Beautiful Music On Broken Instruments 【 The Zero Dot Podcast #16 】

Hey, you got a thing?

You got a tism?

You got this?

You got that?

You have this quirk?

Whatever.

Yeah, cool.

Let me know.

I'll be flexible.

All good.

Most reasonable human beings would do that.

And that's the key word.

Team human.

Humans do that.

Corporations, cog systems that demand you be as easy for them to manage as possible, they
don't.

How do I stop abandoning the parts of me that feel inconvenient?

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Zero Dot Podcast.

I'm Sam, this is John, this is Daniel.

Gents, it's been a week.

Well, yes it has.

I've counted the days and once again they added directly up to seven.

uh No more no less and it's good to be back.

I would say it's better to be back.

I hope you at home feel the same way.

Things appear to be taking a turn for the improved locally where I am, which is very nice.

So, you know, feels good.

Yeah.

You know, it's not one of the weeks of all time.

You know, that's kind of nice.

That's a minor victory, I think, for all of us.

Okay, I got beef with evolution.

I'm calling you out on evolution.

So for those of you who don't know why spicy food is spicy, there's a long backstory.

A long term, is plants were like, don't eat me, I'll poison you with this irritant, ha ha.

And then humans were like, we enjoy the irritant, we will consume your defenses, which was
pretty fucking cool of us.

But then our bodies were like, yeah, well we have capsaicin receptors in our mouth so we
can feel the pain and get endorphins, which is fun.

And then our bodies were like,

Yo, I put some capsaicin receptors in the butt and you're like, why?

And it's like, I don't know, but it's you're going to feel spice in your butthole now.

This is an episode that is not for anybody to listen to.

We should start over.

We should never have done this.

good stuff.

uh Yes, and as uh an adult who gets older and older, let me tell you, the mouth here can
keep handling all the spice it wants, but it's gotta be careful about that other end now

because now that is a painful experience if I don't measure that correctly.

I'm gonna tell you secret.

I gotta lean in the microphone because it's secret.

In my entire professional career, as a therapist, I've never called off work sick once,
but I've called off for spicy butt three times.

Never been sick.

But I have thrice overestimated my ability to contain the flames.

Because the mouth was like, it's not even a problem.

We are in fact having a great time.

And then the back door was like, all is lost!

Run!

And I gave up.

I surrendered.

Yeah, yeah.

If you guys ever want to have some fun, we should play blood.

Well, then I'll find other people to play with, but there's a game called blood typers and
it's very fun.

I've heard about this game, I've never played it, but I've heard about this game.

of it.

a small cult about this game and I've only ever played with exclusively my cousin, but...

that's like my thing dude.

Like this whole thing is really just a vehicle to culthood.

I hope you guys are down with that.

The robes are coming.

Okay, well, if it's embroidered with our logo, I'll take it.

Of course.

Of course.

a robe, a cape, any sort of like long flowing attire.

Very nice.

I don't know why, but as a short person, I feel like I shouldn't be allowed to wear capes
or like long trench coats.

It doesn't look as good on me as if you're taller and lanker.

I'm short, so it doesn't, I don't know.

I've got a couple long coats and they just don't, they make me look boxy.

The phrasing of allowed is like the part that I'm losing it at because like you're trying
to buy it and they're like, sir.

No, no.

like next to a roller coaster, they've got like the height chart and they stand you next
to it and they're just like, so we're to have to ask you to leave.

do not meet the requirements to purchase this cape.

We are sorry.

There was a comedian recently who said something about like, if you're wearing a fedora
and you can do it, that's awesome and you should do it.

But if you are and you can't do it, you're going to make the people who can't do it look
like they shouldn't do it.

And I was just trying to figure out what are the criteria for being good at fedora having.

Cause it's a thing.

It's a thing.

I cannot do it.

I have a giant head for those of you who don't know.

can tell the head is deep like it needs to be smaller this way and I've got a little yeah
I think the fedora has a smaller is a smaller inside cappy thing right if you make it look

big it looks like a top like a big giant hat so you have to be a small hat so you have to
have a small forehead I do not qualify for that and it does look better when you have a

smallish head unfortunately as a short person I have a very unreasonably large head so yes
I am I wore fedora for my wedding I did not look good in it

Two things, one you always look good to, the phrase war of fedora should be acknowledged.

Mmm...

War of Fedora.

That's the show!

That's it!

Done!

Goodbye!

Hey, so it's been a week.

Not one of THE weeks of all time, but it's been a week and John...

I need some good news, man.

You got anything for me?

For me and Daniel?

the news that you're looking for, the news that's so good it might bump it out of just one
of the weeks of all time to like a pretty neat week.

So let's start with some lore.

It might seem unrelated at first, and it is, but I don't care.

When I was a child, I watched professional wrestling on a brand called WWF, and the WWF
got fucking smoked by the World Wildlife Foundation, who was like, nah, pandas are better

than wrestlers, and they won.

But then the downside was that the pandas were endangered.

It's been a hard time for pandas.

If you've ever seen a panda move around, you'd be like, I understand why.

You're having a rough ride here, you cute little puffy old sweetie boy.

They do.

They do.

And that's big problem when it comes to survivability here.

Yeah.

I do think that is really funny.

Like just as like a creature to be like, we should reproduce, but have you had bamboo?

Like, no, no, no, no, uh But.

I just read, grows three feet in a day.

Bamboo grows up to three feet in one single day.

So I mean, if there's one food you're addicted to and it replenishes itself that quickly,
I don't know, man.

Maybe panda's got something.

That, yeah, I know.

I've been trying to get like a cheesecake to emerge three feet long in a day and it's
just, it doesn't really work, which is sad.

Also, I believe cheesecakes emerge.

I don't think they're made.

I think they just like, whoa, and then you have one.

um So this next part is a bit vulnerable.

And by that, mean, literally pandas are now considered vulnerable instead of endangered,
because they're coming back.

They're off the endangered list.

As of very recently, there are now over 1800 pandas.

We're coming back.

It's pay at a time.

WWF.

Stay tuned.

I'm very happy about that, John.

um Not related, but somewhat related.

One of my favorite animals of all time is the red panda.

So anything panda related has panda in the name I'm an advocate for.

I was sad when it was endangered, and I'm happy that those little fluff balls, even though
they are pretty, they are mangy, they will kill you.

If you mess with them too much, they will go after you.

But they're beautiful and cute and lovely.

They are now vulnerable.

And you know what?

I think we all could use some time to be more vulnerable.

All of us.

Yeah.

was gonna do like a bit with that and then I choked it, but now we're here, so yeah.

No, thank you.

You salvaged it.

You salvaged it.

Fucking, I hate when Daniel does this.

I'm here just talking, saying my stupid shit and he's like, but what if you said it in
this cool way?

And I'm like, great, good, that would have been better.

You're not fucking wrong, editor boy.

Fuck!

Can we just like dub Daniel's voice coming out of my face?

people need it and by the people I mean my lawyer.

So when I talk to people and they're like, yeah, and John's therapist and I'm the public
speaker and what's Daniel do?

Daniel's the producer, he's the art visionary guy.

He's also the guy that calls us on our bullshit.

And let me tell you, every single time he cuts him with a knife and it's just like, yep,
no notes, we're done.

Peace out, see you later, bye.

it's rough.

Yeah, no, fucking dear viewer and listener, you should know this is our fifth hour long
take of this today.

We finish and he gets real whiplash, Charles, he's like, not my tempo.

And we're like, what does that mean in this context?

He's like, you talk too slow.

So that's why we're a little bit elevated now to kind of keep it on beat.

Anywho, so that's some good news.

Pandas, they're vulnerable.

We're all gonna be little more vulnerable.

Every single one of us, I think.

If only we could just end the show there.

That'd be great.

Actually, it'd be horrible, because I have some decent to not bad news.

Before we talk about some things we should probably be more mindful of.

John and Daniel, do you recall one of our earlier episodes, I brought up a pretty saucy
topic about Nvidia and OpenAI and how I just had a whiff that something funny was going

along.

Just a recap, Nvidia was investing into OpenAI and it was perceived to us that OpenAI was
investing back into Nvidia in what seemed to be some kind of cyclical fashion.

All while at the same time, Nvidia's stock was going up and up and up.

I'm not here to tell you that I know everything, but generally speaking, I know one thing,
which is nothing is free.

Things cost money.

In order for things to go up and up and up, there has to be significant intake into that
and a significant output of that.

And I just wasn't making, the numbers weren't making sense to me.

And I thought something funny is happening here.

We're getting a circle going down here.

Well, at the risk of coming across, we're taking the credit for everything.

It turns out that maybe, maybe we did it.

Maybe someone else did it.

But through all that suspicion and looking through the lens,

the OpenAI $100 billion deal has disappeared.

It's no longer happening to our poor friends at NVIDIA.

