Should we optimise our relationships?

Ali

My name is Ali. I'm a doctor and YouTuber.

Taimur

I'm Taimur. I'm a data scientist and writer and you're listening to not overthinking that weekly podcast where we think about happiness, creativity and the human condition.

Ali

Hello, and welcome back to not overthinking Taimur. How you doing today?

Taimur

I'm doing great. I had an unexpected poo just before we started recording this. So we're a little bit behind schedule, but that's absolutely fine. How are you?

Ali

I am very well thank you. I got up. I was up to four o'clock in the morning last night reading Andre Agassi, his autobiography, really, really, really, really good. It's so it's incredible. It's so well written. It was it was ghostwritten by some Pulitzer Prize winning author guy they talks about in the acknowledgments, but it was just absolutely riveting. I've been staying up way past my bedtime reading it for the last few nights. But here we are recording the podcast and today's particularly exciting because we are joined by a Joey Savoie Joey, welcome to the podcast.

Joey

Hi, thanks. Great to be here.

Ali

So I wonder if we could start like, okay, shall we? Can you give us like a sort of short bio of like, what what do you do for the people who might not have never come across you before? Please?

Joey

Yeah, yeah, sure. So I run Charity Entrepreneurship, basically a nonprofit that helps other nonprofits start off more impactfully and be particularly kind of great NGOs in various spaces. So it's almost like an education program or a training program incubator, maybe a Y Combinator of NGOs have a very much focused on kind of the ones that do the most impact. So stuff that might be recommended by charity evaluators like Give Well and that sort of thing. That's what we're going for.

Ali

Awesome. That's very cool. And I wonder if we could start by talking about your salary. So you famously decide your salary based on a spreadsheet? Like, how, how does how does that

Joey

work? Yeah, so I take a pretty analytical approach, I guess, in some ways, I'm lucky where salary has never been like a really big focus of mine a really big priority, or this sort of thing. So we do something a bit different, both me and my co founder, we take salaries based on the kind of world average GDP, so and kind of per person. So this is a pretty low buy kind of like London standards, you know, it's it's under under minimum wage, typically, a lot of the time, and that sort of thing. But I think it's very interesting. So I find taking the salary actually, like quite freeing. So when you think about kind of the differential between the amount of money you need to spend to kind of be happy, and then your skill, and you're like, maybe potential earning potential, I think the bigger that gap is that the more general freedom you end up having, so yeah, it's pretty low. But I definitely don't feel poor or impoverished, this sort of thing, I think it's very different than if you're in a dire financial situation versus say, by choice, or taking a really low salary So effectively, that I can donate more or run our organization at a lower cost, that that's why I'm doing it. It's for the kind of ethical reasons, although I've always been a little bit on the minimalist and frugality side. So that probably makes it a little bit easier. Okay,

Ali

so what what's that number these days? And what are the kind of ethical ethical reasons for for doing this?

Joey

Yeah, so it's about it's about 16,500 USD, that sort of ballpark, it moves around a little bit year to year and a little bit based on kind of what measures you're kind of looking at and taking into account. But yeah, it's, it's, it's lean, I think that it's possible for certain people who have like, like, quite a quite a familiarity with finances and how to spend and this sort of thing. And also, I'm a bit lucky, you know, I have no student debt, I have no kind of like, reoccurring costs of children or these sort of things. I don't think it'd be possible for a lot of people, but given my circumstances, you know, I live with a partner, that sort of thing, it ends up being quite quite, quite achievable. I think if it's like someone looked down on my quality of life, they wouldn't be like, oh, wow, you're clearly living like, you know, London minimum wage or below UK minimum wage, or that sort of thing.

Taimur

What so you never you never run into a situation where I don't know, your your friends want to go on holiday somewhere, and you're like, Ah, sorry, man, like this, this will break the bank. Does that not happen?

Joey

Yeah. Not not very often. So I can say that. My friends are like, often, much, much higher income than I am. So sometimes, they'll be like, hey, I want to go here. And I'm like, yeah, that's not really my budget, they'll be like, oh, I'll pay for your ticket. So sometimes I do get to go to cool things on other times, so that that works in terms of trips, and that sort of thing. I mean, I probably travel more than I would like to just for work. There's just a lot of kind of travel that that needs to be done to change the world. So that's never been a challenging endeavor. But yeah, I think I think a lot of it, I mean, it comes down when you kind of look at the super low levels of power, it comes down to minimizing your reoccurring costs, right? So how are you gonna deal with rent, how you gonna deal with food, how you can deal with transportation, and I think I've got those all quite low, you know, a lot of the time it's like upfront investment in whatever particular thing that's that's beneficial or from making a really big spreadsheet about what's the cheapest grocery store to use. And then kind of refiling those habits on going

Ali

On the grocery front or what are your go to meals because I am like, this is Something I've been struggling with for the last several years where I feel like this, I there's there's too much choice when I go into a supermarket or when I'm on Amazon Fresh and I get paralyzed by choice. And I think I need to do I need to just have a, a spreadsheet or a causal causal model of what food I'm going to be eating every day of the week, and then just have that on autopilot. So I don't have to think about it. Yeah, you do anything like that?

Joey

I do. Yeah, I think that's a really great idea. So interesting thing you have to think about, like what parameters you're trying to maximize for right? So what do you want out of food? Do you want to be easy? To cook really quick? Do you want to be cheap? Do you want to be healthy? Do you want to be kind of tasty on a more subjective scale. And all of these are like somewhat sliders that the trade off against each other and like, sometimes you find like a superfood, like for me, peanut butter and bananas, that's just like, awesome. It's super cheap. It's super easy. It's super healthy, it tastes quite good. You know, that's kind of like a winner across a lot of categories. But typically, you're making some some trade offs between these categories. And, uh, one trade off I make is a variety. I don't eat like a ton of variety. I kind of have like a pretty regimented, similar sort of diet day to day, but I find it again, it's kind of like free like, I it's not, I don't really love food. It's not a thing I think about a lot. It's something I prefer to just like, if I could plug into an IV drop when I go to sleep, and then just like, wake up and feel fully refreshed. That'd be great. I would like to sign up for that in a heartbeat.

Ali

Okay, so what are your go to? What are your go to recipes? Or like how, how does it work? Do you have like recurring weekly grocery order? Or what's what's the setup? Like?

Joey

Yeah, exactly. So grocery delivery. I'm a big fan of I don't know if you guys use specially to play but everyone should I guess everyone does now. But everyone should have been doing this for years. It's such a time saver. And even if you're living on really low salary, I think it's kind of worthwhile. So, grocery delivery, once a week reoccurring order set up some pretty similar staples. So I typically have like, an oatmeal type breakfast of fruit for breakfast, and then I only two meals a day. So maybe that makes it easier to a little bit less logistics, some whole wheat crackers, something like that. And then round off with some sort of vegan alternative meat and, and whole wheat buns and this sort of stuff, but a lot of it. So it's interesting, because like, I don't think my diet like if you were taking pictures of it would look that healthy. But every step has been like kind of optimized. So it's like, Okay, what burger buns? Are you going to buy? You know, whole wheat versus not is a huge difference. What ketchup Are you going to buy, you know, there's 50% sodium reduce ketchup 50% sugar, reduced ketchup, there's actually 100% reduced, but that kind of taste gross. So it's, it's, it's sometimes you have to make compromises there. But because I'm only eating basically the same seven things every every day, or every week, you can really, really get it down to a science. So buy, you know, 40 different brands of crackers, and try out each one and look at the health stats for each one and determine like, Okay, I'm pretty sure that in the UK, this is my favorite cracker. And just do that for everything. Again, kind of like upfront time investment for this like long term reoccurring of Okay, now I'm kind of like, this is like a solved

Taimur

problem. Have you always been into optimizing every part of your life? When did this start?

Joey

Yeah, it's gotten, it's gotten worse or better, depending, depending on how you frame it. It's it's gotten more intense over time, I think I've always been very consequential. So I've always cared about the endline outcomes a lot more than the specific path to get there kind of being like stubborn to the ends flexible in the means. And I think even when I think back up to like, earliest memories, I seem to be much more consequential than other people intuitively, and my parents are both like pretty consequential. So probably some aspect there. But I think part of it was just, I want to do too much stuff and even fit more into your life. And you can do more if you optimize stuff. So as people know, an empty an empty schedule, you know, versus like a packed kind of schedule. You just get a lot more done if you kind of structured and organized. And so I think it was like somewhat out of necessity that you and I ended up kind of optimizing on these dimensions. And once you optimize once and it works so well you're like, Huh, I wonder if I could do this again. And maybe I'm more keen to creatively cross apply tech to a whole bunch of different domains than the average person.

Ali

Oh, heavy, heavy, heavy, maybe read the book of The Rosie Project by any chance?

Joey

I don't think so.

Ali

Oh, so I read this a few a few weeks ago. Apparently it's one of Bill Gates's favorite books. And it's about this a genetics professor who's got Asperger syndrome, who is trying to find a wife. And I could really relate to a lot of aspects of it. But he he does, he does this sort of thing where he's sort of systemising and optimizing every aspect of his life and his schedule. And it's done. It's it's done in such a like, it makes so much sense. Like, you know, every Tuesday he's going to have this exact same meal, he's going to go down to the market. He's got the preparation of the meal down like so quick, and he finds it very relaxing to cook the lobsters in a certain way. And it's like a really super fancy meal. But it's just so kind of tuned to the letter. And I was as I was listening to it, I was like okay, this this actually sounds like a pretty solid setup. to not have to worry about what you're eating every day.

Joey

I think people naturally trend towards this eventually, right? Like if you look at young people in general, they tend to be More in the Explorer mode, right? Trying to try to figure out a bunch of different things. So test that a bunch of different things. But then as people get older, they move more into like exploit mode, basically trying to take advantage of the things they've already learned. So young person will go to 10 different restaurants, the old person might go to the same restaurant every Sunday. But if you can just do that quicker, like if you can test more upfront, and then put kind of your efforts to maximizing it.

Ali

So on, on this note, like one one sort of genre of comment that I often get on not often, but occasionally get on YouTube, Instagram and things is the thing of Hey, you know, you're optimizing every aspect of your of your life. This is toxic productivity, you should be able to relax and take a break as well, like you're promoting bad things for men. I feel like there are a lot of like, strong manly type assumptions baked into that. But I wonder like, Do You Do you ever get that sort of sentiment from from people that you speak to about this?

Joey

Yeah, well, that I definitely I definitely get it. I mean, the boring meta answer is you can structure that into, right. So if you think you need X amount of free time, that's totally unstructured, cool. Put that in your Google account. Now that that's a very optimizer answer to an optimized question. But yeah, I don't think the evidence really bears this out. So I think people have this idea that like, Oh, yeah, if you're unplanned and kind of unstructured, you feel more free and you feel less stressed and this sort of thing. And then you actually look at data that has been taken on this. And it turns out that people who plan stuff people who who make kind of more conscientious choices, or have a less kind of lazy attitude actually end up maximizing their goals better, which includes personal happiness. So I don't know. It depends what your goals are. Maybe if you have like an intrinsic value that like you want X amount of free time or that sort of thing, then fine, but I think I think people have maybe a romanticized notion of how good that actually works out in practice.

Taimur

Yeah. Why is that? Why where does this narrative come from? Why is it considered weird to be systematic about sort of most of the parts of your life?

Joey

It's weird, everywhere.

Taimur

Yeah, yeah. So like other cultures in which that's actually sort of seen as a good thing. You know, it's like, it's cool to have the Google spreadsheets.

Joey

I don't know, I don't know if it's cool. Cool maybe an exception across lots of cultures, maybe very narrow cultures, like my office player, something like two spreadsheets. But the weird thing for me is people are totally fine with being quantified when it comes to like buying a car, or buying a house, like they could consumer, large consumer products, people like cool, let's let's do this analytically. But when it's like, oh, I want to pick a job. It's like, Whoa, you can't be analytical about that. Or I want to, you know, even determine what city to live in. All right, that's crazy to make a spreadsheet on that. So it's, it's weird. It's very atypical application of rigor across different areas. And I'm not sure why that is.

Taimur

It's interesting, you mentioned the job in the city thing, because I don't know, maybe, maybe I just hang out with a certain crowd of people. But I think optimizing job in city would definitely be be seen as, like a good thing and like a smart thing to do. I think that the realm where the sort of OPT optimization approach doesn't really sit well to people, with people it's kind of in, in the sort of social realm of like, making friends relationships, stuff like that, you know, people really don't like the idea of having having a method, sir. to that side of your life.

Joey

Yeah, it's probably to do with some sort of uncomfortability with quantification of certain values in general, right. So it's kind of like, okay, to say, like, this house is better than this house on some sort of objective criteria, it's like less Okay, to say, like, this person is better than this person. But again, when you're, if you were to be analytical about social relations, and this sort of thing, it wouldn't be necessarily saying x is objectively better than y, it could be about fit thing, right? So if you know that x character trait, like for instance, for me, when it comes to friends, partners, this sort of thing, like shared values is like really important surprise, because I really care about ethics. So knowing that about yourself is useful. It kind of like sets the stage for like a character trait that you care about, and that sort of thing. I think people are quite uncomfortable with introspection, maybe, maybe it's a bit uncomfortable to like, realize the reality of what things you care about. So if someone's, you know, thinking about like, Oh, yeah, here's the three things I wish I would care about. And then here's the three things I actually care about. Maybe they're kind of, like unflattering outcomes.

Taimur

Yeah, yeah, I think there's also a bit of like, romanticism around friendships and relationships and things like that, where it's meant to be this sort of, almost like mystical thing that happens to you. Yeah, yeah. That kind of stuff. That Do you do take the spreadsheet approach in your social life?

Joey

Yeah, definitely. So I I've used it in a bunch of contexts. Often when so one thing story I haven't booked like the success of online dating. I did online dating as many analytical people do went on OkCupid as many analytical people do, it's kind of the the analytical website, spent a ton of time making spreadsheet for characteristics looking through an outrageous number of profiles. I sent one message, it was like four pages long, got a response when that person was in relationship with that person for 10 years. So like, that's some sort of like success story for OkCupid that they should use them. They're their marketing materials. But I don't actually think it was the website so much as the analytical approach, know what you want. At that point in my life I had dated, you know, quite a few people. So I had a better sense of what sort of character traits were compatible and this sort of thing. For friends, I think a big part of it is you actually want to think about how these people are going to affect you. Right. So there's the common adage that you are sum of your five closest peers, if you think about that, you really want to think about, okay, like, Who do I want to be a sum of like, do I want to be 1/5 this person and becomes a much more like, personal specific choice of like, do I like the way this person affects me? Do I like the kind of trends that this person is gonna lead down? And I think, yeah, leaving it to chance or convenience or this sort of thing? Feels feels like leaving quite a bit of your your life and your personality, your happiness on the table without without thinking about it that hard. And I think people do probably do get better over time and optimizing kind of accidentally, like they get experience of Oh, yeah, I don't want a friend like this and that sort of thing. But it's very slow. You know, it's very slow, if you kind of do the blind feel approach.

Ali

Hmm. Yeah, cuz you often hear people as they as they grow older, they say, you know, one thing I've realized is that I can, I can and should cut toxic people out of my life and things like that. It's a very, like, optimizing friendships is what they're getting out here. It's just a non spreadsheet II way of doing it to say that, oh, you know, this is a realization that I've had that that person is toxic, and therefore I don't want to hang around, hang out with them.

