Vizi Andrei — The Way of the Tinkerer (EP.262)
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Hi, I'm Jim O'Shaughnessy and welcome to Infinite Loops.

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Well, hello, everybody. It's Jim O'Shaughnessy with yet another Infinite Loops. Today is old home week here on Infinite Loops because I have a former colleague who's gone on to do amazing things. Vizzy Andre runs the Sovereign Artist Program, dedicating to helping creatives develop sustainable business models. He's also the author of Sovereign Artist, Managing

Meditations on Lifestyle Design. Visi, welcome. Good to see you. Thanks a lot for inviting me, Jim. It's a pleasure. And I really appreciate that you have mentioned the fact that we work together. And I'd like to take a moment to say that it's been one of the best projects I've worked with.

In the sense that, yeah, of course, I learned a lot from you and the other colleagues. And what's really important, people need to know, Jim, as he portrays himself online, he's exactly the same when it comes to working with him. So yeah, I just wanted to mention that.

That is very kind of you. I have an entire family who would vehemently disagree, but thank you very much for saying it anyway. Tell me about the book. I've read it. I loved it, but many in our audience probably haven't and are probably not aware of the way you approach life. So let's start with the book.

Well, yeah, about the book. It's something that I've been working on for a very long period of time. And I have a very weird approach when it comes to my artistic projects. I don't recommend it to anyone who really wants to make a living as an artist. But for instance, in my pseudo business pursuits, to call them so, I try to be as systematic, as efficient and productive as possible.

But when it comes to my artistic project, I prioritize serendipity, creativity, inspiration, even slowness and procrastination. So it took me, I think, five years to finish this book because I simply decided to work on it whenever I felt like it. I really believe when you read a book, you feel the emotions behind it.

And I wanted the reader to understand that I had a lot of fun writing it. A couple of questions spring from that. Like, do you intentionally procrastinate or is it just kind of a natural thing? Because you also talk about the Sicilian dream, right? And so maybe explain the Sicilian dream to our listeners and viewers.

This is a very good question. I don't think I intentionally choose procrastination. I think you learn throughout the years how to approach it, how to interpret this signal because procrastination, I think it's a signal. And sometimes it has to do with your ability or inability to really do the work or it tries to tell you, hey, maybe what you are working on is not really something you should be working on.

Maybe there's something that you can change about your artistic projects and etc. But when it comes to the Sicilian dream, yeah, well, everyone is very familiar with the American dream. And without going into politics, I think the US is leading when it comes to innovation and tech and everything. It's an example when it comes to how the world should think about the future.

But I think there are a couple of problems when it comes to the hustle culture, for instance, which is something I don't resonate with. I think you had a guest a few months ago, Paul Millard, right? He wrote The Pathless Path. He's one of the very few creators that I fully resonate with when it comes to how we see this relationship between work and leisure, how we see lifestyle design.

So essentially, the Sicilian dream, to be very concise about it, is a work and leisure structure where hard work and deep work spring from leisure, from procrastination. So instead of working hard by default, you rest by default and you try to create a very high quality leisure in your life.

So at some point, hard work and deep work will be a natural consequence of that. So give me a couple of specifics for people who are like, oh, I really like that idea as a creative. Like specifically, what does a day look like for somebody who's kind of mastered the Sicilian dream or approach to creativity? Yeah.

So let's think about high quality leisure activities or rather what are some not high quality leisure activities. I think when we think about leisure, we think about scrolling Instagram or spending time on TikTok or maybe watching Netflix.

This is the problem because when you have leisure activities that are not really of quality, then of course your work will likely not be of quality. And I don't really want to give a recipe when it comes to what leisure activities are really insanely beneficial, but when it comes to my lifestyle...

I think it's about taking long walks in nature and in towns that are incredibly beautiful, if possible. I think it's about taking the time to sip some high quality wine, although not necessarily very expensive, with your fiance and your friends.

I think it's about reading a very good book and really taking the time to absorb it. I think it's taking the time to go see maybe a very nice movie. So not just going to watch a movie just because this is what you should be doing on a Friday evening. Yeah, these are some examples. And when...

At least this is what applies to me when I learn how to be very responsible about my leisure activities. So in a way, treating them like an obligation. This is how I come up with creative ideas about what I can do work-wise. And that's where the magic happens, I think.

And, you know, what happened because you mentioned the word leisure and you mentioned what might pop into people's minds when they think of that word and scrolling social media or watching Netflix, et cetera. Why do you think that we started to attach a negative connotation to leisure and

Whereas you point out that, you know, leisure equals school, I think it was in Greek. Leisure equals learning. What do you think happened that made people kind of like anti-leisure? You mentioned hustle culture, and I'm sure that's part of it. But what else? Is it that people are just really afraid to appear?

I'm a big foe of busyness, being busy just to be busy. I'm not afraid of being busy, but like seeking out activities so that I appear busy to others, I absolutely don't resonate with. What do you think happened?

I actually added a few notes in my book about that thing. This is what I learned from you. And I said, Jim taught me that you should hate business so much to the extent that you should make a habit not to be busy as a constitution of your business. So because I think I said something along the lines that it's a very outdated way to lie about your productivity being busy. Yeah.

I love that. And I think you're right, actually. I think that a lot of people equate being busy with being effective.

And there sometimes might be a connection between those two, but often there is not. And so people overpack their schedule with activities to appear busy to others. I think that's my main problem with it. It's performance art, really. It's like, look at how busy I am. Look at my calendar. I can't, oh my goodness, I couldn't pop.

possibly talk to you because I have a call scheduled every 15 minutes. I generally suspect that that is performative and probably a direct result of, you know, the hustle culture problem

That's certainly prevalent in the United States and elsewhere, but we're kind of the ground zero for hustle culture here in the U.S. You have a course that helps creatives with this. So let's say you get a real hard case who takes your course and you're dealing with him or her and they are kind of like the embodiment of problems, i.e. they over-optimize, they're

They're every aspect of their life. You know, the people I'm talking about, they they wear the rings, they sleep on the beds that tell them how they slept. They, you know, have morning routines that they won't deviate from. Like, what would be your first step with that kind of candidate?

