1780: 4,000 Weeks by Oliver Burkeman, Doomsday Clock, Wheel of Life, Healthspan

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Welcome to the Creating wealth show with Jason Hartman. You're about to learn a new slant on investing, some exciting techniques and fresh new approaches to the world's most historically proven asset class that will enable you to create more wealth and freedom than you ever thought possible. Jason is a genuine, self made multimillionaire who's actually been there and done it. He's a successful investor, lender, developer and entrepreneur who's owned properties in 11 states, had hundreds of tenants, and been involved in thousands of real estate transactions. This program will help you follow in Jason's footsteps on the road to your Financial Independence Day. You really can do it. And now, here's your host, Jason Hartman with the complete solution for real estate investors.

Welcome to episode 1780. 1780. And if you don't know what that means, if you're only watching the YouTube channel, for example, be sure to subscribe to the Creating wealth show wherever you get your podcast episodes because you don't want to miss any one of our great episodes. We've interviewed thousands of great guests on all of my different shows and we'll.

Talk about one of those different shows.

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Got just a bunch of great episodes. They're all free, all available for you. And if you're watching on YouTube, be sure you subscribe.

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Hit the like button and post your comments and questions down below and we'll try and get to them as much as we can. Sometimes on your comments or questions, we don't get to them right in that comment thread or question thread, but we address that on another episode. So be sure to leave your questions and comments down below. We really do try to get to those. So today we have a great show and we do a 10th episode, as we call it. Every 10th episode we do a special show which is about something of general life interest. And this today is all about life and how precious life is and how little time we really have and how we should consider managing that time, managing that very limited time. So today our guest is Oliver Berkman and he is the author of a book entitled 4000 Weeks. Now, you probably guessed it by now, 4000 Weeks is the typical lifespan of a human being. And when you think about that, you really don't have very much time, do you? It's not that much time. Last year I lost an ex girlfriend who passed away and I lost one of my co workers just recently. So it really wakes you up and makes you realize how precious life is and how we need to manage it and how we need to engage in what he calls time management for mortals. Because since the fountain of youth is yet to be discovered and may never be discovered, and immortality is not something that is possible, at least not yet, we need to manage that time very, very diligently. And it's easy to kind of fritter it away and to ignore it. I know I've certainly been guilty of that many times over the years. And hopefully today's guest will, will help.

Shed some insight into how we can better manage that.