And that's all a result of a lot of questions being asked of where is the return happening
on this?

Our foreign parties who are investing a lot of money, especially China, are asking the
question of, look, we're spending a lot of money on this technology and it's doing a lot

of environmental costs to us.

We're opening up all these data centers.

Where's the profit happening again?

And it seems like as a result of that and many others, that deal has closed and OpenAI is
pulling out of that.

And of course there are questions about Nvidia stock and so forth.

I am not here to say that I want to celebrate the downfall of anything.

In fact, I have several computers that use Nvidia GPUs and all that good stuff.

But I'm always happy that when something looks a little funny, we do a little deeper, do a
little due diligence, whether it was myself or anyone else.

And well, something seems to be happening as a result of it.

Thoughts, John or Daniel?

ah I will be the foil to Sam's kind heart.

I do enjoy when billionaires fail at things because there's no such thing as an ethical
billionaire.

And there's also a challenge right now.

And it's been a challenge before.

And it's a thing we talked before about like team human.

And I think this is kind of a win for team human.

The whole AI phenomenon in general has been very funny for the lay person because it's
sort of like, I think Andrew Russo made like a little skit about this, but it was just

like.

You guys can slow down.

We don't need this and everything.

Like, we should do much more of it.

it's like, no, no, just maybe slow the slow the fuck down.

And uh this whole plan, this doing this was not done for the good of the people.

Sam Altman's little spiel about like, I'm going to help people was fucking garbage.

And it feels good to see, you know, the old FAFO occur in real time.

And for once, slightly ahead of schedule.

This is this is the thing 2026 is doing a little bit that I'm kind of enjoying is it's
like.

There are in fact consequences to doing ridiculous things.

And I just, I don't know.

I'm pretty stoked about that.

AI is great for a tool.

You should use it as a tool.

Don't, don't do this though.

This is a exploitation of many things.

And I'm just, it just feels good.

It just feels good from like a pseudo-justice standpoint, I would say.

We don't know the end result of this.

We don't know what's going to happen.

We don't know if other investors are going to come in and swoop in and do other things.

We have no idea, but at the very least enough eyes were looking at that particular focal
point went, something's a little funny, something a little bizarre.

And again, at Zero Dot, we have no shame.

will take full credit for that because we brought it up.

So the things that we bring up during this particular segment just always seem to find
some kind of good justice.

And I appreciate that so much.

It is an important thing to talk about.

um think in general, and I'll try to keep this point concise, but like the world trends
towards change.

Change is a constant and it's inevitable.

uh People that resist that are playing themselves.

It's not a thing.

And in general, to be overly summative, I do believe the good guys win is everyone along,
we just keep playing.

So.

Thank you to everyone who does the thing.

The thing can be anything.

The thing can be making your voice heard.

The thing can be signaling your calls to the people you care about.

The thing can be not participating in shit that goes against your values or ethics.

But like, I do feel like there's a wave coming of like humans being on a team again.

And that's really fucking cool.

And I'm really excited about it.

So down with billionaires, up with humans.

I'll ride that to the end.

And you said a beautiful thing there, which I'm just gonna echo, you there's a reason why
villains wanna do things fast.

That's because they know if the heroes have infinite amount of time, which they always do,
they always do win.

Because we're playing the infinite game.

And so, that is nice.

That's nice to see.

Just jumping in to give a warm and lovely thank you to our paid Patreon members.

As always, we have God of Grunts, we have Aid, we have JP, we have William Kirk, and we
have Robert Rustant.

If you would love to join them, be in their esteemed company and pay us just a little bit
of money, help support what we do, help keep us going, and get a little something in

return for yourself.

Consider it.

Might be a good choice.

It is a good choice.

John and Daniel, I want to walk you through something.

Here's the deal, okay?

Every single one of us, you, me, John even has this, I know, it might be surprising.

We've got a brain.

That brain does things.

It does things for us.

It helps us navigate through this life.

And I think the best way we can think about what this brain does is if we simplify things.

know, John talks a lot about, you know, what the neocortex does, and I talk about what
other facets of the brain do, and like, know, hippocampus and all that good stuff.

Let's simplify things quite a bit.

Because when we think about it, when we think about the headspace that we're all in, every
single one of us has a control room.

That's what our brains are, okay?

It's a control room.

Now, maybe your control room has 1950s people staring at a black and white screen.

Maybe that's your control room, right?

But maybe your control room's a bit more cozy.

It's got knobs, it's got a bed inside, whatever.

It's got these dials, you know what they all mean.

Maybe your control room is really cool.

It tells you the fuel, like how much food you need, how much sleep you need.

I don't think I get that one, but maybe yours has that.

Your computer also might have something like an autopilot.

might...

you know, allow you to do certain things autonomously.

Again, I didn't get that firmware update, but maybe your computer does, right?

Some people's controls have blinky lights and it's very exciting to navigate in that
particular space, right?

Again, I'm jealous of the people that have this type of control room.

In this control room, you have a giant supercomputer in it.

And we, the subconscious, the conscious, we're the ones operating that.

And some of us have an entire big giant room like this, and it's massive, and it takes a
while for us to get from one end of the control panel to

The next.

That sound right, John?

That sound right, Daniel?

That sound good to you so far?

That's how our brains work?

Yes.

Just yes.

Put another way, because all of ours are a little bit different, we all have our own
little personal TARDISes.

That's right.

Making a bridge gap to our Doctor Who fans.

Every single one of our control rooms is specifically spackled and different and unique to
our own.

The computer might not be anything that we asked for, it was given to us, but...

The room we got to decorate on our own and we get to manage that room the way that we see
fit.

Here's the thing though.

Every single one of our rooms has this little thing.

You gotta look for it.

It's there.

You gotta zoom in, you gotta walk to it.

It takes a while, but if you keep looking at it, keep scratching at it and, hey, what's
that?

What's that?

Oh, hey, hey!

Every single one of these rooms has a little, dankly little, jankly little alarm, just
like this one.

They're all about the same.

Got a couple wires in there.

And John, do know what this alarm's supposed to do?

I would assume alert one to the presence of danger.

Yeah, my gosh, yeah.

Every single one of our control rooms has one of those.

It's somewhere in the room.

Some of us it might be buried somewhere, but for a lot of us it's gotta be there, okay?

It has one job.

Get real loud, real fucking fast, right?

It would not be a very good alarm if it had a delay.

Some of us do have a delay, we'll talk about that later, but that's what it's gotta do.

It's gotta get loud and it's gotta do it incredibly quickly.

And let me tell you, John, and I think John would agree with me,

When it comes to tigers coming for us, it is absolutely perfect at this.

It's got no notes.

Let me tell you, as creatures that have just eyes in front of our heads and no eyes
behind, so we always have a perpetual blind spot, this works absolutely perfectly.

mean, being out in the wild, I know I haven't been destroyed by a Bengal tiger.

Have you, John?

Not a single time, Bengal Tigers, zero, John Infinite, get fucked, Tigers.

I mean, let's not point to the fact that none of us are anywhere near a Bengal tiger, but
you know, I've been to a zoo, I've had the opportunity to dangle my hand behind the bars

and, yep, I didn't do that, because again, my good old arm told me, hey, that might be
dangerous, that might be a little, something to be wary of.

And Daniel's like, if you're the kind of person that puts your hand in front of a Bengal
tiger like that, you deserve to have that hand cut

off, don't you?

brother, as a former zookeeper, people who dangle their arms into enclosures, people who
try and feed the animals their snacks, people who climb on fences.

First of all, what you're doing, what you're doing, we told you not to do that, we put
lots of signs up, we were very polite about it.

Second of all, do you have zero survival instinct?

Do you have no survival instinct whatsoever?

Why do you think the bars are there?

Why do you think the fence is there?

Why do you think that there's all sorts of precautions in place?

It's a dangerous animal just because it's in captivity and you think that it's like a
display, it's on show and everything's all fine.

doesn't mean it's not dangerous.

Anyway, I'm not going to get into all that, you carry on.

hear from you real quick.

Cause have a question.

Is there a correlation between people that might do that and people that have their phones
out for Tik Tok or Instagram or other purposes?

Did you see that in your world?

Yeah.

of, I saw a lot of people propping up their young children on fences of enclosures so they
could get a photo in front of the animals.

A lot of picking their small children up or going up themselves to kind of like hang over
the enclosure fence so that they could take a closer look or to get a better view with

their camera phone, something like that.

It's a...

do anything about it?

They just let it happen because of reasons.

ah

more often than not, the parents were the ones who were encouraging it.

Ugh, okay, look,

I want you to be TikTok famous as much as the next guy.

Actually, no, we don't like TikTok here.

Instagram famous.

Do whatever you'd like to do, right?

um That's the thing, please do not fight your biology because your biology is literally
sending a wire.

