Why So Serious? with Ryan "GodofGrunts" Whited [The Zero Dot Podcast #31]

When did we stop being willing to look foolish?

All that and more in today's episode of the Zero Dot podcast.

uh

our love.

Gentlemen, boys and girls, boys and girls, everyone of all ages, you know who I am, I'm
your host Sam Kirk.

John Merrick, our therapist and counselor extraordinaire is on hiatus until later in June.

Our producer Daniel's in the background making sure that we can make these wonderful
episodes for you and make the magic happen.

So it would seem that once again, I might be alone in this particular space, but maybe I'm
not.

Maybe in the shadows somewhere.

Somewhere deep out there is listening.

I hear voices everywhere.

Can you hear them?

Hello?

geez, you heard it right?

The voice, wait, I recognize that voice.

That voice, sounds like Ryan.

Ryan, God of grunts, why did, is our guest today.

That's right for the Zero Dot podcast.

He is our fellow Patreon member, grappler enthusiast, IT administration, cybersecurity
fellow, and overall a very good dude.

Ryan, how are you doing today, my friend?

I'm doing pretty good Sam, how you doing?

I am doing great.

Thanks for being on the show today.

Super exciting.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

You're one of our very first Patreon supporters.

So thank you so much for your support and your investment in us.

hopefully you've enjoyed the show so far, but now you get to be a part of the show a
little bit, right?

That's gonna be exciting for everyone.

And by the way, we have another guest.

Who's the puppy's name?

That you'll probably hear Jade most often.

She's our German Shepherd and she does the most barking.

Yeah, it is the color Jade, yes.

that's awesome.

Well, Jade, welcome, welcome as well.

I can't wait for your input and feedback for these episodes as well.

So today's topic, what we'll be talking about today is, well, I said it before, it's about
feeling foolish.

It's about feeling like somehow we lost the desire to just let ourselves just try
anything.

dance badly, draw badly, ask weird questions, but somehow as adults, we figured out this
modus operandi of optimizing for everything, for performing at all times, always being

careful, and along the way, we started confusing looking competent for what I would say
being alive.

That's our topic for today.

But before we dive into that, I think it's about time we dive into some good news.

What do you think, Ryan?

absolutely, always use some good news.

Absolutely.

I love good news.

And we hear the Zero Dot podcast.

We like to kind of highlight the good things that are happening around the world to kind
of remind ourselves that, yeah, there's a lot of bad stuff happening, but there's also

some good stuff happening as well.

And one of the first things I want to talk about, Ryan, I don't know if you've been kind
of keeping up with this.

Did you know that literally as of last week, they have uncovered, they have started a
production or I'm sorry, they've done clinical trials on a pill.

that can prevent COVID after exposure to infected people.

Did you see this information come out last week?

I have not.

Tell me more about it.

Yeah, absolutely.

So this comes from nature.com.

They got information from the New England Journal of Medicine.

But basically what they're saying is, a antiviral pill has for the first time been shown
to prevent COVID-19 in people exposed to the SARS-CoV-2 virus at home.

According to clinical trials published today in the New England Journal of Medicine, this
is on May 13th of this year, a drug

could be a lifeline for those who still face real danger from the virus says nature.com
such as care home residents or transplant recipients or immune suppressing medication.

And to kind of get into more context about this up until this point when it came to the
COVID-19 virus, the pandemic that we all survived, you know, the times of all time.

ah Basically there's preventative care, there's vaccines.

And then once you have the virus, you just kind of quarantine, you do the best you can.

You might take Paxilovid, which might, you know, help speed along the recovery process,
but there was no what they call PEP protocol, meaning post-exposure prophylaxis protocol.

And now there might be.

This trial was a study that looked at over 2000 household contacts conducted from June
2023 to September 2024.

And about 9 % of people who received a placebo within 72 hours of the housemate developing
symptoms became symptomatic.

Whereas those that received the actual five day course of the new drug, they only got a 3
% showing of symptoms, which is a huge, huge, massive thing.

I'm going to try to pronounce this drug right now.

This is what the drugs called.

Here we go.

I'm a paid professional.

can do this.

Encitrilevir.

Encitrilevir is the drug that they're using right now.

And it's gone through clinical trials.

It's showing incredible promise.

We don't know yet when it's gonna become more available, but at the same time, I think
that's a win for humanity.

What do you say, Ryan?

Yeah, yeah.

And just to be clear, at Zero Dot, we're not pandemic deniers.

We are not COVID deniers.

COVID was a thing that actually happened.

Isn't that right, Ryan?

Yeah, yeah.

Fun, not slash not fun fact.

I know a lot of people lost family members.

I lost my father-in-law from COVID-19.

Um, it was a nasty bug.

We, we all survived it.

And so I'm, I'm super happy to hear that maybe just maybe people are going to be living a
better life as a result of all the lessons we've learned and know that when you get COVID,

it's no longer for some people a death sentence.

That's awesome.

Good job for team human.

In addition to that, I want to point out just one more cool piece of news from,
international waters or at least, you know, across the pond here, in Amsterdam.

This comes from euro news dot com.

Amsterdam becomes the world's first capital city to ban public adverts for fossil fuels
and meat.

Check that out.

Initially proposed in 2020, Amsterdam has officially banned on public advertising,
promoting meat and fossil fuel products has become the first capital city in the world to

ban climate damaging advertising in public spaces.

So basically billboards promoting fossil fuel products and meat have been stripped from
the streets.

Basically

Green marketing kind of has to be the modus operandi starting May 1st is proposed in 2020.

it's part of the city's targets to reach carbon neutrality by 2050 and to have meat
consumption during the same period.

Now I'm not against meat consumption, even though I'm a vegetarian and Daniel is a vegan.

Not necessarily.

You go ahead and do whatever you'd like to do.

I think we can all agree, you know, if we can reduce the promotion of these things and
make the world more sustainable, I think it's a pretty bold move, I would say.

What do you think about that, Ryan?

That is a bull move.

I feel like fossil fuels is an easier one, right?

It's kind of hard to say that you need to advertise for fossil fuels.

I don't know who that would really be for.

But the meat one is pretty brave.

It'll be interesting to see how that goes.

Yeah, for sure.

Absolutely.

And it's interesting that Amsterdam is kind of at the forefront of that.

I'll be curious to see what this looks like in the future for all parties.

But yeah, in the age where, in the United States, gasoline is getting to $6.50, which is
crazy.

You used to only see those prices when you were in like Hawaii or in certain parts of
California.

Now that's kind of becoming more of a standard across the board.

As raising prices are happening thanks to a war that no one asked for, uh I think this
comes at a really good time and maybe that's what kind of edge their bets in that regard.

But they're very interesting, all the same.

Love to see that.

I would love to see newer generations not come into the world believing that the use of
fossil fuels or necessarily meat consumption is the standard way of operating.

um Related, but somewhat not related.

As a bicycle enthusiast, I see it all the time.

uh I talk to people when I'm on the roads.

People just treat bicyclists as if they're a nuisance, as if they're the ones creating the
problems when here you have this two metric ton piece of steel going at lethal speeds,

consuming fossil fuels and doing who knows what kind of damage to the environment.

Nothing against that.

I have my own vehicle that I use from time to time.

But again, we have this general cultural feeling that you know what fossil fuels is just
the way of the world.

And if we can just undo that a little bit or just save the next generation for that, I
think that's a win for everyone.

Yep, not to try to be superior than that, but I do have an electric vehicle because I feel
the same way.