As you may know, I have another podcast. I have several of them, but one of them is called the Longevity and Biohacking show. And it's all about health, wealth and happiness. So be sure to subscribe to that where I interview some of the leading longevity scientists and biohackers around the world on these really cutting edge topics of longevity science and biohacking. So check that out for sure. The Longevity and Biohacking Show. And it was actually when it first came out, it was featured in the new and noteworthy section of itunes and it really helps with some of these questions and knowing what's coming in the future. We are living in an amazing time, no question about it. There are certainly lots of problems, but there are amazing discoveries that we are on the brink of now. You may have heard of the Doomsday Clock and that really, I think, came out of the Cold War in and was a product of that and mostly addressed the potential for doomsday when it comes to the nuclear threat and the threat of global annihilation with nuclear weapons. As we all know, both the US and Russia and then other countries that have nuclear weapons have more than enough weapons to annihilate the human race and to annihilate all life on planet Earth many, many times over. And this doomsday Clock was meant to address that. So over the years, for example, during the Cuban Missile crisis, right, we got very close to doomsday. And at other times, we've been very close to doomsday throughout the years. And so you kind of see this. And back to 1949, the Soviets first nuclear test and then the US hydrogen bomb and all this stuff. Now, you know, many would actually argue that nuclear weapons have saved many lives. And I think that's a very legitimate idea because the prevention aspect has really created a lot of fear. And fear in a good way, where it has prevented wars and it has prevented conflicts, the fear of those, nuclear deterrence. So, of course, this is yet to be seen, and there are varying opinions, but I just wanted to throw that out there that, you know, maybe nuclear weapons have saved millions and millions of lives. Who knows? Because like I always say, you can't hear the dogs that don't bark. We can never judge. Human beings are terrible at judging what might have happened, right? But we all have our own personal doomsday clocks. And these doomsday clocks could be in terms of longevity and health, right? That's the sort of obvious one. But we have other doomsday clocks in terms of relationships and reputation and other very, very important things in life. So we should all be very mindful of our own personal doomsday clocks. And with every choice we make, every decision we make, every relationship, we end badly every time we disrespect someone, every time we put bad food into our mouth or we're lazy and we don't exercise, or we. We do dangerous things, that brings our personal doomsday clock closer to midnight. And midnight is that ultimate doomsday, the way they use the clock in the atomic sense. So some of these are really the most expensive things in life, yet interestingly, fixing them is free. And it's just a matter of not engaging in some things, not saying some things, not doing some things that creates this benefit from the dogs that don't bark. And again, it's hard to quantify these things because we as humans have a very difficult time evaluating the things that are unseen or the things that didn't happen, the things that are unknown. Right? We have a very difficult time evaluating that, but believe me, there is a lot of big expense here. Now, one way that people try to live more effectively, and you've heard me talk about this before, is, is through the wheel of life. I originally discovered this when I was 17 years old from Dennis Whateley, who was one of the great influences on My life along with Jim Rohn and Zig Ziglar and Earl Nightingale and later there were many others, Og Mandino for sure, and so forth. But you know, this is a way to balance life, right? To make sure we're sort of firing on all cylinders. And looking at this the way Dennis Whateley said it is, if the wheel is round, if it's reasonably balanced, it will roll down the road of life effectively. But if it's very imbalanced, it won't. So you might be winning in say the financial category, but losing in the health category. Right. And so here we've got to look at something called health span. Not just lifespan, but health span. And sadly, especially in the United States, people have become so unhealthy and there are so many health problems that just make never existed before where the society is just consuming this poison soda, you know, Coca Cola, sugar, all of this stuff that is just toxic and is not meant to be widely available in nature. For example, if you look at everything from an evolutionary perspective, which I try to do, whether it be with the way we act and the way we think or what we eat and how much exercise we get or how much we don't get, right? And all of these things in an evolutionary perspective, food was not widely available. This is the first time in history really, that food was ever abundant. So we were meant to go without food for lengths of time. You know, many of my friends have been trying to convince me to do this for a long time. Intermittent fasting, right? Intermittent fasting. You've probably heard about it, it's a big trend and rightfully so. Now I've been kind of doing it just automatically without thinking about it reasonably well for a long, long time. And what this basically consists of is just reducing our eating window. It's so simple and so effective and so easy to do this. Picture it this way. If you look at a round clock, an old fashioned clock, and Instead of having 12 hours on it, it has 24 hours on it. And say that you eat breakfast every day at 8am and then you eat dinner at 8pm well, your eating window is very large because that's by the time you're finished with dinner, that's 12 and a half hours of eating. And, and then you stop eating for 11 and a half hours, right? What you want to do is shrink that eating window. Eat, you know, don't worry so much about what you eat, okay? You know, of course eating the right things is important, but shrink the window. So eat breakfast later or try and wait till lunch to eat your first meal and then eat dinner earlier and shrink that eating window. If you can get that window down to eight hours, which anybody can do, I've been doing that for many years. Not even consciously, not even trying to do it. I just automatically do it. But I'm trying to shrink it even more because there are so many benefits when the body is not eating and using all that energy for digestion, it can clean itself up. Think about this. The first meal of the day is called breakfast. And if you split that word up, it means break the fast, right? Break fast. You're breaking your fast because you were sleeping. And all of these studies that have been around for many years that show how important sleep is, well, this is my own theory, by the way, on this, so it's my own take on it. But sleep is certainly important. But interestingly, if you get good sleep and you sleep for a long enough period, you are naturally fasting during the time you're sleeping, because you're certainly not eating when you sleep, right? So you're having a longer fast. And it doesn't mean sleep all day, Right. But it just means that have adequate sleep. If you're sleeping four or five hours, which I have done many, many, many years in my life, you're eating more because you're awake. And when you're awake, you're going to eat. If you sleep seven hours, then you're going to be eating in a smaller window, and hopefully you can add to that window on both sides of sleep. So health span, not just lifespan, is what's so critically important. Where we don't have these diseases that we get usually toward the end of life, whether they be diabetes, cancer, obesity, whatever, these are all terrible things that really destroy the quality of life. And you can look at it many different ways. There are many charts online you can find about health span and lifespan. And, you know, many years ago, I learned that there are basically two things that kill us. And the major two things are inflammation and oxidation. Now, I'm not a doctor, this is not medical advice. This is just my own research and my own learnings over the years. And I really am hesitant to say what I'm about to say because most people do not get enough of what.

I'm about to talk about.

But like anything in excess, it is also very bad because it increases oxidative stress. And again, these are the two big ways we die. Inflammation and oxidation. What is that I'm about to say, and I'm really hesitant to say this. Exercise Exercise, like many other things, can be addictive. It creates a dopamine hit. Those endorphins that come after exercise feel great. There is a high to it. But exercise, believe it or not, should also be moderated. So I'm saying that only to a small percentage of the population.

Most people need to exercise more, but.

Some people do it too much. And so I just wanted to point.

That out, although I'm somewhat reluctant to.