Joey

Yeah, I think the benefits of age in some ways, it's just like acquiring better heuristics, so better mental shortcuts that are going to lead you to better outcomes. But if you don't specify those, and don't think about those, it's really hard to pass them on. It's really hard to kind of know what what's going on. So I think people's processes like do get better, but it kind of like this soft, squishy way, they don't really know that like, Oh, yes, I have determined that people tend to influence like, people tend to affect my effect. So I want to be around like happy, optimistic people, because then I tend to be more happy and optimistic. Thus, if someone's really negative all the time, I should probably not spend a lot of time with that person, especially women downstate. It's like, people have that. But it's it's not explicit. It's not spelled out. It's more like this feeling of Oh, I'm not not as interested in that sort of connection anymore. Yeah,

Ali

I'm so I'm, I'm very intrigued by it by your approach to the dating thing, because so the story in this book, The Rosie project is this guy who wants to find a wife ends up creating a questionnaire, and he makes a questionnaire with like, 100 different items, and sort of he figures out, like, these are all the things that I want, these are all the traits I'm looking for in a partner, and therefore, you know, I give this questionnaire to people. And it's, you know, spoiler, spoiler alert, but the person he ends up falling in love with is someone who would not have made the cut on the spreadsheet. And so part of the moral, if there is one of the book is that, you know, there are some things in life that really shouldn't be quantified. But I think, obviously, the, you know, spreadsheet-ization taken to the extreme is probably, you know

Joey

I mean, the moral could be you suck at spreadsheets. Yeah.

Taimur

I think that's right. Yeah, I think when people approach this, it's, they sort of view the spreadsheet approach always as like, the most naive spreadsheet approach where you can't or you don't account for like nuance and less tangible stuff.

Joey

Sure. Never obligated, you have to set it in leaving forever.

Taimur

Yeah. And I think even when you even when you hit, you know, a lot of the criticisms about like effective altruism and things like that, which is like a spreadsheet approach applied to sort of doing good in the world, the criticisms always assume, like, the most naive thing of like, Oh, well, you know, if you're taking the spreadsheet approach, there's no way you know, you must completely ignore anything that isn't quantifiable. And so that's why you're wrong, you know? Well, you can make that into the spreadsheet, right?

Joey

Yeah, yeah, I do think people yeah, there's this book, "How to Measure Anything" that I that I really like, and it talks about this huge range of issues that people like, but you can't measure this. And then he just basically talks through, here's how you measure it. And everything in the world has some sort of output. So even if there's something like quite squishy, like, I don't know, having a good work culture, like what does a good work culture look like? Compared to a bad work culture, there are external science, like maybe a sign of a good work culture would be lower turnover? Is that the only side? No, you probably want to look at like a collection of metrics. But there is an indicator in the real world, otherwise, you wouldn't even notice it. When you're using these soft things. You're kind of gesturing towards this like fuzzy cluster of things. And many of those things can be pulled out and measured as proxies and they go, it's

Ali

so I've been running into this exact problem this week, because last week, I made a video called something like, why I quit medicine and why I'm going back. And at some point, like sort of 25 minutes into this 35 minute long video, I said, I was I addressed the question of, do you not feel guilty that you're not working as a doctor in the middle of a pandemic? And I said, Okay, let's think about this. I have a generally kind of utilitarian approach to this sort of stuff where I'm thinking, Okay, what's my marginal impact as a doctor as a junior doctor, two years of fresh out of med school where I am no better or no worse than the average doctor and I'm slotting into a system. as effectively a cog in a machine, and let's look at my marginal impact making videos on the internet. And I, and what I said was like, Look, I know these are different things. But even if we use that 80,000 hours did an analysis of the number of lives that a doctor can save in their career, it came out to eight or nine. And I made the argument that like, at the very least, I could donate 30,000, to the AMF - Against Malaria Foundation, by making money money off of YouTube. And in one, you know, in in 30 seconds of being on the internet, I will have saved more lives than I would have saved as in my whole career as a doctor. And a lot of people said, oh, wow, that's such an interesting way of looking at it. I hadn't thought of that. But there were people that said, Oh, my God, if this is how you think about medicine, and being a doctor, then you shouldn't be a doctor, because you can't possibly fit, you can't possibly quantify the impact of being nice to the patient, or, you know, being that person who says something nice to them in their moment of need, like, Yeah. How would you go about thinking about that?

Joey

Yeah. So again, it's like, okay, there are difference in outcomes that you would expect from someone being nice versus not nice to a patient, right? Good. Good example, there's a surgery, close to my house, it has brilliant reviews all the time. And I know why. Because it's really good. They're, they're really nice. They're really quick, they're really efficient. They're really everything you would kind of want. But look, there's a number attached to that, that they score 4.9 out of five on Google's reviews, you know, there are ways to kind of get at this data, and will it be perfect? No will be better than zero measurement and just kind of like hoping and guessing that that's something is there? Yes. So I think a lot of the time, what people have trouble with is compared to what, you know, they don't think in comparative terms. This happens with spending, it happens with jobs, it happens with all these sort of different things. So they're like, Okay, this thing is, you know, infinitely valuable, or something like that, like a human life is infinitely valuable. And it's like, okay, but if you actually thought a human life was infinitely valuable, you'd be doing all these like quite crazy things, you'd be living even cheaper than I am, to kind of like, throw money at charitable organizations, this sort of thing. There actually are values to this. It's just very uncomfortable to talk about and to think about explicitly, like, Oh, yes, life is worth $1.5 million dollars or whatever. People people don't like that. But kind of the revealed preferences. There is there is quantifications here, you know, you could survey 50 people who have gone to 50 different doctors and see which ones kind of score at the top of you know, comfortability bedside manner, and which one score at the bottom, you could even put like a willingness to pay number on this and start to get some sort of quantification of like, how valuable that really is. It'd be messy, it'd be crude, it would take a lot of time and resources. But you could, you know, there there are kind of methodologies to measure this sort of thing.

Taimur

I think, I think part of the reason I mean, so I think I think these two things are easy to see. But you mentioned the average, you know, you're the average of the five people you spend your time with and, I'm actually not a fan of that at all. I actually, I actually really don't like that approach. And then I think that's actually, I think because I don't like that approach, I can I can kind of understand where people are coming from, when they criticize, for example, you are the if you say something like, well, I can have more sort of live saved impact by just, you know, making a YouTube video about my daily routine and then donating the ad money, you know, well, whatever. Right? I think that, I think the issue is that it doesn't sit right with you. I think the friend thing doesn't sit right with me, because it's it's taking a very sort of instrumental view of sort of your fellow human beings where, you know, I'm in this friendship, I don't know, but it's just a heuristic, you're not saying like, this is the only criteria that you're not going to say anything I care about. But it sounds very instrumental to say I'm in this friendship, so that I can become a better you know, so I can become a better person, you know, that's why I'm in this, I want to surround myself with with new people, because I want to be a better person or something. It's, it seems very instrumental. And I think I personally, don't, don't think that's sort of a good way to view sort of other human beings as like instruments to achieve your ends. And I think, I think partly, that's, that's why the hospital thing also doesn't sit, right. Because, you know, you can imagine that people would want a doctor who is, you know, who intrinsically cares about the individual in front of them, and is sort of intrinsically motivated to kind of be nice to the individual in front of them, not extrinsically motivated to save the maximum number of lives in the abstract. And again, it's like, I feel like anything that sort of starts to approach taking an instrumental view of other human beings that that's what doesn't sit right with people, and I can empathize with that. What do you guys think?

Joey

Yeah, I think I think it's a bit missing the concept. So a similar kind of analogy here is there's a famous utilitarian thing which is, say, five patients get rushed in there all kinds of missing a vital organ, and a perfectly healthy person walks in with a cough should the doctor you know, kill that perfectly healthy person, grab an organ from you to them and spread them around. Now on the kind of very naive quick calculation be like oh, You're saving five lives and losing one like that's for in aggregate, great, let's do that. But taking a step back, you're like, Okay, that's like quite a bad society, that that's not a place you want to live where if you go into the hospital with a cough, you perhaps might be harvested for organs. And this has like quite serious ramifications. So I think if you were like to still in the point, you have to think, what, what mistakes Do we want people to use, and maybe like, using quantified heuristics, when it comes to social engagements is like not good. or using kind of calculations like this, when considering doctor versus other career path is not good. But it's tough, because you already are using these heuristics anyways, they're just not stated, right? There are rules happening in your brain of who you want to spend time with and who you don't, you might not know them, the other person might not know them. But there is some sort of pattern to that, like if we could like dissect you and kind of like, pull out what's the actual kind of patterns going on here. So it's actually more about like, a recognition of what drives you or what's causing a given relationship to work. Rather than like specific prescriptions about what I use, you should have for the kind of person that you're, you're spending time with the people that you're spending time with?

Taimur

Okay. Yeah, I think that's a really good point. Yeah, I think, yeah, absolutely. A lot of what what this stuff is, is just sort of making explicit what is otherwise very implicit. And I agree in instances, where that's, that's what's going on, I'm fully on board to sort of make it explicit, you know, try and quantify it, and so on. In the friends example, I'm going to push back against that a bit more. Do you do you think sort of, do you think that's that's the way most people sort of approach friendships of like, implicitly gravitating towards people that they want to become like? No,

Joey

no, no, I mean, I think some, I think some people do, I think most people have a jumble of like 45, different things that they consider. And that fluctuates, like the wind. And some days, they really feel like hang out with someone who's smart. And other days, they really like hang out with someone who's funny. And they have no predictive model, and no idea which heuristic is taking over at which time and it probably even changes based on the composition of the rest of their friends. So you know, I have 55 friends who are smart, I have one friend who's funny, I'm gonna spend more time with that friend who's funny, whatever. So I don't think that's the specific thing people are maximizing off of, I think it's maybe an underrated thing. Like, I think people underestimate the impact of your social relations on who you are as a person. So that kind of be something I wish people would weight heavier as a heuristic. But I don't think that's like the dominating one in most people's model.

Taimur

Okay. Yeah. I also think like, most people don't really approach it in that way. But I certainly, you know, on like tech, Twitter, there's certainly lots of people that kind of, would go by the heart, you know, the average of the five people you spend time with? And, I mean, how, how strongly do you actually follow this?

Joey

Well, it's, it's one of the few, it's one of the few heuristics. Right, so one thing, I think, I have the general mentality that, you know, if I think someone's going to, like, instill in me like quite actively bad habits, and given things like, I find that quite uncomfortable and thinking about, like, all this person's, you know, going into that. But I think that it's not the only driving factor, right, so that there are other like characteristics and this sort of thing. And I think a lot of things that I have might correlate with this kind of like making you a better person. So like, say, I really enjoy having high level conversations. This is like one of my favorite things to do with people. It's like talk about intellectual philosophical optimization thinks that tends to be people who are kinda good at that kind of think about that a lot, kind of kind of do that sort of thing. So maybe that's like a characteristic that I also end up valuing. And you end up talking to people about, you know, things that are there. Another way to describe this is like, common interest, right? And so people with common interests with me tend to have interests in ways that I want to get better and improve and that sort of thing. So I would tend to prioritize, you know, conversations with with those sort of folks. But yeah, it's not, it's not like I have a spreadsheet and I have like, 50 friends, right to kind of like top friend, second friend, whatever. Yeah, we're like, I have this sense of what I would want my optimal friend group to look like or to be like, and then I kind of like try to move in that direction. Almost like you might have like an aspirational vision for your for yourself, you have an aspirational vision for like your social networks.

Ali

And is that based on? Well, I imagine I imagine that that aspirational friendship group would be based on loads of different factors like you know, in interest in ethics interest in quantification general how I how how being around them makes me feel these, some of these people take care of their health which and more incentivizes me to take care of the health is that is that sort of the sort of parameters that you're using?

Joey

Yeah, somewhat similar. somewhat similar to that, although I would say maybe extra emphasis on areas that I'm weak at. So if there's something that I'm already like, naturally very inclined towards, then I might not need like the social boost to do that. So like say I'm already a health nut, which I'm not but if I was already a health nut, I probably wouldn't need that kind of like social encouragement from from friends who are otherwise healthy. On the flip side, if I'm like, like health is the big struggle for me. That's like one of the things I really want to get better at. Then having friends who care about health is like that. equally useful. So there's maybe some sort of like, competitive advantage factor of what sort of things you find difficult to do without some sort of social connection or that sort of thing.

Ali

Yeah, as, as we've been talking about the stuff I've been thinking, I wonder how uncomfortable people would be hearing this, this conversation because like, for, for us, and like I this is, this is sort of the way that I naturally think, anyway, just in a more more sort of systematic approach to most things in life. But, you know, as as Taimur was pointing out, especially when it comes to the social sphere, things like dating and friendships and relationships and stuff, you know, it there's just something very, very uncomfortable that doesn't sit well with people about how can you How can you possibly think like this?

Joey

Yeah, I think it is just uncomfortable things that you value, like, say you valued something totally strange. Like, I don't know how good someone's hair was, or something. Like that'd be quite like a repugnant thing to come to like, Oh, actually, when I really think about it, at the end of the day, I mostly care about my friends, because they have really good hair. So think that that's the scary part about like pulling out heuristics of kind of what's going on in that tangled soup that makes someone your friend or not, like conclusions might be kind of uncomfortable. And so

Ali

that's why people are uncomfortable with this, like, because they are sort of in, in in their heads, there is this thing of Oh, I worried that I will come to an uncomfortable conclusion about x, therefore, I will not even thinking in that way.

Joey

Like not explicitly. They're not they're not thinking like, Oh, yeah, if I did quantify it, I'd probably come to this. They're more thinking that like, any simple formula sounds like really bad, and sounds kind of repugnant. And that's like, probably true. Like, if you pull pulled any three characteristics, like here are the three things that I care about when making friends, people are like, Oh, that's like that very simple, bad model. But I more call this like, bad spreadsheets, or like, under thinking about it, as opposed to, you know, actually necessarily saying, like, we shouldn't have any quantification, you shouldn't have any thought about what? What makes me connect with people?

Ali

Yeah, yeah, that's a good point. It's like, I often, I often run into this when so I'm a bit, I'm a big fan about reading of reading books about social interaction. And when I was in secondary school, I wasn't particularly good at talking to people. And I decided, hey, this is a, this is a skill, social skills are a skill, and therefore I can find books, and I can find like videos and stuff on how to do the thing. I can put them into practice. And whenever I'd mentioned this to anybody, anyone, but my close friends who were like, actually also into this stuff, like, anytime I'd mentioned it to my mom, she would have a very, like, you know, a social skills can't be learned from a book. And I would say, Well, yes, I agree that they can't exclusively be learned from a book. But, but obviously, like when I say, you know, social skills can be learned from books, it's like, you know, it's like saying surgery can't be learned from a book, like, yes, it can't, but like you want to read the book, first understand what's going on, and then you can practice it. But, you know, you don't want to just kind of go in blind and kind of try to try doing the operation without a set of guidelines. And I think, I wonder if what's going on there is that when when we think of this stuff, if if we're not used to thinking in ways in this sort of, sort of where a spreadsheet can have like 100 different things. And our default mode of thinking is that a spreadsheet must only have one or two things, we automatically take any suggestion of quantification to the extreme and say, Oh, well, obviously, you can't learn social skills from a book, assuming it's adjusted the book that you're learning social skills, skills from.

