away with me but also so did everything else and so I started using a bunch of drugs LSD mushrooms math did a bunch of math did a bunch of that stuff and then went off to college and continued to do a bunch of stuff I took too much acid to where for like quite a few years I had like little squigglies on the side of my eyes whenever I'd walk by high contrast object

25:29 and so it's just like that whole period of life was just kind of marked by um just poor decisions and then sometime when I was about 19 years old somewhere in that range I just had this one evening where it's just I felt the very dramatic and real presence of God and it's just like I kind of had this Choice like froto uh on a razor where it's like if I go either way I'm going to fall off and I need to change my life you just you get to make the choice now do you want to do that or not and so I remember going okay I do I do want to change my life like I don't like this experience I don't like what I'm living I am still very sad I still feel very desperate I still feel all those things I'm just like pretending to be this other person and then I just went to sleep that night

26:17 nothing changed in my life everything was still the way it was I woke up the next day the same person and I was just like oh that's just like such a strange weird kind of experience and I just went and bought my Daye and then I remember I think that evening I looked at porn and all of a sudden I just had a conscious I just like this deep profound like shame and I was like I've never felt shame in my life right like I I have no idea what's happening now and then all when I smoked pot I just felt deep shame and when I hurt somebody or did something wrong also it's just like I got a conscious from that evening that's what kind of my gift was if you will and it's just like at that point I didn't even have a choice I had to change my life cuz for whatever reason I've kind of been changed in a moment and so from there I started actually trying in

27:04 school I always kind of joke around that I got 2.14 in high school I had a teacher handw write me a note saying I was the worst student she's ever had all that kind of stuff I was not a really great student and then in that moment it's just like okay now life's changed and I start trying to learn you I try to become a good student and it turns out it's really hard like I was I was really bad I still got C's I went and took pre calculus and failed pre-calculus and I'm like oh my gosh I used to be the smart math guy and now I'm kind of the idiot failing and so it's like I'm just questioning myself and all that and I spend hours upon hours in in like a studying uh math learning center and then just at some point years into this journey I'm like a year and a half into this journey at this point it's just

27:49 like something clicks and I go from being the worst person to just immediately becoming the best everything after that is just I don't know what happened all of a sudden I was the best person at math I started going into my computer science classes I just really got everything it's just like everything at at just years after trying just all of a sudden became easier and I'm not sure if it happened over the course of weeks or when the easier started but it was just first predicated by just a huge amount of difficulty and then this is kind of where I started really Desiring and loving the process of learning was when things started getting easier after all those years cuz I just was motivated by this desire to do something not not not thinking it was going to get any easier and then all a sudden it just started getting easier and it was great

28:34 and that's kind of really where I guess I started having the biggest parts of my life change at that point I started really really really wanting to never look at porn again cuz every single time just such shame and I really wanted to stop and that was by far the hardest addiction to quit like smoking cigarettes was also a really hard addiction to quit shockingly hard addiction to quit but porn by far was just the worst of them all and then I think about 22 I was finally done with all kind of addictions if you will and then for a year I just I just worked in all that and I think right around maybe it 21 and 3/4 somewhere in that range I'm not really sure where I I stopped all the addictions part but or at least the outwardly addictions and then at some point 6 months later a year later met my beautiful wife things just

29:22 started falling more and more into place I loved more and more work I loved programming I started programming like 12 hours a day I watched The Social Network movie and after that I was just like I'm doing a startup and so like that night I started my first startup and I was just like so it was in PHP by the way PHP 5.2 or something like that it was great great times and I was just so motivated to do that and I would just program for sometimes I'd program for 24 36 hours straight and I just like non-stop just that's all I wanted to do at all points I think my wife got a little sick of me I wouldn't she would be like can you drop me off at school and I'd be like no on programming I was not a very nice you know I didn't think through things that well and I was just so into it and I just did it Non-Stop and that's kind of like how I became me

30:07 is that story if that makes sense let's try to reverse engineer some of the pain and some of the Triumph you made it sound easy at times let's try to understand it better maybe when you were 7 years old what do you think about the pain you've experienced there losing your dad what do you think what kind of impact did it have on you what kind of memories do you have at that time the best way I can kind of put it is that I just never knew what a dad was I was young enough that I could kind of maybe repress or just even have the capability of remembering things long term because I know most people don't remember a lot from when they're young and so I'm not exactly sure probably as at one of the best possible ages if I'm going to lose a dad to lose a dad you know uh if you're going to lose one if you're 11 or 12 it's like a terrible age that's what