Even say that now. There used to be this great website that went away called Realage and I loved it because I remember going there many, many years ago and answering a whole bunch of questions and it told me what my age was in reality, not in chronology. So this is like inflation, right? We always talk about inflation on the show and how the most widely used measure of inflation, the consumer Price Index, the CPI, is highly manipulated and how false these statistics are because they manipulate the index through weighting, substitution and hedonic indexing. Well, you know, you might be older than your chronological age and you might be younger. And there is another website that does this now in a different way called vitality.com and I just took my real age test on vitality.com and I was happy to find out that I am quite a bit younger than my chronological age. So that was good.

Now don't cheat on this folks, because.

You'Ll only be cheating yourself. But you need to have your blood work handy. Hopefully you're getting your blood labs done maybe twice a year.

You know, they're only going to usually.

Do them once a year and always when you go to the doctor, insist on more, insist on more blood work, more complete blood work. And there's a great company here in Florida, I had the founder on my show years ago called Any Lab Test now, where you can just go in, pay cash and get a blood test on pretty much anything you want. They do drug testing for employers and stuff, but they do a whole range of blood tests whether you want your typical health panel or a more comprehensive health panel or hormone testing or whatever it is, right? They test your blood, you just walk in and remember you've usually got a fast, so usually you go first thing in the morning and it's just fantastic. So take advantage of those. There's a bunch of them all around the country with different names and so forth. So check that out. But look, this is the world we live in. Sadly, most people are sitting in front of a device and they are sitting and they are not up and they are not moving. So these age related diseases can be A lot, lot worse. Okay, so before we get to our guest today, let me end with some song lyrics that are somewhat reflective on this topic of how we just have 4,000 weeks on average, right? That's the typical lifespan. It's 4,000 weeks. And the older we get, the faster those weeks go by, don't they? They just go faster and faster and faster. So I want to share a couple of great song lyrics with you, and this is one from one of my very favorite artists. And this is John Denver.

So he has this great song, one of many. And I. I know the lyrics to.

Like almost every John Denver song, but also every Rush song. So how's that for variety? John Denver and Rush, usually not together, but I'm eclectic. Anyway, this one's called on the Wings of a Dream. I so wish I could play this for you. But of course copyright will not allow that. It starts out by saying, yesterday I had a dream about dying, about laying to rest and then flying. How the moment at hand is the only thing we really own. Think about that. How the moment at hand is the only thing we really own.

And then he says, just fast forwarding into the song.

I mean, the song is so great. Gotta. Gotta listen to it and read all the lyrics, right? But he says, from the life to the light. And the light, he's referring to God at the end of life. You know, those end of life experiences we've all heard about. From the life to the light, from the dark of the night to the dawn. He is so in my heart he is there, he could never be gone. Though the singer is silent, there still is the truth of the song really makes you think about your legacy, right? Someday we will all be silent, but what legacy will we leave behind? Right? That's. That's what that makes me think about, right? Though the singer is silent, there still is the truth of the song. And then he ends by saying, yesterday I had a dream about dying, about laying to rest and then flying. How the moment at hand is the only thing we really own. And I lay in my bed and I wonder after all has been said and is done for why is it thus we are here and so soon we are gone? So let's go and talk to the author of 4,000 Time Management for Mortals. By the way, of course I want to say, please make sure you subscribe to the channel. Hit the like button if you like the content and comments and questions below. If you. And if you need help with your investing or have questions about real estate, income, property, the most Historically proven asset class in the entire world. Reach out through Jason hartman.com and if you're in the United States, 1-800-hartman you can actually call us on the phone. Who actually uses the phone anymore? Right. We actually are happy to take calls at 1-800-HARTMAN but that's in the US only. All right, let's go to our guest today, the officer author of 4000 Weeks.

It's my pleasure to welcome Oliver Berkman to the show. He's the New York Times best selling.

Author of the Antidote Happiness for People who Can't Stand Positive Thinking and the new book 4000 Weeks.

By the way, do the math on that. See what 4000 weeks comes to. 52 weeks in a year and that.

Is time management for mortals. He's coming to us from Yorkshire, England.

And Oliver, it's great to have you.

Welcome.

Thanks very much for inviting me. Happy to be here.

So the latest book is the 4000.

Weeks book and you know, I'm assuming you're kind of addressing this issue of a lot of people kind of wasting.

Their lives not planning with intention or give us kind of the over overriding.

Thesis of the book if you would.