I get to charge it at night when the consumption is lower and stuff.

Yeah.

How long have had that electric vehicle?

I got it in 2023.

Okay, really good time for it to have.

My wife and I, share one vehicle.

It's a hybrid vehicle.

we, yeah.

Simply just because when we want to travel further distances, we're still in a place where
we're not quite sure when we can get electric outlets.

It's better, but it's not always the best.

But yeah, I mean, it's great.

Whatever we can do in whatever capacity we can to help save the planet, we should do it.

We're a team.

Planet Earth, I don't know if you heard about that here at Zero Dot, we love the planet
Earth, we're Team Human, we're all about that stuff.

Daniel especially is a big promoter of that, whatever we can do to do that would be, it's
in everyone's best interests.

That being said, some people are in very different financial situations, and if you're in
a very different financial situation, you might not even have a choice.

So if that's you, totally get you, my friends, do what you gotta do to survive.

but still this is overall a net good.

And maybe by 2050, maybe by 2050, we will have true carbon neutrality.

I don't know.

What do you think about that 2050?

You think that's a lofty goal?

Do think that's conservative?

It does seem kind of lofty to me.

It's not that far away, right?

It's what, 24, 24 years?

And my also kind of concern with that is I feel like a lot of developing nations end up
relying on fossil fuels in order to...

that's true.

promote their growth, right?

And so I've always had this uncomfortable feeling that in our attempt to become carbon
neutral, we might, whether accidentally or on purpose, impede developing nations and their

growth.

Now, I don't know how to solve that.

Thankfully there are smarter people than me who are working on those kind of problems.

uh I obviously is a great goal to achieve.

just am a little worried about the fanaticism of it and hurting the people who are less
fortunate than us already.

That's a great call out there, Ryan.

When you think about the fact that like, we're in the United States, we live in the United
States, think about how we became quote unquote successful.

We took fossil fuels, we robbed the earth of that.

And now we're basically saying, now that we've done it, you can't have access to it now.

And I think that's what you're saying.

there's repercussions here, systemic and otherwise.

And if it stifles other nations in a way that is not conducive to anything, whether it's
diplomacy and just human needs, that is serious concern.

but uh that's a great call out there.

And uh I'm very grateful we have much smarter people than you and I both, nothing saying
about you and me, but much smarter people kind of at the forefront of that, making those

judgment calls, or at the very least having those good ethical conversations.

Cause I think those are worthy conversations to have.

Good call out.

See, this is why you're on the podcast.

Jeez Louise, look at that.

Bring the good notes here.

Well, that's our good news.

Now it's time for us to get into the main topic.

When are we not being measured?

The moment we're born.

Our our height, our overall health, all that's being measured.

As you grew up as a toddler, you're being compared to other toddlers.

As my good fellow John would say, comparison is the thief of joy.

At the same time, it's literally how we live our lives from the moment we keep going on
through school and then social media and otherwise.

We're looking at our GPA, we're looking at school scores, we're looking at how many likes
and followers.

We're looking at overall productivity.

We're looking at our rankings.

We're looking at how much income we have.

We're looking at how many degrees we have.

We're looking at how much engagement and achievements we have.

We're trying to optimize everything.

And yet I wonder, I wonder when are we not being measured and is it taking us down the
wrong path?

But again, this is why I'm so grateful to have our guest Ryan on the show with us this
week because he has specific experience in a lot of different vertices within his life.

when it comes to not just life optimization, but seeing what the impact is of real, I
would call it paralyzing fear.

The fear of not being good enough stops you from achieving your goals and your wants and
your dreams.

uh I think about all of life.

I think about the commercial life.

I think about the leadership life, but you have an experience here for our friends that
are listening into the podcast in the fighting game space.

How it kind of paralyzes people you want to talk a little about that Ryan?

Yeah, sure.

So I, not as active as I was, but I used to be very active as a mentor for a particular
fighting game community called the FGC Boomers, the fighting game community for people

over the age of 30, right?

And...

A lot of people who aren't into fighting games will see fighting games and think that, oh,
I don't know if I could ever push the buttons that fast or I can never do those combos.

But the actual reality is that...

It doesn't take that much training to learn your character's small moveset that they have
and be able to hit those combos.

Probably 20 hours maybe of playing time.

And I feel like most people have like the muscle memory to perform those actions.

Right, but the actual problem is our topic today, right?

This fear of failure.

I don't know if people...

think of it that way, but when people get into ranked lobbies or going into competitions,
like real life competitions, the fear of messing up the combo or dropping the combo.

Just losing in general really stops them from performing.

And that kind of, if you expand that out, it's just a general thing that I think people in
general deal with.

How am I going to get this job?

what if I ask that person out and they say no?

what do I do as I get older?

Adulting, quote unquote, is a fear that a lot of people have.

And all it kind of ties into that.

Yeah, you this was around 2024, 23, 25 ish that time when I was watching you do a lot of
this.

You talked about life and you talked about other things in life, being productive and real
adult life problems and this anxiety that's a real world adult life anxiety got translated

into, not to dismiss it, but a video game and just the stress of not being good enough at
this video game.

And I gotta tell you, Ryan, in my world, in my little purview, uh

My data set's a little bit smaller, because again, a lot of my feedback was from in-life
person, like in live sessions with people, less online, but I didn't see too much of that.

And yet in this new online space where fighting games have, you know, thanks to things
like rollback netcode, which makes fighting games lot more uh democratic and diplomatic

for everyone to kind of dive in with the internet connection and play on, I saw a lot more
of that, especially COVID, the pandemic and onwards.

What do you think is...

We think it's bringing that up or bringing that to the forefront for people.

You are referring to like the fear and anxiety part of it?

You know, honestly...

I think people put themselves at a theoretical standard that doesn't exist, right?

It's kind of hard, because people will watch some of the best players in the world, and
they will see them play and win.

And they will be like, oh, I should be able to do that.

which is a weird thing to measure against because these people are mostly people who do
nothing, but like, not nothing, but it is their job to play the fighting game, right?

And you can literally go watch some of these people play on like Twitch and they're
playing for 10, 12 hours a day.

You and I have...

other jobs, right?

We go to a different place where we go for 8, 10, 12 hours a day and then we come home and
this kind of activity is more of our hobby.

So the time commitment is just not the same.

It's weird to compare ourselves in that kind of way because even just a measurable
quantity of time is not comparable.

Right?

Not to mention that everybody is just different.

Everybody's path is different.

The speed at which we learn and do things is different.

Some people have natural talent for things and other people are better at learning how to
do things as opposed to having natural.

I'm one of those people.

I am not very good at almost anything that I start at, but I feel like I have a pretty
good knack of learning how to become better at something.

Right?

okay.

Yeah, yeah.

I think people try to assume that they should be as good as some of the higher end things
that they see immediately.

And that's just not a realistic expectation.

Yeah, and to bring it back, know, in the fighting game space in the early days, the people
that were the best were the ones spending the most amount of time in the arcades for sure.

When they had, maybe they should have been doing other things.

They spent a lot of time in the arcades, but also it was the people that picked up on
things the fastest.

And that's why in the early days you had very dominant strategies and dominant characters
win in certain tournaments.

When I think about the year 2026 onwards, know, games that are now 30, 20, 15 years old
now, if you give it enough time, the real slow cookers, the ones that have been working in

the lab for all this time, they are now the monsters playing these particular games.

They've learned all the ins and outs and those dominant strats from way back when don't
work anymore.