Like, hey, that thing, even though it's guarded, even though you're in a place where you
paid a ticket to get in, that's a dangerous animal.

They're not gonna try to kill you, but if you give it any kind of reason, it will try to
kill you.

And once again, we have this alarm system in our control room.

It's a little winky dinky, it's got some wires in there, it does a simple little bell,
gets super loud, but it's incredibly sensitive and it does, it's supposed to do a really

good job here.

Again, I have no notes for it.

The problem is, is that same alarm system works for whether a snail is crawling on our
skin or whether we get an email that we're not really happy about or our coworker's

screaming at us.

That alarm happens all the flipping time.

Now, John, I am not a doctor.

not even licensed to say the following things.

You have to validate this for me.

But I have a suspicion, I have a feeling that our brains, our body, this alarm system, it
was never built.

The firmware didn't get updated.

We're talking about Windows XP, Service Pack 2.

It did not get updated to account for things like emails, arguments, stuff like this.

It just wasn't built for that.

Am I right?

You're very correct.

No, the default software we have expects you to be dead at about age 35 and they never
patched it.

it's a, yeah, it over prioritizes a lot of things too that it doesn't need to do.

Yeah, absolutely.

Again, again, for this scenario, God, you're so good.

You're such a wonderful worker.

You do your job.

Thank you so much.

If I give you promotion, I could.

I can't though, because I need you to keep doing what you're doing.

But for this, I think we can all agree, a little spicy, not great.

So John, Daniel, when the alarms are sending us this signal that we, you know, the
signal's the same.

It's just danger, danger, danger.

Cortisol, cortisol, fight or flight, everywhere else.

What do we do?

We pull the brake.

We shut.

Everything down we go done.

We don't want the signal anymore.

We think that's a really good idea But you know what if the sound is just in my face or in
my ears if the lights are everywhere if it's annoying I'll just shut off the alarm system.

I'll just shut it all down boom BAM Problem is it doesn't shut down just the power to the
alarm system It shuts down the power to the entire system of your control panel and your

computer as a whole it is gone.

It's kaput

It's kapui.

It's literally the thing that says, hey, maybe don't shut this part down because if you
shut this part down, you will receive what we call a short circuit.

This is the equivalent of saying, hey, there's a beeping fire alarm in my house.

I'm not going to do anything about the fire.

I'm just going to take the batteries out.

And then what happens, John?

Well, how are you doing it?

Because there's different answers.

Well, there's a couple of things you can do.

One is you can ignore the beeping, which if you are...

I know a lot of people who have like a fire, like a little smoke that goes beep, like
every however often, they just live their life like that.

And that's, I've been one of those people um and it's no shade, but like you now are
living at risk of various problems you didn't have before.

Plus it's not, it's kind of hard to sleep with that, but for me.

um You can also force suppress it by just clogging your system down with like alcohol.

You can just be like,

threat system offline because now I'm taking sedatives.

uh You can also like become unconscious, I guess.

Those are the main ways that I can think of.

None of them are very good long-term.

Yeah, mean, know, alcohol is a poison and there's always a place for poison and know,
self-medication through alcohol is a thing people do.

I don't think it's anything John and I are ever gonna recommend, but that is a thing
people can do to try to shut down this signal, right?

And as a result of that, whatever way you do it, what you're basically doing is you're
short-circuiting the entire process.

You're short-circuiting yourself.

Now, you'll notice I have a lovely picture here from iStock that was free and the reason I
have this picture is because

I thought having a picture of someone literally be on fire or a person literally having
been electrocuted wouldn't be appropriate for our audience today.

But just imagine in whatever way you can that this guy isn't comedically just yelping, but
rather you've short-circuited the entire thing.

And when you do that, we do what I might call we shooting the messenger.

We shot the messenger.

We said, hey, we're going to short-circuit the whole thing.

We're going take the power down.

And the messenger is now completely kaput.

John, I think you see that a lot in your world, don't you?

Right?

Yeah.

yeah, yeah.

Oops, my bad.

That's what we do, right?

That's what we do.

And there's a reason for that.

We'll get to that in just a little bit.

But what I've just described to everyone, and John knows all what this is about, I like to
call it emotional hijacking, but the official term is the amygdala hijack, right?

Your brain literally just got overridden.

You short-circuited everything.

There's no power there.

And then we behave a certain kind of way we are not very proud of, right?

I was the kind of person that would get viscerally, viscerally angry.

I mean, I'm punching things.

I mean, like,

punching inanimate things.

mean, like hurting other people when I was a younger, younger person.

Other people scream, other people yell.

And hopefully, most of us that are listening to this podcast right now, you have a brain
that eventually, when things come back online and things are back aligned, you are able to

reflect and go, shoot, I wasn't thinking what came over me.

And we get back to that concept John talked about several episodes ago.

Shame, shame might occur, right John?

Yes, sir.

Yeah, shame might occur.

Not a bad thing, but I mean, it's a bad thing for sustained shame.

We talk about guilt versus shame, right?

Shame is saying, you're the problem.

Guilt is saying, what I did was a problem and how can I fix that?

So I bring this all up to remind ourselves that this entire process, this whole thing that
happens, if you have it, that's not a bug, that's not a character flaw, it's literally the

alarm doing its job too well, it is a feature, not a bug.

And that's pretty cool.

But I want to sit on that for just a hot minute before we dive into this topic a little
bit more.

You see, in my world, John, I talk to people all the time who feel the need to suppress,
to control, to stamp down.

And that when the signals happen, they say, I'm just not good at regulating my emotions.

I'm like, no, the signal's doing what it's gotta do.

It's how we...

Give ourselves time to regulate that signal.

That's the important piece.

The amount of, I'm sure John, in your world, you talk to people all the time who say, you
know, they have this deep shame of how they react when the emotions get high.

I don't handle emotions well, they might say to you.

I'm sure you just want to give them a big hug if you ever could and just say, it's okay,
there's nothing wrong with you in this particular capacity.

Am I right, John?

There's two sides of the coin in that there's people who don't handle them well because
they get big and people who don't handle them well because they suppress them and then

eventually they get big.

ah But yeah, the emotions.

So I've said it before, I'll say it again, emotions have one primary job, which is to
communicate.

It's a survival tool among an animal group.

And if they don't talk, they're like, I'm not finished with my job, I'll wait.

And as soon as you're ready, they will.

Yeah.

Suppressing them is not an option.

Like you can, and it's intentional if you do it, they still are in the queue.

You have to clear the queue.

yeah, we've talked about that, right?

Like you haven't mowed the proverbial lawn.

It's still growing.

It is still there.

It is festering.

All you're doing is masking it.

And we'll talk a bit about that in just a bit.

But to give us some additional grace, I mean, let's just think about it.

You get into your electric meat suit, as John says, or your control room, you're new to
the job and you're just asked to sink or swim.

Just figure it the heck out.

You weren't given a manual for this kind of thing.

I mean...

I deal with people all the time who, when they're in the leadership role, like they
weren't given any training on how to be a leader, they're just like, I don't know, just

figure it out.

It's the same exact thing, but it's our entire gosh darn lives.

It's okay to recognize that.

You weren't given a manual.

There's no manual for this kind of thing.

You're looking at a bunch of wires and saying, okay, the alarms are going off.

What do I do?

And the natural inclination is to shut it all off.

And that's, that's if we're lucky.

That's, that's, that's if, if we're lucky.

Because there's another facet to this, and know John knows all about this, the sneaky part
of this entire equation, which is there are some people, not me, I'm not one of these

people, I'm not smart enough for that, but some of us have a computer, it's nice, it's
basic, it does the basic functions.

Some of us have supercomputers in our room.

They got all the RAM before the shortage.

mean, they are brains that are cooking, they analyze, they know all the answers, they're
real gosh darn smart.

And John knows this.

Even though they got a supercomputer.

They still have this guy.

This guy is not the same.

Or this guy is the same.

This guy does not change.

It does not get any better.

It does not get an upgrade.

You get a better computer.

This doesn't become a fancier alarm.

It doesn't become better regulated.

Nope.

It's the same exact alarm.

So what do people do to try to silence the alarm?

What do people do try to silence the alarm?

Well, the super smart people, they try to analyze what's the problem, which is great.

The problem is they shut the whole thing down just like we did before.

They pulled the lever.

But now we've shut the whole thing down, there's no power anymore in this entire room.

And it was the computer that knew the answer the whole time and there's no power because
you turned it off.

And by the way, the room is still on fire.

And with that, we come back to this place.

We did the equivalent of just turning off the fire alarm.

And it's basically the Spider-Man meme where really smart people with incredibly amazing
supercomputers are spending all this time figuring out, diagnosing the issue, but the

building is still on fire.

That sound about on track so far, John?

Yeah, yeah, I would say so.