Sure, yeah. I mean the basic idea here is just that I think, yeah, we don't go through our lives with an awareness of how little we get time wise. We, we don't go through most of our lives and we don't approach time management generally, I don't think with any sense of the finite nature of time at all. So my big criticism of a lot of approaches to time management and productivity is they just sort of assume implicitly, sometimes explicitly, but usually implicitly that you just kind of have all the time in the world or that if with the right techniques and the right systems you could pretty much do everything. If you have an ambition, you can put it into practice. If you get another hundred emails compared to last week, you'll find a way to get through them. And I sort of want to say no. There are some pretty hard limits here and we'll spend more of our lives doing meaningful things if we sort of face up to that and accept that we are absolutely not going to do everything that we could possibly think of. And you sort of need to accept that as a, as the first step in, in doing things that count.

I agree with you. And you know that first part of what you said kind of was the younger me. And as the years go by, number one, you really realize how not the.

Years but the weeks, how fast those weeks go.

Just one after another. And, you know, do you really want another hundred emails? You know, is that meaningful?

Right?

I mean, there's almost this and I'm.

Guilty of it, and that's why I'm speaking to it. You know, I'll call it reckless ambition, maybe.

And I think that's true.

So what should people do if we agree on this being an issue, a problem to be solved, how do we address it?

You know, book has a whole bunch of tips and techniques, and I'm very happy to speak to those. But I think at the heart of it, it is a kind of a perspective shift. It is a slightly different way of looking at your life and at time that sort of starts from this understanding of finitude and of limitation and that in a way people don't like to hear it necessarily, but it starts by kind of admitting defeat, a certain kind of admission of defeat, which is that this day when you are completely in control of time, perfectly optimized, superbly productive, able to take on absolutely everything that might be thrown at you, that it's never going to come, you know, And I think that if you can let that feeling sink in a bit, it's actually not really a defeat in the long run, because that is the basis for being able to. Then, you know, it frees up the time and the attention to focus on a few things that count. I think what has a lot to do with tolerating a certain kind of anxiety, a certain kind of discomfort that comes with not doing things right. So it comes from saying, like, there's five really cool, exciting projects that I want to launch, or five business ideas I want to. I want to really, I want to implement. And I'm deliberately going to not take any action on four of them for the time being and live with the fact that that makes you feel kind of antsy and anxious, so that you can really give everything to the one. And then sequentially, maybe there'll be time for the next one afterwards. And that approach of being willing to put things aside in order to focus on a number one priority, it doesn't come easily. We'd much rather feel like we had a finger in 12 pies at once because it makes us feel like we're in more control, but it's actually much less productive in the long run.

You know, I wonder if that have the finger in 12 pies at once, as you put it, is sort of an evolution, evolutionary thing, right? It's like hedging our bets. It's diversification, you know, more things today, I guess. Work out than in the old days. If we were, you know, living in primitive life, a lot of things didn't work out.

Right.

But modernity has helped us make a lot of things work better.

Right.

In some ways. Not in every way, by the way.

So maybe that's just the way we're.

Wired, is to sort of, you know, have a hand in. In more things.

Do you think it goes back to that?

That's a fascinating thought. I don't really cover that in the book, but yeah, I mean, I think it makes perfect sense. And it's a reminder of a big truth of evolutionary psychology in general. Right. Which is that evolution does not have your fulfillment as it's. It's not interested. I mean, interested in quotes, obviously, but it's not interested in your fulfillment. It's not interested in you having a wonderfully meaningful, happy life. It's interested in your survival and gene propagation. And it may well be that sort of hedging your bets in this way. Certainly, obviously it's the sort of absolutely standard received wisdom when it comes to, like, investing your money or something. But when it comes to dedicating your effort to things you want to create or build, I think it does probably go against that survival instinct to let a bunch of things be on the back burner fully while you focus on a smaller number of them. But that's so. Yeah, I'm saying that's the path to a meaningful life.

Right.

But evolution. Evolution isn't so interested in you having a meaningful life.

Evolution's interested in survival and procreation. That's about it.

Right.

Yeah.

So, Oliver, look, you. You start off with.

I think it was John Maynard Keynes, the economist, who said, you know, in the long run, we're all dead.

Right.

Was he the ultimate of that?

I believe so, yeah. As far as I know, yeah.

In that seems like a really pessimistic way to look at things. Right.

But in a way, it seems like your point is say no as if it means yes, you're already committed to something more important.

Right. But how does one choose, you know.

With all of these options and maybe today there's more options than ever. And, you know, limiting that field of.

View, narrowing the focus, how do you pick one thing over another?

It's the big question, obviously. And I mean, I think it's funny that you say that that kind of outlook in that quote there is pessimistic, and I think it is in a certain way. But I think what I'm all about is this kind of pessimism. That actually isn't really pessimism. That is sort of energizing and embracing in a way.

Right.

Some people, it's liberating, actually. Right, yeah, right, yeah, yeah, I get it.

