E13: What Is The Meaning Of Life Philosophy - Nathanael Garrett (Author)

[00:00:29] Paddy Dhanda: Hey folks, thank you for joining another episode of the superpower school podcast. I'm Paddy Dhanda, your host, and in today's episode, we're doing things a little bit. We're going to go deep into a topic that I think we've all thought about at some point in our lifetime. And so I thought it'd be great to bring in an expert and talk to us about this particular topic, because he's recently written a book.

And I think the title of the book probably sums up the theme of this particular episode. It's called the meaning of life. Hey, how you doing?

[00:01:03] Nathanael Garrett: Hey, I'm doing well. How are you?

[00:01:04] Paddy Dhanda: Oh, excellent. Yes, all good. My friend.

So Nate, tell us about you. I'd love to know your background how did you get to write such a amazing book on this very philosophical.

[00:01:17] Nathanael Garrett: Sure. So, the long story short is that when I was five years old, my father disappeared in the middle of the night. And I don't remember how I felt because I was five. So I don't have any memories really back then. But I do remember when my memories form, cause you remember it was formed around five.

When I was six, a year later, I went to see him, I'm from Pittsburgh and he moved to California. I went to see him for three weeks in two days, and then I came back and it felt like somebody. My heart out of my chest. Like I felt empty and worthless and miserable, and I wouldn't wish that feeling upon anyone.

And I was just bawling my eyes out the night I got back from that trip. And the back of my mind as I was crying, asking myself, well, what's the point of all this. If we're going to suffer like this hurts, this, like, this is terrible. What's what's the meaning of life. And then the back of my mind just kind of.

Well, that's an interesting question. You know, I wonder if you could answer that. So, you know, I'm crying and I'm six and then I have this philosophical part that found the question. Fascinating. So I spent the next couple of decades studying anything I could about how the world works, how life works, how people work at human beings.

Philosophy, psychology, religion, et cetera. And it turns out I found out recently in the past couple of years or so that actually have mild Asperger's. So it explains my fascination with it because I couldn't do it. It wasn't like other people. I couldn't, I had to emulate human behavior. Cause I couldn't naturally.

You know, just do it. And so that's why I studied so much and try to understand and master it. But after like 20, what is it? 23 years or so I asked myself the question of how I would impart all that knowledge on to someone else from a scratch because I was leaving a company and go into another one and I was like, Hey, what would I say if I was leaving, I never gave that speech.

But I was like, well, what would I say? And all these ideas, these concepts popped in my head and it started coming out like, oh, we need desire. Any belief you need this, you need that. And I was like, well, what is this. Success. And then the call back happened to my brain. No. This is spelled it. The point of everything is the point of life.

And that's how it all began. I had this idea in my head that, you know, I just, I wanted to be able to summarize everything I learned. To put it in objective way to not give any bias where I say, Hey, you should live this way because I said so, but literally say, this is how life works. This is how people, humans specifically find their sense of meaning and purpose in life.

And you can use that information to live the life that is. To you. And so I wrote the book took about seven years and it was just published a 20 January, 2020. So, pretty recently and it talks through all the research I found over the years. It's 150 plus citations, so, wow.

[00:03:49] Paddy Dhanda: Oh, wow.

That must've been a big undertaking, I mean, seven years. That's a big part of your life. Right. So tell us about that experience as you were putting the.

[00:04:00] Nathanael Garrett: Well, it was brutal. The worst part is I have an 80 page chapter on ethics. It is absolutely brutal for me and right again, and I'm sure it's probably the hardest thing to read because it's a, what a quarter of the book or something.

And the problem is that you can't talk about ethics and analyze ethics and obsess over ethics without it showing up everywhere. So everything in my entire life was an ethical dilemma during that. And I edited the ethics chapter. Two or three times to that point where everything is popped up around me.

So those were some miserable months. Everything is, oh, that's unethical and that's unethical. And then meanwhile, I'm trying to write a chapter. That's objective. Not saying here, this is what's ethical or not. I didn't put that in there. But yeah, it was definitely a rough going it, I rewrote the book a few times.

But the good news was that I actually had the outline for the book and just like a week or two and it was easy. It was really just filling out all the explanations and the citations and everything that were hard. The most miserable part was I had to go find the sources of all my quotations because I wanted everything to be legit.

So like even the quotations, you know how people put in fluffy quotations, like Abraham Lincoln said, you could do anything. You could put your mind to it. Which of course he never said anything like that. Cause he's not a self-help guru. He's a previous a precedent. So, but people will say he said it. And so.