That makes sense to me.

Tell me if I'm wrong.

No, no, no, no, I don't think there's anything wrong.

feel like there's different, well, it's like its own things.

I wanna be brief with it.

It's just, in my experience, there are people who think I can outwork it, and if I go so
good and so well, the alarm won't go off, which is an option, and they are wrong.

And then there are people who are like, the alarm is a personal failing, and if I ignore
it, that makes me a better worker.

too.

Yeah, that's another facet as well, right?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

They're focusing mostly on the analytics of the situation.

They can choose to ignore that signal and they say the signal is constantly happening all
the time.

They say that to me, they say that to John.

I'm sure Daniel has friends that have said that to them as well.

They just are always constantly happening.

So why am I bringing all this up?

Well, we've talked about it before, but I wanna talk about something that's near and dear
to all of our hearts and there's an important factor to this.

This is how we start beginning to talk about the subject of emotional intelligence, or we
call it EQ in my business.

think, John, you might call it the same thing.

EQ.

Now, if I was in one of my classes, I'd say something to the effect of, well, EQ is just
the ability to recognize, understand, manage, the emotions effectively, are said, blah,

blah, blah, blah, whatever.

I'm not interested in saying that.

Instead, I'd rather say this.

Emotional intelligence isn't turning off the alarm.

It's learning how to pause to turn the computer back on while the alarm is going off.

because what's happening is your computer's off, the alarm's going on, you shut down the
whole thing, everything's still off, you have to give yourself a moment of pause right

here.

The pause is what brings us back where we need to be.

And John, I wanna ask you for your thoughts about the pause.

You discussed that with some of your clients, your patients, how we regulate that, what
are your thoughts on that?

I was discussing this with a friend the other day and that like very close friend and
we're hanging out and.

My friend could tell that I was like not having a great time and nothing was wrong.

But what had happened was there were plans that were made and then those plans were
changed and I have ADHD.

And if I have a plan that I'm looking forward to and you change it, even if it's another
good thing, I'm like, there will be blood in the streets and I will see you all killed,

which I don't want.

And my amygdala hijack is like, this isn't okay.

And I'm like, well, that would be rude to yell at my nice friends because they're just
doing a different thing than I wanted.

And my friend.

who is amazing, was like, are you good?

And I was like, yeah, I need like a second.

So I took time and I was like, I think my brain, and I do for the sidebar, externalize
your brain from yourself.

You're not your brain.

It's like a computer in your head.

You're more than that.

It's whole thing.

But it was fun to talk about it in third person with this person because you could be
vulnerable and be like, hang on.

I think my brain's doing a thing right now and I think it's angry.

I'm okay.

The choices of the day have been value accordant.

I would do them again.

Mm-hmm.

but I think I need to figure out what's going on.

And that for the record fast forwarding a lot of the story led to like a really pleasant
evening and everybody feeling good and doing things they wanted to do.

Whereas for most of my life, especially in my tempestuous youth, would be like, I don't
know, this is fucking shitty, this is fucking, like, you just gonna, and that doesn't

work.

So no, I think that's a good term.

Pausing it to take it back on and analyze, vulnerably analyze, like a panda, vulnerably.

No, for sure.

I like that framework.

less endangered, be more vulnerable and do the pause.

And I love, John, what you're saying there about identifying the brain or the control room
or the supercomputer is having something is occurring, but it's not you.

Like I am not angry.

I'm experiencing some kind of level of anger, right?

I'm having this experience and that's one of the visages of this.

So in the simplest of terms, having the pause is a

can be, if you haven't done it before, one of the most uncomfortable things because what
I'm basically telling you is I want you to stop time for just a little bit in your head.

I want you to freeze everything.

And basically what I'm asking you to do, what I say to everyone, it's the equivalent of
saying, hey, the light is green and people are beeping at you, but I want you to wait and

you only go when you are ready to go.

That's how it feels.

I remember the first time I kind of.

practiced the skill, the whole world was crashing down on me, I felt this immense amount
of pressure, I pushed back and...

Well, nothing happened.

As in, I didn't get in trouble, I wasn't upset, sure, I pissed some people off, I didn't
go fast enough for them, I didn't follow their flow of traffic, I didn't follow their

proverbial way of things, but I was able to go about my day and do my things.

Now, if we were any other type of podcast, John, myself, and Daniel, this is where we'd
say, yay, we've cured you.

We've told you the thing, this is what you gotta do.

Congratulations, you will never ever be emotionally hijacked ever for the rest of your
life.

You have figured it out.

You will though.

Just kidding though, right?

You will.

John just expressed it recently just happened.

had an amygdala hijack.

I get emotionally hijacked from time to time.

In fact, I got emotionally hijacked a few weeks ago.

the only difference between me and John and Daniel and maybe anyone else that might be
listening is that we're getting more practiced at the skill of recognizing when it's

happening versus just letting ourselves fall by the reins of it.

unfortunately, I can't tell you that you're cured.

Unfortunately, I can't tell you the seven, 12, 15, 35 steps you gotta take to make this
work.

This shit just takes time.

It takes a bit of time and it takes practice.

But the good thing is that the ceiling is infinite, John.

Because EQ is different from this thing called IQ, or intelligence quotient.

The science has changed a little bit from now.

I mean, they say now that you can raise your IQ a little bit by a certain percentage, by a
significant curve.

But generally speaking, holistically, if we zoom out,

If IQ is something that's fixed in stone, and by the way, IQ is, if you're following the
metaphor, is our supercomputer, either super or not, you can't change that.

You can change the room, but you can't change the supercomputer.

EQ has absolutely no ceiling, and if you'd spend the time now, you can start working on
this particular craft.

And I like to compare EQ as a muscle.

It's a muscle you have to work on in the gym.

Daniel, John, and myself, we love going to the gym, we love exercising, we know we gotta
do it.

you know, on a pretty consistent schedule.

If we skip a day, that's okay.

Make sure we make a plan for the next day.

I don't think Dan or John, or sorry, Daniel, John, or myself, I don't think either of us
think, you know what, I'm just gonna go to the gym once this year.

I'm gonna do it for like 10 hours and kill myself, and that's gonna be good enough.

It's not a one-time thing.

But you tell me, am I wrong, John?

Is that what you do?

that your training regimen?

You just go in once and that's it?

Yeah, I know that's what I do.

I do one bulking session where I work out for 72 hours straight and then I eat 67,000
calories.

And I think that should like just kind of rock it for the next several months at least.

So I'm going to die from a heart attack.

And also I haven't slept in so long that I'm seeing colors that aren't there.

But other than that, it did feel very exciting, but that could have been all the
stimulants I took to be able to do it.

okay, yeah, yeah.

It does feel good when we do that.

But hopefully, if you don't make the mistake that John's making, or the mistakes I used to
make, I used to kill myself in the workouts.

I used to destroy myself.

And it was like every day I gave myself no time for a recovery of any kind.

But the same metaphor can apply.

It's something that can be done every day, can be built over time, et cetera, et cetera,
et cetera.

Here's the thing about that infinite ceiling though.

You say, have no emotional intelligence, Sam.

I have no emotional intelligence, John or Daniel.

I can't do this.

No problem, man.

That means you have a lot to grow and there's a lot of things to learn to do.

But then you might be on the other side of the coin because we know we have those people,
John and Daniel, that are in the comments right now going, well, actually, I'm at 100.

I'm already perfect emotional intelligence.

There's no such thing.

You can go even higher from there.

And yes, to my friends that love Dragon Ball Z, if you say, you know what, my level is at
over 9000, guess what?

Why don't you shoot for 10,001?

You can always raise your ceiling a little bit higher and get better at this.

And I share with you a story, John and Daniel.

I was told in one of my old leadership roles that, you have such incredible emotional
intelligence, you make space for people, you give people patience and kindness and all

that stuff.

That's just incredible.

And I made this horrible mistake, John and Daniel.

I said, great.

That means I'm good.

That means I'll stop working on it.

I'll just stop dedicating my life to that.

John, can you imagine what happened six months afterwards?

I assume everything was totally fine and you were right.

Yeah, I was absolutely right.

Except the fact I was noticing that people were skipping my meetings that I scheduled,
people were coming 15 minutes late and leaving 15 minutes early, people were avoiding me

in the halls, and I got a good little tidbit from someone who wanted to be anonymous and
say, hey Sam, do you know that you're coming across unapproachable?

And you come across like you're a little high and mighty over people?

And it's because I wasn't paying attention to this thing, which means it was something I
was working on.

But it's not a gift you have it's not an innate ability.

It's a craft like anything else That's the thing I want us to walk away from as we dive
into this real topic that we're about to have Emotional intelligence is a skill one of my

big pet peeves John and Daniel is that people call emotional intelligence a soft skill
This is a soft skill now as far as I'm concerned.