This is a very difficult question in theory, but in practice with these kind of creators or aspiring creators or entrepreneurs, I find it very easy to deal with because it's just a psychological shift that they make. So it's a mindset shift.

And once they do it, because they already have the hustle culture system embedded in their psychology, for them, then it's actually quite easy, paradoxically, to use the systems that I talk about. Although the Sovereign Artist is not really the same as my book. It's a completely different scenario. Because my book, although it has the same title as my program, they don't really have much in common. So in the Sovereign Artist program...

I'd rather try to tell people something along the lines of the Gregory Shuffle that you have been talking about a while. So let me map it out for you. Would it be interesting? Please, I'd love it. So what I have noticed is that, for instance, at the beginning of the internet, 30 years ago or so, if, for instance, you were an aspiring entrepreneur or an aspiring businessman, let's say you wanted to open up a business

graphic design agency, although I'm pretty sure that that wasn't a thing back then. But let's say you wanted to do that. How would that have been possible? Well, you have to hire a bunch of people, have to invest quite a lot of money. Maybe you needed to find a place that you can rent to create an office for that. And yeah, hopefully with a lot of fingering, with plenty of money and energy that you are

that you are using, hopefully you will become an entrepreneur, a businessman, something along those lines. So basically, there are two kinds of people. Either you wanted to become an entrepreneur, a businessman, or you were employed. So there wasn't anything in between that you could leverage. Now, as technology has progressed so much in the past when it comes to software, when it comes to infrastructure, when it comes to internet,

I like to call them the pseudo-entrepreneurs, the creator, the freelancer, the minimalist entrepreneur. And suddenly you can make the transition sustainably from being employed, for instance, or maybe you are a student, maybe you start your journey towards entrepreneurship early on in your life.

You can make the transition sustainably. You are employed. Maybe you have something, some sort of gigs, a few projects here and there. So you are sort of a freelancer, sort of. And then maybe you're also a creator because the internet allows you to become a creator. And all of these projects combined at some point help you to scale. Maybe you can negotiate your current job. And now...

We have these steps that we could take. We can be employed, then we can be a freelancer, then we can be a creator, then we can be a minimalist entrepreneur. And then hopefully, hopefully we can be entrepreneurs by all means or business people, if you know what I mean. So I think this is something revolutionary that a lot of people don't realize that

It's basically a democracy that has been created when it comes to building projects online. I think this is the beauty of the internet. This is the massive beauty of the internet. I'm sure there are many other aspects that I'm missing, but to me, that's insane.

Yeah. Having done it both ways, I can attest to what you said. When I formed my first company in 1987, when I was 27 years old, it literally took months because I had to, nothing was digital. Everything was in real atom space.

So you couldn't simply whip up an LLC. You had to go to the lawyers, meet with the lawyers multiple times. Then if you wanted a brochure, I still remember the brochure for that company.

I went to marble queries to take photographs because I wanted the thing to be kind of very classical looking. And so I spent weeks, now maybe that's my obsessive nature, but I spent weeks looking for kind of the perfect piece of marble to photograph and then send to the graphic design firm, you mentioned, that I had hired. But like everything was...

Very viscous. It was not easy. It was very difficult to actually form a company. Today, like literally I could...

tap out something on my cell phone here and we'd have an LLC, you know, together all set up before the end of the day. Do you think that it's some sort of cultural overlay or, you know, cultural leg that is planting in people's minds that, oh, really, it's hard and I can't do that?

And if that's the case, it would surprise me for younger people like yourself because you didn't have to experience any of that. Is it just maybe your parents' or your grandparents' influence? What do you think? I think you just asked one of the most important questions of the 21st century, or at least when it comes to the Internet. Maybe one of the reasons people are not

optimistic as they should be about it is because paradoxically, they are taking it for granted. They don't realize the beauty of the internet and hence there's no appreciation for that. I think this is one of the reasons. And secondly, I guess based on the conversations that I had with plenty of young people my age, of course,

They have very high expectations when it comes to what they can achieve on the internet. They only look at the outliers, people that gain millions of dollars. And they think, well, if I would like to create some sort of creative project on the internet and I don't end up like Gary Vee, then I'm a failure.

And I think that's a very big problem because to me, because I started that very young, I remember when I was in university, I started law in the Netherlands. And that's when I built some of my creative projects, my digital creative projects.

For me, success at that point was making $500 per month. That was insanely nice for me. And I said, well, if I can keep doing, I can keep going, then maybe I can make 1K. And it wasn't just about money. It was a synergy between loving what you do, but also learning at the same time, et cetera. But yeah, I think these are two main things. So taking the internet for granted

and having very high expectations because they only focus on outliers. So that's why I coined the term the sovereign artist. A sovereign artist is not an influencer or someone that's incredibly famous. A sovereign artist is someone who may have some sort of audience online,

But it's kind of niche, you know, so you don't really know what Paul Millard is a sovereign artist, for instance. Yeah. And you mentioned the great reshuffle thesis that we have here at O'Shaughnessy Ventures. And that's a big part of it is the idea that the idea or the mentality that you have to contrast or compare yourselves to the extreme outliers is really silly because

What happened with the technology and innovation is it created very long tails in which you could be... I mean, power laws still exist, but they don't have to exist as they did under a traditional bell curve distribution because you can have...

you can have a wonderful living even if you've got just a couple thousand people who are looking at your art or your content, et cetera. And like,

I definitely agree with you that by comparing yourself to extreme outliers, you're really kind of setting yourself up to fail because they're extreme outliers for a reason. And maybe much better to compare yourself to somebody like you, to somebody like Paul, to somebody who is literally kind of loving life. And, you know, they're not Mr. Beast, right?

