Transcript: http://nav.al/kapil. Kapil: http://twitter.com/KapilGuptaMD.

Highlights:

- Sincerity -

Naval: “I can always tell that people who ask for stock tips, aren’t really serious about investing. People who ask for book recommendations aren’t really serious about reading. People who ask ‘What, what business should I build?’ aren’t really serious about entrepreneurship.”

- How-To’s -

Kapil: “Take the person who “made it’ and became world-class in whatever he did. If he went back and retraced his steps and did everything again the same way, but this time he did it by mimicking himself, he would fail.”

Naval: “I can’t watch Roger Federer play tennis and swing the racket the same way, nor will any description from him on how to swing the racket, get me to swing it the right way. Then we go to intellectual efforts. We start asking Warren Buffet why he invested in a company and there he can try and create a mental construct as to how he thinks and how he invests in a company… But there are just as many details to Warren Buffett’s activities, when he decides what to invest in and how he lives his life and how he thinks, as there are to Roger Federer’s body running around a tennis court, hitting a ball. At some level, the details are not transmissible. They’re not copyable.”

Kapil: “The things that you do greatest are the things that you know not how you do.”

- Truth -

Naval: “Society is a set of collective lies that we all believe so we can get along. It allows us to establish a lower common denominator consensus so we don’t all kill each other and we can cooperate. These shared fictions that we have to maintain for society to function are fine. But there’s a cost to that, and the cost is borne by the individual.”

Naval: “One of the ways in which I know that I am finding truths is then that problem is solved for good.”

- Freedom -

Kapil: “Any freedom that leads to the desire for more freedom is not freedom.”

Kapil: “Freedom comes from the understanding of where things come from, not the conscious attempt to end them.”

- Progress -

Kapil: “A human being becomes his environment. It is absolutely critical to savagely and surgically arrange one’s environment in a way that is in accordance with where he wants to go.”

Kapil: “Looking for progress is essentially looking for pleasure. It is the pleasure of self image, which says, I’m in a better place now than I was before.”

What's interesting about talking to you, Kapil, is that you're not for everybody.

The things you think about and the way you speak really only applies to a very small set of people.

This discussion is gonna be unique in multiple ways.

And 1 of those is that it's just not going to make sense for most people.

It doesn't mean that you should try and have it make sense to you.

It just doesn't have interest for most people.

Another way in which this differs is that I'm nervous to have this conversation.

And normally I'm not that nervous about podcasts or conversations.

In this case, I'm a little nervous because all the questions that I want to ask you and all the things that I want to discuss with you are intensely personal.

If I'm not genuinely interested in the answer, then I'm not really asking the proper question.

I've been working with you, Kapil, for years now.

Because whatever I need to figure out, I should have figured out by now.

Why do we still have to keep going over the same old ground?

But the territory that you're walking or the things that you're interested in and your take on them is so unique that it takes time to even just understand the vocabulary and the grammar of how you speak and how you think and how you behave and how you view the world.

There are a couple of keywords we can start with.

It's a word that you use over and over and I don't think other people really understand what you're saying.

Even I still barely understand what you're saying.

I have some concept of it, but it's a mental shift that is so important that I think it's really important to understand and to examine carefully what you mean before we get into

They are hacks and they are techniques and methods, various methodologies to get somewhere.

When you talk about something from the standpoint of a mechanical behavior, turning on a computer, riding a bicycle, prescriptions are useful.

The problem is that whenever you venture into the realm of art in any form, be it in business or sports or even in the setting of finding peace in your life or freedom or arriving at enlightenment or all of these so-called spiritual pursuits, those things cannot be prescriptionized.

If you attempt to prescriptionize them, what happens is the prescription becomes the new God.

You begin to try to live up to the prescription.

Then you introduce an intermediary, the prescription.

Then what will happen is that your mind will begin to focus upon the intermediary and it will enter into a deal, which it never signed up for.

That deal is that for the rest of your life, you will attempt to satisfy the intermediary.

In all domains, you have many people who do great things.

You have Michael Jordan and Tiger Woods doing amazing things in golf and Elon Musk and various individuals who do great things in business and even yourself.