30:54 my brother was and he fell into drug addiction and never got back out and so I just kind of have more of like a fuzziness and just kind of a longing that I I just wish I had a dad what impact did that have on your Evolution on your life sort of having that longing I think that's why I was so bad uh socially in the sense that I was looking for approval right like something I needed approv I think a lot of people kind of Desire that approval or that loving figure and I just didn't have that and so I think I just looked for it and everything else right like if I to psychoanalyze my actions during the time it's not like I was actively thinking that uh but yeah I just always wanted something to fill in whatever that was I

31:41 felt I think a lot of people listening to this will uh resonate with your experience in high school like being The Outsider being picked on uh struggling through a lot of different complexities at home uh what advice would you give to them mat the worst part about high school is that you're surrounded by a bunch of people your age and it feels Eternal yeah you don't think like the people that are around you you feel like are the people that will be there for the rest of your life at least that's what I kind of like I thought and I didn't really even realize this until many years later that they are going to be some of the least consequential people in your life which is very shocking to kind of think about especially if you're in it right now yeah right like right now they are the everything that you're experien is your

32:27 whole reality and then one day it all stops and then real life starts to begin yeah it's just that's such a shocking thing and if I could just tell myself that maybe I would have been a bunch different person that's so beautifully put I mean it is a it's like a trial run you know like at the beginning of video games there's a little tutorial that's what that is yeah and actually that should be a chance uh to try shit out to take risks uh because real life will begin where there is more consequences after that here you can you know if you like a girl ask her out try try shit if you get picked on hit that guy back try shit out I'm not going to condone punching another person I will beat the shit out of him and uh take some Jiu-Jitsu and

33:14 learn how to take him down and then and then and then that girl that rejected you would be like H maybe I'll give that guy a second chance be a bad motherfucker it's a chance to try stuff out this is very motivational speech for kicking ass it is true there I mean there is something very true about that that I think especially I I mean I have no idea what the girls experience of high school would be like but as a guy there's definitely a lot of like physical requirements in high school there's a lot of physical measurement at least where I grew up I think that might not be true in all high schools but if they're filled with boys it's probably true and so it's just like yeah it probably does help to do those things to go to BJJ to do any of these activities because even if you don't ever kick someone's ass just having some level of confidence in yourself is probably a

33:59 very valuable thing but just remembering that this is such a short tiny moment in your life is just like a huge help I mean the way you phrased it is exactly right that's what it feels like that this is these are the people that will be with you for the rest of your life and this is the whole world and so that means that there'll be just tremendous amount of impact if somebody picks on you or if you fall somebody low somewhere low in the hierarchy uh in the status hierarchy of this high school that means you'll be low in the status hierarchy of the world and you're fucked for the rest of your life and that that carries a tremendous amount of weight it's is why psychologically it's extremely difficult to be I I think it's underated often by parents by Society

34:47 how difficult it is to be a high schooler how difficult psychologically it is how it actually makes sense that some people would suffer from depression and be on the verge of suicide it's very very yeah I think it's even I you know people always say back in my day you know blah blah blah I think it's genuinely harder today than it's ever been in the sense that when I was a kid there was a qualification to people meaning this is a cool guy this is not a cool guy today there's a quantification of people you have 32514 people following you you have 12 like there people can visually they can inspect your exact social value on whatever platform you're on and that has to be just so much hard harder and I can imagine that there's a lot of of just so much weight put on that that it's just

35:34 it feels probably way worse and way more damning to be uncool because you have an exact number of how uncool you are yeah the challenge there and the task the quest is to remember that just because your Social Circle on social media and uh in high school thinks you're uncool it actually might mean you are cool yeah and you need to find that cool and grow it and let it flourish so that when real life begins you can fucking come out of the gate firing on all cylinders that's a great way to put it I I I think if anything High School is really bad at picking out the cool people that like uh

36:21 this whatever the system the hierarchy that forms it is so it's such a basic bitch hierarchy like you're good at very generic shit that's how you rise your parents bought you an expensive car expensive car right materialistic shit yeah exactly it's a greedy search see they didn't have a proper search so they're just hitting that local Optima but theist I mean even the objective function uh for that greedy search is just a really shitty one yeah where those people that win the game of high school are very often not going to be the people that win the much more exciting beautiful game of life so do epic shit and uh try stuff out the weirdos are the ones that are going to succeed the weirdos in high school uh probably because they also get bullied and they get to be