You know, to me, that kind of is another one of the deficiencies of Aristotelian either or logic, right? Zero one. Yes. No. Black, white. Like that is not the way the world works. The world is probabilistic in nature. It is not deterministic. And unfortunately lodged in many of our brains is this either or mentality that

And it in instances like this can really be destructive because how many people out there who would have like really true talents and gifts that they can share aren't doing it simply because of that outlier methodology. Like if I came to you and I'm like, my first thing is, hey, busy, I want you to help me become like Mr. Beast. What are you going to tell me?

First of all, yes. Again, it's about the mindset shift. I don't know. I think I would hesitate exactly what I'm doing right now. Maybe it's clearly the wrong approach. So it's the wrong belief system. I'm not very good at persuasion from the very beginning.

But you mentioned that this sets you up for failure. I don't think it's about failure. They don't even try because they expect that they could become like Mr. Beast. And maybe they try and then they fail because they didn't get the dividends they were wishing for in the very beginning. They don't realize the leverage that people like Mr. Beast have. It doesn't mean that

I'm saying you don't have things to learn from outliers or that it's not important to study them. But this is another problem. Because if you, for instance, want to become a sovereign artist, you don't want to study the outliers.

Because there are so many different steps that they took. So let's say you want to become like Naval or, I don't know, Elon Musk. And you think that you can copy exactly what they are doing right now and you will become like them. So you start tweeting and you expect the same results Elon Musk has on Twitter. It doesn't work like that. That's why, for instance, if you are at the very beginning of your journey, the best thing you want to do is to look for people that are...

the next step so what's the next step for you maybe the next step for you is to find a creative project as a freelancer maybe your next step is to grow a newsletter of 1000 followers where these small things that may seem unimportant but this is exactly what you need right now so

These are the questions that aspiring creators should ask themselves, I think. What's the next step for me? Who are those creators? Who are exactly at the level that I want to reach next? And yeah, that's where the magic happens, I think.

Yeah, I think it also helps if you mentioned one of my bugaboos that triggers me often. And that is, you know, the obsession with, oh, I'm going to be just like fill in the blank. You mentioned Elon Musk or Naval or any of those people. No, you're actually not. What you ought to be is not a copycat. You should be very authentic to yourself.

And that's kind of the first observation that I would make. The second is I really like your idea of bringing it in much closer to where you are right now, right? So if you're right now just sort of thinking, wow, I really would love to be able to do X, Y, or Z, right? And then kind of, I'm a big believer that you should write it out because I think writing is thinking, right?

And if you can't write out what you would like your life to look like, then you need to work at it because...

If you, I've, I think one of the biggest gifts continually writing things out for me has given me is it gives me very quick feedback as to whether I really understand what I want or what I'm thinking about or what I'm proposing. And it's, it's one of the reasons why, you know, we published the book, The Two Thoughts. I have been a quote collector all of my life.

just because these short maxims can really nail situations, right? And I know you love them too. Yeah. I'm remembering your one, kindness without truth is flattery. Truth without kindness is just being an asshole. You didn't put it that way. That's the way I'm remembering it. But like, it just seems like a daunting task to me.

to get people, so many people are kind of willing to just buy into the prepackaged life, so to speak. In other words, here's what you do.

you get your accreditation from some great university, you climb the ladder, you do all of those things. And, and, and yet you, you never stopped to reflect, am I even climbing the right ladder? Is this the ladder that I really want to be on? How, and then you get captured sometimes by

by hitting your fitness maximum. In other words, you're on that ladder that you're not even questioning whether you should be climbing, but you're doing okay, right? You're climbing and climbing and climbing. But as you're climbing, your life changes. And things that you mentioned like

people loving Netflix or whatever it becomes or the attitude we have about the internet it's just there right we're not looking at it as this miraculous thing right we're just yeah yeah yeah kind of a casual dismissal of it how do you get people to take that first step right the

Socrates' very famous quote, you know, the unexamined life is not worth living. How do you get people to start examining their lives? David Perrault, I think, came up with a very good question and I stole it and I gave credit to him, of course, that's what I mean by stealing from him, and I bailed upon it. So he says, are your goals your own or simply what you believe you should want?

And then I go, are your goals your own? Are your dreams indeed authentic? Or are they prepackaged narratives designed by whole youth, corporate advertising and social media sessions? So first of all, we should think deeply about this problem because at the end of the day, whether we like it or not, we are still...

some sort of developed monkeys, and we should be very careful when it comes to our dreams, our desires, whether they are original or not. And we should try to find out how we can craft authentic visions. I think this is a very difficult thing. And I've learned you can only have conversations like this

with people that tried a lot of things, with people that have experimented with. So I have a word for that. I call these people tinkerers. So they are not really entrepreneurs. They are not really artists. They are not really businessmen. They just try things. They do a bunch of things. And the only way you can learn what you truly want is to experiment with things. We learn much more from experience than we learn from theory.

Totally agree. Jed McKenna said that the difference between reading a book on how to swim and learning how to swim kind of encapsulates what you're saying there, right? Like you can read so many books about, you know, how to swim and efficiency in swimming and efficiency in strokes.

And the way to learn how to swim is to jump into the fucking pool. Right. And, and that sometimes still astounds me, right. That people, uh,

really get confused about, you know, like, no, but I studied that in school. I don't have to continue to read those particular books or whatever. Whereas I look at, you know, life is a verb, not a noun. Right. And that implies action. And it's sometimes confusing.

me when, when I see incredibly talent or at least people I view as incredibly talented being kind of roadblocked by, by that mentality. What, what sort of, like if we were sitting around in a cafe in Sicily and I was asking you for your advice, right? First off, we're in the right location probably, but I, how,

How would you help me if I was a young guy who felt that way and was really kind of disappointed and I was, you know, kvetching to you? Oh, God, I got my degree in economics and like I hate economics and I don't want to be in that field. Like, well, what advice are you going to give me?

Another big problem with my young generation is that we don't realize that knowledge is much more existential than it is theoretical or conceptual. So knowledge at some point, that's why I think that there are plenty of successful people.