Quotes in there. I actually went and found the sources of the quotations. Like my favorite one being the shoulders of giants quote from Isaac Newton. I actually saw the original letter that he wrote that quote in to verify it's a legitimacy and then quote it and I was able to cite the source. So it was pretty serious.

It took a long time. It was absolutely brutal points, but I do really like that. The output it's pretty common.

[00:05:37] Paddy Dhanda: And so did Isaac Newton actually say those exact words or did they kind of change them a little bit?

[00:05:42] Nathanael Garrett: That was actually pretty spot on. So like if I had seen further than others, cause I stood on the shoulders of giants, something to that effect.

That's pretty much what he said. Oh, wow.

[00:05:50] Paddy Dhanda: So. I guess what would be really useful to understand is the sort of the structure of the book? I was having a look earlier at the contents and saw. Eight different elements that you talk about.

But yeah, be good to understand the structure of the book.

[00:06:06] Nathanael Garrett: Yeah. I tend to over explain things. So I set a rule for myself that I, the chapter names had to be one word, so I didn't go overboard. But they're basically. Concepts. Each concept is a core driver of humans, a sense of meaning in his or her life.

That's how it works. There are eight main drivers and those eight main drivers are growth. Experience, desire, belief, emotion. Ethics support and choice. And so each one I'm pretty obsessive about this stuff. So each chapter is structured in the exact same way. There are five subsections and they basically cover how this concept evolved in living things like starting every chapter starts with single celled organisms.

So, you know, it's pretty, pretty seriously going into evolutionary bio. And then it goes to humans, then it goes to you, like, how could you use this information, understanding how it evolved in an organisms and then in humans and then what would it happen if you didn't have that capability? Like, if you didn't have choice, if you didn't have ethics, if you didn't have desire.

And cause you know I, you know, trying to follow the scientific method here, you have to disprove that it's not a thing not proving that it is a thing. And so that's that fourth section and the fifth section. Yeah. Where do you start? Like, what do you do if you don't know what you want, or what do you do if you don't know what you believe or, you know, what do you do if you're stuck?

And so it goes through each of those sections for each of those eight concepts to help you just completely comprehensively understand the topic. And then it ends with exercises and questions. To get you to think about it for your own life and then apply it. I even have all these, like, you know, write down a list of your growth areas, identify experiences, and put those in.

And at the end of the book, if you follow actually do the work on the exercises, you'll have a complete map of your entire life plan at the end of the book. So by the end of reading and complete the book, so it's pretty. You know, fulfilling to get to something that's tangible at the end of.

[00:08:13] Paddy Dhanda: And Nate, who did you have in mind when you were writing the book as a reader? Is it aimed at a particular person or is it for everybody?

[00:08:22] Nathanael Garrett: Well, I kinda tilted at windmills with this one. I know you're supposed to have a target audience. I know you're supposed to play to the market.

I didn't care. I was like, yeah, it is everybody. And for in terms of philosophy. So if you are a theist, if you're an atheist, if you're, you know, Know, pure science. If you're law of attraction, the beauty of the eight concepts is that by definition, because they drive a sense of meaning and purpose in your life.

Every philosophy has to incorporate them into the, so are into it. So you have to you have to account for these. So like every belief system by definition has beliefs, right? They also suggest things that you should want in life are things like Buddhism, where they say, well, you should detach yourself from desire, things like that.

So. Every philosophy has a position on these eight concepts. And I don't take a position on eight concepts. I just tell you that you need to have them or understand them at least to find meaning in your life. So it's for everyone in that respect. I do mention, I did notice in some of my reviews atheists thought, I mentioned God too much.

Cause I just said, Hey, for those of you who are wondering how God fits in for the sake of this, where we're putting that aside. Cause I can't answer. God exists or what created the universe or life or whatever. I can't answer that question scientifically. So I'm not going to talk about it. And apparently that was too much for some people.

But then theists of course were like, well, it's too atheistic. I'm like, well, you can't win. Right. So it is for everybody in terms of like, I made sure I didn't exclude anyone for being able to read it and go, oh yeah, these are the things. If I'm an atheist, they apply to me. If I'm a theist, they apply to me.

They will apply to you regardless. However, in terms of who it's for from a psychographic perspective probably the best audience would be someone who thinks like me in terms of wanting to know how things work so that they can master it. That's the kind of audience. If you're looking for fluffy inspirational stories, there are a million self-help books out there.