So on one hand, I love that element of how the digital age has brought that to us.

But at the same time,

I noticed it in the space that you and I were both in and in other spaces, just this level
of anxiety about playing a video game, whether it was ranked or not, didn't matter.

There was this anxiety about being perceived almost from other people as if I had to be as
good as what I was seeing on stream.

I had to be as good as the legends in the tournaments that I was watching.

And what's fascinating to me about that is I think about other things like I don't...

I don't watch a movie by Robert Downey Jr.

go, screw that guy.

I'm way better than him and just start doing his job for him, right?

He's a paid professional.

He's an actor.

He knows how to do his job.

I don't do that when I watch a big sports event, although we like to scream at the TV and
say, I could have done that better, but we all know we couldn't have done it better,

right?

On one hand, fighting games propagates this because it is an every man hobby.

Anyone, if you have a controller can pop in and play the same way everyone else does.

Yet at the same time, I can't help but wonder there's this pervasiveness of like,

the newest generation of people, they're 20 somethings now and even some 30 somethings and
millennials, having this thought that every single waking moment of your life should be

spent optimizing, learning, producing, improving, not quote unquote wasting time.

And I think about things like the TikTokfication of life.

We at Zero Dot used to have a TikTok account.

We chose not to have a TikTok account anymore because we just don't believe that.

having a platform where your only option is to scroll and have a algorithm feed you what
it thinks that you like.

We think that's a little nefarious, so we stepped away from that.

But just that programming of just every single moment must be spent optimizing, getting
the most amount of dopamine possible, and then being the best that I can be.

I wonder if you have similar thoughts or different thoughts on.

It's really easy to see the appeal to that, right?

If we're always getting better, we're always succeeding, good things are happening, it's
really easy to see the appeal.

I think though...

I also fell into this problem when I was younger, for sure.

I think probably most people do at some point.

Some of the things you hinted at earlier, as you grow up, everything's measured, school,
work, your performance in sports, et cetera.

And I think at, not to get too personal a little bit, but I ended up being homeless for a
little bit.

and then I ended up joining the army to pull myself out of that situation.

Once I had gone through my military part of my life and gotten out, I kind of just had
this realization that...

Because the Army would really get to expose me to people of all different walks of life,
which is one of the grateful things that I'm for for my military experience.

And you kind of there's a great reset that happens because I was with people who were had
it like even though I was homeless at the time, I people I would consider probably had

life harder than I did because at least I had a car to live in.

Right.

Some of these people even had it worse than I did.

Yeah.

then I was also with people who came from essentially military families where this is the
thing they've done the entire, you know, they basically were preparing to join the army

the entire time they've been around.

Right.

mean, even younger than that, they allow you to join at 17.

Yeah.

Like I literally was with 17 year old kids and the oldest person in those was with a 34
year old who had also gone through hard times and had to join.

Right.

But there was this great reset where

It doesn't matter what our experiences were before, we were all crawling through the mud
together.

Right, everybody had to, we all had to lift each other up over the rope bridges and oh
stuff like that.

And I kinda had just like a moment of clarity at some point, after probably after running
for the 14th mile of the day that I had to run.

And I kinda got to the point where was like, man, it doesn't really matter what's...

we accomplished before this, we're all here just doing our best trying to get through
this.

And I refined that after I got out with some different thought processes and things and I
think I just kind of came to the conclusion that the idea for me is not to compare myself

to other people necessarily, but when I'm going for an endeavor that I want to get better
at,

I just think about who I was before, right?

So it's like more of a local comparison.

But I guess you do also have to be cognizant of the trap of still wanting to constantly
improve, constantly get better, whatever.

But you kind of have to balance that mindset of, I better than I was before with, like, am
I pushing too hard to where this is no longer a healthy endeavor, right?

wow.

Well, thank you for sharing that.

Yeah, mean, not to steal any away from your story, but I mean, I have also shared a little
bit on this podcast about how I was homeless for a little bit and like how that reshapes

you a little bit.

didn't go to the military or anything or anything of that nature, but hitting rock bottom
and having to, as you said, reset and go, what really matters?

the words you chose were, it doesn't really matter who I was before.

What matters is how I move forward now.

And I wonder as you speak about that, I think I try to teach a lot of the people that I
coach is we need to give you, your skills are gonna keep improving.

The brain is wired in a specific way that if I have you do something over and over and
over again, you will just get better at it over time.

I need to teach you to realize that, that it's happening so you can see the feedback loop
over and over and over again.

And then after I've taught you that, what I want you to do is develop a trust in your
future self.

Meaning it doesn't matter what,

You throw me into whatever situation, I will get better as long as I focus and dedicate
myself to that.

And I wonder, was that a similar lesson you learned when you were in the army?

maybe not necessarily from the army because the army is a really rigid structure but like
after after i got out and i started getting into i was 23 at the time so i was still

fairly young and if you we all end up working with someone who we think is uh not

Yep.

And it's very easy to take that in negative opinion and just run with it, like, I can't
believe they, blah, blah, blah.

But to me, it was actually kind of reassuring because I also didn't know what I was doing
at the time.

And I saw these other people who also seemed like they didn't know what they were doing at
the time, but also still progressing in life.

And so I took that to mean like, hey,

You don't necessarily always have to be the guy at whatever it is you're doing.

if, I don't know if I'm not those people, right?

So don't know if they were progressing in life, it gave me the confidence to be like, you
know what?

I could also do that.

I don't necessarily have to be perfect at whatever it is that I'm doing.

And as long as I keep trying to get better at it, because like you said, it's just human
nature.

We keep doing things, we get better at it.

that I could improve myself and get better at those things.

And it kind of releases a burden to me anyway, because I can now attempt to go for things
that I'm not capable of doing right now with the, like you said, the trust in myself that

I will get better at it and be able to do it later.

You said remove is the burden.

It's like it takes the stakes to being super low.

There's almost no way I can fail, right?

I mean, what's the worst thing that can happen?

What's the worst thing that happen?

I definitely, like, I can't fail maybe isn't the correct answer, but it's I will be able
to recover.

Okay, yeah, okay.

I'll be able to recover, right?

um Again, trusting in your ability to bounce back.

Yeah, the mental resiliency I think is the important part.

You should allow yourself to fail.

uh You just will fail at whatever it is.

No one's perfect, right?

Even like just getting second place is a form of failure because you didn't win, right?

But failure is okay.

We have a really negative connotation of failure as if it's like a morally bad thing.

Right, yeah.

But it's not a morally bad thing, it's just a part of life.

It's just a natural, it's a force of nature.

And you just take failure, reflect upon it, how you could improve, and then you do better.

And that's just what it is.

And in high production teams that I work with, they actually have a motto.

Most of them were, we want you to fail faster.

If you're not failing, that means you're not doing enough.

Like let's keep hitting the failure button so we can keep learning and adapting and get
better.

And again, the formality is failure is not a bad thing.

Failure is the way in which we learn and grow and get better.

uh

right, you don't learn a whole lot from succeeding because you're just already
implementing the things that were working and they kept working.

That's just status quo at that point, right?

Yeah, I'm a big staunch believer in if you're listening to our podcast for the first time,
uh don't get financial advice from billionaires.

They are successful in spite of the things they are telling you to do.

There's a thing called uh success bias where you kind of forget all the steps it took for
you to get to be as successful as you were.

And so you start giving garbage advice that you think everyone should apply to everyone,
but it was not absolutely the advice you took.

yeah.