37:06 tormented more psychologically and get to explore their own mind and think through what it means to be a human being more cuz if you're winning in high school you're not being challenged yeah you're not self-reflecting you're not trying shit out so there is some degree to like being tormented as long as it doesn't break you the porn addiction that's another powerful one that I think will probably resonate with a lot of people and it's interesting you say that's one of the hardest addictions um to uh overcome let me say it this way some addictions have a much bigger societal look and porn is just not one of them which makes it super hard none of your friends are going to cheer you on if you go on Twitter and say I quit porn they're going to be like well

37:51 that's good for you but not everybody you know not every you know no one makes that argument with meth right no one's going to be like well not everyone has to quit meth okay it's actually a fine industry and people who you know are the ones producing it they're good also right like no one's going to make that kind of argument whereas with porn you're going to have like a whole thing and friends friends are going to think you're dumb for doing it or whatever it's like you have it's a much more difficult one in just like that so it feels accepted and I think it's also an addiction you can practice participate in privately and hide it from the world there's certain addictions that are harder to hide from the world for prol long periods of time yeah and porn addiction is probably one you can just have for many years and then it can deepen that's probably like a serious issue boy am I glad I grow up before the

38:37 internet because the it's porn is so accessible so so easy to go deep into that addiction uh I mean what can you speak about what impact it had on your life maybe some of the low points but also how to overcome it I'd say as far as impact goes is that you will have such a long and broken look at women by the very like I can again I'm only speaking from a a male's perspective that porn in its just like most basic thing is that you use another person for your own uh desire or your own want it's not something that is deeply needed there's no need there's no like need for porn it's purely a want based activity or a

39:22 lust however you want whatever word you can fill in there and it is purely an objectifying activity like someone else is on display for your own enjoyment and so I think you carry this around like I do think that the women that I dated during high school or the women After High School in college like I looked at them as a means to an end I think porn greatly kind of shifted that kind of perspective in my head that I did not give the value that was desired to another person it really devalues uh Humanity just in general is my perspective of it it makes people into Commodities and I don't think people are commodities I think everyone has value and so during that for me that's kind of like the great effect of porn is that you know it's just consumerism gone wild or materialism

40:08 maybe you could ask argue gone wild and it's extremely hard to quit just like you said because I can look at porn and then I can go out to lunch MH you know no one's going to know no one's going to have any ideas like it's a very private it can be very short session it doesn't have to be something that takes like you know you can't take acid then go out to lunch right you're going to be you're going to your whole day is going to be a very different day and so there's that it's very quick easy accessible and then obviously there's like all the like the science and you know statistics like men make worse decisions for some period of time after looking or being exposed to sexualized images there's the whole dopamine effect that's just like you constantly need more and more dopamine that's why people typically don't just watch five minutes a porn and call it a day there's like you know the hund tab joke that's always made on the Internet

40:54 it's because you it's just this this constant dopamine cycle you're constantly doing and all that stuff is great to say and I'm sure statistics and Science and all that stuff is really great Arguments for some amount of people but for me it just comes down to like is it really a good thing to do like is it really actually something we want is to Value people in such a profane or kind of just like disregarding way like I just really think it's just bad for the soul even if all the stats said it was great for you I still say it's actually bad yeah you have to look at long-term big picture psychological impact it has on your relationships with human beings in general that's my more generally than just porn uh my problem with the the quote unquote sort of

41:40 manosphere is I think sleeping with a bunch of women is great wonderful but the problem is is making that the primary objective of your life similar with porn is you devalue one of the most awesome things which is intimacy that's true for deep friendship that's true for relationships I think porn does that like in its purest darkest form which is like the thing that matters is the sex not the like the Deep connection with another human being I think again going back to high school and uh the the manosphere the objective function if it's to get laid which helps with status and confidence and all all that is

42:26 wonderful I think again can be an addiction but the thing that's even more awesome for a lot of people is a deep friendship or deep intimacy with a with a romantic partner like that's also fucking awesome and both of those are great it's subjectively better to have like I would say that there's no universe that exists or there should be no argument possible that exists that a guy who has meaningless sex has a better or a more meaningful life than say me and my wife who've been together for 15 years we have a very like can depend on her in all circumstances whereas if you live that other life it sure it could be it could feel great but there's no meaning to it there's no Val there's no actual real value to it that's absolutely correct I do think that getting