It's a skill like anything else It's my recommendation that everyone works on it But if
you're someone who wants to dedicate a lot of time to it you can be a master craftsman

when it comes to emotional intelligence for sure.

And that thing we talked about a long time ago that John was really, really all about,
that empathy thing, empathy thing is just realizing that everyone else has their own

control room.

So for instance, my control room has a bunch of levers on it, because I hate buttons, but
John's control room has nothing but buttons.

So the thing is, if John says, hey, hey, hey, I can solve your problem, Sam, here you go,
here's the manual, and it just tells me a transcription for all these button notations,

well, that's not gonna work for me, because my control room has levers.

So if you say to hey Sam, here's how to solve it.

And you say, here's some drumsticks.

Don't you have drum pads in your room?

No, I don't.

I just have a bunch of levers, right?

That's the thing.

Empathy is understanding all of us have different control rooms.

Every single one of us.

Our rooms are different, but our alarms are mostly all the same.

By the way, our signals and how they're transmitted are very different.

It depends on frontal lobe regulation, other factors.

We are not doctors.

Do not sue us, but...

Generally speaking, our alarms in this metaphor that we're using are the same.

This translates to when something is happening with our homies, say, a homie is trying to
figure out his or her alarm versus my homie is a jerk.

Oftentimes we try to villainize the person's having that big emotional response.

We say, why is that person being that way?

They're being nonsensical.

That person's mean-spirited.

Nah, they've just got an alarm.

It's going off and they're just figuring out how that all works.

John knows all about this.

The place in which you can be more empathetic versus

pointing your fingers and blaming fingers brings us more together as human beings.

Would you agree with that, John?

Strongly, and I have a lot of things to say about it, but I'll save them.

But yes, I agree.

Well, it's just like a lot of people are born into families where they, there may not be a
significant knowledge of mental health, the average EQ fairly low.

And that's not like taking a shot at anybody, but like, if I'm just Johnny family haver,
and I have a kid and that kid has like borderline personality disorder, people with that.

aren't like, I'm gonna be difficult today.

They're like, I want this relationship with you, but also holding it is very painful and
scary.

I am so incredibly activated that I have to do something significant to feel safe in this
way.

And if you go, oh, my person who's going through that isn't so much pain, they're doing
the best they can.

Let me help them navigate this.

They're going to have a better outcome.

You're gonna have a better outcome.

but it's really easy to be like, stopping such a fucking dramatic dick, which is going to
make everything much worse instantly.

And it's, yeah, there are so few villains in real life, so few of them.

Villains are people who have chosen to forego empathy or gone, yeah, I could, but I don't
care.

Whereas a lot of these people who are in pain and are acting in some way that feels
disruptive or dramatic or intense or whatever, they, they,

they're doing the best they can with the alarm going off and they feel alone, they don't
know how to handle it and they're scared.

And you can help them if you know it's the alarm and don't pathologize them, which you are
built to do for easy categorization, which is a failing on our systems internally.

Not a single one of us is wired to believe that we're the villain of the story.

We all think we're the hero.

And of course, mathematically it's not possible.

We are in a chaos engine of life, but no one has bad intentions.

Even the actual villains of our story don't have bad intentions.

That's what John's saying right there.

Couldn't agree more, my friend.

So, why am I talking about all this?

Well, two reasons.

One, that's the beginning of EQ.

There's a bit more to it than that.

But I thought we had zeroed out

Save you a Google.

What I just described to you in high level is Daniel Goleman's book, The Emotional
Intelligence, Why It Can Matter More Than IQ, one of the best selling books of all time.

Yeah, the book costs about $3.95.

You want to get it digitally?

Yes, you could Google or chat GPT this book, but please do not.

And here's why.

If you chat GPT, please summarize this book to you.

I've done it several times now and it gives you wrong information, information that is
literally not in the book.

And I've gone ahead and take AI.

Yeah.

You're joking!

Oh, wow.

Yeah, that's right So we at zero dot were team human I thought I'd take the extra labor of
love and save you that ambition a bit of nature if you'd like to go ahead and grab the

book I'm not advocating for it or against it although I teach quite a bit about it But
I've given you the high-level overview of it But if you like this summary and other

summaries you can come join the club zero dot patreon for only three dollars and 99 cents
or more if you vibe with us and get extended episodes of us get our priority quality

Sorry, get priority questions and answers from us.

So feel free to send us your questions.

We'll answer them on the podcast right here.

And then sneak peeks into some future spicy projects we got cooking up.

won't say more about that.

And just generally speaking, you will now be a cool person if you give us $3.99.

I want to be very clear.

You could have also have been a cool person prior to that, but you are guaranteed to be a
cool person if you submit to our Patreon right here and then.

So once again, let it be known that Zero Dot always gives incredible value to its
listeners.

And that's right, John.

our viewers as well.

I just want to make a special shout out to people who are really suffering right now.

If you're a person who like has a lot of friends and you've been doing well, but you can't
stop going like bruh or wassup or dabbing and you're no longer cool, it's okay.

Help is on the way.

And for 3.99, we can restore your status to what it once was.

We'll get through this together.

We're not gonna leave you hanging man.

Not at all But that's just the beginning of our story John and Daniel I wanted to level
set with ourselves because here's what I actually really want to talk about Let's switch

metaphors for just a little bit.

So before I was talking about the control panel or the control room We've all got our own
control room and the supercomputers that we have whether they're super or not are kind of

fixed It was kind of given to us.

We had no choice in the matter

And we all have these alarm systems that are basically uniform in that way.

Let's change the metaphor a little bit and say instead of control rooms, we're actually,
all of us, we have a cracked instrument inside of our head.

It's an instrument.

It plays music.

But, you know, it's got some more.

It's got some cracks in it.

You know, maybe Daniel, you got a drum kit.

That's a crazy symbol right there that's got damage in there.

But I've seen it before and people go ham on that thing.

Daniel, have you ever had a situation where that happened to you for your drum kit?

I was renowned for being very harsh on my cymbals.

They were, they are hunks of metal that are meant to be hit to make cool sounds.

Don't be gentle with those boys.

Give them a bit of a slap around.

Give them a bit of a, give them a bit of a love tap.

No, I've kept some cymbals until they were just...

shreds of their original selves, just they're warped, they're mangled, they've got cracks
in them.

I've tried to like, tried to fix them and it's not gone quite right, but yeah, so yes.

Okay, all right, so you have experience with that.

ah John, I don't know what musical instrument you ever played if you ever did, but I have
a feeling you played on the piano once or twice.

Very much so, started there, trumpet, euphonium, guitar, bass guitar, and then singing.

The face was my other instrument.

excellent.

Yeah, yeah, you know what it's like to play on a piano that's a little out of tune.

know, my parents had this baby grand piano in their house for 30 years.

It was always perpetually out of tune.

The strings were warped.

Some of them were broken.

Finally got it fixed a couple years ago.

Shouts to my father, who's a Patreon member of our wonderful club, Zero Dot here.

And now it sounds pretty okay.

It doesn't sound like it's, like, you try to play just any kind of tune, chopsticks,
whatever.

It just didn't sound quite right.

And of course,

As a fellow guitarist, bassist, keyboardist, uh jammer of all kinds, I have many uh
musical instruments that are little cracked, a little broken.

This is a joke, you think it's a joke, it's actually real.

One of my guitars, the G string, just perpetually comes out of tune within maybe three
minutes of playing.

I'm not joking, I've taken it to several different artisans to try to fix it, it just
doesn't work.

All of us, in our way, we have musical instruments.

And when I say the word cracked instrument or broken instrument, that's not...

me putting a label on it, but that's our perception of the world putting a label on
ourselves.

And I'm bringing this up for a very, very specific reason because all of our instruments,
remember, we're changing metaphors here, they've got parts of the instrument that don't

work as well, they've got some wobbly notes, people might even perceive it as wrong notes
or wrong sounds, just ugly, and the world shrieks and goes, ah, please don't do that,

please stop doing that, the world says to ourselves.

and to mirror the wonderful Miles Davis, it's not the notes you play, it's the notes you
don't play.

If you're a big fan of a kind of blue, one of the greatest jazz albums of all time, Miles
Davis basically made his career to be a trumpeter who only played very specific notes,

very nice notes, very kind notes, very simple melodic gestures.

And so we feel the need to do the same thing for ourselves, John and Daniel.

We put on armor.

We say, okay, I will be the person that you want me to be.

I will...

I will mend the cracks, I will fix those things.

I won't play those notes that you don't like so much.

I won't play that screeching sound.

I won't use that G string that's always out of tune.

Daniel's not gonna use that symbol that literally makes a weird shrieking, wobbly sound
now that parts of it are broken.

And John's not gonna use the entire bass clef of the piano because that part just sounds
like mud right?

John, you still get a thought.