Success is a fun story.

It's a really good Hollywood movie, but it's not the best where we get the best lessons
from.

mean, think about all of your favorite Ted talks that the Ted talks usually tell of a
harrowing story or of a piece of failure.

And that's where they learn their deepest lesson.

And it's the same thing from human nature as well.

Failure is a very powerful learning tool.

I wonder, as you speak about that reset that you had, do you remember what your thought
process was before that period in time?

Not to get too into the weeds, but like,

Obviously now you have a pretty healthy relationship with failure, but there might've been
a time when you didn't.

Is that true or not true?

yeah, like at the time, becoming homeless was just the most crushing, embarrassing thing
about my life.

Like nothing even kind of compared to how embarrassed I was that I, it seems so silly to
talk about now because it wasn't necessarily all of my own fault that this happened, but

like the idea of, oh

I failed at keeping a job.

I failed at having enough money to sustain myself.

that that was so embarrassing to me that it was almost crippling because I lived in my car
for three like three-ish months before I decided to go join the army and a lot of that was

like I also had way too much pride because I was like oh I can't go get a job at
McDonald's I was a man I was in management before like I go back to working at McDonald's

like that's that's almost worse than just being like just a weird pride thing that I had.

before.

Yeah, for sure.

Yeah, yeah.

I remember the age, it was a young age when I was very perfectionistic and things had to
be perfect and I had to do things quote unquote the right way.

And uh I faced a lot of roadblocks and uh yeah, and then hardship occurred.

And one of two things could have happened.

I could have just rejected the reality in front of me, which I thought about a couple of
times, or I could be like, no, this is the reality in front of me.

I need to change my way of thinking.

Otherwise, as you said,

or I think you implied, I might not live, might not survive, I might not get through this
existence of life.

And so I think that's part of it too, is some of us have the great fortune of having gone
through a pretty harrowing piece of life and learning, well, I can either change my

mindset or I can die.

Which one am I gonna do?

I should change my mindset probably.

And then you change your mindset, success comes in a slow but very healthy, probably
foundational way.

And then the tricky part, Ryan.

Maybe in your world, and I know especially in mine, I get paid to do this, I get paid to
coach people on this, but it's still so difficult to convince people that, maybe you

shouldn't be going down this very precarious, very self-hatred way of viewing things, even
though it's the easy route.

Even though all the systems we have in our place, whether it's social media, anything, it
kind of propagates this idea of trying to be perfect, trying to be sensational, trying to

be amazing.

and it's not healthy from a lot of different perspectives.

um You've hinted at it briefly and I won't ask you to dive into it if you don't want to,
but we've talked offline about this, the need to kind of take a break, the need to kind of

uh give yourself recharging time, the need to kind of disconnect from all of the things in
the world that things are asking you from.

I'm running a podcast right now with my good friends, John and Daniel.

There's always this pervasive thought of, okay, what else can I do for the podcast?

What can I do on the podcast?

And I know if I do that, if I just let myself go in that path, that will be a very
dangerous slope.

So we all kind of have a general rule, all of us in the podcast of like taking time off,
certain days of the week off, or you're not thinking about the podcast, just recharging,

because we are our best selves when we recharge.

But if we just keep going seven days a week, 24 hours a day, you will hit a point of
exhaustion.

Did you learn that lesson as well in the army or did they just kind of?

grind you to a pulp and you kind of learned it the hard way.

So the really nice thing about the Army is that you only need to do like three things to
succeed.

You gotta be at the right time, or be at the right place at the right time in the right
uniform.

So thankfully the thinking part of being in the military, not a requirement, but that
actually does free up, or at least for me, everybody's different, but it freed up time for

me to think about other things in life, which is where I started to think about this reset
that was happening in my life.

and what have you.

I guess unintentionally because when you're in basic, well I think it's different now, but
back when I was in basic training, they take your phone away, right?

And you have no access.

The only thing I was allowed to do to communicate with the outside world is write a
letter.

They didn't allow you to have your phone.

Especially there in the first like six weeks.

We weren't even really allowed to like call from a payphone I think they allowed us to do
it like the first weekend just let our families know that we were You know there and not

dead yet oh

It does, it essentially forces you to take a break from the rest of the world for nine
weeks, essentially.

And even past that, because there's a different part of the military where go to, and the
army is called AIT where you go to school, basically.

uh But yeah, that nine week isolation period is just really refreshing, honestly.

like I said, coming back to the real world after...

seeing everything, it really did change my perspective and I think that would that's
probably a really healthy thing for most people to try to do.

Yeah.

I mean, I would navigate for nine weeks unless you really want to, but yeah, just having
that, having a period of time where you're just really disconnected, um, not having the

noise and you, know, uh, I've said this many times, you know, the newest generation of
people coming into the workforce, they grew up with a supercomputer in their pocket.

Um, during the years of eight years old to 12 years old, when their brains are most
neuroplastic, they have more information at their fingertips and you and I ever had Ryan,

I don't think it's a controversial statement to say.

The human brain is not ready for this.

There are not enough, we'll call it safeguards around this technology yet.

And I think maybe in years come, we'll figure that out a bit better.

we're seeing people get emotionally hijacked very easily.

We're seeing corporations and companies use advertising as a way to kind of latch onto our
brains and get us to do things and influence us through addictive game-like patterns to do

things we don't really want to do.

So that break is massive.

And I try in whatever way I can to advocate for that, even for myself, I need breaks from
time to time.

um They are incredibly helpful because the myth of just go forever like the everlasting
bunny, ever charging bunny, what's the phrase?

Energizer bunny, thank you.

The energizer bunny, um not only is it unsustainable, unrealistic, it's not possible.

You will burn out, you will crash, you will burn and you will regret all of those
consequences for that.

I think this is costing us quite a bit, this anxiety of not being afraid to fail.

uh So what do you think, Ryan, can any one person do to give themselves an environment
where they feel more free to fail and be their best self?

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It's really it's really hard and I just also want to make it clear that even though I had
this this thought process while I was in the military It didn't fully actualize for

several years afterwards Yes, I once I got out I started trying to look into

I don't know if I have the correct vocabulary, but I was basically looking at the way that
previous people had handled this sort of thing, like sort of philosophy.

I knew philosophy was a big thing, But I hadn't really ever studied anything philosophy
or, you know, hear sound bites and things, different philosophy quotes of, but yeah, yeah.

So I just kind of like, well, maybe there's something to that because they teach
philosophy because a college course you can take, right?

And so I started reading through those sort of things.

I started picking up on some ideas, especially when it came to reframing how you view life
instead of externally viewing it more internally.

uh And I kind of latched on to those parts of the philosophies that I read that I really
enjoyed.

But again, it wasn't anything immediate.

I probably wasn't really strong in my mental resiliency until I was in my late 20s.

Probably took five, six, seven years before I was really comfortable with the idea of
failing and not looking...

Not looking, it's okay to look stupid, or not just like stupid, it's okay to be wrong is
what I like to say.

Right now in the position that I'm in, have, the people aren't under me in the terms that
they don't report to me, but like I am the highest level person in my division, so I have

like technicians and other analysts and stuff underneath me.

And one of the things I always try to drive home with them is like, it's okay to be wrong,
right?

but it's not really okay to hide it, but that's a separate thing that's not necessarily
super tied together.

But it's okay to be wrong.

And I try to push that because I do truly believe that, but it did take me a long time to
get there.