43:11 laid can have a tremendous positive impact on the confidence of a young man I think just there's a certain number of sexual partners from which you can collect a lot of data and it can free you about like not to be so nervous about the opposite sex not to be so nervous about human interaction and that will allow you to see the world more clearly and to actually find that one partner that with whom you can be deeply intimate with sometimes like the nervousness around like this societally uh constructed like value in getting laid can Cloud your judgment and if you just release that by getting laid a bunch of times then like you could see that the world clearly that getting late

43:58 is not as nearly as important as you said as finding the right human including I should put in that pile not just like a romantic partner but like friendships like deep lasting friendships I mean I think you're right that our society puts a lot of emphasis on getting laid and I'm sure that's true among any group of males uh throughout any point in history I'm sure that's a very common joke that's never actually like never stopped at any point so I'm I'm sure that exists but and there's there's probably some truth to the sense that after you've you know who was it uh Jim Carrey I hope that everyone can get rich so they realize that money solves none of your problems yeah like the realization that this thing that Society told you is hyper important is actually not the important part like it is a very important it's a great sign that your

44:43 relationship is healthy like if me and my wife were to have no sex at all for months on end like something's gone wrong which means what you know we are no longer like on the same plane some you know but it's not also a good identifier just because you're having a lot of sex doesn't mean you're having a good relationship and so it's kind of like a unique kind of um I forget the the right term here but it's a unique way at looking at the problems and our society puts so much emphasis and maybe that's why porn was so hard to quit but I my guess is it's just all the dopamine effect that it is uh but for me like the the most important part and the thing that actually has real reward is having that having just my wife I do not look at I try I desperately try not to look at any

45:29 other woman I'm hopefully not going to get caught Mark zuckerberged at the White House like that um you know like I don't look at porn my wife has complete confidence in me that there is not going to be a situation in which she has to question me in any kind of sense and that builds a much more deeply I I would argue it a very deep relationship because the trust is that much bigger I think the deepness of the relationship is probably proportional to the trust you have in each other MH it's very hard to have a deep relationship with no trust yeah uh a probably a prerequisite maybe a component of trust is vulnerability to where you like take the leap of being vulnerable with another human being and that vulnerability when reciprocated

46:14 builds this this really strong trust and it's a beautiful thing yeah I I I personally just given my position uh that's even more challenging you know being vulnerable with the world and there's a bunch of people out there that that want to hurt you for it and um but I think it's worthwhile anyway to be vulnerable it's always worth the risk is always worth it in in some sense like obviously everyone has a different kind of Life they have to filter through their actions with right because the person that has no say social following or anything their risk reward profile could just be local impact which could be just as you know damning or harming to them yeah and so it's always worth the risk though in my personal opinion cuz like finding my wife has been obviously the most impactful or changing

46:59 thing in my life so or second most I'd argue that one night with God would probably be the most impactful thing that led to everything else but then the wife would be the next most impactful I mean I'm like cleaning up after myself and stuff now changed man I'm a changed man can we try to reverse engineer that moment of you finding God what is it at 19 cuz it feels like that was a big leap for you to escape to escape the pain to escape the addiction or the beginning of that Journey uh what do you think what do you think happened there I think it just felt like I just there was no line that I wasn't willing to cross like everything was fine and just like it just all a sudden just in that moment it's just like I had a I

47:44 guess some sort of deep fear and understanding like I am going down a path is this really the path you want to go down and I don't know what the result of that path would be or anything like that I don't tend to speculate on things I I don't understand I just know that in that moment I had the option and I just chose I I didn't want it anymore right it's kind of mixed in this whole thing where it's just like I had no value I wrapped up all my meaning or value in having sex or getting laid I had you know all that stuff all the things we just talked about like that was where all my worth was and that is just such a like a terrible place to have your worth and it's just like kind of came to a point and I can't tell you the day of the week I can't tell you

48:30 anything other than it was nighttime and I was in South hedges in Montana State University go Bobcats um that's about yeah that's the sign that we do at football games don't worry about it but like that's all I can really that's all I can really tell you cuz the night that night was no more or less special than some other night it's just the specialness was I got at least a chance to make a choice cuz you find in that advice that you can give to others who are probably there's there's probably just an endless amount of people that are struggling with porn addiction now young people what what advice could you give to them how to overcome it for me to overcome it I had to realize that I was taking something away