Pretty much everyone tries to give you cute, funny or inspirational stories. Not there's nothing of that sort in here and yeah. Okay. Maybe that makes it a little bit drier. I can accept that. The second thing, that's like no parables or, you know, like, you know, I'm going to tell you this weird story about whales or lions or something, and then you're going to somehow, you know, derive some sort of life advice from it, nothing like that in there either.

It's very analytical. It's very literal. It's very silent. Good. At least scientifically backed as philosophy can be. And so if you're really trying to understand how to dissect it, understand it, and then do the actionable steps to figure it out for yourself. Then that's great. The best audience though, is.

If you read self-help books or not even read them, but like, if you look at the self-help book section and go, these are all great. If I want to make a lot of money or if I want to find love, or if I want to do this, but what if I don't know what I want? What if I don't understand anything? What if I want to start from scratch?

And my book assumes that. No, nothing like you don't know what your goal is. You don't know what your ethics are and it helps you to construct them yourself. And so that's the one thing that bothered me about self-help books is because you have to define a target audience. You have to guess at what that person wants.

And then they look at the title and say, oh, okay, I want money. So I'm going to read this book on money or success or whatever. This one assumes none of that. And just helps you say, well, if you don't know what you want, let me help you understand how to fix.

[00:11:41] Paddy Dhanda: Okay. Wow. Now you've got me. I'm really excited because I can't wait to hear some of those concepts.

And I mean, it'd be great. If you could just share some of the insights that you found as you're writing the book and maybe even pick up. Some of those eight different elements as well. That'd be fantastic.

[00:12:00] Nathanael Garrett: So let's start out with the first one. Let's start out with growth. So, a lot of people when they say meaning of life, the contrarian point here is that they usually mean the goal of life, but there is no one goal for everybody. Goals are subjective. You can pick whatever you want to do in life.

So I S I said, Nope, that's not it. A lot of people think a meaning of life. They mean like, how should you live? What's the best way to live. Those are what you might know as ethics. I'm not going to tell you what ethics to have, that I consider that a conflict of interest to explain how things work. And then also tell you how to live, because then I'm injecting my own personal beliefs and ethics into, so you don't know what science and what's not, what's my personal opinion.

Right? So I scrap that. So I know those, if you want to go find, talk about those meanings of life that's fine. Go do it somewhere else. Not my book, but my book, there are three definitions that growth satisfies. With regards to meaning of life and they are provable. So number one is growth is literally in the definition of life, go look it up.

It says capacity for growth. Is it literally in the definition of life, you cannot have a definition of life without the word growth in it. Two is the purpose of life. So we all know from Darwin. Life survival and fitness, right? So you basically live to not die. Right? But what's what do you do?

You survive, right. But why do you survive? You survive to grow. Every organism is built in with a drive and inner drive to grow. That's what your hunger is. That's what your thirst is. That's what your sex drive is. Those are all growth drives. So it's literally in your DNA. So it's the meaning of life.

But then the third one is. Uh, It's what makes life significant and you don't have to look further than award shows. So if someone gets an award, first of all, the person wins the award, not the thing. So like if someone, if something wins best picture, like the people go up, they don't like print out a copy of the DVD and handed a trophy.

[00:13:47] Paddy Dhanda: Like that's ridiculous. They give it to the people now, why do they give it to the people? They give it because they grew into the people who could make that wonderful piece of art or music or whatever. You can see in real life that the point of life in terms of significance, in terms of purpose, in terms of definition growth answers those three definitions.

Got it.

 I like your analogy there about sort of. Absolutely. You know, we get the Oscars and it's all about the people and the movies are there just as the focal point for actually it's the effort that people have put into it.

Fantastic. Okay.

[00:14:22] Nathanael Garrett: Number two experience. So, you know, Experiences the medium through which all growth occurs and experience I'm defining as any kind of observation or activity over time. So, you have to now everyone thinks about certain things like grasses and struggled to grow or anything like that.

And very much so your cells just kind of do a lot of stuff on their own. So experienced in fr and aren't exactly the the the same thing necessarily. But what's important to note about experiences. A lot of people think that yeah, you have to like, if you're not growing as much as you, like, you have to work harder and that's not necessarily true.

And the example I like to give is if you go to the gym and lift weights, right? When are you growing? Are you growing from the lifting of the way? No, actually your muscles are breaking down. You grow from the recovery, from the rest of the recovery. And so a lot of people think, and while it's true, the more experience you have, the better you are.