So. So one answer to the question of how do you choose is actually. I mean, I have other answers, but one of them is to say it almost doesn't matter. Right. If you've got five different paths for your life and they all strike you as deeply meaningful and exciting, then the truth of being a limited human being is that you're not going to get to do them all, or at least not all of them at the same time. So there's no option here that involves not jettisoning something meaningful. And I find that very liberating because then I feel to myself, well, okay, I don't have the option of avoiding a certain kind of loss here that's built in. It's baked into the situation. And then it's actually often just comes intuitively and naturally to say, well, okay, I'll go for this one. You know, there's nothing bad about lots of the other ones. Obviously there are also bad options for a life, but. But even you're not even going to have time to do all the good ones. So that's actually kind of a good example of this kind of idea of pessimism that isn't really pessimism because, like, oh, that ship has sailed. I don't get to do all the things that strike me as cool. So just go with. Go with intuition, go with instinct. Go with the one that excites you the most.

Yeah, well, you know, you talk in the book about getting the wrong things done, right? And we all get this, you know, dopamine hit of checking something off of our to do list.

Right.

There is a feeling of accomplishment. But as the late Stephen Covey said, you know, you climb the ladder of success and maybe realize it's leaning against the wrong wall.

Right, right.

So I think people, you know, they understand that. Not necessarily that they're doing it, but.

Are there broad areas of focus?

I mean, is just weighing career over family or, you know, this over that?

I mean, how does one do that?

Well, firstly, yeah, I think, you know, getting the wrong things done. Productivity, which is part of what I'm sort of critiquing in the. In the book, it's such an odd thing to celebrate, like, the sheer fact of getting some things done, like, without any particular reference to whether they are good things or the right things. You know, your day might be used much more usefully spent getting two things done rather than 200 things, if they are the things that really count. In writing this book, I didn't want to offer, like a laundry list. I think of, like, this is how to have a meaningful life, and this is not. I think most people do have a strong sense that, you know, relationships are key, and absorbing and engrossing work is key, and physical fitness, maybe time in nature is key. One of the questions for making these decisions that I really like and that I write about comes from the Jungian therapist James Hollis, who says that he suggests asking when you're maybe facing a dilemma or a life choice or a decision about which direction to go in, asking whether a certain choice enlarges you or diminishes you. And it's a bit of a sort of strange language at first, but it's an alternative to saying like, will this make me happy? Or will that make me. Or will it make me unhappy? We're terrible at predicting what's going to make us happy. That's like one of the oldest findings in social psychology. But this question about enlargement or diminishment, if you sort of let it seep into you a little bit, people very often know the answer, right? I mean, and it could be that remaining in a job, remaining in a career, remaining in a relationship, that. That is the hard but. But enlarging route. And it could be that leaving one of those things and quitting is the. Is the enlarging route. Very often I think quitting feels like a bold move, and sometimes it can be the. The non bold move, and that commitment is the bold move. So, you know, it's like, it's just as a way of connecting to our intuitions, I guess. I do have a fairly strong faith that most people who might be reading the book or listening to this, watching this conversation, they're not dumb. They know roughly what the shape of their ideal life looks like. I don't think they're going to be sort of accidentally thinking that owning 500 sports cars and having no friends or personal relationships is truly the path to fulfillment.

So, you know, I saw an interesting, you know the Onion, right? That comedy?

Yeah.

I remember I picked up a copy of it once and it said, you know, man leaves his friends and family to spend more time with his stuff.

Right?

Oh, we know. Right? We know that. So I think it's less about me telling anyone what the things are that they should have in their lives and more about clearing away this fog that gets in the way of seeing that which comes from partly this kind of hunger to just do as much activity as possible regardless of what the activity is.

Do you think a lot of this problem goes back to, you know, Madison Avenue and the sort of the advertising culture and this. I mean it seems like it's become so hyper focused now, like you know, the, just this constant, the Kardashian culture, the whatever.

Right.

I mean back in the 80s it was lifestyles of the Rich and Famous but it wasn't hyper radical back then. Even though people view the 80s that way. But it has become like off the charts. I mean how ridiculous. This, you know, at a certain point you got to ask just like what's the point? Right, right, absolutely, yeah. I mean, what is the point?

Right.

Meaningful work is a legitimate thing.

Right? That's good.

You know, having work that influences and helps and impacts other people, I think that's completely legit. But at some point, you know, how.

Many marbles can you collect?

How many do you need? You know, there's got to be some level of like rationality there.

Yeah, no, totally. And I mean this was one of the places where Keynes, who was so wise about so much sort of got it wrong and predicted that we would be working 15 hour weeks at this point in history because we would have, you know, the growth of wealth and technology would mean that we had met our needs. But of course what happens if you meet your needs is that you just invent new things to need so that it sort of is an endless cycle. And I think consumerism specifically, not necessarily capitalism per se, but consumerism specifically is a, is a big part of this because it is, it's built into the system that you have to be unsatisfied. If you could buy a couple of things and be satisfied the whole, it wouldn't work.