49:16 from my future wife some people be like oh well you just you know once you get a girlfriend then you can stop it's just like no because you never stopped the problem you don't stop a problem by replacing it and so I didn't have a girlfriend didn't have all that I just realized that I was truly taking away from something from my future wife and I didn't even know my current wife at that time I didn't she was not in the picture I'm not even sure if she was at Montana State University at that point and so it's just that's uh once I made that realization I think it went from my head to my heart which they say is the greatest distance in the universe I finally like got it and that's really where things change so if the the ability to say like what's going to help you change and all that I don't know if there's I don't think there's silver bullets right if someone

50:02 could offer you a drug I forget who says this phrase but there's this really interesting phrase that goes something like um he was a very depressed man and he was struggling with suicide and he kind of writes about this in this Memoir and he goes to the these doctors and the doctors effectively say well here's antidepressants it's going to help you and he says that well the problem was is that scientists told me that I could just touch my brain and make myself happy and that's it like they could reach in they could configure some stuff and I'll be happy he's like for me it was a lot like going out into a field and being able to take a drug to see the rain I could look out see the rain it would fall down it'd be silvery it'd be beautiful but all the crop would still die cuz there's not actually any rain I had to discover how to be happy myself and so for me it's like the reason why I looked at porn is cuz I was unhappy I

50:49 was trying to find meaning I was trying to find Value in something right something that was supposed to finally give me this ultimate satisfaction and it just does not no matter how hard and no matter how much you think it will there is no Escapade there is no pornography that will ever give you that satisfaction you're looking for that's the reason why it's addicting that's kind of like my call to why you shouldn't do it but how to get out of it I only got out of it by realizing I think that's really brilliantly described you knew that this thing you're doing is preventing you from finding your future wife and future wife could mean more even broadly this path to a to a to a

51:36 flourishing to a to a beautiful life I think there's a lot of choices we make that just preventing us from opening the door to whatever future like I think what's really nice to do is to imagine just like we said with high school that there are a bunch of trajectories in life where you'll be truly happy and you need to construct your life in a way where you have the chance to travel down those paths and there's a bunch of addictions there's a bunch of choices that prevent us from traveling down those paths so just believe that you're going to have an awesome life and remove from your life the things that are uh preventing you from walking down that that path which is essential what you did it's a leap of

52:22 faith that like if you let go of porn that a better life is waiting for you on the other end yeah I definitely can't say how long it will take a better life but for me there's no way in the universe I could have had the relationship that I have without first making those steps cuz I couldn't value uh like I couldn't value my wife in the way that was proper for who she was I would have valued her through the index or the lens that I currently was looking through so got to ask so I've never done math I've never done meth a great segue by the way oh man I don't know what the fuck I'm doing honestly with this

53:07 interviewing thing but yeah meth and LSD you know I did IA I did shroom a bunch of times oh on this topic I should say that like uh there's a lot of uh on Twitter and on Tech in Tech Community in general sort of people speaking negatively about iasa uh and some positively don't I think it's it's such a roll of the dice like I I had incredible experiences but I don't think I want to recommend it to anyone it's a risk it's a serious risk it really is a role of the dice that you could meet your demons and they could destroy you or you can meet your demons and let go of them or you could have experiences like I did which is like never apparently I don't have demons I'm pretty sure they're somewhere in the basement but like I've never met them on

53:54 drugs yeah I'm always really happy I'm a happy drunk I'm a super happy an iasa just full of love I don't understand I don't understand where the demons are but that's my biochemistry whatever that is and for some others you know one trip could be amazing and the next one could just completely destroy you and wreck your life so um I don't know what the recommendation from that is maybe avoid it but then all of us die and life you know I I tend to lean into Adventure but but drugs is a it's if you fuck with the biochemistry of your brain you can really destroy yourself in a way that's going to torment you so I would generally recommend that people avoid

54:40 drugs altogether probably unless you're a crazy motherfucker Hunter is Thompson what what an intro to this topic uh I'm sorry what's meth like it's it's it's that's a great intro I I I like you are very correct in the sense that there is at least when it comes to Hallin Jens there is a wild variance to what you're going to experience and there is no guarantee there's no you know just because you buy the product doesn't mean you're going to have a good time right there's a lot of uh personally I find that stuff uh to be very I believe in the spiritual realm right like I believe demons and angels exist I believe God exists and that kind of whole realm is like I don't know what it opens you up to but it's much much