When you hear them talking, they just say a bunch of cliches and things that are really mundane. But at the end of the day, that's not what you should be looking for when it comes to these people. They're telling you something else. They're teaching you maybe how to approach your spirit. Maybe they're transferring you their energy. But when it comes to their knowledge, it may be mundane. So...

It's amazing that everyone is choosing very, very difficult degrees.

I don't think that there's any advice other than you just have to do things and you just have to try things. But when it comes to the internet, the beauty of the internet is that the internet allows you to take plenty of small risks on a frequent basis without being harmed by them. This is the difference that we are experiencing right now compared to 30 years ago when the internet was just...

getting built. Because at that point, you'd have to take maybe one, maybe two massive risks, and hopefully you would become a successful entrepreneur. But now, the beauty is that you can take 1,000 small risks on a frequent basis, and you learn, and you will not get harmed by them. And then you are gathering data, you see what works, what doesn't. And yeah, the question is, what are those risks? Well, right now is...

Just about, for instance, creating an account on Substack, maybe launching a product on Gumroad, maybe trying to create content on Instagram, maybe sending a bunch of emails to some people you admire on Twitter or LinkedIn, and hopefully they will accept you as one of your employees. Frankly, this is what I did when it comes to you. So I admired you a lot and I still admire you. A few years ago, I saw your post on Twitter.

And then I, of course, I learned some things about you and what you're working on, et cetera. And I really liked the things that you're promoting. And I just said, I remember I told my fiance at that point, which is now my wife, I want to work for Jim. And she was like, but you told me you don't want to work for anyone in your life. And I said, yes, but

There are exceptions to this rule. I think Jimmy's building amazing things, and I would like to be part of his project. So yeah, going back, this is the beauty of the internet, that you can take plenty of small risks on a frequent basis without being harmed by them. So you are anti-fragile, you know, in a sense. I love that distinction because it is absolutely overlooked often by many people, especially

The Internet really did reduce the costs of risk if you take a lot of them, right? One of the ways I've described it is, you know, we've gone from a world where you maybe, maybe would have three or four times at bat, which is an American baseball analogy, whereas now you can literally have thousands of times at bat.

And by experimentation, I just had the author of the book Tiny Experiments on, and that's her message as well. You can also use these tiny experiments to figure out what you're really into or what you're really interested in.

And the cost of them is vastly different than it would have been for someone of my generation to simply say, yeah, you know what? I'm not going to go to college. I'm just going to saunter around, flaneur and figure things out. That might have been met very, very differently when I was young than it is now. And yet, and yet we still have that hangover, cultural hangover, right?

where people still have that attitude in a degree that kind of still surprises me, right? We talked about busyness, and I think that comes from the old, what we in the United States call the Protestant work ethic. In other words, that no, no, no, no, you got to keep your nose to the grindstone. And yet, so that's one side of it. And yet,

The Marxists have a similar theory, the labor theory of value, right? Like the value of anything is equated to the amount of labor that the person put into it. At the end of the day, Marxism came out from Germany, which is also a Protestant country. Right. And what's interesting is that

You know, I always said, you know, the massive problems that we had was simply miscategorizing Marx's book. It should have been in religion as opposed to politics, because it really works on a religious level in many, many ways. It does. It utterly fails as a system of governance, right?

Because, you know, now, granted, I am a free range capitalist, right? And I believe that free minds, free markets, rule of law, et cetera, at least historically, have proven to be the absolute best at getting people where they want to get. No question about it, I would say. And and so, you know, your background, you grew up under really kind of both systems, didn't you?

Not really, because I was born in post-communist Romania. So post-communist countries have very weird dynamics. And I don't think many people could understand them because it's kind of the beginning of capitalism in a society that wants to be fundamentally communist, you know? So it's kind of messy, to put it that way.

Yeah, but I also think you'd be surprised when you're looking at the former communist countries of Eastern Europe, for example. Look at Poland. Look at, you know, a lot of the regions are coming up with incredibly cutting edge. In other words, they're like, oh,

Cool. We have this thing called the internet here. I guess that we should make maximum use of that in our governance. I think that the ability that they had, that legacy systems weren't the problem, right? Like in the United States, the reason that Europe lepfrogged the United States in cellular phones is because we had...

a wonderful legacy wired system that we called Ma Bell.

And so a lot of countries outside of the United States did not have that. And so when, I mean, look at Africa today. Entrepreneurship in Africa is soaring because of this, because I'm holding up a cell phone for people who are listening and not watching. Entrepreneurship is soaring thanks to the U.S. Yeah. And so...

The hangover, would you call it the hangover of the kind of belief systems that people had kind of shoved down their throats by the dictatorships that got swept away? Are you still running into people in Transylvania who are like,

I want to go back to the good old Stalinist era or, or yeah. Yeah. Really? Yes. We are very divided. We are very divided. This is what people don't understand about Eastern Europe and, and,

probably all of the former communist countries, with some exceptions, of course, because, for instance, the Czech Republic and Slovenia had communist systems, but it wasn't as harsh as they were in Romania. And in fact, it would be a mistake to call Romania a communist country, because for the last...

15 or 20 years, if not even more, of the regime, it was actually a combination between communist and fascist systems. Because Romania, for some reason, during that period, you know, Ceausescu, that's the name of the dictator, wanted to be sovereign, so to speak. But the communist system works when you do

business with the other communist countries. So Poland creates nails, you create tractors. It's not a very good deal, but this is what my mind produced. And then you make an exchange. That's how the communist system worked. But Romania also wanted to be sovereign, wanted to be nationalist. And there's nothing wrong with these words, but the way it was interpreted at that point.

But going back, yeah, I think we are very divided right now. And I think the young generation, let's say between 22 and 35, everyone needs kind of things in Western terms, which I think is a great progress. But when you talk to anyone, not anyone, but many people, 50, 60, especially at the countryside, they just dream about the old days, even though objectively they were living in poverty.