Interestingly, that's the way Americans and probably.

The rest of the world used to.

Be, you know, before really the twenties. I think it really is when it kind of changed in the 20s. Edward Bernays was the founder of kind of modern PR and advertising and it just shifted. And then of course we've all seen Mad Men and you know, we know about the rise of Madison Avenue and so forth. And this is not a us thing, it's a worldwide thing because US had Hollywood and influenced the world through, through Hollywood and media in so many ways.

So American seemed like a fairly contented bunch in the old days.

You know, I don't know, I'm sure there were some that, you know, greed and avarice, these are always human Traits.

But no, I think, you know, I think that has a lot to do with, I mean, it's not all technologically driven, but it has a lot to do with being able to sort of developments, I think, in market research and being able to understand audiences on a sort of deeper psychological level and thus being able to speak to their hopes and dreams and fears and insecurities instead of. Instead of just to, you know, their need to get around and dress and clean their homes or whatever. The other thing that's really, I don't, you know, who knows, the chicken and the egg, which came first? But the culture you talk about, the Kardashians, you know, the culture of fame and celebrity and the championing of sort of fame and celebrity above all, is another driver of this. Because, I mean, two things. Firstly, it puts everyone in. In a sort of by definition kind of zero sum race because only a few people can be super famous. Secondly, it has this strange effect of defining.

You know, a meaningful life only as one that is kind of extraordinary. And I think those are two very different things. I'm all for people doing extraordinary things with their lives, but I'm all also, I'm also all for people getting a lot of satisfaction and a lot of meaning and a lot of happiness out of things that look pretty mundane from the outside, raising a family, doing work that counts, and that matters, but that is not.

Going to be known to millions and millions of people. So a little part of what I'm getting at as well in the book about meaningful use of time is don't pick a definition of meaningful that makes it sort of unnecessarily hard to have a meaningful life. Don't pick a definition where you have to be like Shakespeare or alternatively, Kim Kardashian for it to count. Like, you succeeded. That's just setting yourself up for unnecessary failure.

I couldn't agree more. And it's a funny thing with the fame culture and the social media companies, Instagram and Facebook and such, it seems.

Like they've really learned how to trick our brains, right?

The marketers have done that and so have the tech companies. All of the meaningfulness that you just talked about from mundane lives, right, no one from the outside will appreciate you or notice that.

Right.

You know, it's only going to be you that notices that and maybe a few people really close to you, right? But even then, maybe not them. You will get no admiration, you'll get no applause. You know, it's. It's like, and we've been so trained to like Seek this ridiculous recognition and how many likes and shares and the social media revolution has just destroyed our brains.

It's awesome.

No, I think it's true. I think, you know, and I think it's, I often think about this. You know, it's like I think we think of celebrities as these people to model our lives around or that we wish we were, but oh, some of.

Them are a disaster.

Well, you might actually think about, you know, I think there's a, there's a good rival theory. I don't have any sort of real evidence for it, but an sort of impressionistic theory that maybe celebrities are the people who are actually the most psychologically sort of limited. There may be the people who are not able to be satisfied with being normal. It's almost like a disorder to need to be that famous. And then I would say, you know, someone like me, maybe you, who on some level we do have a sort of modest public profile. We're not the Kardashians. That's probably because we've got some like slightly weird ego need for an audience. Probably the sanest people on the planet are the ones who have no need whatsoever for that kind of, for that kind of public acclaim.

I would have thought the truly independent and self reliant person who does not depend on anything from the outside. Right, right. That is the self actualized person. Definitely. Tell us a little bit about the attention economy. I want to ask you about a couple bullet points. You mentioned the productivity trap earlier, if you want to expand on that, the efficiency trap and the attention economy. Because as we talk about these tech.

Companies, you know, they really are using us.

We are paying so much money to them with paying our attention and that is making them fabulously rich and powerful beyond comprehension.

You know, what about those things?

Attention, efficiency, productivity, all those traps.

Yeah, I'll do them in a couple of buckets. I guess the efficiency trap is really just my phrase for the way in which if you focus in your life, in your work, in your time management, on getting more efficient just per se for the sake of it, without some kind of broader governing value. If you just want to be more efficient at getting things done, the natural result of that is that you'll get more and more, you'll become busier, not less busy and you'll get more and more and your system will fill with less and less meaningful stuff, more and more kind of junk, junk tasks. That's just a sort of, seems to be a general rule about efficiency that if you make a system like your yourself more Efficient, then the default will just be that the greater capacity you have to do things gets filled with more and more stuff that doesn't really matter.