But no, I just don't want to do what you're saying.

I don't like it.

Yeah, you don't like it, right?

But the world asks us to do that sometimes, doesn't it?

Right?

Yeah, we put on this armor and we want to be a certain kind of way.

So back to my metaphor about the green light, we feel like the light is green, you cannot
wait and you have to go now.

We have to follow the tempo of life that it gives to us.

And that creates an incredibly frustrating experience.

On one hand, if we're younger adults in our younger lives, in our teens and twenties,

It's good to learn the rules of the world, I'd say.

I say just learning the flow of things, for sure.

But I think a big mistake happens once you get into your 30s and 40s, where the rules of
the world are infallible, you don't mess with that, and then you start living your life

dictated by it.

And I know as I say that, Daniel especially is like, mm, I don't like that at all.

That's not a good vibe for anyone.

That's what the world tells us.

Be perfect, hide your flaws.

Well, that crack, that defect, that unevenness that we're talking about right now, I'm a
leadership consultant by trade and what I specialize in doing is letting people know that

that weakness that you perceive to be weak or that the world tells you might actually be
something far, far, far cooler.

What if I told you that that's not a flaw, that that might be your indication for your
superpower, that little thing that the world doesn't like?

It doesn't like it because it's unusual.

a little, it em goes against the grain of other things.

That sensitivity that you might have might be an additional emotional attunement.

That overthinking that you might say you do, you're really good at doing pattern
recognition.

That conflict avoidance that a lot of us have, maybe that's an additional social
awareness.

That self-doubt that you think that you have, people say, you hesitate too much.

There might be reflective intelligence.

That emotional intensity that you have might be depth, conviction, and care.

Again, it could be any of those things, could be more of those things, but there's a
significant possibility based on the social sciences and what we do in inventory

personality surveys that those glaring quote unquote weaknesses, those cracks might
actually be a strength somewhere else.

And it's all a matter of where you find your ecosystem, your tribe, where people
appreciate things like that.

And I say this, we shame these qualities because they're messy.

They don't fit neatly on a resume.

They slow things down.

They feel unsafe in systems that reward certainty and speed.

And so as a result, we make the mistake that many of us make.

I made it myself.

We armor up.

We armor up.

Now, John and Daniel, you guys are hip, you're cool, the JIV.

Do you remember the moment exactly in your life when you decided you weren't going to
armor up anymore?

You weren't gonna hide yourself anymore, you were gonna be your real self.

Do remember that moment?

I have things that I would describe as contributions to that moment.

were episodes, times.

How did it feel when you started making a dent in that direction of like, you know, I
don't want to be this version of me anymore.

The honest answer is scary because

you can abandon the thing that feels like, you know, very rigid, stiff armor and be like,
here's the thing that's more comfortable and fluid for me.

And then there's a sort of pregnant pause of like, is this going to work?

Is this marketable?

Does this make money?

Do you die if you do this?

Do people reject you?

The answer is no for the record, but it's scary.

maybe make that clear if this is the only part you're listening to you right now a glaring
note But yes, the fear is there 100 % John Yeah

It is...

It is scary.

But it's...

It makes me proud of myself for being true to myself.

And it's exciting.

It's exciting and it's fulfilling and it's joyful.

It's, you know, like me.

I like all the weird things about me.

And if other people don't, that's okay.

Some people will, some people won't, that's fine.

But I'd rather express it anyway.

I would share a very short story that is just the exact moment you're talking about,
Daniel.

I met my first job working in a rehab and it was an interesting place to cut your teeth as
a therapist, but I'm in a break room and a coworker of mine who out of the kindness of my

heart, I will leave nameless.

I was saying something to her and she kind of went like this and looked at me and she
said, John, you know you're real weird, right?

And I said, yep.

And walked out of there with the biggest strut that I get.

It felt good.

I was like, yeah, you don't like this at all.

But uh that makes me like a little more convicted that I should do it.

Not like in a fuck her way, but in a way of like, I'm not for you.

Like this isn't a demo.

You're not the person that I need to go with this.

And there's a lot of people and I, especially for ADHD homies.

I have way more energy to be the me that I like being.

Being the me that I have canned and made into the suit to look the certain way to fit the
picture.

I can do it if I have to.

For instance, if a cop pulls me over, I'm about to be that very specific version of me.

But that's a spoon spender, man.

That doesn't feel good.

Yeah.

It's exhausting, It's so exhausting.

It took me a really, really long time.

I finally got to the end of it and I was just like, no wonder I am so tired and so at the
end of my rope.

Having to try and keep that up on a daily basis for hours on end is so exhausting.

You know what is a joy that I would share?

And for the neurotypical homies, I'm sure you've experienced something like this to a
degree, but for the neurodiverse homies, especially the autistic homies, there's a thing

where a group of you will all be together, knowing, meeting one another, and then one of
you will break character and just fucking be weird.

Maybe you verbal stupid, maybe like, boop, boop, boop, or just some stupid shit.

And everyone's like, oh, hang on, you're one of us.

and then they start being weird and you can watch the collective mask fall away and
everyone's like, it's gonna be much easier and better here now.

As opposed to like, yes, I also have a job and do business.

I'm going to complete a transaction and we shall consume the food together.

How about that breathing in and out, eh?

Real good.

Mmm.

uh good reference to that.

oh

It's a beautiful moment when that happens and I'm thinking about, Daniel, what you were
saying about enjoying yourself and realizing that the fear of not being accepted as well,

I accept me and I'm not for everyone.

One of the things we opened with in this podcast when we started, we should probably keep
opening with it, was we're not gonna be for everyone and that's okay.

We're not gonna try to be, but we know the people we are for, we wanna be the voice for
them and the voice to champion for them.

And so I think we've said this in many different ways, but like,

If you're a voice for everyone, if you're trying to appease everyone, then you're really
trying to not be lovable to anyone.

And we want to be lovable to everyone.

We want to have that service to some people, not everyone, but there's going to be someone
who goes, yeah, that's my vibe.

And that's one of the greatest feelings ever.

John expresses like, hey, you got a thing?

I got a thing.

I got a thing.

We got a thing.

And we see each other.

We start mimicking each other.

We start loving each other because we love, human beings love seeing other human beings.

That's absolutely true.

100%.

I share with you one of my favorite feelings?

And I get this feeling like fairly often, probably at least once a month or something.

ah I'll bring a new client in to the fold and it's therapy day one.

If you've ever been to therapy before, let me tell you, therapy day one is the worst day
of therapy.

And not cause it's bad.

It's just because you're not doing any of fun shit yet.

It's a lot of like, tell me a bunch of details about yourself.

Also, hi, I'm a stranger.

Fucking be vulnerable with me.

It's weird for you, good luck.

But over the course of that hour,

Um, and I also, I do flatter myself a little and then I think I'm pretty good at getting
people to come out of their shell a little bit by making a safe space.

Pretty easy to talk to.

Um, you watch somebody come in and be like, here's my agenda of things to work on by the
end of the hour.

You can see they're like their body language is softened and they're talking, they're
moving freely.

And it's like, that's you.

Like we got you here.

And it's just such a, it just feels so good.

Not into like I cracked the case, but in a way of like, I'm so glad this person could come
out and I could cut the real person there.

That's awesome.

for some people it takes longer and that's completely fine.

There's people who like, I hope this doesn't, I don't know, it might sound some sort of
way, like, there's people who like I'm seeing for like four five times or just like a

month or more of therapy.

And then like, it like hits.

I'm like, oh, that's how we, okay.

I'm like, it feels so good.

So if you're a person and I am, well I used to be, one of these people.

who would take a particularly long time to come out of the shell, because I need to make
sure the coast is clear and that you're not gonna kill me for being weird.

Like, that's okay.

But also, secretly the news is very good, because if you come out of your shell and the
person's like, my God, fun, cool, thanks, great.

And if they're like, that's not for me, cool, get out, you don't need to do anymore.

That's not a problem.

That's true.

Yeah.

Yeah.

we've

people can sense authenticity, people can also sense a lack of authenticity.

If, and it's, oh when you, when you speak to someone and they're just so authentically
them, it's so beautiful and it's so lovely.

and I just think why would you not want that for yourself?

I picked the job that I work at because my boss, Meridy Rylan, is a wonderful human being
and a brilliant, like she's a great leader.

But I really liked the interview I had with her because she was asking me about my
practice and I said something, something and I said, and it's just been lovely to do this.

And she said, lovely?

That's a great word choice.

And Daniel just said that.

And I just think that, I don't know, there are words that make you feel like you're
communicating like yourself, be they casual words or slang words or just words that you

use more than like the average bear.

But like, that's good.

Like you should do that.

And it's an EQ thing to recognize that when someone's doing that and to make them feel
comfortable while they're doing it.

Absolutely.

Yeah.