Yeah, and it is not lost on me that you were one of the few former communist satellite countries of the Soviet Union that had a violent end to the rule of Ceausescu and his wife. And my theory is that, like, literally people aren't fooled.

And by that, I mean, you remember that scene with that critical scene where Ceausescu loses control of the crowd. Yeah. And literally the look on his face, if you haven't seen that video and you're not aware of the leader Ceausescu in Romania, you should check it out on YouTube. It's really interesting because a picture worth a thousand words is his face and

When he is giving the speech that all other times that he gave, he would give to a cheering crowd, you know, because the crowd is cheering on fear of, you know, the secret police coming and shooting them in the back of the head. And yet he lost him and he realized it. You could tell by the look on his face, but it was also a look of utter confusion.

And this idea though, to me at least, is he and dictatorship type ruling systems, they're not fooling anyone. They're not fooling the people, right? And so when you are forced to live under essentially what is a lie, that can lead to really profoundly negative outcomes for the people who are forcing you to live under that lie. Right.

And it really kind of does surprise me to hear you say that older people in the countryside, why would they feel nostalgia for something like that? I don't think I have an explanation for it. I'm pretty sure there are some people that do have an explanation for it. Maybe one of the reasons that could explain this situation is that

They think they had it better because they had some sort of poverty, but they knew exactly what the next day would look like. So they had certainty. They were poor. They were living in decent conditions to be able to keep living. Right now, in a capitalist society, the biggest problem is that you are responsible for your life and you

Nothing is certain. And this is the greatest tragedy for someone that lived in a communist regime. And because it's a big mindset shift in a communist state, the state tells you what you are allowed to do or what you have to do in a communist state.

democracy, in a capitalist system, you can do whatever you want as long as the state doesn't find that illegal. And that's crazy because suddenly you have optionality, you have options, you can do things, but then you get drunk with that optionality because you don't know what to do. And this lack of certainty, I think this is what really troubles people.

that lived in a communist regime. They cannot undo what they have been used. They cannot get rid of the software that they have in their minds. I actually think that's a very profound way to look at this because I have often scratched my head at

the you know deep in our human os is this desire for the what i call the illusion of certainty but i've never i'd never put them together that that is probably one of the reasons why these people were able to seize control of a country because if nothing else

people's desire for certainty got fixed, right? Like in a, now let me rush to say in a horrible and limiting way, but nevertheless, I hadn't even thought about that. You've given me something now that I'm going to have to ponder for a long time because I

That leading from that base part of our software, the desire for certainty, for control, et cetera. I'd never thought about the fact that authoritarian or totalitarian governments gave that to you. You know, what I would view as a shit sandwich, but...

Other people aren't liking the sandwich per se, but they are liking the fact that they get to wake up every morning knowing exactly what their day is going to look like. That would be my version of hell, but I get it. Like I'll have to, that's, that's a really great insight on your part. I will think much more about that. You also talk about that.

You know, people often model the wrong people. We got into it earlier when we were talking about, you know, Musk or Mr. Beast or, you know, any of the outliers there. But, you know, as I was getting ready to chat with you, I was thinking, you know...

He also, at least for me, you see this clear line of thought where, you know, in monarchies, people used to admire the aristos, right? The aristocrats. And then that, you know, after democracy started to flourish, then the aristocrat kind of became the founder or the successful businessman, right?

And, or a celebrity, God help you. And, and they really are modeling the wrong thing. How would you go about, cause you mentioned earlier, you know, look at the person who's at the, on the next leg of the journey that you're hoping to craft for yourself. How would you go about finding those people? Because almost by definition, right? They're, they're not, they're,

not a lot of people already know about them. I mean, you know, one of the things that I try to achieve with infinite loops is I'm, I'm interested in having people like you on that I can help amplify. I'm not terribly interested in having people on who everybody already knows. Right. And it's not, I have nothing against those people. I'm admire many of them, but like, I'm not doing any, I'm not providing any new kind of insight.

And, you know, when you were talking about, you know, finding your purpose, I thought of that

quote that is misattributed, as it turns out, to Mark Twain. Well, isn't it funny that whenever you're not sure who did the quote, people say Mark Twain or Thomas Jefferson or... Banksy has this wonderful meme that says, to make something sound really deep and intellectual, attribute it to a great philosopher, Plato. And then he crosses out Plato and writes Banksy.

But the quote I was thinking about that is attributed to Twain, but is not his, is the two most important times in your life are the day you're born and the day you find out why. I'm a big believer in finding out one's purpose in life because I think everyone's purpose is different. And like, what does that go into your calculation when you are contemplating, you know, what's next for you?

Absolutely. This is maybe one of the questions of the 21st century, also the 20th century, that troubles plenty of people in a way. What's the meaning of life? And I reflected on this and I tried to find out why. Why does this question bother us? Well, maybe the first reason is because back then you would rely on religion to

to tell you the answers to this question. But right now, you have to be an existentialist. And if you're not an existentialist, then things get really bad. But when I ask myself, what's the meaning of life? I think the breakthrough that I had so far

I would rather allow this question to sit somewhere in the back of my mind for a very long period of time, and I would prefer to never be able to answer it. But I always come up with some other questions that help me clarify it in a way or make the situation even more confusing. And one of the questions is, can I decentralize my meaning of life? Can I diversify my meaning of life? I think when it comes to

You mentioned purpose. I don't want to digress, but I think purpose and meaning are correlated. And when people think about meaning and purpose, they think too much about work or working in the Protestant way.