55:26 different experience now some people be like oh it's just a bunch of chemicals in your brain they all get mixed up LSD just takes all of your Pathways and they all go you know they all get kind of scrambled up in your brain it's just like yeah the experiences are profound I had some really bizarre very cool very awful I've had all the experiences in them all I can just tell you that I like I personally always say the same thing it's like choices that I made I can never take back I would never take that away from myself because I don't know if I would be who I am today without all those experiences going up to it but if you not had that experience I'm on your team or at least partially on your team maybe more severely I don't think you need those experiences I don't think they're going to you don't have to put yourself through that to make good decisions or to realize that uh people have value right you can you you don't have to do

56:13 that so as far as like what is meth like meth is like if you've ever done cocaine cocaine starts off with like a 15-minute dance party just it's just so intense it's like so great and then it just followed up by like like a five hour like just feeling Wiggly right I don't know how else to describe it a meth is like that except for I didn't get as much dance party or any dance party but instead I just got that part for like 12 hours yeah so did a lot of skateboarding did a lot of you know running around would you say it's a pleasant feeling or is it more like an escape from the loneliness of Life what is it Pleasant or negative in the actual moment not the consequences but in the moment so there

56:58 I mean this is this is just like a very interesting kind of area which is that not if universally you can't say that um often you'll find that there's kind of these two um groups of drug addicts there's those that like the the opioids and those that like the uppers MH they typically don't like there's there's very few people in the drug world that do both they really just kind of like find their side and they go for it so Will is meth a a thing that everybody's going to enjoy well categorically as you can see in just like how people experience drug addiction no uh but for me it's just like I had a really it kind of like feeds into like the ADHD nature of like this like because you know you're kind of high energy you're kind of like always in the moment so it's just like you're in the moment but it's just like go I'm in the moment you know like it's like everything's just so

57:44 intense you know like you just want to like really be in the moment uh and so it's just experiencing that constantly and so was that great well some people you know my wife always me this like being like nervous or I forget the anxiety of a situation can also be the same thing as like thrill I forget the exact way she she's probably super disappointed that I messed this up but it's like you could perceive those two experiences in very different lights some people you know get in front of a crowd it's like thrilling some people get in front of it and it's just like the worst experience of their lifetime they' actually literally rather die which is a crazy thing to think about then stand up and speak and so for me meth was that kind of thrilling side but at the same time is it didn't it

58:30 still didn't like quite give me that thing I wanted whatever I was looking for I'd use it to help try to get that thing I want but it was never giving me that thing I wanted yeah uh for me I've had all really wonderful experiences do not recommend them but like that's like a YouTube policy by the way that you have to say by the way don't whatever you do do not do illegal activity but I had great experience but don't whatever you do don't do it Mr the primagen I have no master I don't have YouTube or whatever I'll say whatever the fuck I want I'm just uh but seriously yoube no I don't no I don't give a shit about YouTube or anybody honestly I'm just kind of careful about the words I say because just because I had positive experiences I don't want young people

59:17 listening to this think they should try the experience I think the much more powerful message is that life is awesome even without that that's something I definitely experiment with On the Alcohol side so for me you know I'm an introvert I'm afraid of the world social interaction fills me with with anxiety alcohol is definitely a thing that helps with that sometimes but I think honestly like it's not even the alcohol it's like having to do something while a person is talking to me I could just like drink a liquid they yeah mhm there's like a social thing with a beer it's like yeah uh-huh yeah having fun and I think it's it work for me it works the same as if the if the liquid actually looks like

1:00:04 alcohol it does the same purpose often because like alcohol from like if you have of a whiskey or a beer looking thing it kind of sends a signal that we should be having fun so we're socializing right we're fucking getting crazy and then that mean you don't actually need the alcohol you can get fucking crazy without the alcohol substance but there is some kind of uh like uh social signaling that happens when you have a drink in your hand so I've been to get togethers where I'm not drinking but just doing like a fake drink situation and I can also have fun so I've been uh but that said you know traveling across the world there are times when you to be able to Dawn a bottle of w that's very essential for

1:00:50 the for my line of work but but that's that's sort of that's almost like a cultural experience versus like a necessary component of a successful uh social interaction one that brings you

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