Joey

Yeah, I do think this is true. In general, I think that were mentioned, as you get older you like get more heuristics and get more tools. If you try to solve a problem using one tool, if all you have is a hammer, everything's a nail, and you just can't get very far, right. So despite me, me loving spreadsheets and things are underutilized and this sort of thing. I do think that with the most complex decisions, you probably do want to come at it from like multiple methodologies. And that will give you a more robust conclusion. But I think that meta process can be structured. So say, I'm making an important decision about a career. Yeah, do I think you should make a spreadsheet and like, evaluate the top 10 things you care about? and kind of put numbers on them? Yeah, that that seems like a useful exercise, it's going to give you a bunch of insight as to, you know, this career might score higher than this. But do I also think it's worth say, interviewing three people in each of those careers and asking them like a bunch of soft questions to get a better sense of narrative? Yes, like, that seems like it brings a very useful, additional perspective. And then what you want to look for is robustness of conclusions, right? So okay, I looked at this from five different angles, and they're all kind of like pointing in this direction. This looks like a better thing to do. So I think part of this is people imagining that you're only using one tool and then that being like, adding like an incomplete resulting in incomplete picture of the thing and like I have some sympathy to this. I do think that you can you can run into trouble. If you use solely One, two, I don't think this is true justice. spreadsheets seems to have like talking to people or that sort of thing. Like, if you talk to people, you're gonna hear a lot about more conventional options, you're gonna hear a lot less about unconventional options, right like that. That's a natural flaw that will come up from using that methodology. So I don't know, I think it's like, have a fat toolbox, apply a bunch of tools to a given problem when you're when you're encountering it. And maybe that's people's aversion to it is that they're imagining it bit more like exclusive that I think it actually ends up being. Yeah, we maybe if it's an unimportant problem, you only come up with one approach. But

Ali

we kind of run into this problem a few a few months ago, we did we did an episode where I it was, we we touched on the on the on the topic of dating. And I recounted a story from a friend of mine, who was telling me that the way I come across on the internet is too feminine. And I should have some more masculine energy by, for example, not wearing pastel pink t shirts. And I sort of brought that up. And we had a lot of a lot of kind of emails about that episode saying, Oh my god, how can you possibly boil down dating and preferences to the color of your T shirt? This is just awfully absurd. And what we said in the in the following episode was that when we talk about a thing, you know, in our heads, it's obvious that there are other things going on here. And this is just one thing that we're talking about. But I guess when it comes across in a podcast, if you're talking about a thing, some people assume that that is the only thing that you care about. And this is this, this this massive difference between this is one of a zillion different things versus this is the only thing I care about.

Joey

Yeah, and it is hard. I think naturally, if something's talked about 10 times people will tend to wait it like 10 times more important than if somebody talked about once. So if you dive into like a specific thing, and you're like, Okay, we're talking about this whole bunch, then, you know, in some ways that there is like a natural implication, that is like a more powerful thing. On the other hand, of course, if you constantly zoom out and talk about like, Oh, yes, you know, any given topic we're talking about, of course, there's like 50, other things that are like, kind of related and tangential and connected, then you'd never talk about anything specific ever, right? Like you can say, Oh, you know, having whiter teeth is like good for dating, like, of course it is. But it's not yet. Like you couldn't just be a giant white tooth and get a bunch of dates. Like it's a Yeah, it's kind of iterative factors in this sort of thing.

Taimur

Yeah, I think in all these discussions, it's really just a language problem where the language we, the language we use sounds very similar across a few different contexts, even though the things we're talking about are completely different resolutions, so to say, you know, to say, hey, Ali, if you want to be, you know, if you want to be more successful with dating, you should wear more black t shirts, you know, that that's, that's a piece of advice. That's a common, a very different resolution to, you know, hey, hey, Ali, the girl you're dating had a rough week. So you should like, you know, just be a bit more compassionate to her tomorrow. So that, you know, like, the language we're using is pretty much is structured in the same way, you're kind of giving advice about all you should do this. One of the things the black t shirt thing is like a very high resolution, super general thing, you know, you're not, you're not claiming that any single individual will truly be swayed by this, you're just claiming that in aggregate, there's probably some kind of effect there. Whereas the other thing is actually about a single individual. And I think a lot of the issues come from kind of conflating the two things where someone's making like, a very high resolution statements. And then if you interpret that as that as them actually making very low resolution statement, then it's like, Whoa, man, you're such a dick. Like, I'm an individual, I'm not swayed by your black t shirts.

Joey

Yeah, I often wish that people would put like confidence intervals on their claims, and this sort of thing. And this is, of course, the very analytical solution to communication type problems. But I do think people don't. Yeah, it's hard to understand, like, how, what the strength of a given kind of thing that you're describing is, and also what your kind of like meta confidence in that thing is. So if I'm like, you know, I don't know. Yeah, sure. Wearing a given shirt is like, good that that's going to go well, how significant effect size are we talking about? Are we saying that that's going to be like, you know, that's gonna, like quadruple? Did you know your results? Are we saying this sort of thing. And when you look at, like clinical medicine and studies of trickle effects, it's, it's quite specific, right? It's like, we think this will improve income by X percent. And if you just talked about in the kind of like the vague way that people tend to communicate with kind of no confidence intervals, no description of like effect size, then then it's easy to get a perception that the stated effect sizes like a lot bigger than it actually is. That's basically what's going on is people are assuming like, there's this massive effect size and you're trying to communicate, yeah, no, it's not a mass effect size, but it is like a net positive effect. And you know, in aggregate, these things can add up.

Taimur

Yeah, sure. I just saw this topic. We actually got an email from a listener a couple of days ago. I think she she recently listened to I think, the dating episode that you're talking about Ali? I think in the in the email, she mentions that her initial reaction to the T shirt thing was like, you know, this is this ridiculous. You know, there's that this isn't how this isn't how people work, basically. But then she said that in her own sort of online dating profile previously, I think, yeah, I think that basically, she found that something along the lines of she wasn't getting that many matches, when she changed the clothes that she was wearing, you'd have to hit her pictures, she started getting a hell of a lot more matches. And so like, even though the idea, the idea and how it came across the podcast was initially like, weird, and you know, this is silly. Like, you know, I'm an individual people are individuals. Yeah, it did actually make a difference. I think

Joey

she's, I think I think swings to an example of things people are un omfortable admitting, like, wouldn't it be horrible? Wouldn't it be a horrible orld to live in that actually that the color of your shirt like, is a big redictor of whether people want to spend time with you in a romantic context ike that, that is not really the world we want to live in, we'd like to think hat people are like a bit less superficial than that a bit less easily, easily ooled bite by a shirt color. But there is often this big gap between the world e'd like to live in, in the world we actually do live in. And I think that auses a lot of uncomfort in different people. This is part of why I don't think eople flesh out their values that much. Because I think sometimes your values re like quite uncomfortable when you stare them in the face, as opposed to kind f like having them nebulously in the back of your mind. Like I kind of care bout these five things. But if you actually like kind of gun to your head had o say which ones you care about the most the second most, it might not be that hat good. It might not be that that happy a list to kind of look at so I think he vagueness Yeah, keeps the romanticism makes humans love to think that we're better than we are that we care about, you know, things that are more noble and this sort of thing. And I think that, uh, if you shine the harsh light of quantification on it, yeah, it can be it can be bad, it can be uncomfortable, it will be not what you want. But my argument would be if you look at your values, and you're like, Oh, this is the bias. And I'm like very uncomfortable with that. Maybe you should do something about that. Like maybe you should work deeper on kind of figuring out like, why is it that I care about this or care about that? It's hard to know how to change your actions, if you don't understand the kind of like metacognition that's going on of why you're doing the things that you're doing.

Ali

What's your, what's your approach to figuring out values, like, this is something that I've been sort of trying to research in depth, because I'm, I'm working on a book about meaningful productivity. And part of the equation is, you know, figuring out what direction that we're going to go in. And something people say is that if you figure out your values, then that gives you a pretty good first approximation for, you know, what are the things you value therefore, one of the things you should be doing with your life? And I've come across all these different ways of doing it, like value lists and stuff, but I'm, I'm curious, like, what, what's your approach to figuring like, how would you actually define a value? Like, what what the hell is a value? And how would you go about like, finding what your values? Oh,

Joey

yeah, yeah, these are, these are good questions. So I'll start with a disclaimer of like, I don't think that they're like our objective values, I think they are kind of like nebulous, subjective things floating around in your head and this sort of thing. So there's not really right or wrong values that are values that are like very different from other people's or this sort of thing. But yeah, for me, when I think about, say a value versus like a preference, it's something that you kind of like, want to perpetuated. So if you say like, I value chocolate ice cream, that would mean you like, want other people to eat chocolate ice cream, you want more chocolate ice cream to exist in the world. So like, I have a preference for chocolate ice cream, I might not care if you have you know, ice cream or whatever else it kids come there. So that's where some of the distinction goes. And then I think most of the time when people are talking about with values, as they're talking about high level values, like these, these kind of like, primary fundamental things, they're not talking about kind of like, means values. So you know, maybe I value being healthy, I'm kind of a high level. And that means I should brush my teeth, but I don't value brushing my teeth, it is like a kind of method to get that kind of higher level maximization of your value. Another thing that I think is very interesting, that also briefly is I think values change way more than people give them credit for. So I think people imagine that these are kind of like very fixed elements that are kind of like core to them. But I think if you actually look at what it seems like people value in terms of kind of their actions and that sort of thing. It changes quite a lot more people's life safety can be modified by experience and this sort of thing. So I think there may be like, a bit less fixed pillar that people expect. That being said that there probably is some convergence, like probably, if you got 100 people in a room to think about their values a lot, they would probably come to certain conclusions more often than than other conclusions, you know, they might move higher up on that kind of spectrum, like less more I value health, less it brush my teeth sort of outcomes.

Taimur

Do spreadsheets account for potential future value changes. Because whenever you're evaluating things based on your current set of values, and if there is some unknown future set of values, which you might then shift towards, then yeah, maybe you should change what you're doing today. Right?

Joey

Yeah, yeah, value drift. It's a huge concern, currently really likes currently is values and does not want future me to have radically different values. values are self preserving. They care about themselves being there. So if I could take a pill and know that I would no longer care about people or altruism. Interestingly, of course, I wouldn't care about having taking the pill after I take it, but right now my current values, I would say, No, I do not want that pill. And the pill doesn't have to be as dramatic as a pill. It could be anything, right? That's gonna affect your value. So, yeah, I definitely worry about value draft, you know, if I was to say, win the lottery and win $50 million, let's say maybe right now, I would think, Oh, yeah, I want to donate the bulk of that. But I would probably set up a system to make sure that that actually happens. So like, maybe put it into an advice fund or donate it to a charity then be grants or something like that, because I don't really trust 10 years from now, Joey, that guy could be cool. He could be bad, but who knows, people change a lot more than they expected. You will always think you're you're at your final self, and you're really not. So if you are worried that your next final self won't be quite as altruistic as your current self, then you do want to plan around that.

Taimur

Well, how have y'all heard about

Ali

figuring out your values? Oh, boy,

Joey

I mean, a lot of talking to people, a lot of introspection, a lot of that sort of thing. I think sometimes, you know, kind of things like nebulously floating around for me, I spent a lot of time thinking about weightings of values, actually, because I kind of like knew that I had some of these like primary values, but it was much trickier thinking like, how much do I value A versus B? So I have a system that I call that the "Three H System". So these like my top three fundamental values. And this is helpfulness, happiness and health. And there's kind of an interesting story for each of them. Happiness and helpfulness, I think like quite quite self evident. A lot of people have these values to some extent, you know, they want to help other people be altruistic. And they want to kind of be intrinsically happy. But those can break down in all sorts of interesting ways like buy happiness, do you mean life satisfaction, happiness? Or do you mean moment to moment hedonic happiness? Those are very different optimization paths. And when I think about, say, helpfulness versus happiness, how much do I value that? Do I actually fundamentally, fundamentally value health? Or is health actually just a proxy to get health and happiness again? So I think what I wanted to do is I want to kind of get this all down into like, one page, I wanted to get down, like, what are my fundamental values and what are kind of like my sub values in those values, so that kind of like, look over them and modify them. And it's a changing page. It's, you know, it's a Google Doc, I modify things and that sort of thing. But the higher level stuff sticks, and I have ratios. So for me, each value is one order of magnitude less important than the value before it. So helpfulness is like 90% of my time, energy, focus. excetera. Happiness is like 9%. And health is like 0.9%. And then that other 0.1% is, you know, pancakes, or whatever else kind of doesn't fall into one of those modifiers.

Ali

Interesting, because, so when I do these kind of value exercises, one thing that often comes out for me is this, like I very highly value, autonomy slash freedom, which is played out in my life and sort of my biggest fear of being shackled to a job that I might potentially not enjoy, for example, but then I think, well, how much do I actually value autonomy and freedom. And it's sort of if integrity and honesty is on the list of values, but like, intuitively, I know that I really value autonomy and freedom, but like what, I don't know, be dishonest for the further for the sake of autonomy and freedom is like, probably not. But does that mean that I value honesty and integrity more than freedom? But maybe, but like that doesn't, that feels to not really sit right with me where I where if I think about you know, what the primary thing I'm always optimizing for, it's always autonomy, freedom. So yeah, any thoughts on that issue.

Joey

So there's probably like curves, that matter. So if you look at like Maslow's hierarchy of needs, or whatever, you have to like, fulfill these survival values before moving up to the next thing. And I think there might be like, minimum thresholds for some values that that don't continue scaling up. So let's say my health value only only like 1% of my time and energy. But if I was like, extremely unhealthy, like extremely sick, or something like that, that value, of course, would get a lot higher. It how it's kind of ranked in its context is based on how easy it is to go like maximize or satisfy server, this sort of thing. Part of why health only gets like 1% of my energies, because I actually think it's quite easy. I think it's, it's a lot easier for me to be healthy than it is for me to be happy. For example, I think that's just like a much more challenging problem. So I think that kind of comes to it. So maybe what that like the part of integrity that you value is actually like quite easily achieved. And yeah, if you can have like, create theoretical situations where you really have to, like trade it off, and you're kind of like below that threshold, then, then it's there. One interesting thing that values

Ali

Sorry, I was just saying, Oh, that's interesting. Haven't thought I haven't thought of it in that way before going.

Joey

I think some people have maximisation values for some things and satisfaction satisficing values for other things. And that also can make it quite messy. So maybe for integrity, you don't need to like maximize like you don't wanna be like the most integrity, integrity focused person ever. But you have this like minimum threshold, like you want to be x level of integrity. And once that satisfied, you're kind of like indifferent. My values. For instance, happiness and health are both satisficing goals. There is a level of both which are just like, cool. I don't want to be the healthiest person in the world. I don't wanna be the happiest person in the world. I kind of want to be an eight out of 10 on both and that's like good, like once I once asked that good enough. Where helpfulness, so like saving other people's lives and doing altruism, that's a maximization goal. I don't really have a number of which I'd be like, yeah, I'm happy with that. It's kind of like the the infinite ambition that you have.