And I'm not saying work is not important. Plenty of people online tell me, hey, Vizi, you are just telling me to take walks in beauty supply and not do anything. No, I'm not telling you that. I'm telling you that work shouldn't be the main part of your life. There are other things in your life. For instance, picking up

a project that you do for its own sake. And I'm not saying hobby. I'm not saying hobby for a reason because people, when they pick a hobby, they see it in a superficial way. No, I want you to pick something, something artistic, something creative in nature where you are able to dedicate your soul to it. When you have a hobby, it may be superficial, like, yeah, I'm doing it for fun. There's nothing wrong with hobbies, but not just hobbies. Then, of course, it's your family. Then maybe it's your health.

and other things that are important in your life. But at some point, you need to create some sort of constellation. These parts should make sense so that you can come up with something hopefully bigger than yourself. So that's legacy. For me, I'm always trying to think how I can create some sort of legacy. That's not about my name, but something that helps society, even though not in a...

huge way, but it should help society in some way. I think this is something I like to reflect on. Your comment about existentialism resonates with me because I think that a lot of people say, well, you know, if there is no, I believe that there is no truth with a capital T out there, right?

I think that one of the problems with a lot of what I call seekers are they think that there exists some truth with a capital T, and by that I mean one truth, right? Like this is the meaning of life, this truth with a capital T. I don't think that's right. I think that you find meaning within and through exploration, right?

And, you know, to the argument that says, well, existentialism ultimately leads to nihilism. And then where are you? And I'm sort of like, yeah, but that's just the starting line.

What you've got to do is you've got to walk across the bridge of nihilism and understand that meaning making in your own life is your assignment, right? Like if we had an instruction manual handed to us at birth, I think that that's what it would say. And the idea that since that does not exist anymore,

And that, that, that is one of those things back to certainty, right? Like organized religion, traditional religion, traditional political systems, et cetera, are all prepackaged belief systems that, um,

At least give you certainty, right? And they worked way better than Marxism. Yeah, right. And, you know, it's like I'm not religious in the traditional sense, and yet I was born and baptized Catholic, and I still remember, you know, as it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be world without end, okay? When I think about that, though, it's kind of like they're telling me the answer to everything in one line.

As it was in the beginning, that covers everything in the past, is now, present, and ever shall be future. Like, okay. If that's the way it is, I guess I'm done asking questions.

And so I think that I'm absolutely not opposed to people who are spiritual or do a lot of reading. I think you like Nicolas Gomez Davila a lot because he talks about this. Yeah. It is saying so he talks about how religion back then didn't get involved in giving advice. It was just about the mystical aspect of it.

And I think this is the main reason why Buddhism is de facto the religion of the Western world, because it's very flexible. It doesn't tell you, hey, you are not allowed to do it. It doesn't give you rules. So I think it's a very big statement. But Mircea Eliade and Nicolas Davila made this point, not myself per se. But when Catholicism and Christianity in general

tried to get involved in giving people too much advice, that's where it started to slowly lose some of its audience, I think. Yeah, that's an interesting thought because if you do think, I mean, certainly this isn't going to be true for everyone, but in all my readings and all of the

my thinking about these things, Buddhism, Taoism, those are the places I'm very naturally drawn towards. I love that the Dalai Lama, I think that this is true. I'd have to check to make sure. But apparently the Buddhist sect that the Dalai Lama is the leader of has a practice of if science disproves one of their beliefs, they get rid of the belief

They don't say, no, that's wrong. Science is wrong. And we are right. They upgrade it. Yeah, they upgrade it. That's a great term, right? I passionately believe that if you want to have a great life, you have to continually unlearn things that no longer serve.

and learn things that now are going to serve you much better. I think it was Wittgenstein who said, don't look so much for meaning, look for use. And I think that that can be very helpful for people trying to create meaning in their own life, right? Yeah. Because...

Another thing that we just naturally do, and me included, by the way, and I often say, I'm not saying any of this that says I'm not like that. I am. I'm a human. I'm a domesticated primate. And so I'm going to be using the same human OS as you or anyone else.

And, and, you know, if you look at evolution, what, why do we care so much about the eyes of others? I think it was Virginia Wolf. The eyes of others are always on us. Their gaze are prison. I'm botching that quote, but I love that. Mark Twain said it in fact. Oh, it was Mark Twain. Thank you. Anyway, the, the idea that.

Why do we care so much what other people think about us? One thing I learned as I grew older is other people very rarely are thinking about us at all, right? They're thinking about themselves and yet they're

And evolutionarily, it makes a lot of sense, right? We grew up or evolved in very small hunter-gatherer tribes. And what's the first thing you want to do? You want to be a member of that tribe because you want to survive. And so fitting in becomes very, very important. And Darren Brown, the magician, the illusionist in the U.K.,

actually is also a very thoughtful and erudite person. And he wrote a book on happiness in which he explains a thought experiment that another author had come up with, which is, hey, imagine you wake up and you're the last human on the earth. Nothing cataclysmic has happened. It's just all the other humans have disappeared. Everything else is the same.

All of our human artifacts are there, right? What are you going to do? And then he kind of walks through, well, you know, on your first day, you might drive a Lamborghini or go live in a mansion or wear really fancy clothes or put that watch that you always admired that costs, you know, 150,000 on your wrist. But you wouldn't do that for long. If you were literally the only human left on the earth, you

You're going to wear clothes that are comfortable and easy to maintain. You're going to eat food that is nutritious and simple and easy to get, right? You're going to live in a dwelling, again, that is comfortable and easy for you to maintain. And the obvious point here is that much of what we do is to impress other people. Remove that.

And suddenly our natural state, if you will, is far more modest. What do you think about that idea? We go back to the question asked by David Perel, are your goals your own or what you believe you should want? I totally agree with that. And then so, but again, how do you disambiguinate or untangle yourself?

Like my own belief systems, no doubt are heavily entangled with the society in which I grew up, with the family I grew up in, with the friends that I had and have. How can you go about

We've explored writing, thinking about it, et cetera. But like, how do you, how do you light that fire in people who just haven't even had that thought? Haven't had that original, like, Hmm, wait a minute. Like somebody who stumbles upon your book and is very intrigued. Like what, what's their next step? Do you think?

I would invite people to an invitation to slow living, but slow living not in the consumerist way we have been accustomed by influencers.

What I learned is that when I'm rushing to do things, and I'm not just referring to being busy, I'm saying rushing as a default state in general, not being able to observe, not being able to be present even in situations where maybe it's uncomfortable to stay present. I think we live in a society that is unable to appreciate boredom and anxiety.