If you take what those people did and you write a book and said that these people did X, if you follow that, you will not become them.

I found business biographies to be useless for building a great business.

I can read Steve Jobs' bio and be inspired, but I can't be Steve Jobs.

And if I want to be amazing at something, then I have to find my own way there.

But when you're trying to operate at the top of a field, or when you're trying to do something creative, how-tos don't work beyond the most extreme basics.

When you're first starting something, it is actually a mechanical endeavor.

You're just figuring out how to drive a car.

But when you're trying to figure out how to race it around a track faster than anyone else, then all coaches and techniques and prescriptions have to fall by the wayside, and you are at the edge of the art.

When there's only been 1 loudspeaker in a person's ear for his entire life, then that is his norm, and that is the only language that he knows.

That paradigm of how to is so embedded inside the culture, it is so deeply embedded inside the cortex of the human brain that the idea of omitting it or the idea of even challenging its existence is completely off the wall.

It is so otherworldly and antithetical that it takes years to even get to the point where the idea of prescriptions being a impediment to whatever you seek begins to dawn.

People consider you to be a spiritual guy on Twitter.

And in my understanding, you're not like that at all.

You're always talking about extreme performance, and that's why your brand is Scyther Performance.

It's seeking performance, essentially, and seeking the truth that gets you to the highest performance in all things, whether it's business or sports or peace of mind.

This drive towards utility, reality, truth, performance, they somehow wander into spirituality.

People interpret them in spiritual ways but it feels like spirituality is so cluttered with nonsense that it gets lost.

Your model makes sense if 1 realizes that it's designed to go after extreme performance.

If you want to be the best in the world at anything, you cannot follow prescription.

If you want to be okay at it, then sure, you can follow prescription.

If you want to learn how to lose a pound a month and get in decent shape, then you can follow a calorie counting worksheet.

But if you want to be a shredded bodybuilder or an Olympic athlete, you're not going to get there through how-tos.

You're going to have to create and forge your own path that is unique to you.

Well, what I will add to that is that 1 does not have to want to become the greatest in the world.

If you look at the lives of human beings, there is intense struggle.

The guy who works 3 jobs doesn't want to work 3 jobs.

He may not want to become Tiger Woods, but he wants to be beyond being forced to work 3 jobs.

What keeps him working 3 jobs is prescriptions.

The futility of prescriptions does not just harm 1 who wants to become world-class.

It gravely harms the 1 who simply doesn't want to struggle.

The way I think about it in the business world is that hard work has very little to do with effectiveness.

The grocery store owner or the person working at a restaurant might work 60, 80 hours a week, and that might be all Elon Musk is working.

But Elon's making a lot more money because of his specific knowledge, knowledge that cannot be taught, but can be learned on the job if you have a strong enough desire.

Because Elon is doing the right things, he is far more effective in earning power.

And the right things, at least in business, can't be taught because it's a moving target.

It can only give very vague principles that inspire people to head in the right direction, but I can't teach you how to make money or trade the stock market.

It's like when people ask you for stock tips.

No 1 who's any good at stock trading gives actionable investment advice in a public forum because all the details are too hard to convey.

I can always tell people who ask for stock tips, they're not really serious about investing.

People who ask for book recommendations aren't really serious about reading.

People who ask what business should I build aren't really serious about entrepreneurship.

People who say what career path should I take, they're not really serious about their career.

When someone's asking for a how to in anything, they aren't actually that serious about it.

If they were truly serious about it, they would figure it out.

But then that leaves the paradoxical question, well, how do I figure it out?

Take the person who quote, made it and became world-class in whatever he did.

If he went back and retraced his steps and did everything again, the same way, but this time he did it by mimicking himself, he would fail.

What has to be understood is that where greatness comes from, it's a very murky affair.

Perhaps nature and the universe set it up this way that you have to jump in.

Once you jump in the soup and you're being bombarded through all sides and you live in confusion and you have no idea which way is up, if the obsession is there, then what happens is through some messy process, you find a way.

When you come out through the tunnel and someone asks you how you did it, you have no idea.

The thing that's almost laughable is when you ask a great athlete, can you show me how you did that?