Taimur

What's the point of writing these things down and ranking them. And so I mean, it's, it sounds like, there's some fuzzy, nebulous internal process in your head, which consists of your values. And that's how you evaluate things. Once you've written it down, like, what, what changes?

Joey

Well, one thing is you live by it more. So health, for example, got added because I figured that I would not prioritize it, it tends to be the thing that's forgotten. And as funny as it sounds, even putting it down as a 1% value has made you think, like, Oh, this is something I intrinsically care about, I do want to maximize longevity and this sort of thing. And I am healthier than I was, before I had it as kind of a value in my mind or designated thing. So I think that's, I think that's one thing, I think your actions end up corresponding to your specified values. It also helps you kind of like break down, if you're gonna have imagining it as like a tree with like the top level value, you're going to break it down further. So in my one page document, I have like, you know, for health, for example, I break that down into like, three subcategories of like physical health, mental health, and habits. And then I have three like pillars of each of those that I think if I do well on, I'm probably going to success on that category. So for physical health, if I sleep eight plus high quality hours, if I eat food, not too much, mostly plants, and for exercise, if I use my feet, get to get to work and exercise, 10 minutes of hard workout a day, that will probably maximize my kind of physical health goal. So you can kind of like break these down. And actually, right below my values, I have like, what my morning routine is or my day routine. And that is very closely corresponding to these kind of like ultimate values that I want. It's very motivational tip to be able to go like, okay, yeah, I'm doing this 10 minute workout, not because I want to do a 10 minute workout today, but because it kind of fits into this overarching set of goals that I want to succeed on.

Taimur

So then so then the values list, is it really more of an aspirational values list in that, you then change your behavior to match that, rather than these are my existing values, you know,

Joey

I think it's most useful to start with your existing values, but then think about where you do want to put time and attention and focus on kind of like making certain values better. So again, I think they're more multiple than you think. So I think a lot of people will think that like, you know, I really care about hedonic happiness, don't care about life satisfaction. But then as they get older, they tend to care a lot more about life satisfaction and a lot less about happiness. And it's like, Huh, that's interesting. And I actually think you can do this deliberately to like, you can be like, I want to value health, like that's, that's an example, I'm going to put it on my chart, I'm going to integrate it. And now I really do think it is an intrinsic value at about 1% weight, like it really has kind of integrated with my mindset, kind of like, if you hear something said 10 times, if you hear that health is part of your values and your identifiers. I'm a person who cares about health. It kind of like gains a weight or prominence in your Yeah, your morals, your actions, that sort of thing.

Ali

That makes sense. Yeah, I've definitely found that as well. Like, especially in the in the health example, where in the past, I just sort of had this vague thing of Oh, yeah, I guess I kind of want to be healthy. But then it was, it was any, like last year where I actually wrote down that, you know, health is something that I value, probably, you know, above most of the things that without my without health, there is no, there's effectively no happiness, or with without good health, my happiness will will likely be severely limited. Therefore, I should take care of my health more, I guess like before hearing you describe it as like maximizing versus versus satisfice, satisficing. I just hadn't quite, because, for example, a few a few months ago, I signed up with a personal trainer, and I said, Okay, I want to go, I want to get six pack abs some time, at some point this year, it's been a, it's a, you know, fun goal to work towards. And then like, every week, you'd be like, you know, how's your nutrition going? I'd be like, well, I got a takeaway last night. He's like, okay, have you been counting your calories. And it took a few months of this a few a few weeks a month of this, for me to realize that actually, I don't care about getting six pack abs, I care about being healthy enough. And healthy enough is the current state where I'm at. And yes, I would like my biceps to be a little bit bigger because, you know, dating. But beyond that, I actually don't care about the six pack abs. And that was enormously freeing. I was like, great. That means if I do the thing of eat food, mostly plants, not very much. And maybe, you know, skip breakfast each day, hashtag intermittent fasting, that it doesn't really matter if I get a takeaway every night provided I fulfill, you know, roughly this parameters of mostly going grilled meats rather than fried meats, blah, blah, blah. And now I feel like this is so much more liberating. Because I don't have to be counting calories, because I've actively decided that this is not something I value.

Joey

That's actually a big thing that I think is another benefit of kind of like specifying it out. I think people have all these values, but they don't realize the trade offs, right? So yes, I want six pack abs but do I want to have six pack abs enough for the trade offs in like tasty food? If the answer is no, let go of one of those goals. Otherwise, you're gonna be constantly frustrated, where you're kind of like, Oh, I really wish I had six pack abs but I don't I'm not going to do it because I like this food. When you kind of like feel You're out. Okay, how do I values conflicts? How do I resolve those conflicts? It is it is nice because you can just drop stuff like, would I like to be like I was a very fast runner as a kid what I like to be a super fast runner still Sure. Would I like to be a super fast runner enough to prioritize that above a million other things my life? No. So there we go. It's gone. It's It's, it's, you know, it's a goal that I would certainly love If I could snap my fingers and have it. But it's not a goal that I'm willing to kind of trade off the time and energy that it would take to kind of make that happen.

Taimur

How did you conclude that your 90% value is helpfulness?

Joey

Yeah, so I think I've always cared about people. And like, many people have always cared about people. So there's like some kind of intrinsic drive there that most people have. And I think a lot of it was figuring out just like how extreme the level of suffering in the world was. So I think that when I was young, you know, I imagined that the world was like my world like that. They're the kind of most salient things and there were problems in that world, and, you know, issues, education reform, and this sort of thing, but they were quite small. And I think in that world where, you know, everyone's like, an eight out of 10, or something like this happiness, I don't feel the same pull to kind of help them as being this really important value. But when I found out that like, Oh, you know, there's factory farming and the animals are really bad conditions are, oh, there's extreme poverty, and people are really, really having to fly or war, this sort of thing, then then it really changed it kind of like, wow, this, this is quite important. I think maybe the most like fundamental value that I find very persuasive. And very core is this like "Veil of Ignorance" argument. I'm not sure if you guys are familiar with this. But maybe for folks listening, the basic ideas, you don't know who you're going to be. You could be born as anyone or anything. You're kind of like floating above above the world behind this veil of ignorance? How would you want the world to look? And I found that very, very compelling. Like, I found it very compelling. When I first heard it, the more I thought about I was like, Yeah, I just continue to think this is very compelling. And that's part of the kind of celebrate thing that we talked about beginning, right. So I have kind of done what I wish a lot of people would do, which is, you know, kind of taken that veil of ignorance aspect and applied it. Of course, you know, there's all sorts of caveats and that sort of thing, you know, you get free health care in certain countries, and how do you value that, so it's not like, I actually think my life is on average, with the average person, but at least I'm kind of symbolically gesturing towards that, like, I would like the world to be more fair and more happy, especially for those in kind of very extreme situations. So I think it's the extreme suffering to kind of, like, amp this up, and realizing that I could do so much about it, too. So I think a lot of people have this perception that yeah, it just takes like, an incredible amount of time and energy to do these things beneficial. Like you have to you know, become a doctor and dedicate your whole life to to ever help somebody. But if I can, like realistically save a life for $3,000 that is really, really a different bar, then kind of changes my level of optimization and this sort of thing. So yeah, I guess I feel like I can probably maintain, you know, quite a high level happiness, quite a high level helpfulness. And then I have a bunch of like, spare cycles, you know, a bunch of spare energy, spare time and this sort of thing. So kind of like, put more more of that into helpfulness. helpfulness, I think is like the trickiest school for me, because of course, it is maximizing. It's not satisficing. So it's not really like, if I save a million lives, I'm happy, I would just want to kind of save 2 million lives. But I think it's actually okay to have one maximizing goal, one maximizing goal can be really nice. It can kind of give you like the fuel and ambition to like continue to do things where you get into trouble. If you have like multiple maximizing goals, then then you're then you're in real trouble. Because then you're trying to it's very hard to independently maximize two factors.

Ali

I'm just going through like my, sort of the way I've been living there for the last few months, I'm thinking like, what is what's the thing that I'm maximizing? I feel like, yeah, I wonder if having like maximizing goals is is part of why we get this hedonic, hedonic treadmill in a way, where if you don't think about, like, like for, like, for example, in personal finance type circles, they always say, you know, think about how much money you actually want to be aiming towards that and like, write this number down and like, stick to it. Because if you don't, then money by default ends up being a maximizing thing where you make $2 million a year, and suddenly you're like, Okay, well, I know somebody makes $10 million a year, wouldn't that be nice and the goalpost keeps shifting, whereas, theoretically, if you've decided, Okay, I can very comfortably live off X amount per year, therefore, I don't need to now maximize money in all these in order to get more than X amount per year. Therefore, I can spend that time doing things that I actually do care about, is that that thought process I would imagine, I imagine be quite liberating. I haven't gone through it myself.

Joey

yet. That's like along stoicism lines and kind of get into more of this. happy with what is I think from a happiness perspective, weirdly, you probably don't want to set happiness as a maximizing goal, even if that was your top goal, because it's one of those weird things where Yeah, the more you focus on it, that the more elusive it becomes. But other goals, you know, if you do want to become like the best weightlifter ever, like you probably do need to set that as a maximizing goal and just like like really go for it. So some goals aren't very susceptible to maximization frameworks.

Taimur

I feel like folks like you, and folks like the Lucia and you know, the EA community in general. Maybe this is a mischaracterization, but it feels like if you're, if you're wired in a way where, for example, you you only say for example, it's really care about this helpfulness thing, right? It's, it's, it's very simple to distill your values down into like, Okay, I've got them. It's the helpfulness thing, right. The top that's like, the main thing I care about. Yeah, a little bit health over happiness really, is about the health of this thing. I think most people's motivations, I mean, myself included, are just a much weirder mix of like, you know, I want some, you know, some, some social validation from my peers. I want to I want to I want to be, you know, I want to sort of broadly have fun day to day I want to be healthy. Yeah, be nice to be helpful. Like, did you feel like you, I feel like EA folks have a particularly easy job here, because you sort of wired in a way where you really just care a lot about this one thing, because for example, you, you sort of had the veil of ignorance thing and just really compelled by, whereas I had the ignorance thing. And I'm like, yeah, it's, it's, yeah, it's, I can see why you'd be compelled by, like, and followed by a tiny bit. Like, most people haven't have not found that one thing that they just find super complaining that they can just, like build their entire lives around.

Joey

Yeah, so one thing is, I think you can, like you, I think you can pick and build your life around this to some extent, like I think there is, again, more flexibility than you would think. So like, say, I got knocked in the head and like altruism was was gone or took the pill, whatever. And I'm like, Okay, now I need some other kind of gold to maximize. I think I could be like, Well, you know, I kind of like this happiness thing. And I kind of think that life satisfaction is more important. And I think that a good way to life satisfy the like, read a really good book. Okay, cool. I'm gonna set that as my backside and go, I want to write a fantastic book. So I think you can use some deliberateness in this. I think a lot of people's values are that you're looking, you're looking to step down. So like social validation, right? Do you like intrinsically care about social validation? I'm not sure. I think probably that that's like a, you know, need that needs to be satisfied to be to be happy, I think back to like, some sort of level of personal happiness. So once you pull that once you say like, Okay, well, happiness is one of my fundamental goals, then what are the kind of like paths to optimize that it might turn out that like, social validation is like one of those one of those paths and like, is pretty, pretty stable as one of those paths and probably district? Like, that's true for a lot of people that validation scores, like quite high. But yeah, I do think I do think you can pick a pillar, I do think you can pick, yeah, almost, if you have, like, values as revealed by by kind of how I act right now. And then you have like values that I would like, like to have, if I was like, you know, the the person controlling the sim of myself walking around the little world, I think you can like push your values a little bit closer to that you probably can't like change them massively. Like if you really care about A and then you're like, I actually from up kind of, like philosophical perspective shouldn't care about A, that's quite tough. But I do think that you can like, kind of move them in your more aspirational direction. What,

Ali

what's the menu of options here? Because for example, you said social validation is a subset of happiness. What do you have, we got like a list of, you know, a top level values that where we can sort of just be like, okay, yeah, I'll go for that one. Or is that too simplistic way of looking at it?

Joey

Yeah, it's a bit tricky. So I think I, there are many people who say, oh, what it all boils down to happiness, like even my altruism drive. It's just that like, I would not be able to be happy with myself unless I was excellent, altruistic. But then I think that's like, kind of useless as as a framework, right? Because you're like, Okay, cool. Everything boils down to happiness. Now, what the heck are we even talking about when we talk to values? So I think it's more something that you think is like, fundamental and not a means to an end. So, for example, I have friends who are like very libertarian, and they would choose freedom over happiness, that there would be like worlds where they will be more free, but less happy. And they'd be like, Yes, I would, I would pick that, that, to me feels like freedom starts to be a more fundamental value there, as opposed to a maximization to kind of happiness, where if someone was like, Yeah, I care about this, but mainly, why come with this, because it would like make me feel good and make me feel happy and this sort of thing, then it feels a bit more like like a means to an end. So I think if you try to, like pull that out, like would I still care about this, if I knew for a fact it would not, you know, maximize these these other values that I have. So maximize happiness, for example, then I think it starts to move into the more like, fundamental value category. And there are probably like some things that are more common up here and things that are less common, you know, fairness is one that a lot of people have, for example, like they have a really strong fairness drive, kind of outside of individual happiness and this sort of thing, you know, that that's, that's a common one, the the ones described in righteous mind and that sort of thing. I think those pillars can quite often be independent, you know, someone is like, willing to be pure, independent of how it affects their happiness and this sort of thing. I'd be curious when you think about because you guys are both productivity orientated when you think about kind of, I want to become better at a job. Where does it stop? Like, where does it tend to dead end? In terms of like, Oh, yeah, okay, like this has met the end, how high up do you think you go towards something like a fundamental value?

Taimur

I was thinking about this, I feel like in general, I just don't really care about maximizing in. I can't think of anything I care about maximizing I've just very, like, you know, subject to the satisfied point oriented with everything.

Joey

Yeah, that's probably good from a happiness perspective, like maximization. Like, I think ambition, ambition is very useful. But it's also probably like, quite bad for happiness in most situations.

Taimur

Yeah, I was, um, there was a, I was Esther Perel or something, or some sort of relationship coach type person was on some podcast recently. And she was kind of talking about this where with a lot of our clients, a lot of our clients are sort of, you know, very analytical type people. You know, maybe they work in tech and things like that. And a lot of them take a very well, sometimes issues come from taking a very maximising approach to your relationship where, you know, you've been with a partner for a few years. And, you know, the, the mind starts to wander of like, Oh, you know, maybe I could find a better partner who is, you know, the same but a bit more attractive, or like the same, but a bit more nice or whatever. And it's, it's, you know, taking the maximizing approach to relationships. And that sense, at least in her experience, leads to more problems. And it's the people who have very satisficing approach to their relationship who are actually much happier.

Joey

I don't like very sympathetic to that. Yeah, that sounds like the happiness one.

Taimur

Yeah, I think I'm totally on. Yeah, I think satisficing is definitely how I approached sort of the the sort of social realm.