Of course, we do live in a very fast-paced society, but technology, although it is an incredible tool, makes things even worse. Because right now, if you are bored, you have a supercomputer in your pocket that's ready to entertain you whenever you want. So when it comes to these deep questions that we have discussed, what's the meaning of life? What's your purpose? What do you want to do in your life?

What kind of creative project do you want to work on? I think it starts with some sort of invitation to slow living where you learn how to appreciate the small things. And as cliche as this may sound, I think that being in a rush

castles the present moment, which in turn castles anything of depth and meaning on a spiritual level. I think being in a rush as a default state means living in denial of death because you are rushing all the time where exactly. And I see that as an expression of being in denial of death as a factual reality.

That we don't think about. So it's kind of the almost a catch-22 situation in some regards, because I completely agree that always being in a rush without, I mean, like sometimes you do need to be in a rush. I get it.

Yes. But, you know, habituating the idea that you're always in a rush. I think I agree with you entirely that you are really you have sub optimized your life if you are always rushing to the next thing.

You know, one thing we think about at O'Shaughnessy Ventures, too, is one of the downsides, and you know what a huge fan I am of technology, the new platforms, of AI, of all of these things.

But one of the downsides of it is the algorithmic sameness, algorithmic compression, right? Look, I ran my entire asset management business using algorithms, right? And it's called factor investing or quantitative investing. And I loved it because it was, I could test things.

And I could run thousands of tests and see like what, what is working, what isn't more importantly, I could see like the downsides, not necessarily look at how great this did, but I could also share with people, Oh, by the way, look at these 10 times that it was crushed, crushed by the market. And to me, that was exciting and interesting, but yeah,

With the new Oceania's Adventures, which is mostly media and book publishing, film production, et cetera, algorithmic compression leads to a sameness that I think is detrimental to helping highlight the really cool new stuff that people are doing right now. And so we're kind of looking for a way to,

That that could kind of crush that algorithmic compression and introduce new ideas, new movies, new books, new podcasts, new sub stacks.

And it is really interesting to me because like people do get really habituated to, I mean, that's why we have so many Marvel superhero movies, right? And like, why are there not a ton of Citizen Kanes showing up? Because after all, like the tools that you need to make a great movie have never been easier to acquire, right?

And yet, like, you're going to see this kind of tsunami of slop generated, I think, in a lazy fashion.

by people who just like, oh, I want to become an influencer. I'll have the AI write this story for me or make this movie for me. And then I'll put it up there and, you know, presto change-o, I'm an influencer. That's really not the right path you want to be on. And so I really do like your idea of, you know, deeper thinking. One point you make often, which I also like a lot, is...

Instead of reading self-help books, read real authors who struggled a lot. Who are some of your favorite authors to read in lieu of reading, you know, The Secret or one of those many self-help oriented books? I do have plenty and I...

I think Alain de Botton made the point that a book is useful if you read it at the right time for you. So if you are experiencing some sort of problem in your life, existential or not, that's when a book becomes really useful and that's when you like it. But I do have books that I go back to every now and then. So I read a lot Roger Scruton, Nicolás Gómez da Vila, Nassim Taleb, Humberto Eco,

Even some Romanian ones, so if people want to read more about the religious experience, not religion in itself, like organized religion, but religion as a subject in itself, Mircea Eliade, I recommend it fully. And yeah, Paul Millard, I'm reading some books by him right now.

Yeah, these are some authors that come to mind right now. Yeah. And, you know, I was also thinking as I was getting ready to chat with you that while you were with us at Infinite Loops, we kind of did something that

very much is a good example of your playbook, so to speak. Remember, your wife was the one who provided the art. We wanted to figure out the NFT market, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Amazing, amazing experience. And we are totally grateful, but keep going. Yeah, so what I loved about that

is i didn't know anything about the nft market and we kind of collectively when we were talking about it was like yeah none of us really know anything about the nft market so we thought well let's launch an nft and learn about the nft market and and so your wife who's a wonderful artist did did the what turned out to be the cover art for the nft then we were like well i'm

I talked to a bunch of people who were kind of experts on NFTs. And at that time, that sounds like funny saying it now, doesn't it? But they're like, the one that really did impress me was an NFT in and of itself is worthless. It should unlock some.

thing. Remember what the, and we were trying to decide, well, okay, so what's this going to unlock? I immediately thought, wow, maybe NFT should replace concert tickets, right? You could buy how much you paid for an NFT who's maybe cover art is your favorite band, right?

Right. Maybe what you pay for that NFT unlocks different privileges at the next concert of that band. Yeah. So like if you're buying the you're paying top dollar for it, you get backstage passes. If you know you're you're not paying a lot for it, you get to go to the concert and you maybe get a T-shirt.

And so we decided that what it was going to do was it would give you a spot on this podcast to either co-host, be a guest or nominate a guest. And then how it unfolded was just so cool because the NFT ended up going for a lot of money. It was something like the equivalent. 30K, 30K dollars. Yeah. And so the person who bought it

was an immigrant who'd done really well with his startup and he wanted to raise people above the radar. And so he gave us

My friend, David Roney, who has an extraordinary story, is a naval officer, a surgeon, a lot of stuff that David is. He's an amazing human. Well, that kind of led to, we're writing a book about David. We're making a movie about David. And then we decided, well, we shouldn't keep this money. Let's give it away. And you gave us what ultimately proved to be a great charity to give it to.

But all of that, all of that came from just us saying, huh, wonder what, wonder what this whole NFT market is about. What other things can you do in your opinion like this, where it just continues to lead to even cooler learnings? Like, for example, I didn't know anything about the monuments movement in Romania and I learned all about that and I thought it was so cool.

It's actually a very funny story because we decided with your acceptance, of course, to donate the money to that charity. I didn't know the owners. I knew about the charity because someone told me that it's actually legit. I have a thing where I'm quite skeptical with NGOs. So that's why I want to really know if someone is doing the right job in good faith. And then after we donated, we actually became very good friends with them.