Well, there's even a saying for that. If you want something done, give it.

To the busiest person.

Right, right. They're efficient. It's just you're not necessarily going in the right direction.

Right. And that's a good example of how one of the things that will happen is you'll become a, you'll, you'll become governed by other people's agendas rather than your own. You know, it's a, it's very close parallel to what happens very often when they, when they add a lane to a freeway to try to ease congestion and it becomes a more attractive route to travel. So more drivers use it than before and the congestion returns to roughly what it was prior to the, prior to the road widening. And then the attention economy. I think most people have a good basic grasp of this now. You know, it's not, we understand, I think when we're on Twitter or Facebook or whatever, it's not, it's not quite as free as it looks because as the old saying goes, if you're not paying for the product, you are the product.

Those platforms, the business model is they sell our attention to advertisers. The money changes hands when the advertisers pay the platforms. And that is a huge incentive on the part of those platforms to do whatever it takes using totally cutting edge data gathering and technology, algorithm building and all the rest of it. We also increasingly understand to show us whatever it is going to be that will compel our attention based on our past behavior on those sites. The data we're providing, that doesn't mean stuff that you want in the long run to have consumed, stuff that meshes with your highest goals for your life or even stuff that makes you happy. In fact, as we see, it's likely to be things that make you unhappy, unhappy, angry. If you get to acclimatize to a particular political viewpoint, then it's probably going to be things that are a bit more of an extreme version of that political viewpoint.

We're all living in echo chambers thanks to the tech companies. I mean, echo chambers and sort of.

Radical, radicalizing echo chambers as well, because they have to sort of juice it and give you a bit more so that, so that everyone gets sort of channeled to the fringes.

You know, there are various things I talk about in the book for sort of reclaiming some of your attention, but I think that one of the Most important points there is just to see that that is what is going on, to understand it, and to understand that, in a way, we collaborate with it. Right. Because people talk about this as if you're just sitting there, focused on your work, and then like, evil Twitter comes along and distracts you. Well, no, you go to Twitter because the work was kind of making you feel uncomfortable or intimidated or bored or something. And again, it's a case of learning to handle a little of that discomfort and say, okay, this project that matters a lot to me is not feeling great at the moment. That's not a coincidence. Things that you care about don't feel great often because the stakes are high and they sort of get to your deeper psyche. And I'm going to feel that discomfort and not immediately choose to try to assuage that discomfort with a. With a scroll through my phone, with.

A fix of junk food. It's basically junk food for the mind. Yeah.

Yeah. And I am so far from perfect at this. I mean, I'm.

I'm.

We're all fighting.

It's.

We've all been there.

Yeah. Of course.

One of the things I'm always telling my audience, Oliver, is it's imperative that people watch old movies, watch old TV shows, read old books, and listen to old music, because you really notice that people were. Now granted, of course, it's a production.

I get it. Right.

You know, you're never gonna have, like. Unless you could travel in time.

Right, Right.

You're never gonna know exactly what it was like.

Okay.

Right.

But people were more intentional and thoughtful.

There's no question about it. I mean, I lived before the Internet. Okay. And I remember how it was in my own life.

Right.

And this world that we've created is.

It's got a lot of negatives to it.

No question about it.

It really is.

It's like a diet of mental junk food.

They've learned how to hack our minds.

You know, many people have seen that documentary about the social media companies and so forth.

It's very powerful.

It really is. And probably needs to be regulated in some way.

Yeah, no, I think. I think so. I would agree. The other thing you notice when you watch all those consume that sort of old media is the speed at which things come at people seems to be slower, happier, with a slower speed. And I think that that is something also something I write about. You know, the faster that we're able to do things technologically, the more impatient we get, which is a really odd outcome. When you start it, it should be the other way around. And I think what's going on there is that we are being encouraged to believe that we're ever so close, like on the brink of being able to do everything instantaneously. And so every remaining moment that we can't is worse than otherwise would be. So it's actually a lot more aggravating for some reason, to wait three minutes, two minutes for the microwave than to wait two hours for something in a. In a traditional oven. Again, because I think the microwave sort of asks. It encourages you to believe you're almost God, you know, when it comes to time.

Right?

Not quite. It's that last to that last two minutes is far more enraging than the two hours.

No, nobody has ever beat the clock, whether it be through immortality or any other way. You know, I remember in junior high school, I had a very traditional wood shop teacher, you know, and I used to love mechanical things, building things and stuff like that. You know, he used to really not let us use the power tools much. He said, look, if you can't sand this block or cut this wood, you're just. All you do with a machine is just make the mistake faster.

Right.

And that seems like in a way, what you're talking about here, you get to a destination faster. But was it the right destination and was faster?

The thing that was most valuable about.

It maybe the journey, like survival.