Ali

Hmm,

Joey

yeah, I think. Yeah, certain goals. Even if your goal is maximizing, weirdly, it's better to have satisfied Yeah, I guess. Yeah. Like, like happiness, and most social things. I think I like this too, because, yeah, there's negative flow through effects of kind of like constantly being analytical about stuff. And it's also just processing power. So one critique that I hear about, you know, being very analytical all the time is like, Oh, don't you get like, tired? And like, isn't that a lot of analytical thought and you kind of like, are done with it. And there is, to some extent this, like, maybe I find it like, personally fun to make a spreadsheet. So like, Okay, cool. It doesn't tiring. But if you have only so many analytical hours in a given day, I think you do want to think about which problems are going to benefit from those analytical hours the most, and like, some problems are very good to that you can make really good analytical progress on them quickly. And other problems are completely intractable.

Ali

Yeah, yeah. on the, on the, on the maximizing satisficing thing. And then thinking about, like, my own personal goals, and a, I don't really like to think of goals, because I feel I have an aversion to the one goal, but that aside, with my own personal goals, I feel like they're mostly satisficing. But, for example, like, I am writing this book at the moment, and I know I want I want this book to be as good as it can, as good as I can possibly make it. Now that feels like, it feels like a satisficing goal in that I want to be satisfied with the book I've written. But it also has an element of being a maximizing goal. And I want to make it you know, it's, it's on the road to maximization that I will end up all along this thing of, Okay, I'm not satisfied with that with it with this book, equally, one sort of goal that's been in my mind with this, this book, which one will come out like three, three years from now. So it's like, very medium term plan is, I would love for this to hit the New York Times bestseller list, just kind of it's so it's so arbitrary, and so stupid. And every time I think about it, it actively makes me less happy. And enjoy the journey of writing the book less, because now that there's this baggage associated with that, but at the same time, I kind of think, Oh, this would this would be kind of nice. Like, I guess, I don't know, any, an actor might be thinking, Oh, I guess I guess it would be kind of nice to win an Oscar for this performance, like, does. How does how does that work within a framework of like, maximizing versus satisficing? or?

Joey

Yeah, well, I feel like the question becomes, what's the useful frame for you? So if someone's like, motivated by Oh, yeah, I want to hit the New York bestseller's list and like that, like gets them up in the morning and like, get some type of [...] and that sort of thing. I think like, cool, great put, put the New York Times list like on your mirror and and use that as fuel. On the other hand, if it's an anchor, if it's a, you know, slowing you down, then I think it's like, not a very valuable, kind of like, sub goal or state of thing to get there. So I think, yet creative creative work is really, really messy with this. So I write quite a bit to, you know, boring nonfiction about how to start a charity that I try to make entertaining. But I have found that there's like huge variation day to day, like how good writing quality is. And a lot of writers describe this that like, Yeah, one day, it's just flowing, and the next day, it's just like garbage. And you want to set up goals that make you have more of those, like excellent days, and sometimes that's, you know, goals that are a little bit ambitious and other times it's like No, I'm just gonna like right when it really sparks my fancy and that's how I like What's the best thing? So to? Yeah, to put analysis on whether to have analysis or not, if you were to like track your days and like, think like how good a writing day is this and then think about like, okay, I thought about this goal for like a week while writing, I didn't think about this goal for a week writing. And then you saw what the output is, that seems to be like the most valuable strategy for that. So if you know something is like not useful that like, trash it, like try to try to get rid of that desire, or at least put it in the back of the mind. So it's not salient.

Ali

The other thing very helpful, I just, even though I haven't explicitly tracked this implicitly, I know that whenever I think of kind of the the marketing of the book, I think of God, whenever I think of the writing of a good book, I think, yeah. And it's the marketing side that I just feel a real aversion to. Even knowing that marketing is half of the equation to get on the New York Times list, writing a book or writing a good book is the other half.

Joey

Yeah, well, you don't have to think about marketing right now. Right? Like, there's probably no particular benefit to think about it a couple years in advance. So it does seem like quite an easy thing to like, bury, you can just be like, Yeah, whatever. I'll cross that bridge. When I get there. I want to have a book that is the book quality equivalent. Yeah. And that's that little worry about absent marketing. Yeah.

Ali

One thing that I'd written down where that I were very keen to get your thoughts on is how so you, you mentioned that you did this kind of dating OkCupid thing. And then you've sort of found someone after writing a four page message to them that you're bidding that you were in a relationship with for 10 years? When it comes to dating, I think kind of both Taim and I are having this quote, problem is this thing of explore versus exploit in that, I feel like I've I have not dated very much I've been on fewer than 10 first dates, I think, or sort of roundabout that roundabout that ballpark. And so I don't really know quite what I'm looking for beyond like, just the very high level things. I you know, it would be nice to, to find someone who I find attractive and who I get on with. And that's basically sort of the most kind of narrow, I've broken that down to. And then there's also a thing of Okay, what if I meet someone who I think, okay, yeah, I can I can, I can see ourselves gain, I can see us getting married, I can imagine a future with this person. It's like, you know, I'm 26. I'm only been on like, 10 dates. Do I really know? How about, I haven't really got enough of a sample size to be able to make the decision, especially if it's, especially if it's not a hell yes. Especially if it's like a, you know, I'm not really sure how to feel but like, Maybe, yeah, maybe things will work out for this person. I'm not like in love with them or anything like that. But like, maybe it's just me, maybe I just don't have the capacity to feel that. Do you? Do you get what I'm gonna say for this exploit?

Joey

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I definitely do. I think one thing people forget, with this sort of thing is often you have more data than you think. Right? So, yes, you personally have gone on 10 dates, and that's like very relevant, useful information. But you also know many other relationships, right? You know, presumably, you know, friends and relationships, you know, parents in relationships, this sort of thing. And that is not like, like, zero some some data, you know, if you know, the five relationships, if you're considering a relationship, or you're in a relationship, and you're like, I'm, you know, this level of connected, satisfied, whatever. And it seems like that is way below the average of my peers who are in long term relationships like that, that's probably a sign, you know, that that's probably indicative of that sort of thing. So that will be one thing. The other thing I would say is in terms of data, it doesn't have to be data in a purely romantic context, right? So if you go to like a general social setting, and you're like, wow, I clicked with this person, like X amount. And this is like, really great. You want to like find that cross applicability in a romantic situation. One of the advice that I heard that I've always followed, I think, is quite valuable, which is like, marry your best friend. And I think the nice thing about that is, you have had way more of a sample size of friends than you've had of romantic partners, typically, most people have. And that's like, a very useful frame to kind of put things in because then you're like, Okay, is this you know, my best friend? Is this, someone who I could, you know, spend a lot of time with and kind of continue to enjoy that time, but at high levels of volume and this sort of thing. I think sometimes people have higher bars for friendship than relationships. So I think sometimes it does end up leading to someone different criteria.

Taimur

Yeah, I think even if you're in like your 20s, or whatever, you have probably met pretty, pretty much a pretty wide gamut of sort of people. And you probably have met enough people there already, that you can have a pretty good sense to, like, who do I get on with? And so yeah, I feel like you and I actually talked about this, like a year ago or something where you were saying the same thing of like, you need to do more exploration. I've only been on like, a few dates or something. But yeah, I think like the the meaningful data points are not just dates as well. They're just like people, you know, people you've met, and you've, you probably have a pretty good understanding of the range of people that that you that you could possibly meet.

Joey

Yeah, that being said, there is a more like softie psychology interpretation of this in terms of, if you feel like you do not have enough data, even if you actually do, and there can be a difference resulting there, right? So, you might be able to say like, Okay, well, I can extrapolate from friends and other relationships I've seen in a year, and I think I have like a pretty good model. But there is something somewhat different about experiencing something. And if you kind of like, feel like, Oh, you know, at the end of the day, even if I met the perfect person, I feel like quite uncomfortable, like being in a long term relationship at this point. I mean, it's, that's a valuable thing to be honest with yourself about as well. And that could be the case even if yes, from a straight analytical perspective, you probably have like enough data points to make a call.

Ali

Hmm. This is something I was I was talking about with my with my housemate last night, where it was, it was on this topic of, so I think I am the sort of person and feel free to tell me on bullshit, I'm bullshitting myself here. I think I'm the sort of person where, if I'm in a kind of long term relationship with someone, I still think I would quite like the bulk of like, 90% of our time to be spent doing our own thing and 10% of our kind of waking hours to be spent kind of hanging out together, maybe doing something together. And I wonder if, and my housemaids view was that if that, if this 90/10 separation is what you're what you're thinking, then chances are, you're not ready for a long term relationship. Because at the point where you become ready for a long term relationship, that number start, you start to actually want to spend more time with the person and this is why people move in. And this is why people get married, because want to spend more time together. But then I do have a few friends who are in kind of very long term relationship have been married, married for 10 plus years, or like, Yeah, actually, you know, we're both, we both been on percent of our time doing different things. And then maybe on the weekends, we'll actually we'll do something together. Do you have any? Any any thoughts on that?

Joey

Yeah, similarly, I have friends and connections, who I think are in like, an interesting way to frame is thinking about how much coordination you want to do with with the partner, right? So different relationships, whether they be friendships, or family members, that sort of thing require different levels of like coordination. And maybe there's a friend who he like really liked seeing once a month, but if they were your roommate, they would drive you absolutely nuts. And people have different like, bars for each level of that coordination. It could be that you just don't want to have a super high level of coordination with someone like, I definitely know, people who are long term happy relationships, living separately. And that's how they like it. Like, they don't want to be roommates with the romantic partner. And that's like, fine. I think that Yeah, there probably are like some statistical trends of like, as you spend more time with someone, you end up coordinating with them kind of, for better or worse, just because it's convenient in a bunch of ways and this sort of thing. But I don't think it's like an insane model to have, I do think some people are just more independent and want less coordination with a given person. And I would guess that this would reflect a little bit in other relationships that you've had, like, you know, Duke has, has every roommate you've ever had given you nuts, that might be like, a little bit indicative that having a romantic partner would be like, more challenging. Like it, you know, it won't be all sunshine rainbows. On the other hand, if you tend to love having roommates, maybe it is a matter of like finding the right partner who would love to have as a roommate, and it's just that the partners you previously had might not fit that sort of like, level of coordination. One thing I think is unfortunate that people do with relationships is they kind of like have all these knobs and they correlate them at all the same time. So like, if you've spent X number of years with that person, you are now like obligated or expected or something to move in. And like that seems quite quite unfortunate, because there is just a lot of human variants. And maybe some people don't move in ever, maybe some people want to move in a lot quicker. And I wish there was like, a bit more willingness to perhaps go against social norms when it comes to that sort of thing and do what seems to be working better for the relationship. So yeah, I know people who are separate. I would say it would depend on how can how you feel like your connections work with other interactions. And that would give some more predictive models.

Ali

Okay, because on that on and so I've, I've had roommates for the last like, well, since for those nine years, basically, since University, but since graduating three years ago, I've had like one roommate for 18 months and another roommate for the last like, eight months. And it's been really good. Like, I love having a roommate/flatmate. But I think part of the reason why I love it is because we are living together, but there is almost on my end anyway, there's almost zero requirement to hang out with them in that, like, you know, if I'm, if I want to stay up till midnight, playing World of Warcraft or doing some YouTube stuff, then that's totally cool. It's not like there is an obligation of, alright, you know, it's 8pm. And now we need to spend some time together. My housemate would say that that's a sign of immaturity on my part.

Joey

Yeah. Any thoughts? In my mind that doesn't specify not being able to live with the right partner, you just need to be clear in terms of what the expectations are, like. I've lived long term with with multiple romantic partners. I'm living long term with a romantic partner right now. It's not like we're under obligation to go to bed at the same time. That sort of thing, I would actually say those sort of things that sounds a bit more like you've freshly moved in with someone, then you've actually been living with someone for like 12 months or that sort of thing. Like, you know, people do do independent stuff and that sort of thing. I think the real trick is just making sure both people are on the same page, because you don't want someone who's like, Oh, yeah, I expect that we're gonna spend after work time together every day, and someone else to be like, Oh, I expect we're gonna spend after work time together at the same frequency of dating, but then sleep in the same bed, then you run into troubles, if like, the expectations are really different. But again, the benefits of pulling out your values, kind of knowing what you're looking for, and actually being able to be clear about it. If you have no idea feel like okay, I want to move into someone that I have no idea how it's gonna go. I mean, then your expectations and reality are almost definitely be different.

Ali

Okay, that's very cool. Final thing that I'd love to get your opinion on, just on this on this topic is, again, this is the you know, this is turning into a personal therapy session, but well, like, how much do you weight, the attractiveness of your partner taking into account the fact that of hedonic adaptation, etc, like all of all of the nuances associated with having having a preference for looks? How do you think about it? or How did you think about it seems like 10 years ago, when you were doing this online dating type stuff?

Joey

Yeah. It's always not been that important to me. So that's like a nice answer. Now, I would say revealed preference wise, a lot of my partners have been very attractive, sometimes not. But a lot, a lot have. So I don't know, maybe there's like some, some factor there that I'm not being honest enough with myself on. But I genuinely do think it's not the biggest factor, I think an interesting model to have is, there are factors that that fade and factors that don't, right? So if you're looking at something like looks, no matter how attractive someone is, that becomes a less significant part of the relationship. Once you're 10 years in like period that that this just everyone kind of agrees knows that that doesn't scale cuz I've always been very, very long term esteem approach to everything, you know, career life, friends, that sort of thing. So I think when I think of something as more of like, Oh, yeah, this would be important to the short term, that that's never been as big a factor for me. So when I'm thinking about characteristics that I'm looking for it is, you know, in the similar vein of what I was talking about value, alignment, connection, compatibility on kind of like work topics and talking about, you know, the things we care about, enjoying spending time with a person, these these sort of characteristics, looks as not played that big a factor in, but my friends would be like, Oh, well, yeah, it looks awfully big factor. Why are the people you're dating, you know, so attractive. But I think that i think that's been somewhat like random chance. And somewhat just like correlations. So like, you know, maybe someone who's very conscientious, but some more time into the physical appearance than like the random an average person or something like this. But yeah, it's it's not, it's not on top 10 of characteristics that I that I look for.

Taimur

Wait, so what are you actually saying that? Are you saying that? Are you saying that you personally just have a very low, low threshold for who you would be physically attracted to? Or are you saying that you have a pretty standard threshold for who you'd be physically attracted to? You just choose to not care so much about being physically attracted to someone who you're in relationship with?

Joey

Yeah, it's so good question. I think a, it started off less important than most people for me. And then B, I thought, like, Oh, that's not really a trait that I like about myself, or value myself. So I kind of like, you know, explicitly said, like, I don't want to care about this and didn't start to care about it less. So I think I think both have happened. Like I probably started off in a in an easier state than most, and then pushed it to be even less important as a characteristic.

Taimur

How do you push it? Is it just like introspection, and just kind of try to internalize that I shouldn't care about this thing?