You're not wanting to go to your superior and be like, I don't know how to do this thing.

That's really hard.

And it's something that you have to train yourself to be okay with doing.

Because honestly, most people are okay with that.

I least I hope so.

But like I myself know that if someone who is under me comes to me and say, Oh, I don't
know how to do X thing.

And they're coming to me because I do know how to do that thing.

Right.

That's fine.

That's I was at your point.

I was after your spot at one point in life.

I didn't know how to do that thing either.

Here's how you do it.

Right.

Yeah.

Yeah.

mean, human beings love being asked for help.

We'd love that stuff.

It's, it's, makes us feel good.

It makes us feel like we're valuable.

So when you come to me asking for help, like, don't know how to do this thing.

It makes me feel good.

We, we have this fear that, I'm asking for help.

look weak.

No, you're bringing community in.

And when you bring community in, it makes everyone feel good about the whole situation.

It's just that first hurdle of getting through that.

You're speaking about something that I talk a lot in my talks, which is the two most, in
my opinion, the two most important.

sentences in the English language are, don't know, and I was wrong.

And if you can, in whatever way you can, promote yourself to say those two sentences once
a day to people and promote that ideology that it's okay to say you were wrong and it's

okay to say you don't know something, uh it can spread a place of safety, psychological
and otherwise, to everyone else, make everyone feel good, and promotes authentic real

thinking and not just people puffing their chest and being afraid of being wrong.

So it sounds like you got to a place where you did some reading of philosophy, which by
the way, makes me happy as a philosophy guy myself, I have a degree in philosophy.

Learning about kind of the ways of thinking and just being brave enough to say, I'm wrong
on some things, I don't know about these other things and kind of getting to the truth,

the root of things.

It sounds like that kind of really helped you out quite a bit there.

Yes, it definitely did.

Yeah, that's great.

That's awesome.

Yeah, yeah.

So you had a pretty big life experience.

It's a couple of years to think about that.

How could we get people to have that realization faster, do you think?

This is the question I have been struggling with since I came to the realization.

It's always been a question of how could I lead other people to that same thought process?

And honestly, I don't know the answer, because again, it took me a long time, and I was
purposely trying to figure out.

how to do those things.

And even through my mentorships where I tell people like, hey, being bad is not a problem,
right?

You will keep learning and you will keep getting better.

the number next to your name doesn't mean anything, right?

But I don't actually know, and I was hoping that you could shed some light on this for me,
because I think that is one of the things that I have always struggled with trying to help

people with, because I feel like they also, even if they agree with me, because some
people are like, yeah, I know it's uh mental headache that I have to get over.

right?

Yeah.

but it's just, it is what it is.

It is how we measure it.

I'd uh love to hear your thoughts on it because I actually don't know how to help people
with that part of it go faster, I guess.

Yeah, mean, to answer the question of how to go faster, mean, there's things, there's
tricks you can do, but the thing that I try to get to systemically is, we talked about

this a bit on the podcast before, you have extrinsic value and intrinsic value, right?

So extrinsic is I'm doing something to achieve a thing.

I'm doing something for a net result versus I'm doing something for the joy of doing the
thing in and of itself.

And so whenever I worked with anyone, whether it was in the fighting game space or not,
that was so fixated on the score, the number, the result.

I'm like, are you doing this for the extrinsic value of it?

Or are you doing this for the intrinsic?

And I would get them to finally admit at some point, I'm doing it to achieve this
extrinsic thing.

I'm like, okay, so what you are saying then, you want to suffer until you reach this
particular number.

You are saying to yourself, suffering is worth it.

And they say, well, no, I don't wanna suffer.

I'm like, okay, we need to fix this then.

We need to examine the fact that you're chasing this extrinsic value.

How can we get it so that you enjoy the process?

And the end result doesn't even matter anymore.

What could we do to make this every step of the way, the process just so enjoyable,
failure or not, that you just wanna keep doing it over and over and over again?

And so every person's a little bit different, but we work upon asking the questions of
what do you like about this?

What don't you like about this?

How can we get rid of the stuff you don't like?

How can we give you a sp-

free space, a safe space to do some of the things you don't like or you're afraid of
people watching within your own privacy.

How can you navigate this in a way where every single time you are energized at the end of
your session and you want to do it the next day and the next day and the next day and the

next day.

I can't take the number away.

The number is going to happen, but the number is, if you are chasing that number, that's
extrinsic.

How can you live a life that's more intrinsic?

You do things for the joy of things.

You do things because you want to do things.

You know, the Zero Dot podcast,

We had a lot of conversations early on about what our goals were for this podcast.

And one of the things, one of the promises we made to ourselves is to always make sure
we're doing this for the joy of it.

There's a lot of social media stuff out there.

There's a lot of YouTubers and other entities where it's a, it's a for-profit business,
but it's all about getting a million subscribers by a six month marker, a 10 month marker,

whatever your metrics are.

And we always made it a goal.

We're not chasing that.

We want to make sure we're doing it because we love doing what we're doing.

If we get subscribers, cool, but we're not,

Having a million subscribers doesn't mean anything.

Having more battle points on my card doesn't mean anything.

The important thing is, yesterday, did I do something that I loved, and is today something
I'm doing that I love.

Keeping it small and granular and focusing on the things I have control over.

Because I think Ryan, in your example about fighting games and rank, because of how the
ELO system works, you get a score based on parameters in which you have control and

parameters you don't have control.

You have control about a lot of stuff, how you control the character, how you play the
game, even your internet connection you have control over, but then you can't control the

other player, which is the other 50 % of the equation.

And you can't control how you're getting match, how the matchmaking is working, how they
kind of give, distribute the matches to you.

And so what I tell people who are really emotionally hijacked by that, I say, what do we
call it when you are putting your emotional stock into something that has both

controllable and non-controllable factors?

And it takes them a while.

But eventually we get to the place of, we call that gambling.

So what you are doing now is you are gambling every single time you play.

Do you want to keep gambling?

Because if you wanna keep gambling, we have nothing to talk about.

Keep gambling, have fun, ride your emotional highs and lows and say, no, I don't wanna
gamble anymore.

Okay, so let's get rid of the stuff we cannot control, focus on the stuff we can control
and focus on the process.

That is a great way to frame it.

I like that a lot.

Because I have, in my time, tried to tell people like, you can only control the parts that
you can control.

That part always made sense to me.

But I haven't really thought about that framing of putting your hope into the parts that
you can control is essentially gambling.

That's a fantastic way to look at it.

Well, I mean...

Yeah, it has a way to look at it and to try to describe the problem.

I like that a

Yeah.

And there's some people who I've met a few very high performing people who they have a
very, their brains go like fire and they are very fast at going through the whole stages

of grief.

Like, no, I lost my points, but I'm gonna keep going.

And they have a, would say a somewhat healthy relationship with that whole dynamic of
ranked.

But for most people who get the, they lose the points and it's like doom and gloom for
them.

the

people that get like a couple of points and it's like, yay, let me go ahead and post my
screenshot to my homies.

I would say you are, you are getting into the space of gambling.

And so when I tell most people, do you want to keep gambling for your recreational time in
your hobby?

Most people say no.

Some people say yes.

Some people say, yeah, I love this.

I love the emotional.

I love getting angry.

Okay, fine.

Then you do you.

But for most people, they don't want to do that.