And I write in the book about how important I think it is for people to have at least something in their lives that they just do for the enjoyment or meaning of doing it, not because of where they're going. Here in the Yorkshire, the North York moors, where we've just relocated, I'm going to have the opportunity to walk the talk here because it is some of the greatest hiking country in England. And as I write in the book, hiking is a great example of this. If you want to be really efficient at a hike, just don't go in the first place. Right.

Or take a helicopter.

Right, right, exactly. It obviously defeats the object of something like that. And I think that generalizing, I think that applies to lots and lots of our experiences in life that like, yeah, you could do them faster, but is faster what you wanted to get out of that experience?

Yeah, good point. Very good points, folks. We all have about 4,000 weeks in the average lifespan, so good reminder here from Oliver to use them wisely. Anything else you want to say? Question I didn't ask you topic you want to hit on. Maybe the antidote book, anything from there before you go?

Well, no, not really that book is a similar sort of approach, I suppose, but it's looking at the idea of positive thinking and the idea that sort of a relentless focus on trying to make yourself happy is really counterproductive. And again, learning to accommodate feelings of uncertainty, insecurity, failure, sadness like these. Look, that's the superpower. The superpower is not getting rid of the bad stuff. The superpower is becoming a little bit better at.

Working with these things that we just can't get rid of in life. I think the non negotiable limitations of being a human being, that's really my subject matter, I suppose.

Yeah, I think it's good. It's grounding for sure. Oliver, give out your website. That's oliverburkman.com Oliver Berkman, thank you so much for joining us.

It's been my pleasure. Thank you.

So George Gammon, Jason Hartman and I have, we've created a high level mastermind group called the Collective. The goal of the Collective is for you to learn from the three of us as well as of course the other members on how to build and more importantly how to maintain your wealth. In this video we're going to go into detail about what the Collective is and what it can, can do for you. Enjoy. So I'm Ken McElroy, I've been in real estate for over 30 years. Started with a two bedroom, two bath using my own money and now I own over a billion dollars worth of real estate that I bought over the years. Built a big company, we have a construction company, a development company, a property management company and of course an investment company. And typically now we syndicate and work with large, both private and public institutions for the equity and the debt. And so what I bring to the Collective is how to scale, how to grow. Starting with one really small property with no experience at all and growing it into an organization which I've been able to do that basically runs almost without me. So that's what I'm going to bring to the Collective. We decided to start the Collective because one I met George Gammon and George brings a very interesting perspective about the economy and the Fed and the way money works and Bitcoin and alternative types of investments, which quite honestly I was super focused on real estate almost the entire time and even I want to be a little bit more diverse. So when I talked to George and to Jason, they're always doing very, very different things. On the investment side, Jason specifically is more focused on the single family housing and what's going on in that market so that we could Collaborate and have different viewpoints on different things. And so that's why I thought the collective would be good because I think everybody's kind of searching for the same kinds of answers. So the collective means to me basically the collective group, the whole. And I've always been a big believer of team and collaboration. So for me it really means collaboration of everyone kind of coming into a room and learning from each other based on their individual highs and their individual lows and to be very, very respectful of all their independent views on things and to be more open minded to transparent and authentic. So I cannot wait for the group to get together each and every quarter because we all have very different walks of life that we're going through. And so it's very, very cool to get into one room with like minded people. I think the right person for the collective is somebody who's into personal development, somebody who's trying to be a better individual, somebody who's trying to have that work life balance, trying to figure out good decision making on the investment side, specifically good decision making on the personal side perhaps certainly on their health and on their wealth. The members that have already signed up are people typically that have businesses that they're growing, businesses that they've started or businesses that they've sold. So typically they're higher net worth and they're trying to figure out out what to do with their money. They're probably a little bit afraid of inflation, they're probably a little bit of concerned about where to invest. And they're obviously looking at real estate as one component. Somebody that's trying to do the right things both on the personal side and on the financial side. So some of the experiences that members can expect to get out of the collective are certainly the network. And I think that's always super powerful, powerful. I've been involved in groups like this before like EO and ypo, the Entrepreneurs Organization and YPO which is Young Presidents Organization, which is kind of a peer to peer network. And I, that's what I envisioned and I think people are going to certainly get that out of there. They're going to have lifelong friends for sure from this and they're going to meet people at every single event. But also we're going to have fun. So as an example, things like race car, car driving and doing all kinds of really cool things and meeting celebrities and things like that and fashion shows are going to be part of it. So it's kind of a how do we have fun and learn together and we're going to have that at each and every event. So thanks for watching. If you guys are interested, there's a link below you can click on. It'll take you right to the website which has a load of information on exactly what the collective is, where the next events are, and what exactly you'll be getting if you become a member. Thanks for watching.

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