Who is God?

 

One of the best podcasts I enjoyed on Lex Fridman Podcast was Sam Harris this past summer. And one of the things I liked about that conversation is he talked a lot about happiness and meditation. And he said something that resonated with me. He said you can never be happy. You can only become happy. Kurt Vonnegut said you should say to yourself every time you’re happy, like a little mantra. Every breath, everything that you do when you make an impact, even some of the bad stuff that happens. Good. It's good. So Sam said that, and it made me think because I was like, what does it mean? To be happy? I can think of two or three ways that right now I could double my happiness like winning the lottery or whatever.? Like, you know, had this kind of thought like, how many boats can you water-ski behind? Like, you had twice as many followers now you got 2 million followers, five minutes, whatever. It doesn't do anything. It's called the hedonic treadmill. Once you get to a certain level, it takes a lot more. Followers, money, and women, whatever you want to make you have one more quantum of happiness. But, this is a concept from entropy. I can make your life miserable in an infinite number of ways. In other words, there's more space to make your life unhappy than happy. And so I thought about that in the context of what Sam said about happiness. So it's sort of like, yeah, it's an expression of entropy.  Going back to the question of God's existence. There are many ways you can become a believer in God. You can increase the confidence level that there is, let's call it God. You can increase your credulity in the goodness of life. We have this bias as humans towards negativity, negativity bias, well-known facts. So what I want to do is what's called God, good, right? That's where it comes from. God good. Same words in German. And when about what is good, let's do those things that would devastate us. And a lot of that could be relationships. And there's a powerful concept from network theory. So a network grows like that. So you want to increase your network as much as possible, but only the kind of high-quality interstices between them. And in doing so, you make yourself fragile, not antifragile, and that is where purpose and approaching some notion of God can come from. So that is a source of meaning. Maximizing the goodness in life and the way you know is good, is if it's taken away, it would devastate you.

 

That's one way. Think about your brand, your business, your spouse, or your kids. I mean, parents can't count them. I've known parents that have a law. Jim Simons. Here's a perfect example, is one of my oldest friends and mentors. He is one of the richest people on Earth, a Gulfstream mega yacht. These are all documented books about how he lost two sons as adults. And I hear people say I'm so jealous of Jim Simons. Would you take everything? I don't know where he gets his strength. And his wife Marilyn, and his first wife, Barbara. I'm not like that, as some people are, there are angels that walk among us. They get they're broke, right? And I was like, God, please test me with money. You know, that'd be great. But, in reality, you should never say I want what x person has. Unless you're willing to take everything and you'll find you won't want to take everything.