So again, being able to kind of frame it what you can control and focusing on

I know this individual is a little bit problematic right now for a lot of different
people, but I think about what Jerry Seinfeld, the comedian said once, which is when he

directed his movie, the Pop-Tart movie on Netflix or whatever, they asked him, know, what
made you know this movie was going to be successful?

He says, I had no idea.

And that was irrelevant.

All I knew is that was exciting.

It was an interesting challenge and I wanted to try it.

And then once I made it, it's up to the universe to decide if they like it or not.

And it's not my call anymore.

And I try to adopt that mentality for everything.

Like all you can control is your efforts, what you're doing, the joy of it.

You're proud of the thing that you've done and then how the world perceives you or how the
world gives you ranked points or whatever.

That's the world's problem, not your problem.

You, all you can do is control what output you're giving and you're going to die someday,
Ryan.

I'm going to die someday.

And there are gonna be people that thought that we were assholes and there are gonna be
people that thought we were beautiful people and there are gonna people that thought we

were friendly and there are gonna be people that thought that we were kind.

There are gonna people that thought we were mean-spirited.

And I cannot control that.

But what I can control is what I have ownership of, intrinsic value of, what I wanna give
out to the universe and let the cards be where the cards are.

Yeah, it's kind of a Nile, probably a nihilistic viewpoint, I guess, I like, well, not
necessarily what you were saying, but I also have this thing that I say where the heat

death of the universe is going to happen in like 3.5 trillion years or whatever.

So it's not going to matter.

Right.

So, and a lot of people that can be kind of a negative thought, but like I think it's
really freeing.

It's like, it is okay for me to just to do whatever because at some point none of us are
gonna exist anymore.

Now, again, I know that can be really negative for a lot of people, but for me, that's
again, this idea of releasing burdens from myself that I've kind of mentioned before.

That's like the ultimate burden release, right?

Like even if I get recorded as the biggest failure of all time,

human history is gonna disappear at some point and then no one's gonna remember.

Right?

So like I get to make life about what I think is important because that and the end, that
I am the only one who...

gets the, once I'm gone, it doesn't matter, right?

So while I'm alive, I'm the one who gets to decide what is important.

I'm the one who gets to decide what I value in life.

because of, it's all internal to me, and I don't have to worry about what other people
think are important, to me, it's really freeing feeling.

Absolutely, I'm with you on that 100%.

I tell the story a lot of, think like you, had a lot of lows, I had a lot of resets, but
the moment that really made me feel super free about, gosh, was it 20 years ago now?

Wow.

I hiked the Grand Canyon.

I went all the way from top to the bottom of the Grand Canyon.

And when I did that, I heard a tour guide off in the distance, not my tour guide, just
heard him talk.

And he says, well folks, uh

You know, the Grand Canyon has a lifespan of about 10 million years.

And we estimate that it's about 5 million years old right now.

So you've picked the perfect time to be here for the Grand Canyon.

Not a better time.

You really picked the right time to be here.

And as he said that, I thought to myself, 5 million more years before the Grand Canyon is
gone.

I will be a fleck of dust that will be totally forgotten.

Every, all my struggles, all my anger, all my angst, all my frustration will have, they'll
have been nothing.

And the Grand Canyon will still

most likely persist and exist.

And so to think about that, I know that in the social sciences, we say, you generally
speaking, with the exception of like significant historical figures, if you are a quote

unquote successful, impactful person, you might, if you're lucky, have influence two to
three generations outside of your existence.

And then after that, it dies off.

So like the exception of like George Washington and other folks like.

for most people, that's the most impact you can possibly have.

So even after three generations, you will be forgotten almost completely and utterly.

And that is such a freeing concept.

man, all the frustration and misery that I'm feeling right now, it's not gonna matter.

And I'm just a fleck of dust in the wind.

Mm-hmm, yep.

And that particular concept gave me this idea of, want to be selfish now.

I want to experience all life has to offer, because I will die and I will be a fleck of
dust in the wind.

And I don't know what my impact is going to be, but at least I'll have, before I died,
I'll have experienced as much as I possibly could.

And that gave me such a great reframe that it became incredibly difficult for me to get
super up.

And I still struggle on occasion with

people's perception, but it gave me such a one-upmanship in terms of like, the stakes are
so low guys.

Like, I just want to experience all of life that I can.

Um, and you know, I'm going to screw up and that's perfectly fine.

But then tomorrow's going to be another day.

And you know, every day is a gift.

Like literally I'm that jerk now, you know, that uppity person who's like, my gosh, every
day is gift.

I kind of am though.

Like I wake up and I'm like, there's another day out here.

I could have been dead tomorrow, but or yesterday, but I'm alive now.

Yep, I 100 % agree with you.

I'm also kind of that jerk.

I feel you, I feel you.

Yeah, I mean, so we've talked about some really good stuff here.

uh How we speed that process along, I don't know, especially in an age where if you're
glued to your blue sky, your Twitter, your Instagram and comparing yourself and looking at

things, I don't know how to solve that problem uh without physical systemic guardrails on
that stuff.

But I guess I have a couple of questions for you before we start wrapping up this episode
then.

uh Just kind of, know, quick hot topic questions for you.

um We've already answered that one.

So let me ask you a really good one.

In the past five years, my good friend Ryan, what is something that you want to share just
with me and our podcast listeners and viewers?

What's something you were embarrassed to start recently in the past five years?

Hey Zero Dot fam, do you have a question you want featured in our future episodes?

If so, all you have to do is go to our handy dandy email address at questions at
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Bear is to start.

Any new skill, any new thing you've started in the past five years that you remember
going, I'm a little embarrassed to try this at this point.

And in being in, I don't, not trying to toot my own horn, but like I think I have pretty
much gotten over being embarrassed to do things.

Because like I said, I now have gotten to a point in my life where like I really
appreciate new opportunities and failure.

So like I've done a lot of things since the pandemic.

I went to a blacksmithing class, which I didn't know how to do before, right?

That's cool.

This whole thing into cybersecurity is new for me from that point.

where I, like cybersecurity can be really daunting to get into because there's just so
much and like, there's a lot of uh pressure because now you are one of the linchpins to

protecting the environment, right?

So I don't mean to sound like uh I'm superior than things, but like, I don't really get
embarrassed to do things anymore.

Yeah, okay.

All right.

All right.

That's fair.

That's fair.

I can tell you some things that I've failed at trying to do.

Maybe that's more impactful.

Like weight, weight loss has been a pretty thing that I've struggled with for a long time.

And I have failed several times over even more than just the past five years of losing
weight.

And like I'm on a really good train right now, for example.

And I, but I, in that case, I think it's really important that again, even though I've
been failing this whole time,

getting back to it and trying to be better every single time.

Now to the point that I'm on a really good uh path.

Yeah.

So when you speak about failure, you know, you say you do it multiple, multiple, multiple
times.

You just keep coming at it.

You know, I think that's the other piece of it too is, I failed.

It's all over.

It's done.

Nothing I can do about it.

It's over.

It's just done.

It's just done.

um You make me think about, uh this is an old study, but I bring it up from 2024 um
Columbia university and other universities uh have been very, been outspoken with their

Ivy league students.

They've been struggling with assigning their students full-length books to read for the
reason that Incoming students literally have never had to read a long-form piece of book

unless it's to achieve something on a test and sort of ask them to do something as
quote-unquote uncomfortable as reading a long-form piece of fiction or nonfiction for the

sake of just discovering themes and what it meant to you uh It's Columbia is a upcoming
college

that has had to change their curriculums to meet what the students are interfacing with
right now.