Joey

Yeah. So I mean, have you ever heard about different techniques that people use for quitting smoking, where you like, kind of like notice that so that there's, there's this these techniques, where you're kind of like doing value modification on yourself when it comes to smoking, and you should like, notice the bad parts of smoking. So when you're ridiculous when you think about all the other kind of good aspects, but if you really focus on like, Oh, this tastes awful, or something, and like, every time you do it, eventually it starts like taste quite bad. And that becomes like, the salient part of the experience. So I think some sort of like associative thinking, and that sort of thing. So if I'm, like, you know, the sort of person I want to be, you know, is not someone who's who's highly concerned with Lux. I don't really like that. That's a that's a character trait I'm not a fan of. And I think that that's a silly character trait to care about anyways, because you know, it doesn't matter in the long term, there's hedonic adaption these sort of aspects, I think, like, telling yourself that makes a difference. I think exposure makes a difference. I think sometimes you think like, Oh, I couldn't ever date someone with x. And then you date someone, like, actually, that was that was kind of fine. Like it didn't really matter in practice. So some some of that sort of aspect. And also, I think really explicitly about the trade offs. So say, I don't care about looks at all, my dating pool is bigger, the the the characteristics that I can maximize on other dimensions like value compatibility is much higher. And to me, that's much more important. So in some ways, I don't even view it as like, letting go of looks and not caring, but at all I see it as like, Oh, I'm totally not willing to trade off looks for kind of any different and any of these other characteristics that I put in, like higher regard. So,

Taimur

but I think most people will kind of view looks as like a satisficing thing or that, you know, their partner needs to be above some threshold of attractiveness. Are you basically saying that you have you have like, reduced that threshold, you know, through, like deliberate practice, or, or something? Or do you not see it as a satisficing thing do you see as more of like a maximizing thing, like, if they're, you know, if they're, you know, if you think they are very unattractive, then then being like, you know, them having very aligned values can actually make up for the attractiveness.

Joey

Yeah. So, again, a bit of both, like, if I think someone's personality is awesome, they do just, like, look more attractive to me. I mean, I think that does happen to everybody. But I also think that my like, natural bar is like, low enough, there's never been a problem. So so low enough, that there has never been someone who are like, this person would match my dating criteria, but they are missing this looks component, nothing has has happened there. So maybe there is like some lower threshold, and I just, like, haven't bumped into a person that that fits this, but it has not, I've never had to compromise on other things that I care about more, which is a really the important lesson. Like, again, if I could snap my fingers and the person's super attractive, like Sure, yeah. But I'm not willing to trade off. Yeah, say like, intellectual compatibility or something like this. Yeah. So another thing, I thought he started just because another nice thing about knowing your values, and having unique values for anything is makes, it makes it a lot easier to find what you're looking for. So if I'm looking for a house on the UK market, and I care not at all about natural light, that's great, I can probably find a house that has really crappy, natural light, but it's very good on old metrics that I do care about, if I'm looking for literally the same house as everybody else. So like, Oh, yeah, I'd like big natural light and new floors and this sort of thing, then it's very difficult world to be in. And the same is true for the dating market. If you're a little bit weird, it's easier to find someone's compatible, because not everyone is looking for someone who's super introverted, like I am. But for me, that's a really important trait. So like, great, and that works better. So I actually think it's actually beneficial if you can find areas that you uniquely do care about or uniquely don't care about relative to just like the standard person because then you can find people.

Ali

Yeah, market inefficiencies. On the note of like, changing, changing, changing of value, slash desires, there was a point last year, I think it was last year, two years ago, I mentioned on the podcast where I had this exact thought process, I was like, Okay, in this in this realm of dating, I currently care way too much about looks and that care, caring, less about looks is not warranted, like I, if I could take a pill and not care about looks, I would absolutely do that. I was like, Okay, what can I actually do in my life to make this not the case? And I realized that prior prior to this decision, I'd been I'd been following a load of like, swimsuit models on Instagram. on all of the different accounts. Great, okay. That's one aspect of my life in which now that's like, I am not constantly reminded that oh, my God, there are these beautiful women out there. Any other suggestions on that front? Because, like, if I could take the magic pill like, genuinely, I would I think I care way too much about looks, and this is like bad. But it's like that. Yeah. Yeah.

Joey

Yeah. So Syrah modification, so a few different things. One thing is you can find like, replacements that get at that similar drive. So an interesting question is like, Why do you care about looks? Is it because you really care about visual beauty? And you should, you know, surround your house with artwork? Or is it because it's kind of like a high status thing to like, date someone who's really attractive, and that makes you feel that way?

Ali

For me, it's more like the status thing. It's more like, I want my friends to think like, Oh, yeah,

Joey

yeah. And that, and that often is the thing about

Ali

Wow, yeah.

Joey

But then the question is like, Okay, well, now that I know that like this is connected to, I want my friends to think well of me to think that I'm cool and can get a desirable partner. What if I talk to my friends about what I actually desire in a person that changes things, right. So all my friends know that I'm not looking for a super attractive person. They know I'm looking for someone who's super hardcore and altruism and someone who's super intelligent and that sort of thing. So from a kind of like, Joey is good at maximizing his goals in finding romantic partners. They know that my goals are different and different. I just like they would look up my house with no natural light, and they wouldn't be like, Oh, you got screwed. They'd be like, Oh, yeah, you know, you don't care about natural light. You found a good house, except of course, I wouldn't rent it because natural light. So I think that sort of thing can be helped if you can like decouple these kind of like mixed up drives and think that like, Oh, yeah, that the other thing that I would add here is people tend to think that people like people tend to way overweight, this sort of thing in terms of how much other people care. So that's a good thing to realize, too, like, we are each the center of our own universes, right? So we think that like, each of our actions are like really, really impactful and like our friends totally remember this and think about this and just like everyone else has like other things going on in their life. Right. So I think, yeah, letting go of that a little bit, your friends probably already think you're cool. They probably don't need like, you know, you'd have a supermodel to like, continue to think you're cool. You probably you've probably already won that battle to a large extent. So I don't know,

Taimur

that's maybe an aspect I think I think you're kind of on the fence right now you need a few more points. [...] kudos for coming out and like admitting to that other podcasts, I think. Was that was that easy? I mean, I think, yeah, you seem pretty happy with just kind of being pretty open about these things.

Ali

Yeah. I mean, like I in a way, I mean, there's a there's an element of like, honestly, I think so many other people think like this, I do get a bit of a kick in sort of saying saying that. Other people are thinking that I'm that they're not saying and it adds to my think of the one of the things that I know that I value is like transparency and honesty and stuff, and in most things that I do. And so it like ties, ties into that.

Joey

Another thing on the desire modification in terms of like getting experience, I wouldn't be surprised. So that kind of we talked about the spreadsheet, like not working for someone's dating, and it's because they were like, incorrect about one of the parameters. I think people are incorrect about their their parameters all the time. So if there's a parameter that you'd kind of want to be incorrect on, check it, like, can you know, if your bar is a, can you go on a date with one of us like a little bit below a and they're really compatible on every other way, probably, you will find Oh, actually, the bar wasn't strictly this, I'm actually like, pretty happy with with how this is going. So that's another thing that you can do, you can kind of like on a macro side, say like, this is the value I don't really want, I'm going to try compromising on this and try experimenting with people who are a bit below this value. And this is the value I really do want. So I'm gonna hold it quite fixed. So maybe for me, it's like, my, I need to be innovative or someone ethical, I'm not really gonna change that that's going to be a kind of high value. I don't want to experiment with dating someone less ethical, because I don't want to make some of us ethical that that's not the plan. But looks maybe I'm okay, dating someone lower trying to date someone less attractive. And maybe it doesn't work out. Maybe it turns out that that that bar is like quite fixed around that level. But often, I think people are sort of if you were putting in a spreadsheet, I think people have elimination criteria. Like if someone falls below a five on each of these traits, they're gone, where I actually think social relationships are more like multiplicative. So if someone scores quite low on A, but they're really good on all these other things, the relationship can still work quite well. So if that is a model, sometimes experimentation can kind of like reveal that like, yeah, if they're good enough on these other characteristics, then the bar for this one isn't quite as steep. Okay,

Taimur

I've got a question. So we're sorry, just just just take on that same note before me. I think there's also a danger of you bullshitting yourself, I think that what might be also partly going on, is that it makes decision making a lot easier if you have this very easy disqualification criteria, where if they're not basically a supermodel, then well, you know, I'm not attracted to them, you know, therefore, I'm not gonna date this person, it makes it very easy to not put in, you know, it takes sort of effort and work to meet people and build relationships and stuff. You know, if you tell yourself well, you know, they're not they're not supermodel Therefore, I won't go and date with them. It makes life easier. You know, it's easier to kind of sit in your room, play World of Warcraft, make YouTube videos, and say, oh, man, I've got to so hard. I just need I need someone. I just need someone really attractive, man. That's what's holding me back. Like, it's always I mean, it's it's not dignified. But it's it's almost dignified center variable to say that, oh, that's the limiting factor is that I just, I have such a high bar.

Joey

There's a lot of people who are fearful of going on dates who say they're picky. I think that is, like outside view. That's the thing that happens that a lot of people say so. Yeah.

Ali

Okay, so I so the things that I've tried to do to combat this is I sort of set a bar for myself where it's like, if I'm if for example, I'm I'm matched with someone on hinge, then I will, this was all like blood, like, like pre lockdown. But the thing, the thing I was saying in my head, which again, feels feel stupid to admit out loud, but it's like, as long as I think, oh, she's kind of cute, then I will be more than happy to go on at least one date with her. And then after after, did this a couple of times, it was it was that issue of like, Okay, I'm not really sure how you're supposed to feel at the end of the first date. And it's like, Okay, so, you know, how do you decide whether this warrants like a second date? I was like, Well, I'm not really sure I supposed to feel and so after speaking to a few few friends about this, I, they were like, Well, you know, every every everyone that was a little bit kind of nervous on the first day and like second that maybe so maybe like, you know, sending a three date rule whereby, if you're talking to someone and you know, think things were all right, like all right is is the bar to decide whether to go into the second or third date with them. And then and then you figure it out. But then like, the the issue that I'm actually sort of, that I was running into is like each of these intervals, how, like, what are you what do you suppose To be feeling as like the bar for for continuing, because there are friends of mine who are in relationships where it felt it was like, oh, from day one, I just knew. I was like, Okay, great. Well, that's great for you. But I thought of one time when I was 18, I've never had that feeling of oh my god I just knew. And it's like, then at that point, it becomes a, you know, do I? Like, what, what's, what's the feeling here? And which, which, for me, is always just a little bit like, I don't really know, versus what's the sort of the logical thought process here? Ie, you know, we match on values, and we enjoy spending time with one another, and therefore, they should, they should they should continue into like, an exclusive relationship or something like that. But what, do you, like I'm curious, like, what's, what's your heuristic for? Do I like, yeah, enough to warrant to continue this relationship?

Joey

I might sound like a broken record. But I do think a lot of it comes down to like, meta self awareness. So for instance, I think a lot of people get infatuated, very quickly. So they'll like go on a date, they're like, wow, this person's like 15 out of 10. I am 110% sold. And for that sort of person, I mean, if they have felt that rush with, like, half the first date that they go on, you know, probably the other half, you don't go on a second date, because that that feeling is happening pretty often you're you're you're getting that 15. For me, I don't really get infatuation, I kind of have like a negative prior about someone. And then I get like, stole like positive. So I tend to like people more, I tend to like people more, the more I get to know them, which is great. Because it doesn't mean I get to that 15 and make all sorts of crazy decisions. I'm kind of like, okay, yeah, okay, I like this person a little bit more like this person a little bit more in than that kind of like, you know, escalates over time. So I think that's the kind of question you have to ask yourself. And I might exclude the first data point, because the first one you present is very weird and quite strange. But if you're generally not getting a rush, period, you just might not be that sort of person, you're just not might not be the sort of person who gets that huge escalation. So it's more like is this in the top 10% of dates I've been on, maybe it's worth the second date, then, you know, is that second date in the top 25% of second dates I've been on, maybe it's worth a third date or something like that. I would say, for me, the first few days are very much just getting a sense of the person and getting to know them. And I really like coffee dates and talking to people and have like, heavy amounts of social interaction, because of course, I like talking in general. And then it tends to move more towards like, Okay, what would it look like after three dates? Like, what's the long term trajectory of this? We should talk about what we're what we're interested in this sort of aspect. But yeah, I wouldn't let it stop you. I think people have perhaps this like overly Hollywood romanticized notion that, like, you're gonna, like, look at someone be like, Oh, my God. And of course, if you're looking at someone, unless like holding like a protest sign or something like that, all you know, is there is that x, which is already, like, not a very good long term letter. So yeah, I think that's what I would, that's what I do. Like, am I more excited with this date than I have been with many of my other dates? Or am I not, not like kind of a cross comparable with other humans reference class? Like, you know, some people are just more excitable?

Ali

Interesting, because like, a lot of friends have said to me that, well, if you're, if you're in the position kind of three days later, where you're still not sure, then the fact that you're not sure is your answer. And, you know, you don't want to sort of necessarily get into relationship or, you know, whatever with someone that you're not sure about, therefore, you should be sure, after X number of hangouts with this person, as to whether you want to pursue this, and I've never,

Joey

I don't know. Some people are never sure. Some people are never sure, like, you know, there's, there's always some, I think, when I talked to rationalists, about this, in particular, they're like, aware of statistics, right? So, you know, 50% of marriages end in divorce, and, you know, most relationships aren't super long term and that sort of thing. So, I think sometimes that's in the back of the head, even if you're like, yeah, this feels like it's going very well, but like, I'm aware that, you know, this this sort of thing. You know, it feels like it's gonna last forever, most of the time, it's not so like, you can distrust that feeling. So, yeah, I don't think you need to be sure to go on a date with another person. I think it's about how it how it has felt relative to other similar situations. And then, you know, try to benchmark off of that. Awesome.

Ali

That makes a lot of sense. Thank you, for the, for the wisdom of the topic was actually very, very helpful stuff.

Joey

Yeah, I think one weird thing about dating is a bit like happiness, it is one of those things where if you like try to grasp that it can, it can move further away. A model I heard on this is you just want to meet a lot of people, generally not just moment, context by period, and that might very much be a version of your best self. And that's kind of like the recipe to find someone and I think that's like, pretty good. I do think you can be more analytical about it. And you know, online dating has this power of just being able to look through like 1000s and 1000s of people really quickly, which is cool. But I do think if there was like there was like two software mystics, it would be like, make yourself the person that you would want the person to date, kind of thing and and just interact with and meet just a ton of people, especially a ton of people who are kind of in the reference class of people you'd consider dating so you know if it was me, meeting a lot of people who care about ethics You know, that's going to be a good way to meet someone who's eventually going to be a really good long term partner.

Ali

Nice. Very good advice. Um, one one other thing that I'd written down that I'm, I'm curious if you've, I'm sure you've thought about this is, have you found any sort of, sort of, like, quick and easy happiness hacks for your life like things that surprised you in terms of Oh, this thing surprisingly, makes me more happy. And it's actually not that much that effortful, and more people should do the thing.