They won't come on and say, I have no idea.

They will provide you with some semblance of an answer, which is a non-answer.

And what they will do is, because there's a gun pointed at their head and their backs against a wall, they will create the highlights.

When the human being who watches that follows the highlights, he misses.

And the reason that he misses is because it's all the small things.

I can't watch Roger Federer play tennis and swing the racket the same way, nor will any description from him on how to swing the racket get me to swing it the right way.

We start asking Warren Buffett why he invests in the company.

And there he can try and create a mental construct as to how he thinks and how he invests in the company.

But there are just as many details to Warren Buffett's activities when he decides what to invest in and how he lives his life and how he thinks as there are to Roger Federer's body running around a tennis court hitting a ball.

You can be inspired to try it yourself, but without that sincerity, that obsession, you won't get there.

Not only are the details not transmissible, the details are not even knowable.

Ah, so Warren and Roger don't even know it themselves.

The things that you do greatest are the things that you know not how you do them.

I would argue that you're not even there when you do them.

You're not consciously thinking about it.

I find that when I'm speaking, I do best when I'm not thinking about what I'm going to say and I don't even hear what I'm going to say until it comes out of my mouth.

JS You become as surprised as the audience as to what you're going to say.

Pure is not morality and purely is not good.

That's actually the next topic I want to get into.

That's another set of assumptions that everybody has that to understand you have to be left by the wayside.

What we're doing here is we're trying to focus on what is true.

And that means we're going to speak as honestly as possible, which means we're going to be vulnerable, which means we're going to say things that are socially unacceptable, and we're going to say things that are potentially surprising.

And it's very difficult to speak truth in a public forum.

JS Because there's an internal dialogue which says that a person wants the audience to understand.

There's also a piece of it that society is a set of collective lies that we all believe in so we can get along.

It allows us to establish lowest common denominator consensus so we don't all kill each other and we can cooperate.

But there are these shared fictions that we have to maintain for that society to function, which is fine.

There's a cost to that and the cost is borne by the individual.

It all comes back to DNA, not genetic DNA.

DNA in one's sensibilities, the way that he is wired.

And for some people's DNA, what society thinks is almost an insult.

If we don't discuss truth here, then what's the point of having a conversation?

If there's any compulsion that the audience should understand, and it doesn't mean that I go out of my way to try to be arcane and abstract, but it isn't about anyone understanding.

Now that we've established that prescriptions don't work and that we're here to discover the truth and we're looking past good and bad and right or wrong and we're just trying to figure out the answer, let's pick the first thing that we're going to dive into.

Jay Famiglietti Freedom is freedom from the mind.

The only reason that any human being is not free is because of his mind.

It is the mind which creates his tortures.

It is the mind which creates his anxieties.

It is the mind which creates his conflicts.

All that he is confined by, all that he is imprisoned by, is the mind, not anything else.

When I was young, I wanted freedom, but I wanted freedom in the sense of I didn't want to be trapped in the house.

I wanted to be able to live where I wanted.

I wanted to go to a place where I could do whatever I wanted whenever I wanted.

In my mind, freedom was just getting away from physical constraints and material constraints.

I traveled the whole world, I ate all the food, I made all the money, I got all the things that I wanted in life.

Yet, the quality of my life did not change that much.

The quality of my moment to moment experience didn't change that much.

That's because I hadn't changed that much.

My internal experience was still very much the same.

Every time I got something, I wanted the next thing and wanted the next thing and wanted the next thing.

All the same pains and tortures and miseries were still there.

Obviously, it's better to be rich than to be poor.

It's better to be healthy than to be sick.

But beyond a certain point, my baseline level of peace had not changed that much.

Then I started making a transition to what you're talking about, realizing that a lot of these traps were in my mind.

You're saying, no, it's all from the mind from the very

Any freedom that leads to the desire for more freedom is not freedom.

If there's a bleed, you don't clean the tributary vessels.

You want to look at the source of the bleed.

Even if it took someone 30 years to learn the source of the bleed, to learn the truth about what freedom really was.

It would be far more effective to begin that journey at this very second as opposed to doing it piecemeal, because that'll take 900 years.