And one of the main things I think about when I think about that story and that reporting
is, newer generation folks struggling with failure, thinking it's ultimate, thinking it's

done, but also thinking with discomfort, right?

You're talking about on a weight loss journey, I fell off the wagon, I'm gonna try again
tomorrow, I'm gonna try again the next day, I'm gonna keep at it, I'm gonna try something

new, this isn't working, let me try another pathway.

You know, all these levels of discomfort and failure, it's not that uncomfortable.

It's new data sets.

I'm getting new information.

I tried this thing.

It did not work.

Cool.

Let's try a new thing.

Let's try a new thing.

Or, Hey, some of this works.

Some of this did not.

How can I modify?

Right.

And just kind of every single failure is a new data set.

And I think about that study from, from Columbia university.

I, and I wonder, again, back to our question before, how we can get people to just not be
so afraid of failure and just think of it like it's failure today.

It could be success tomorrow if you keep trying over and over and over.

Yeah, and again, that's just one of the hard questions you to keep asking yourself.

It's interesting the idea that's, because like we're not that old, right?

I'm 36, think you're roughly my age too, You're 40 years, just a little bit older than me.

We were in high school together.

So that's a really interesting thing to think about.

The struggles that you and I went through.

just gonna be so vastly different than just even a little bit my sister is was born in 96
so she's six years younger to me so it's like ten years out from you and I already saw

with her struggles they were just from technolagical standpoint very different it's like
we didn't get social media until we were I think I was probably like 13 so you were

probably in the

oh Social media wasn't a thing until like end of high school college.

Yeah that area.

Yeah

Because I think I was on Myspace when I was like 13 or 14.

oh

Zanga.com.

I don't know you remember know what Zanga.com was.

There's that.

Yeah.

Yeah.

But my sister basically had social media from as soon as she had access to computer.

And just seeing her struggles with how social media happened, like I wasn't really at a
point in my life where I could give her advice anyway because I was too young.

But even now, I don't know what I would tell a

third grader, like how to handle, I couldn't give them advice other than to turn it off,
how to handle those social media pressures because I didn't get to live through it.

You know what I mean?

So I don't really have the lived experience to be able to help them with that, other than
the general advice of disconnect, look internally, et cetera, et cetera.

But it's a different problem.

And your book thing you were talking about where,

they literally, kids are not reading books anymore is also a very interesting problem
because when I was younger, the only two options I had for media consumption really were

either watch a movie, in terms of like literature, was like either watch a movie or read a
book.

Like video games, at least at the time, with the exception of maybe some RPGs didn't
really have.

that kind of thing where you could experience an entire story.

Right?

Like I think Final Fantasy VII was one of the first games.

I had like a real long story that I was able to play through as a child, but most of them,
know, Mario's running and jumping on dudes, right?

It's not a literary activity.

So that is, that's really interesting to me.

That I guess because they have so much other things in their life, like social media that
they don't have, they don't set a...

Well, you know what?

I didn't think I'd set aside time.

I think I just didn't have anything else to do, so I read books.

Yeah, it's time, but they're also saying is, so people are reading more than they've ever
read before, like something like 150,000 words a day, more than what you and I used to

read, but it's all quick, very short form, know, it's all the little, little stippy stuff.

So when they're asked to read long form stuff, it's painful.

It's like, they describe it as like really angsty, like,

I can't do this, I can't do this.

There's not enough stimulus, there's not enough, these sentences are too long, get to the
point, get snappier.

And so that's why when Columbia is in other universities talking about this, they're
having to reformat the curriculum to meet their needs because they watch their students

and they physically can't do it.

It's like a pain center that's happening for them.

That's wild.

that is wild and seems like a net negative.

I believe it to be but again, I want to keep myself open.

There's other elements to this story that we don't know yet.

But yeah, I think the difference that you and I might have because of our age differential
is This is not life.

This is just a tool This is just a tool and yes life requires a lot of this tool like
going to a restaurant scanning a QR code now or Using your credit card on this thing like

it but is at end of the day it is a tool and if I lost my cell phone

It would be really inconvenient.

It would suck.

have to do a lot of reformatting and cancel my credit cards and do security stuff.

And you on your side would know there's more that you have to do with that.

But I could get a new phone.

And when I talk to younger people, they don't view it that way.

Like the phone is them.

And they don't use those words, but like the phone is like attached to them at all times.

It's a part of them.

Yes.

Yeah.

And I don't.

I don't know what that means, if that's good or bad.

It's just there's a difference that I'm seeing when I travel the country and talk to
people.

That's what people are saying.

I I don't interact.

mean, I have a couple of people I work with who are in the Gen Z age group, but I guess
maybe I just don't interact with enough younger people to have seen that.

That's a, huh.

I'm gonna have to think about that one.

That's interesting.

Yeah.

And on one hand, on my side of the fence, because they're so glued to this and they're on
TikTok with each other, they're talking to each other via TikTok now.

That's how they interface with each other.

We're seeing a huge workforce change where these folks know all the tricks HR and leaders
are trying to do to like fire them or lay them off or do all that stuff.

So they're coming in more informed in these workplaces.

So that's great on that level.

But it's also their place of community.

And it's also the place where they build antagonism towards other people.

They're being

uh I don't want to use the word manipulated, through the witch, the mechanism is coming
through to them.

They believe it's us versus them kind of mentality with almost all topics about all
different kinds of things.

And as a result, and again, in addition to that, they feel like this is attached to them.

They can't live without it.

So um it's all fascinating, a little scary.

There's some good there, but there's a lot of stuff that I, as a coach, I get concerned
about.

So what, have you had to work with a lot of the younger generation, like people younger
than us?

So what has been in your experience, because now I'm really curious, if this is becoming
more a part of their life as opposed to a tool, how does that affect...

what you do and how you approach.

Do you also find that you have to approach them with snappier, shorter, or whatever the
case may be in order to be able to talk to them, to be able to get your points across?

Yes, they cannot.

So as a philosophical minded person.

One of the things that we learn as human beings as we get older is that two things that
are opposite of each other can be true.

We have to juggle both of those things.

They struggle with that.

You can't talk about in terms like that.

It has to kind of be black and white or here are the five steps to do X, Y, Z or here's
how you think about this.

But then once you get them hooked on that, then they can start thinking about that
nebulous nuance thing.

And you can see the gears turn.

You can see them think, well, sometimes it is, sometimes it isn't.

And that's good.

And they kind of argue with you a little bit and you get some of that, some of that
dynamic.

But when you first start off talking to them, you cannot hit them with the philosophical
stuff.

You can't hit them with the Facebook, Facebook mom quotes.

You can't hit them with what Descartes said.

You can't hit them with any of that stuff.

You gotta be very direct, very explosive, very exciting to get their attention, to get
them hooked on.

And then you have to let them, because what ends up happening in my workshops is I ask
them a pretty challenging questions.

And they, and they kind of struggle and they go, wait, what do you mean?

What do you mean?

And I'll start asking even more questions, start getting them to think about answers on
their own and let them suffer a little bit.

I use suffering in scare quotes, but let them kind of swim in that sauce a bit.

Cause it might be the first time they've ever had to do that.

Especially when I tell them to take their phones out, just take their phones off.

Just you don't have your phone with you.

I'm asking you to think about this problem right now.

And I'm seeing that in real time.

They're really smart folks, but one of the things I teach, you know,

middle managers and C-suite execs.

These kids are brilliant, but the one thing we've failed to do, and this is our failing,
we have to own this.