Joey

Yeah, I have a bunch. That the The first one is tracking your happiness is super important. Because if you don't track it, then of course, you cannot do an experiment and see if it in fact makes you happier. I think people think they kind of can, but they totally can. It's very hard to know how happy you are day to day, you tend to think whatever you're feeling at that minute is how you felt for a really long time. And then you look at that and be like, Wait a second. I'm feeling bad right now. But I felt great all this week. So it's like the first step like how you're tracking happiness every day. Yeah. So my daily tracking routine looks something like I have a happiness score, I have a productivity score. And then I have some hypothesis that I'm testing. So maybe I'm testing waking up earlier in the morning or something like this. And I want to see, what does it do. So I'll do that. And I actually tend to do like a one week experiment. And then if it works, I'll do it later in a one month experiment and see if it works on a longer time span. And if kind of the results are looking good, and it's not statistically significant, cuz you're not getting enough data points, you know, you're getting like seven versus seven. And then you're getting like 30 versus 30, or something like this. But it looks like it's having positive effects on those kind of numbers, the productivity are happy December, that's kind of positive indicator. And I would say some things are like, pretty surprising. Like, I've had friends who've done this and found like quite weird things like, Oh, I need socialization first thing in the morning, or, oh, it really makes a difference if I sleep nine hours instead of eight. Like that's one thing I found, I'm a long sleeper, I hate being a long sleeper, I'd get so much more done if I didn't sleep a long time. But my happiness and productivity and creativity tank, if I don't get really large numbers of hours of sleep, and that's like a good thing to know, again, better to be aware than unaware. And just like kind of chronically tired all the time. So yeah, measuring that sort of thing.

Ali

And then on that note, what is your like? What's the zero? And what's the 10? On your happiness scale? for exactly how do you know what number you're at?

Joey

Yeah, I'm one of those irritating people that like never puts a tab ever almost. So I'll tell you 10 when I when I figured out, but something along the lines of like the best day I've ever had, and the worst I've ever had, or maybe maybe I wouldn't even put a one of the worst I've ever had. But the worst day that's like conceivably reasonable to imagine, in practice, I would say my ratings tend to fluctuate between like a five and a nine. So I don't end up putting like very, very, very low ratings or very high ratings, probably I should like, dynamic range that out a little bit to get kind of more nuanced, but I find that that tends to work well enough. And I just put decimal places if I have to.

Ali

Okay, and do you just decide at the end of the day? Like how happy you generally was I today, or do you fulfill like the Edelbrock questionnaire or whatever. Like, what's your method for this?

Joey

Yeah, slacker slacker method. Just one number. At the end of the day, I do try to do like a quick day recreation idea. Because that that helps you be a little bit like what happened today. This, this, this this this? Okay, yeah, I think this is my average happiness rating. I think you can get more precision. But depending on what level of experiments you're doing, like day to day, precision is pretty useful. And I'm not experimenting with things that are like done in an hour very often, that's normally over days and weeks and that sort of thing. So that's one happiness thing. sec. Second happiness act once you've measured stuff, what once you're measuring stuff, things that will come up for almost everybody. People chronically undervalue friendship. time spent with friends is like, ridiculously productive. And people just people just don't, don't do it. Right. Like, you hear people moving to different city for jobs all the time you hear people moving to different city for romantic partners all the time, you almost never hear someone moving for a friend group. From a happiness perspective, that friend group is like more important than the job or the romantic relationship. So I think in general, prioritizing friends, valuing friendship making time for that sort of thing. Super, super valuable. I yeah. When I think about cities, so obviously, I think about cities, mostly from a helpfulness perspective, what's Where's triage mentorship be the best, but when I think of it from a personal perspective, it is all about the people. Almost everything else like a rounding error, like okay, London's water is kind of crappy, Vancouver's water's kind of good, who cares? It's mostly about the quality of social interactions that you can get there. So I think that is super neglected by people. learning some sort of stoicism and some sort of like letting go type techniques, I think are very, very valuable. And I think people sometimes put this on like a false dichotomy where it's like, you're either like perfectly stoic, or you're normal. And I think just moving yourself a little bit up on the spectrum. So you can just let go of some things that can be very, very useful. Yeah, I'm looking at my my happiness pillars that I came up with. So I actually have nine pillars of sub goals that relate to my happiness. Friends, we talked about letting go we talked about partnering with best friend we talked about that's one of my those are my three and social relations, focusing on experience. Lots of evidence suggesting this. So creating some sort of novelty in your life. And this is funny from a guy who structures his meals the same every single week. But I don't think novelty and food are great novelty, new experience. So I tried to do one thing that's kind of like novel every every Sunday or something like that. Creating calm, creating flow, both those are really good if you have little introductions of them throughout the day, and then attitude. So optimism antifragility and cultivating 90/10 on most goals are all things that I think correlate quite nicely to this attitudinal benefit and creating more happiness.

Ali

90/10, meaning you'll do it 90% of the time, and you'll forget about it 10% of the time,

Joey

basically, being that the that I'm setting more things to satisficing goals. So not trying to maximize health, just trying to like Yep, this is good enough for health and that sort of thing. That does tend to be a good strategy for happiness is more satisficing goals less maximizing ones

Taimur

it sounds like you've really got it all figured out. Does it? Does it feel that? Does it feel that way internally for you?

Joey

Ah, I mean, so there's a very big difference between having this on a Google doc and consistently. Exactly,

Taimur

exactly, yeah.

Joey

So I have a color coded for how well I'm doing on each of these goals. Right. So, you know, I'm in a really good relationship so that partners one might be like green, but friends, you're some close contacts prioritize them. I haven't like done a great job on that. So that's, that's like a red red bar. I've only been okay on that. So

Taimur

implicitly shizzing on your friends right now?

Joey

No, it's it's somewhat some of us to do a circumstance. So I did move to from Vancouver to London. So I lost a bunch of ties there. And then of course, London had the pandemic. So this is like, out of my control. But But some of this is just, I've just been busy. So it's been, it's been hard to find the time to do as much friendship prioritization as I would like to do. I think, if I was an optimal agent, I would do a little bit more of that. So yeah, I mean, a lot of these, I probably have like a third in green, a third in yellow, and a third in red. So I'm not I'm not maximizing all these goals. Some are easier than others, you know, it's easier to sleep the right amount of hours than it is to exercise the exact amount that I want. You know, so some some goals are, are easier than others. Yeah. Yeah, yep. Yeah. I wonder, wonder what, what, which one of these ones are forgotten a lot. I think one thing that I've changed my views on quite a bit is the importance of the importance of cultivating atmospheres. So I used to think, atmospheres are kind of silly, like, I'm sure I can just be happy at any place to be calm at any place and that sort of thing. And then I thought, Okay, why am I like forcing myself to be calm in a not calm room, when I can buy like a $10 light bulb, that makes it a lot more calm. So I think sometimes, sometimes you want to work with your rationality, if it's easier to kind of like to solve the environment than solve your, your mental thing. So for instance, with creating calm, creating calm space, I have a nice little place that's like lit by soft, orange fairy lights and kind of like, immediately activates like a calming mentality and that sort of thing. So I think sometimes people don't like maybe it seems a little bit cheesy or something for like, theme, a room or theme, a corner in a certain way. But I think if it cultivates an attitude in yourself that you want to cultivate more, that's often worth the investment.

Taimur

Yeah, this is something that I I sort of really started using as well, because I think I think like, I'm just inherently very sensitive to how things are designed and kind of the, the sort of aesthetic beauty around me. And I think it's, you know, I think it's kind of stupid. And so I'll be like, Well, no, I should be able to be like, perfectly productive. sitting on the sofa in a messy room versus, you know, or whatever. But like, it just makes such a huge difference that Yeah, now I'm much more happy to give into it and say, okay, like, I need a nice place.

Joey

What's it's about which one's easier to change? Yeah. I don't know. If you're frustrated that the suns in the sky. Like that's a pretty difficult thing to change, you're probably gonna have to change your own brain on that. If you're frustrated that like your your light is really white and makes everything look kind of bad. Like that's actually pretty easy to change. She's probably just seems like digging into your psychology article. I

Taimur

actually have to head off guys. Um, but don't stop. stop us from continuing. Joey, great. Great to meet you virtually. We'll hangout once it's legal.

Joey

Yes, I agree. I miss miss 3d humans are as good as we can get for now.

Taimur

2D is pretty great.

Joey

Alright, see ya read it beats the heck out of out of nothing.

Ali

Cool. But so enjoy what we have you ever hear? We got a few more minutes.

Joey

Yeah. Sweet.

Ali

So one of the things I wanted, I wanted to ask you about So essentially, I wonder if I can talk you through my sort of rough first draft thesis for my book, and you can kind of suggest things I would, I would love to do that. Okay, cool. So one way that we're approaching it now is imagining this, this, okay? So we all want to be successful, whatever success means to us. Generally, that that involves doing the things that we want to have done. for lots of us want to have written a book. Lots of us want to have taken our friendships more seriously, but it's actually like like doing the thing itself that that

Joey

compartment. Yeah,

Ali

yeah. And so, especially given that, that we live in an age of distraction, where we've got Netflix, we've got our phones, especially because usually the things that the these things that we need to do that we want to have done usually involves some level of work and sort of some level of energy investment. And even sometimes this might just be really, really boring. We often default to doing the easy thing rather than doing doing the hard thing. Now, some, some authors will, will tell you that the solution to this problem is to throw away your phone, they will say if you throw away your phone, you'll become a digital minimalist, you'll become indestructible, you'll suddenly magically be able to get things done. But if you actually talk to people who are quite successful, productive, happy, yes, there's an extent to which you know, that they, they sort of throw away their phone, but most people in that position have actually found a way to enjoy the things that they're doing. To make it far more likely that they'll actually do them. You don't often hear people say that, you know, the the journey was was suffering and the end goal was worth it. And when you do like, somewhat like Muhammad Ali says, like, you know, 10 years of suffering for that holding up that trophy, we probably most of us probably wouldn't want that particular lifestyle where it's like, actually 10 years of suffering to get to the trophy. And so, whenever people ask me, like, How are you so productive? You do ABCD and E, you know, how do you do it? The real answer is not something to is not that I throw away my phone. And the real answer isn't that I've got the perfect to do list management system. It's that I just find, I pick stuff that I enjoy doing. And B I find ways to enjoy the things that I'm doing, even if they're not inherently fun. And so the thesis for the book is that this book is a practical guide on how to make the things that you're doing more fun, so that you actually are more likely to do them. Cool. How does that sound is like sort of a top level summary.

Joey

Yeah, conceptually sounds very good. I do you think that a lot of people imagine productivity is like, like pounding through the wall working through it. And I do think you have to be a lot more clever than that. Like, it's, it's more about designing, designing it to be fun designing it to be easy designing to be to be the default. So I'm sympathetic to this. All the productive people I know, on phones, you know, they do have strategies to maybe control the amount of time that they spend there, or that sort of thing. But yeah, I don't think I think an interesting analogy here is I had a friend and my friend were both like, Hey, we want to be more productive. And we were like, maybe we should quit video games, because we're both playing video games at the time. And this was quite quite young, in high school or something like this. And I quit video games. And the next funnest thing was the work that I was aiming to do, because I was doing charity work, everything like that. He quit video games, and the next one thing was Netflix. And then he put Netflix and the next one, his thing was scrolling through social media. So that's, that's, for some people, I think there's like 25 things I had of that productive thing that you need to do. And it's very hard then to just like, cut out all 25 things that beat it. But for other people, say, like writing a book or whatever is like pretty high up on your list, then maybe you can get some benefits from kind of like, yeah, putting the phone out of arm's reach.

Ali

Okay, cool. And then, in terms of sort of practical ways to make things fun, you know, there's the standard approach of like gamification and short feedback loops and making something sufficiently challenging so that you are more likely to get into flow state and having some level of autonomy or ownership over the thing that you're doing in whatever way that might be to, which makes it more fun. Things like having a meaningful destination while working towards something that feels purposeful, because, you know, if ultimately, if the thing you're doing is actually meaningless, then it's there's only so much dopamine hacking that you can do to make it more fun, as things like incorporating a social element into it to sort of get that if like doing doing something with friends is generally more fun than doing it on your own. Thinking about like things like environment design, like like, for me, working at a clean desk is twice as fun as working on a dirty desk. And so just like recognizing, okay, cool. Let's clean the desk or even things like when I was studying for exams, like he had to go into a different library each day, like add some novelty, some variety to the otherwise monotonous thing of studying for exams. Are there any other sort of broad categories slash examples that come to your mind of things, practical things that we can do to make what might look like work and boring on the surface actually feel more enjoyable?

Joey

Yeah. Again, on the kind of psychology, kind of convincing yourself mindset, I just think identifying as someone who finds x fun, makes it makes it more fun. Interesting. So if you're like, I am a writer, I enjoy writing. And you describe that in social situations, I actually do find you enjoy writing more, because your brain is like, Oh, yeah, okay, cool. I am I am a writer. I enjoy writing. That's, that's, that's the thing that that's what's going on. So that's, that's quite a weird one. associative stuff. So you mentioned going to the library, I think you can do that even more. I know a friend who like would keep a bowl of candies on their desk. And if they did, like a particularly creative idea, they just like take a candy and it's kind of like, apparently conditioning themselves to like creative ideas or to get some intrinsic enjoyment out of that. Yeah, I wonder what else comes to mind in terms of ways of designing your system? Hmm. So one thing we talked about is upfront energy to experiment and find the right thing. I think a lot of time, you can do this. So, for instance, say you drive to work, okay? Now there's a lot of different ways to get to work. And it is probably not going to be that fun to test out 20 different ways. But it might be quite fun. Once you find a way that is actually fun. So you're like, Okay, cool. I'm going to try taking the bus. Nope, I don't like the bus. I'm going to try walking takes too long. Oh, no, I'm gonna try electric scooter. Oh, actually everything like electric scooter. That's super cool. So I think if you can tell yourself like, I don't need willpower forever, I just need willpower to experiment. And if you find joy in experimenting even better than you really set, and then you find the activity that is going to be reoccurring physical activity is another good example of this. Use your willpower to try 10 different things. Don't use your willpower to go to something you hate 10 times. And then hopefully you find one that can kind of like slot into Oh, I actually liked doing team sports, or whatever that thing is. And that kind of like perpetuates itself.

Ali

And, and speaking of speaking of willpower, like we have this, this, this phenomenon that often, even if we like something, even if we enjoy it, there's like still some level of friction, some level of activation energy that we need to do to do the thing. I like a colorful example is that most people would say that they enjoy sex. But often it's like, oh, it's just it always makes it not worth it. So any any thoughts on how like, if we've decided we want to do something we can then bring ourselves to get started with doing the thing cuz often kind of getting started is the hardest part. And once you're doing it's like, okay, that's actually quite fun.