It is not abstract to say that freedom comes from the mind.

The belief is that anxiety and fears and pain arise from circumstance, that they arise from other people.

As long as that belief is invested inside of someone, he will spend his life trying to change circumstance.

And that will be a monumental waste of life, and you only get 1.

So quite frankly, there isn't enough time to go piecemeal.

It is far better to not understand than it is to go piecemeal because then you're going down a tributary and that tributary leads to other tributaries.

What we're really talking about here is that all of the problems that we struggle with, we tend to externalize, we tend to solve them in the external world.

And there are certain ones that are practical in the external world.

But beyond a certain basic level, a lot of the problems we're trying to solve in the external world are actually internal problems.

And even if we manage to solve the current manifestation in the external world, the new problem will just pop up tomorrow in the external world.

Everyone's looking for truth, whether they profess to look for truth or not.

And the evidence for that is that everyone is looking for a way out of their problems.

If they weren't, then there wouldn't be 14, 000 prescriptions on every single corner from spirituality to self-help.

The very fact that those things exist And the very fact that they are populated by millions means that there's an enormous appetite for relief from problems.

No human being actually wants to be told what to do.

There's something within a human being which rejects the idea of being told what to do, quite frankly.

Even when you do give prescriptions, most don't follow it.

And they will beg you for years to get the prescription.

People look at that and say, see, You've been given the prescription and you didn't follow it.

The fault is believing that that's what they really wanted.

Freedom really is what everyone is looking for.

It is just that they've been sold many lines.

They've been sold many lies that it's about meditating and it's about practicing mindfulness and it's about doing all these things.

If your question is, I like to feel better for 20 minutes a day, it gives me a sense of peace, what can I do?

If the question is, I really want to have peace in my life, I don't want to have problems every single day, my entire life is spent putting out fires, I don't want that anymore, That's a different question.

And those prescriptions are invalid for that.

I would begin with the 1 that's most acute for a given individual.

Now, broadly speaking, everyone's problem is problems.

Anxiety, fear, concern, worry, conflict, confusion.

This persistent non-specific anxiety is probably the single most common human condition that most people are trying to get away from.

And the naive version is I have anxiety because I don't have enough money, so I need to go make more money.

Then the slightly more sophisticated version is, boy, I wish I could just get over the anxiety of feeling like I don't have enough because Practically speaking, I have enough, but for some reason I'm still anxious.

The idea that someone should get rid of anxiety is the problem.

The problem is not how do I get rid of anxiety.

The way is actually to learn where anxiety comes from.

The people who have conquered anxiety are the ones who had a clear understanding of what it is and where it came from.

The solution to a problem is never the solution, it's always the problem.

The solution to any problem lies squarely deep within the problem.

Everyone is taught to look for solutions and they believe that the solution is independent of the problem.

But ingeniously nature has hidden the problem inside the solution, and maybe it did it because it wanted human beings to look inside the problem.

The definition of the problem is the key.

In the case of anxiety, a person asks, how do I get rid of anxiety?

Their problem isn't that they have anxiety.

The problem is that their anxiety will never end as long as they look for a solution to it.

Well, if I don't find a solution, then I'm always going to have anxiety.

The solution is to go backwards, is to look what actually is this anxiety, put a name on it.

Know the face of anxiety, not run from it like a boogeyman.

Is this something that's been solved on an individual basis?

The solution to any problem lies diving deep into the problem.

Every single thing that I say is fraught with peril because the prescription givers have hijacked the English language.

They've already attached an image to every single word that I use.

When I say that you have to look into the anxiety, where that will go is, thanks to the spiritual jargon, what they'll say is, oh, I must face my anxiety.

Oh, that means that I must watch my thoughts.

Because if you do that, you'll be doing so prescriptively.

You'll simply become an automaton who sits there and watches his thoughts.

And then you will say, I've watched my thoughts.

The prescription is so subtle that any attempt to follow it removes you from the solution.

Even as you're listening to my words, it isn't about finding out what I'm telling you to do.

And through understanding, You can take your destiny in your own hands.

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Kapil Gupta: Conquering the Mind