I'll share one of my favorite things I get to do.

In my job, I work with people who are business people.

They're working people.

For the first two hours, they don't want to talk to me, because they're like, I don't got
time to be in this presentation, meeting, whatever, training, whatever, whatever,

whatever.

Then I open them up and we have some jokes, we have a good time, whatever.

At almost exactly, and I do like eight to nine hour workshops at like the six hour mark,
John and Daniel, I drop the F-bomb.

I just throw a curse word in there.

Because at this point, what are you going to do, throw me out?

We've been together for six hours, I'm going to throw the F-word in there.

And here's what happens.

Half the room goes, oh my gosh, he said a curse word, my gosh.

The other group's like, oh, thank God.

And it's like, you can see the proverbial belt buckle, like loosen up, like they are ready
to like actually be human with you.

And it's a beautiful experience because it's like, yeah, we're in this together.

Like we're human beings.

Let's see each other.

Let's not try to be cogs in a machine.

Let's really be together.

Let's take the armor off in whatever way we can.

You are paying a cost to have that armor.

And I want us to remove that cost as much as possible.

Which leads to my point about the armor.

It has a cost.

We pay it every day.

And Daniel spoke about this, realization of how much effort was being spent to put this
armor on, to put this facade on.

And you don't realize it until afterwards, but if you're not in this part of the stage of
your life, you think it's totally fine.

it's no big deal.

It's just, it's just what I have to do with life.

But I'm here to tell you, it is exhausting you.

It is draining you.

And this is where we come back to Daniel Goleman, especially the idea of emotional
intelligence.

It's, is uncomfortable, but it's true.

Intelligence isn't just what you know.

It's how you relate to yourself and to others and to...

pressure.

Specifically, if you don't give yourself permission to be your real self, then you are
missing half of the equation in your human relationship with other people, whether they're

professional or otherwise.

You're missing that piece and emotional intelligence helps you this.

So again, EQ doesn't erase your weaker traits.

That's what a lot of people think.

It teaches you how to use the weaker traits to communicate and bridge that gap with other
people and create that continuity with others.

EQ is what turns sensitivity into empathy.

That overly sensitive person, that's me.

you become what some people might call an empath.

My father's listening to this podcast, but if he is, he might remember all the times he
told me that I was an overly sensitive boy.

Well, it took me a while, but I learned that actually that was a superpower of mine and
that that sensitivity led me down a certain path and I'm grateful for that.

Our fear turns into information.

emotional reactions turn into recognizing signals, right?

If I'm always having emotional reactions, everything will hold on.

That lets me know that if John's having an outburst or Daniel's having an outburst, I'm
having an outburst, that's a signal for something.

What does that mean?

That gives us an opportunity to kind of get into that and have an exploratory conversation
about that.

And here we come back to our pandas.

It's a vulnerability and we turn that into trust, right?

We're going to ask all of us to be pandas today, moving on forward.

Be more vulnerable.

because otherwise you will become extinct.

Without EQ, our weaknesses run us, but with EQ, they can inform us.

It can be a data set for us.

But this is why this all matters.

This is the crux of everything right now.

Artificial intelligence, learning language models, all that good stuff.

Look, Zero Dot, we don't hate AI.

We're not a big fan of the bad faith actors that are trying to use it to commercialize
things and rule the world, but AI is a tool like anything else.

But the thing is, AI is getting better every single day, whether it's chat, GBT, open AI,
whether it's Gemini, whether it's whatever the heck Apple uses.

Here's the thing though,

AI is already going down the path of trying to figure out perfection.

I use scare quotes for this, but basically for all argument's sake, perfection already
exists.

AI makes things perfect.

Of course, not really.

Some things are missing some hands and things have that weird emoji slant or whatever, but
perfection is already a mechanism that particular device is trying to go towards.

I'm here to tell you, I'm making a plea to everyone listening and watching.

John already knows this.

Daniel knows this.

I'm asking you to not be perfect.

there's already a mechanism in place to make things perfect, whatever that is, perfect to
an audience that demands perfection.

So if you are listening to us right now, watching us, it's a fool's errand to try to,
you're not gonna beat AI trying to be perfect, you're just not going to.

AI will eventually win.

And don't try to be perfect because there's gonna be mechanism that's gonna be out there
to try to replace you.

I'm literally asking you to be unmarketable in this particular capacity because there's
things AI cannot do.

It cannot do emotional nuance of any kind.

It can try.

I've seen what it can do.

It sounds like words.

There are definitely words it comes up with that sounds like it knows, but it doesn't
know.

It's just a learning language model.

AI can't handle moral friction, conflicting moral issues, values.

We talked about value accordant issues last week.

You know, it can't handle that.

It will measure both pretty equally.

We've seen that.

We've seen AI literally try to survive and actually do whatever it can to keep itself
alive and do the unmoral thing.

And it can't have the ability to sit with uncertainty.

It can't say, don't know, I was wrong.

And what Daniel said earlier and John said earlier, I care.

Those are things human beings can do.

And that comes from embracing those dents and cracks that we have.

So the work isn't how do I become fearless, flawless, and optimized?

Rather, it's how do I stop abandoning the parts of me that feel really inconvenient?

That's the thing, right?

When we put this armor on John and Daniel, when I did it, I felt like I was doing everyone
a service.

Like, oh, there's just parts of me that people just don't like.

I want to make their life easier.

And I ask to you, are you really making their lives easier?

Are you making your life incredibly harder?

Because let me tell you, I mean,

I'm able to adapt to almost anyone's life as long as they're not murdering anyone.

Hey, you got a thing?

You got a tism?

You got this?

You got that?

You have this quirk?

Whatever.

Yeah, cool.

Let me know.

I'll be flexible.

All good.

Most reasonable human beings would do that.

And that's the key word.

Team human.

Humans do that.

Corporations, cog systems that demand you be as easy for them to manage as possible, they
don't.

How do I stop abandoning the parts of me that feel inconvenient?

And I want to pause there because John's got a take.

He's got a thought.

I can tell.

can see it in his eyes.

do, I do have a take.

You can see it in my eyes.

My take is this.

First of all, that hurts my eyes.

um Second of all, this kind of mimics or mirrors a style of therapy that frankly I haven't
studied enough to be talking about, but that's never stopped me before, which is internal

family systems, IFS.

And if you're not familiar with it, which most people aren't, I wasn't super until
recently, it's the idea that inside of you are a lot of different parts.

and to massively oversimplify this, the different parts kind of fracture off of you at
times when things are hard.

So if I'm in high school and someone's like, I'm gonna bully you because your body's wrong
or your ways are wrong or something's wrong, a piece of me will crack off and he'll be

like, cool, we want to fight now.

And then people will like, Sam or Daniel will be like, hey man, that's an interesting
shirt you got, meaning literally your shirt is interesting.

And he'll be like, they're making fun of you, fucking punch them.

You're like, okay.

And other parts of you will be like, Oh, you know what?

should just be kind of small.

Like maybe they won't be mean to us if we're small.

So when they get the same comment, they're like, yeah, okay.

Yeah, sure.

Thanks.

And then they get really quiet.

They don't talk.

But the secret, the cool thing about IFS is the goal isn't to tell the parts that they're
not helpful or that they're wrong.

It's to let them talk so they can chill out and reconcile with you.

And it's, it just, it's one for one, what you're saying, which is like, if a piece of you
is getting in the way, that's cause it's trying to do something you, you gotta help it do

the thing and let it yourself work with it instead of trying to overpower it.

Cause if you do that literally very not fun fact, the park gets angrier effectively.

Like it gets more intense, which is very human to begin with.

Humans are very, what's the, what's the term for this?

It's that thing where we don't think of an alternate way of doing anything.

just do the previous thing much harder until it like, you know, breaks.

ah There is a real term for this and I can't think what it is, but fixed something fixed
pattern mindset something like that.

I don't but that yeah

is the best indicator of future behavior.

Mm-hmm.

So if a thing feels inconvenient and frankly, mean like if you want to get ridiculously
summative, which I do uh EQ can be reduced to mindfully noticing things about yourself

without judgment and using that to inform your actions So if you notice a piece you always
does this thing instead of be like why the fuck am I like this be like it is the thing

that I'm like I have noticed that I am like this

Yeah.

You can do the same for other people.

Mindfully notice things about others without judgment, but here's the challenge.

John knows this.

How many people have we run into who say, yeah, I'm very emotionally intelligent.

I know all about it, but they're the judgiest motherfuckers you've ever met.

That's really hard to do.

I say this stat a lot and it's absolutely true.

If you take a room of a hundred people and you ask them, hey, how many of you think are
emotionally intelligent?

You have a pretty good reasonable awareness of yourself and others.

80 % of people will raise their hand.

But then you take those 80 people and you give them a survey to test whether or not
they're actually emotionally intelligent.