They're super smart.

They can process things really quickly.

If you give them the why, they can figure out better ways of doing things for us.

But what they can't do is here's a bunch of tools.

Here's the problem, go solve it.

And they go, I need some kind of instruction.

need some kind of like starting point.

Because at all points in their life, they've always had the opportunity of Googling
something.

of looking up a how-to, looking up a YouTube video, doing all that stuff.

They've always had something to start off from.

They've never started from scratch.

And that whole blank canvas thing is more paralyzing for them than any other generation.

Interesting.

As you were talking about that, was kind of thinking since it's mostly a lot of short form
content, this idea that they can only see in black and white initially, that's not a thing

they're going to with forever, is it the, because it's short form content, there's less of
a chance to provide nuance, do you think?

Yes, absolutely.

um Nuance is for them in their day-to-day life practically gone.

And I'm not saying that against them, I'm just saying through the mechanisms in which they
receive data and what they gravitate towards and what people have made for them that's

exciting for them, like to watch, nuance is incredibly difficult.

um

It is incredibly difficult to communicate an idea that, this thing is wrong, but there's
good things about this thing as well.

They, they, they struggle with that.

So they would, that almost makes me think that they are probably struggling more with this
idea of the failing situation because if they can't, and not can't is probably not the

correct word, but if their mindset is currently framed in such a way that you can only
have either, if it's so binary that it's either success or failure.

then I could definitely see where they would struggle with like failure is actually more
of a stepping stone as opposed to the path to success as opposed to like a state.

Like it almost makes me think that they're thinking of a success state and a failure
state.

Those are only two options.

I think you're right, like one and zero, you're the one or you're zero, right?

And you're in this state now and you're in this thing of failure.

And that also relates to what this generation is going for, which is they are seeking
alignment more than they ever have.

What I mean by that is this newest generation of workers coming in the 20 somethings, they
are the most sensitive to criticism in the way in which they believe if you criticize an

idea they have, you don't like them.

And if you don't like them,

then it attacks their whole wellbeing and all of the stuff.

Now we're all sensitive to criticism.

I'm sensitive criticism.

We all are, right?

But this generation just by heaps and bounds, they're very sensitive to it and they're
seeking alignment everywhere.

They're quick to cancel things.

If a person says something they don't like, but they like everything else, but like one
little thing they don't like it, they're looking for their tribe and they're all becoming

one tribe, but they're very exclusionary in that way, but they don't know they're being
exclusionary.

So it's very interesting.

You're right.

When you talk about binaryism,

The binary is clear in a lot of different facets, not just failure, but just also
alignment and trying to find like-minded people.

interesting.

guess, because like this promotion that I was talking about earlier is going to move me
into more of a managerial spot.

So these are definitely things I need to keep in mind because I obviously will start
hiring people younger.

You know, at some point, I'm still fairly young myself, but like at some point there will
be people younger.

Interesting, we're definitely gonna have to be doing some reading and research about how
to approach that then.

Yeah, for sure.

Yeah.

And feel free to hit me up.

But one of the biggest things I've had to learn myself, I grew up that if you disagreed
with someone, that was a sign of respect.

And like, let's dive into this big deeper, like have a conversation as equals.

I have learned newest generation of folks, any kind of disagreement is like, it shuts them
down completely.

And like, you are attacking me.

So I've had to learn the very difficult.

way of like asking more thought provoking questions to get them to think a little bit
differently about things before I start disagreeing with what they have to say.

um It's very hard, um but it's worthwhile because then you get them to come up and you get
them to kind of have great conversations, but you just be very careful about just shutting

any, any force that comes across, like it's shutting them down.

They take it all the way down.

They're just, they're done.

So that's my one tip for you is you go on this endeavor that may or may not happen.

Thanks.

I guess that also kind of leads into like the the bubble-fication of social media, right?

Like, because people end up writing up and in their own bubbles and like they are just not
that like you said it becomes very exclusionary where anybody even if they align with your

ideas 95 % that 5 % often is enough to kick you out of the group.

Wow.

That's yeah, it all kind of ties together, huh?

Yeah.

And I've caught myself too.

There's been a couple of social media accounts that I liked and then they made one video I
didn't like.

And I remember who was the person?

There was a, there's a fitness guy I watched called Scooby.

Really great stuff.

Check out his YouTube.

He's, he's a good, he's an older gentleman, 60, 70s.

He gives you very pragmatic tips on how to just get in better shape.

He had one video I disagreed with and it was kind of like him screaming at clouds saying
the younger generation sucks and

Be more financially responsible and all the nonsense you hear boomers say and I
unsubscribe for him and then about a week later I'm like that was dumb of me.

I've gotten so much value out of this guy's content and his stuff and I'm just canceling
him because of one dumb video he made so I forced myself to resubscribe to his stuff and I

asked myself why did I do that?

It's because I'm being fed into this is the way of doing things and I have to fight this
tendency to just cancel things when I don't

I have to fight this tendency that it's so easy to push my hand out to things when I don't
want it instead going, okay, I don't like everything you're giving me, but I like some of

it.

And so I still want to entertain these ideas as we keep moving forward here.

And that idea systemically and otherwise is very foreign to the newest generation.

Yeah, that's I don't know how you would get along with most people, because no one's the
same, right?

The magic words, that's what you just said.

How do you get along with most people, right?

Everyone's a little bit different.

Yeah.

I live in Indiana, which is a more conservative state, right?

And I do not align with a lot of the conservative talking points.

And uh I don't think I would be able to function if I live like that way.

Yeah.

And I'm sure in your position where you are, you've had to learn the very important skill
we've all had to learn, which is, okay, you and I are probably more aligned than you

think, but the language in which you're using is separating us.

So let me try to get to the root of what we're actually involved with.

Like when you talk about people and their politics, they think they're one or the other,
but then you ask them the real things like what matters to you having a roof over your

head, having enough money to take care of basic needs.

You don't want other people to suffer.

Like you get to those basic fundamental things and we all agree.

It's just the language gets warped thanks to our environmental and our conditioning.

You've had to learn that skill of finding what brings us together and not separates us.

Right, yeah, the, The, I...

I...

You have to keep in mind that 90...

plus percent of people just are trying to do their best and they're trying to believe the
things that they think will be the most beneficial.

And if you come at it from that perspective, almost any political opinion makes sense from
the perspective of like they're, they are doing what they think is the correct thing.

Now it could be from a different viewpoint that you don't have, but I think if you give
people that grace, it really allows you to connect with them regardless.

But I really hope that that is not going away because I feel like that's just, that'd be
really sad to lose your ability, our community to be able to pull the people together of

different ideas.

Yeah, I do the best that I can to be the bastion of that, Ryan, but I'll be honest, I'm
seeing a downturn.

I'm seeing tribalism, I'm seeing people hunker down in their, as you said, bubble-fication
of their ideas.

So it's a fight, it's a battle.

I think we all can contribute towards fighting, but it starts with just being open to
ideas that are not our own, entertaining ideas that we don't love, but we just still think

about them and go down that path.

uh

while still fighting the good fight for humanity and everyone else.

And then of course, not being afraid of failure along the way.

Because we will fail.

That's just what's gonna happen.

That has been another episode of the Zero Dot Podcast.

I'm your host Sam.

This has been our guest Ryan.

Thanks so much for tuning in.

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Folks, it's been a pleasure.

Stay on Team Human.

Until next time.

Cheers.