Joey

Yeah, well, you've probably heard the brush one teeth, a brush one tooth concept. And the idea of that is basically just you're telling yourself, you only have to do the absolute minimum sort of thing, I do that all the time, I have a 10 minute workout is pretty intense. I tell myself, if I get through the first 30 seconds, then I can stop. But I almost never do, I would say nine times out of 10, I finish the whole workout. Once I've done you know the first set of push ups or whatever. So that's one thing. The other thing is associative. So I like caffeine. I like Diet Coke. That's how my caffeine injections work at the moment. I told myself, if I get up to do a diet coke that I need to get a diet coke that I have to do that the 10 minute workout. So I've kind of tied them together. So when I get up, I'm not getting up to do my 10 minute workout I'm getting up to get to go. And then I have now I'm standing might as well do the 10 minute workout. So sometimes cushioning yet at the beginning or end with like a little a little and positive inflection point can can be a way to kind of like surround that sort of thing. And if you tie it like oh, I only ever have coke when I do my workout, then it could be net worthwhile. And then in terms of activation, also, if you do get rid of the default activation and make something else that the default activation. So one thing I have done, not now because it's weird and COVID. But I do often leave my computer at the office. Because I find if I bring my computer home, the default action is something on the computer and I don't want to spend too much time on a computer. And if I leave the office technically and do stuff on my phone, but use my phone drives me nuts, it's tiny screen, it's really crappy. So I tend to read a lot more books. And that is actually happier even if the energy to go and find a book and be like, Oh, do I actually want to read this book is more intensive. So that's that's another thing if you if if that works very well, if there's one thing between you and the goal that you want to do, it doesn't work that well. Yeah, it's like 25th down the list, because then you have to remove a heck of a lot of things. Sweet. Thank you. That's been very helpful and wonder what else can you make fun? Oh, yeah, actually, another one, they can make fun. I think sometimes purchases can help. So for instance, I noticed that I was doing some little drawings. And I was like, Yeah, I kind of like doing these drawings. But I hate that I always have to find some paper and the papers on the other side of the house and this sort of thing. So I bought like a stupid little notebook. I actually have it, like right here, like five pound notebook from Amazon. And I just like writing in the notebook. It feels nicer than doing that. And again, could I hack my brain to treat mobile paper? The same with notebook like Yeah, probably. But it's a lot easier just to buy $5 motivational thing I think sometimes people go too far on this for they buy like, you know, huge expensive home gym sets. But if there's a purchase for under 10 pounds, that will make the activation feel a lot smoother. Yeah, then find that.

Ali

Yeah, that I very much use that as well, where like, you know, just having having a nice notebook to write on makes me far more likely to write in it. AndI want to pay for I did the thing.

Joey

It seems so ridiculous that our brain is that hackable, but better better to know that it is and use it to your advantage and that sort of thing. Yeah,

Ali

I find this applies to certain apps as well, like the app Notion is very pleasurable to use when it's not really slow, with like emojis and colors and like, Oh, I'm more likely to spend time in here. And this is where I do my work planning out videos. So the fact that it's pretty makes me more likely to want to do it. Okay, cool. Let's let's just go with that.

Joey

Yeah, putting environmental change stuff. So one thing we haven't talked about at all is symbolism. I think symbolism can be like, quite useful. Okay? So for example, for the laptop thing, one of the laptop at work, but it's, it's kind of hard to leave the laptop at work. So I have this little elephant here, which I got from Malawi, when visiting Lucia, actually, and I put it on top of my laptop is kind of like a guard of the laptop. And again, it's like a small physical object, but it basically reminds me like, Oh, yes, it is my like, wiser elephant self that does not want me to take this laptop home. And it's a deliberate symbol for that exact purpose. And that's why it's an elephant versus any other animal. And I think sometimes you can tie this symbolism into things that that, yeah, make it feel more motivational or fonder or this sort of thing. If you make it more like, you know, the sort of person that I want to be with would do this. I picked a spirit animal for that very reason. I mean, it's a very funny sort of thing to do. But I figured, and I think that it has been true that by picking one I kind of like aspirationally move in that direction a little bit more. And I think the same goes for a person. Like, if you have a person you think of very well, and you're like, what would x person do in that situation? Like, kind of like, set your brain on the right track?

Ali

Yeah. So on this on this note of sort of, like making the stuff that we do more, more and more enjoyable. One, one sort of category of criticism that I'm trying to try to think about is, yeah, well, not everything can be fun 100% of the time, to which my current responses? Yeah, I agree. Sometimes we do have to use willpower. Like, my battle for this is generally, if something is fun, we generally don't need to use willpower to do it. Like most of us don't need willpower to watch Netflix. But we need willpower to do the thing to do something that feels hard, or it's less fun, like doing the workout, for example. And, sure, some of the time, we actually have to use our willpower, but it would be nice if, if we, if we could hack our brains into enjoying the thing more by doing all these different different techniques such that maybe only in 10% of cases, we actually had to grit it, you know, and make ourselves do it. Does that really resonate? Or any other way that you think about this?

Joey

Yeah, I think that's true. I mean, there's been a lot of debate about whether willpower is like a muscle when you can, like, get better at willpower, or whether it just gets fatigued. And that's how it's like muscle and it's not like a muscle in terms of you can actually build it up. Systems systems tend to be willpower, you know, willpower is soft, and and, and inconsistent, and will work for you sometimes in other ways. I think using willpower to initially set up systems is like a better better success strategy. And yeah, can you make everything fun? No. But can you make everything fun? Or, or more fun? Yes, you definitely can. You know, even if it's like, like, say, I hate doing dishes, which, which I do. Can I listen to my favorite podcast only when I'm doing dishes? And now it's like, kind of fun? And like, yeah, of course, I could listen to that podcast lying down in bed, that would be much more fun. But if I've kind of like tied them together, they're close enough that the action on aggregate is is fairly enjoyable.

Ali

Hmm. I like that. Can you make everything fun? No, but you can make everything more fun. Yeah.

Joey

And it's about malfunctioning in life and this sort of thing? Yeah, you kind of set it up, set it up to be there. One thing that people don't think about with fun stuff, actually, this is kind of like a social answer. Sometimes you can trade tasks with people and there's like Win-Win trades out there. I think a lot more often than people think. So people just naturally when they're like part of a family, like, you know, the kids might do A the parents might do B and C. But I actually think this can happen even like roommates like for instance, I find cleaning kitchens like particularly gross because I have different food sensitivities and don't like it. And I have more tolerance for cleaning bathrooms. Weird. I don't know why that is the way it is. So whenever I have a roommate, I'm like, Hey, what's your what's your view on how much you'd like clean kitchen for bathrooms. I'm happy to make that trade if you are. And I think that sometimes with something that is just unfindable you just can't move it around. Sometimes you can trade it with something that you can make fun. So maybe you do really like your podcast. This is you actually don't mind as much as who cares, because you're really into your podcast. But you can't listen to a podcast? Well vacuuming because it's too loud. So you know that there are other people with other optimization algorithms. And that makes life a heck of a lot easier if you have a bit of flex to to kind of trade tasks around.

Ali

Is there anything you find helpful on the on the on the on the dishes front? Some people would say that, hey, you know, listening to a podcast makes makes dishes more fun. I'm broadly in that camp. But then other people would say that being so mindful about doing the dishes, that you're fully focused on the task at hand and you're fully present, that actually makes dishes more fun than being than distracting yourself by listening to a podcast. My theory on this is, you know, try both see which one works for you. I prefer the podcast personally. But hey, sure, if you if you get mindful joy out of washing the dishes, then you know, more power to you.

Joey

Yeah, I think some people do. I think some people like this sometimes I think this is a post hoc rationalization to like, why they haven't set up a podcast, a home or that sort of thing. It's like almost like the activation energy for setting up a system that's better than like, No, no, but I kind of like this. I like the triangle. I think if you try both, like can't can't hurt to try more systems and then implement the systems that work so that they're more default more consistent. Yeah. Nice. Yeah. I think in general, like happiness experiments and productivity experiments and these sort of things, just like trying out a lot of stuff and doing it more if it seems to be working is like, way under utilized in the world.

Ali

Yeah, definitely. It's like, like right now. It's, it's, it's only because you mentioned the happiness thing that I've noticed it, it's like, last night, I got like five hours of sleep. And currently, there is like a haze, and like sort of front front of my head and is like, I'm enjoying this conversation. But I would, I would enjoy the conversation more if I had not been stupid and stayed up before o'clock in the morning reading book, which I actually could have just read tonight instead. So it's like recognizing that and then telling myself that not as, as good as this Autobiography of Andre Agassi is like, you can still he's gonna be there.

Joey

Yeah, no, I think I think that's, that's a big problem. I mean, one of the constant challenges we deal with, right? Is we care about our current selves, much more than our future selves. So we're kind of like, yeah, that's a problem for tomorrow Joey, like, screw that guy. I'm gonna, I'm gonna leave him with dirty dishes or that sort of thing. But of course, when you're tomorrow, you care about yourself as much. So I actually think trying to like, steep like, curve off that a little bit so that you care about an hour of your time a week from now, as much as you carve out an hour, overtime now makes life so much easier. And what it normally results in is you're doing really heavy duty upfront time on a bunch of things. But then your life is just super easy, right? So you've like, you've tried all the different things, you've done all the analysis, and then you're just doing this really awesome default thing all the time. And I think that, yeah, if there was like a meta hack, outside of measuring your stuff, and experimenting with stuff, if you can find ways to like level your, your perception of your own value of time, a little bit more. Wow, that makes that makes a huge difference. And I think that is how you get ahead of the game. And like part of why I have so many things figured out is I just took the time to do it really well, once upfront. And now I can kind of write that for a long time. Like, I don't have to re evaluate. Oh, God, how do I make myself healthier? Like people, some people think about how they make themselves healthier, healthier, like every single week? And I don't, because I did it really thoroughly thoughtfully, once looked up a whole bunch of research. And now I have right here, cool sleep eight plus hours. It's just right on the three pillars.

Ali

Nice. Yeah, I think this upfront, upfront making the choice of plot applies to so much other stuff as well. At the moment, we're wrapping up a live cohort at my part time youtuber Academy, where you know, the real aim is to tell people that like if you want to succeed on YouTube, the only habit you have to build is being able to consistently put out one video a week. And, you know, that's a real struggle for a lot of people, especially with day jobs and things like that. But often, it's like it, like an enormous amount of willpower goes into the decision to start. And then once you once you start and you commit that, alright, I have decided to take YouTube seriously, I've decided to spend 3000 pounds on camera gear. This means that for the next two years, I'm going to put out a video week and it's not an option, therefore, I don't even need to think about it. It's just, it's not going to work. You just do it. Whether or not you feel like it is is not an option. It's just hate it.

Joey

Yeah, well, in some ways, deciding thoroughly upfront, takes away the amount of time you're spending on decisions. Like it sounds funny because you're like God, you have the most analytical, frickin food spreadsheet I've ever seen. But yet, I probably spent less time over the course of a year thinking about food than almost anyone. I just spent it all at the very beginning. Kind of rode off that for a really long time. Yeah. So yeah, I think I think that's an optimize. One thing that I do think though, is again, kind of like working with your mental weaknesses. If you know you have this, like, dilapidated view of your future selves, you can set yourself up for that. So like, I know that if there was junk food in the house, it is much easier for me to eat junk food, where I really hate buying junk food. I'm like, Man, I'm spending money on something that is actually bad for me like that is that that's clearly the point at which to intervene. And it's because current Joey doesn't really want chocolate feature Joey does but future Joy has no choice because current Joey is making the grocery order now and you know, he will get it in seven days and you have to deal with whatever comes in the basket. So if you notice flaws or biases or mistakes, trying to jujitsu, those to work to your advantage can also be a really good thing cuz we have them all over the place. Right? So knowing that that future jury will think aboc How do I do that? We talked about this with value draft right? Like, I am not sure that future jury will be as ethical as current Joey. As such, I want to do things that make it kind of inconvenient for me to not be ethical. Like, you know, it'd be nice if I had a job that gave me great skills for a charitable community but less great skills for random jobs would just make me lots of money. Like that's cool.

Ali

Yeah. Oh, things like you know, for example, even even taking into giving what we can pledge and doing it publicly. So now it's like, actively socially embarrassing if I don't do this for the rest of my life, because I know that okay, well, maybe in the future, I might be thinking well, you know, that extra 10% would be useful for my you know, exactly. For the next holiday or, or whatever. It's like no, that is now too great to not do it.

Joey

Another system and I think this is perfect with donations and exactly the given account pledges, it's kind of like drawing this line in the sand. So I was looking up at weight gain because I was gaining a bit of weight, start to get a little bit less healthy. But I was gaining weight really slowly. But then I looked at these statistics. And it basically showed that everyone gains weight really slowly. Not everyone, but a lot of people. And they kind of like, get a pound here appear here, here and slowly over time, eventually get to kind of an unhealthy weight that they're not they're not happy with. So I drew an entirely arbitrary line in the sand, like, this is the weight that I care about. If I have a pound over this week, I'm going to actively work on it right then. And it was very easy to kind of draw that line when thinking at that point, like, Oh, hey, here's, here's a future thing that future Joey is gonna work with. This isn't the exact line that I'm at right now. But it's kind of this this arbitrary thing. But you have to be you have to be strict on it. You can't rationalize. And once you get to that, I'm like, well, I'll move the line a little bit. So I do think some of these artificial lines in the sand, especially artificial lines that constrict future you can be really good, because future use is a rationalizing genius. And we'll try to come up with all sorts of ways to fudge around it. But if you're like, no, that's the line. That's just how it is, then, you can it's funny, I'm very consequential, but I think being deontological, about those sorts of things lead to better outcomes. So it's kind of like meta, meta, consequential,

Ali

amazing. Alright, Jerry, thank you so much. It's been an absolute delight. I've learned so much stuff. When taking copious notes, like a sort of little index card thing. I'd love to have a chat with you at some other point, maybe in a few weeks, two months, when my outline is more fleshed out and just sort of running you through the structuring because of you. I'm sure you can suggest examples or things along the way.

Joey

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I'd be I'd be super keen on that. I'm definitely, I'm very far on the instrumental side of rationality. So things that help the goals get accomplished. That's what I'm voting down for. I'm, I'm quite a fan of Yeah, tricking your brain or your body or whatever, into getting the things you want them done. And I think fun is a very, very good pathway to doing that.

Ali

Amazing. Where can people find you contact you? If you're open to that sort of thing? If someone has listened to the end of this three hour long podcast as probably is the stuff that you talk about? Like where can they find more of your stuff?

Joey

Yeah, yeah, no, no, I should actually add a couple words like I'm a very extreme effective altruist in terms of quantification, terms of ethics, in terms of the thing, you can be part of the movement with way softer engagements, like donating 10% of your income. That's great. You don't have to live off the global GDP. I'm just kind of like this weird, anomalous example of kind of things taking to the extreme. So yeah, so charityentrepreneurship.com is, is the best place to go get in contact with me and that sort of thing. I think my emails kicking around that website somewhere. But that's what I'm always excited to talk to entrepreneurs, I think people who are productivity orientated, and optimizing, orientated, and medicine orientated as well, are all like very good fits to potentially found impactful organizations. So always keen to chat to people who are considering that as a possible career path or that sort of thing or want to make a difference with their lives, you know, on the more ethical side of things, but yeah, that that's, that's it? Yeah. Don't don't take anything I say as purely representative of people who do charity entrepreneurship, or EA. I'm way, way off from the bell curve on both of those in various ways?

Ali

I think and if people want to want to contact you, is there an email on charity entrepreneurship, or do you prefer Twitter or what? Yeah,

Joey

it's joey@charityentrepreneurship.com easy. That will go to that box.

Ali

Fantastic. All right, Joey. Thanks very much for joining podcast, everyone. Thanks for listening. And we'll see you next time. Bye bye.

Joey

Perfect. Thanks.

Ali

That's it for this week. Thank you for listening.

Taimur

If you liked this episode, please leave us a review on Apple podcasts on the apple podcast website. If you're not using an iPhone, there's a link in the show notes.

Ali

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Taimur

Yeah, if you're up for having your voice played on the podcast and your question being the springboard for our discussion, email us an audio file mp3 or voice notes to hi@notoverthinking.com.