Only 11 % of those 80 % actually qualified.

We all think we're a lot more emotionally intelligent than we are, which is not a bad
thing.

But again, just being mindful about that judgy part.

We all have this judgy thing because we're trying to put things together.

We don't have enough data.

So we're trying to make causal reactions and causal conclusions to things.

It's part of our makeup.

It's part of how brains are.

It takes a pretty wonderful, amazing person to really pause on that.

But even if you're not that person, which I'm not that person, you can at least just be
aware of it and do whatever you can to slow down that process.

That's a great call out there, John.

So I bring this all up.

How do I stop abandoning the parts that I feel inconvenient?

This is the instrument I was given and it plays a sound that no one else can make.

There is no one on this planet that's like Daniel.

There's no one on this planet that's like John.

There's no one like me.

John is one of the best at what he does.

But he's absolutely the best at being John at what he does.

I'm one of the best at what I do.

Really, I am.

But you know what?

There's no one else that's like me.

There's now a demand for people wanting me specifically, because there's a specific thing
that I do that only Sam can do.

And Daniel's the same way.

There's a specific way Daniel does his vision, his art.

He has such incredible artistic integrity.

actually had the permission to be like, I know you want me to do it this way, but that's
not going to work for how I do things.

I'm going to do it.

this other way that I think will work and we'll go, we'll leave or take it from there.

There is no one on this planet that can do it better than us.

And one of the things I'm really proud of about Zero Dot is we're not trying to play the
card of like, we're the masters of our domain.

Yeah, we're pretty good at what we do, but the most important thing is we're team human.

And we know that the connective tissue is what brings us all together.

So back to good old Miles Davis.

Remember what he said before about making sure...

You know, of the 400 notes that you play, only play like five of them, and that's the
clean stuff.

Well, even, he even he had an evolution of himself, and he said, when you hit a wrong
note, it's the next note that makes it good or bad.

And if I can take even one step further, if you're playing on the major or minor scale,
just to get into music theory for a moment, if you actually do hit a wrong note, you're

only one note away from one of the right notes.

No matter the rules, it's your control room.

It's your instrument.

And I am pleading with you.

I'm pleading with everyone that's listening in and watching in.

We need more humanity.

We need

need more rawness and I can't think of a better example of this than good old bushy one
string.

You guys know who bushy one string is?

Yeah?

It's a viral video on YouTube.

It's literally got 70 million views.

I won't play the song for fear of copyright.

Probably won't get an issue with it, but I'll be safe on the safe side.

It's a nice hook.

This is a gentleman that plays on a broken guitar that's only got one string and it's a
bop.

It is a bop.

And you know what?

He's still playing on one string.

He can afford more strings now.

He can afford a better guitar.

And he's been like, nope, I'm going to do it my way.

This is me.

This is how I vibe.

And the amount of people that have told him, you're stupid for that.

Learn how to play on more than one string.

And he said, I hear you, but that's not me.

I bet you it's a lot.

And I leave you with that.

Be like Bushy One String.

I want to hear more about you, our listeners, our Patreon members.

I want to hear more stories about you, specifically about you have been able to

overcome all this and become someone that has a name and has a brand and it's yours
uniquely and specifically you in whatever way we can because that's how we're gonna fight

all of this.

Again, we're not enemies of AI, but let's just be real.

There's things AI can do and AI cannot do.

And I think it's a fool's errand to try to compete with AI and the things that it is
already doing.

Let's do the better thing and be human.

Any further thoughts, John or Daniel?

No, well said.

um I would, I would add a little thing at the end in the, just a small circle.

Yeah, not a square, never a square.

Triangle's very structurally sound, which is nice.

But a, my little, my little bit here is like AI is mimicking us.

Like it's built to use the things we've done and try to rep, like recreate them.

replicate them.

um And it's very good at being fast and it's very good at being fast and it's quite fast.

um You'll notice that I only have one real single piece of praise for it is it does what
humans do just very quickly.

Oh, at the cost of the environment, the earth and accuracy ah and being good at anything.

It is, it's very fast though.

So I can surely give it that.

um

There's a reason that people in any sort of creative profession will give a human money
and work instead of AI.

And it is because of how it feels.

even if an AI could be as good at therapy as me, which it can't, but even if it could, it
would feel like a robot.

And it's...

That will never change.

I don't care how good they get.

If they can mimic...

Because they're pretty good at tone already, I won't lie.

They actually are pretty fucking amazing at tone.

But...

It's a robot.

It's not a person.

And your human brain wants it to be a person.

And it can, if you're not protecting yourself, be a little glitchy and be like, are you a
person?

Because it doesn't have a pre-existing concept of AI because it didn't exist back when our
brains were made.

But obviously there are significant deficits and we'll get into that in another episode.

Just the value in being a human has never changed.

It's as high as it ever was.

And the kind of are, the specific one that you are, is the one you're gonna be best at and
people will like the most out of the ones you could be.

That might sound like buzzwords, but I promise you it means something.

I, no, no, no, I like nerdy.

So you get nerdy.

AI can give you an already proposed solution to an already known problem.

Human beings are the ones that can handle a problem that's never happened before and come
up with a new solution right there and then.

So to echo your sentiment, John, there was a time, I won't name who, but they were trying
to replace people like me in my job with AI because they thought, yeah, that's nice,

that's fine.

They actually, I kind of got a wind that they were going to try to do this, but they were
going to use me as a demo to see like, yeah, we're going to see how well Sam does in this

particular environment.

And the client walked away after my delivery of this and like, there's no AI that can do
what Sam just did right there.

If we did a module that tried to replicate what Sam did, it would fail because some of the
questions that were coming up was something that the ad wouldn't be able to solve.

And we actually ran it back and it was giving wrong information.

uh So again, yeah, we can go forage new ventures, but AI cannot do

I mean, it's John Henry and the steam engine, you know?

Like it's faster and it's more powerful and that's not the fucking point.

Also like, I don't know.

If this finds somebody, I'll be glad.

ah I remember I was going to school and they had us do a test for our career, what you're
supposed to be.

And my answers were heavily informed by A, my dad, because my dad is my example of what a
successful man looks like.

And also just my idiosyncrasies.

And it told me I should be a pharmacist, which every man in my family who isn't me is.

um Or it told me I should be a watchmaker, like I should fix watches.

And I have the manual dexterity of a particularly zealous ferret.

So not a great call, say if I.

And I remember feeling very angry and scared and sad because I was like, I'm not good at
anything.

Like I can try really hard to force myself to care about chemistry and be a pharmacist
because clearly that's a lucrative career path to work with my family.

I'm not good at anything.

And I told my mom and she was like, you're good at lots of things.

And I was like, no, not.

And she was like, no, you're really kind.

You're kind to people.

And I was like, you can't fucking make a career out of that.

Yes, you can.

You have to do a few other things, but like whatever the thing is that like you're good
at, that you feel good when you're doing like that is significant.

I promise you, whatever it is, it's good.

It's good enough.

You might have to kind of wiggle and bob and weave to find where to do it, but like you
don't have to fit yourself in a box that doesn't fit you.

That's...

What a waste of you.

I would rather not have that happen.

you.

i will note

one exception to the try not to fit yourself into a box that doesn't fit you unless your
dream is to be a contortionist in that case do

Yeah, that is your job.

That's what you're trying to do.

Yes, but in cats like box cats, they love boxes, man.

They love it.

oh

you can't force them to go into a box.

They choose to want to go into the box.

They always have autonomy over that.

So that's true.

It doesn't even have to be an actual three dimensional box.

You can draw a square on the ground and they'll be like a box and they will go and see it.

It's just so cute.

It's so, so adorable.

it's amazing.

I just lived the meme where I was with a friend who got like a little bed for their cat
and they took it out of the box and put the bed down.

Cat went right into the box like immediately.

It was just like, yeah, this, we all knew this would happen.

And yet we try.

We do.

we try anyway.

All right, folks, that has been our show.

That's right, we do things differently around here, but we always do.

That's because we are Team Human.

Once again, my name is Sam.

This is John over here, and Daniel as well.

We are here every single week here on Wednesdays to present to you, well, the tools you
can have in order for you to be the best human being you can possibly be and fight

whatever injustice that are happening around you.

You can find us on thezerodotpodcast.com.

You can find us on YouTube.

You can find us on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music.

Wherever podcasts are aired, we are there.

Or even on Instagram, if you check us out that way.

And by the way, if you've got a particular topic you want us to talk about, well, you can
submit your questions on our comments page.

You can submit your questions on our website, thezerodotpodcast.com.

You can also join our lovely Patreons to be part of Club Zero Dot, and you get priority
asking of those questions.

We'll feature them here right on the podcast.

But enough waffling about.

I hope you have the most wonderful, great rest of your day.

Stay human.

We'll see you next time.