It's insane. And I'm not sure if you know, but you decided to donate to a few 45 churches in Transylvania. They were built in the 14th century. And even King Charles was part of the same organization.

the same charity. So you, King Charles, and a few others were the ones who actually donated the majority of the money. I think that was insane to see if it looks next to King Charles Foundation. But anyway, going back, yes, this is the beauty of the internet. So I see the digital world more like a supplement where you can do unbelievably nice things in the real world.

We can do very nice things online as well. But one problem with that is that when you create something that just stays on the digital realm, it's kind of abstract. It's not something real. But when you transfer all of that energy in the real world,

as I said multiple times, that's where the magic starts. And I think that's the powerful tool that we don't realize we have. This is not just the internet. It's what you can do with the internet. It's what you can do with technology.

And I think that the real world is sacred. And I think we should try to create as many projects in the real world as we can, because that's what creates legacy, I guess. And seeing the digital space and technology as an insane tool to create dreams, I think this is how I see right now my career, at least.

So on that note, what is exciting you now? What are some of your projects that you're working on?

So it's actually very funny. So I do have the Sovereign Artist program in my book and I host, I take care of a minimalist branding agency. So I work with a few freelancers. But at some point I was thinking, I need something else. I would like to create something in the real world. And it started as an experiment, exactly as we did with the NFT. And

While I was in Transylvania and in some of the villages, and I read biographies about some of my favorite authors and artists and thinkers, I realized most of them had some sort of secular monastery where they invited more people from the same group, for instance, from the same intellectual group, where they would exchange ideas.

And then you create some sort of community that's focused on learning, on leisure, on sacred leisure, as I like to tell it. And at some point, I just basically shared a few Instagram stories, a few ideas in my newsletter, if there's demand for something like this. And I was like, I don't think there's demand for that. I think it's very hard to sell anything related to philosophy to art.

I was wrong. I was wrong. There's immense demand for things like that. And right now I'm building, it's called Kronarete. I think that the way you pronounce it in Greek, but to make it understandable, Kronarete, a relaxed philosophy circle that's digital in nature. And we host lectures about, for instance, a topic that would be next is how to waste your time, the art of procrastination, the Sicilian dream as well.

but also other things such as beauty and art and architecture. We also talk about poetry. So essentially we...

I wanted to create, I've been dreaming of creating something where I teach nothing because I'm not the teacher. I'm just the moderator and I invite others to participate and I also present things in a kind of interactive way. But I wanted to create a space where I teach nothing in terms of ideology, in terms of advice, but simply a way of living where we integrate leisure into

as a source of inspiration for our creative projects and for our work in general. And yeah, it's going insanely well. I was amazed by the quality of members. And I encourage anyone who thinks about creating something that wouldn't work because you've never seen someone create a project like that. You'd think it wouldn't produce dividends. I would give them advice to...

Although I just said I don't want to take advice, so it's kind of contradictory. But yeah, I would advise them to give it a try. So we'll put the link to that in the show notes. But you also do it in person, yeah? Yeah.

Yes, we also do retreats in Transylvania. And it's very nice for you to point that out. So yeah, it's a digital place. So the way it should go, right now I'm just experimenting. I don't know exactly where this project would be going. But yes, it's a digital place. But the next step would be to organize retreats in Transylvania. And hopefully then a community center that I could find

in Transylvania or in Europe depends on the logistics. But yes, this is where I'm trying to go. Very, very cool, Vizi. Well, it has been absolutely great catching up with you. I'm getting the hook here from my producers. They know that I'm a bad child and will continue to go on endlessly if not constrained.

As you know, one of our final questions on the podcast is we're going to make you the emperor of the world. You can't kill anyone. You can't put anyone in a re-education camp. To use your own words, you can't even give them advice. But what you can do, what you can do is you can, we're going to hand you a magical microphone and you can say two things into it that will incept

the entire population of the earth to believe the next day when they wake up, whatever their next day is, they're going to think that these two things were their own thoughts, their own ideas. And they're going to say, unlike all of the other times when I had these great thoughts and never did anything about them, I'm going to act on these two thoughts today. And for the rest of my life, what are you going to incept in the world's population?

How can I avoid answering this question without coming up with some sort of cliche? Well, let me think. So two words or just a sentence? No, no. You could say two things. They can be sentences, whatever you like them to be. Well, based on our discussion, as I said, the problem right now also with the AI revolution and we have so much information, information abundance.

I would say when you do things, it's not about what you know. It's about the energy, the enthusiasm, the desire, the grit that you leverage when you are doing things. So this would be one thing that I would try to manipulate and brainwash everyone. That it's not about what you know. Knowledge is existential. So it's about the energy. For instance, you are someone.

That although it is incredibly knowledgeable in many aspects of life, what someone can immediately learn from you is the energy that you have. And I'm not saying just about enthusiasm, but this combination between prudence, ambition, calmness, you know. So...

People should think more about their mood, their spirit, their energy, rather than just what they know per se. So that's one thing. And the second thing, so that we can reach a conclusion right now, if you really want to produce high-quality work,

Invest in your leisure. Make your leisure sacred so that you can also enjoy sessions of deep work. Because if you have superficial leisure activities, you'll have superficial work. I love both of those. It's the first one reminds me of Nikola Tesla's, if you want to understand the secret to life, look at the frequency vibration.

energy. And vibration is the right word. Yeah. Yeah. And I love the second one because it reminds me of good old Charlie Munger, invert, always invert. And so many people have overscheduled their in quotes, busy work life.

Well, neglecting, tragically neglecting deep leisure, which is better planned out and has a whole different experience. Well, Vizi, this has been super fun. Thank you for joining me and best of luck with all your endeavors. It was a pleasure, Jim. I really appreciate this. And hopefully we can meet again in the future, maybe in other contexts as well. We'll see. Terrific. Thanks much.

Good luck with everything. Thanks. Good luck with YouTube.