And of course that's true. But you also have to rest. So a lot of people kind of miss that part and they burn themselves out and they think that more growth is inherently through more effort and get and doing that sort of thing. And they just have. Be clear that's not necessarily the case. The other thing is that with experiences.

And you can get experienced a lot of different areas. And of course we live in a time limited society. You only have a certain amount of life span so many hours in a day, and you got to get some sleep at some point. And so you do have to make trade-offs between which growth areas are important to you.

And that's definitely nothing to to take lightly. But you don't need to work yourself to the detriment of everything else. You know, I mean, Tom Brady. Wife and kids. So, and he's the best at what he does. So it's not like you said, Nope, no, no wife, no kids, no life just football.

No, of course. He does have a life outside. So you do want to make sure you strike a balance and keep yourself healthy and well, because if you actually grow in one area more by sacrificing others, after a certain point in time, you'll actually start to lose a little bit of that sense of meaning and fulfillment, because you won't feel.

I mean fulfilled part of that fulfillment is, you know, the field part and part of this, the full part and the part of this, the field part. And so you won't feel you won't feel like rounded out and feel like you're getting everything you need to be happy.

[00:16:34] Paddy Dhanda: Yeah. So it's about living a fulfilling life and not just going into a jungle and, you know, sort of becoming a hermit it's about really living life, I guess, is what you're saying.

You know, having that sort of experience of.

[00:16:48] Nathanael Garrett: Yeah. Yeah. You have to find experiences that are best to get you to the next step towards your growth goals. And you also have to make sure that those you have to find meaning in the outcome and the experience. A lot of people will just think that there's meaning in the outcome.

Right. And that could be true. So like maybe you have a job you don't like, you know, you know, the famous least American dream kind of story. When you have immigrants come in and then basically work, you know, 24 7 and they do. To make enough money so that their kids can go to college and that their kids can have a better life.

So maybe that's your goal in life and maybe that makes you happy. And so that's why you're willing to do it. And that's absolutely wonderful. That's fine. But just to note. Of what you know, you want to make sure that the experience itself can be meaningful as well. So if you don't enjoy, like I'll use the gym example.

So everyone knows that at one skips leg day, it's a funny meme in the weightlifting community. And so basically if you really want to be the best weightlifter, you have to learn to love leg day. That's the secret, right. Is to learn to love the process and not just the.

Got it.

[00:17:50] Paddy Dhanda: Oh, fantastic. Oh, night number three on the

[00:17:53] Nathanael Garrett: list. Desire. So, man, there's so many different ways I can go with this desire is the motivation. I'm not going to, like, you can talk about that kind of desire. Desire is the motivation to have the experiences that will lead to growth, right? So you have a desire to go get food because the hunger drive, which makes you go get food, so you eat it and you grow.

And so you stay alive. So that's really important, but I do think that most, this is where I kind of want to start to, I don't like to critique philosophies too much, but this one is as absolutely necessary. A lot of people think that desires are inherently bad. And I'm not sure why, I think it's because you can want to do things that are at others' detriment, which is where ethics come in, which is number one.

Is that number six? We'll talk about that later. But just two things about desire. First is that people only want people actually don't want bad things. They want good things and they only think that bad things are necessary to obtain. And you can take that anywhere from someone who steals bread, because there they think that's the only way they can get the food.

If they thought that they could get it another way that they would do that. So they think it's necessary and you could go all the way. We'll go all the way to the other extreme, right? The Hitlers of the world. Like, I mean, as warped as it is. Hitler thought he was doing the world favor. He was not, but he thought he was.

And so like if he didn't have those really warped ideas, then he w he wouldn't have done all the atrocious things that he did. So desire is everyone wants things to be better for themselves and the people that they care about. And that's a good thing. The other thing is that people associate desire with the.

And desire and addiction are different things. Cause normal, healthy desire is to lead to your growth and addiction as I'll talk about in a second and the emotions piece cause emotions can be hacked. And we'll talk about that in a second, but addiction is not healthy, normal desire. It's hacking your brain.

So your brain's reward system, and then you go through withdrawal after you've hacked it, and then you need more of that to get it. And so it's not really desire for growth and fulfillment, but it's actually usually comes from some sort of inner emptiness or pain that you're trying to cover up with, like alcohol or drugs or whatever, or boredom is a lot of people get into drugs just because of boredom, but in any way, The it's usually filling the gap of some sort of gap rather than some sort of normal, healthy desire.

And we will talk about that and emotions piece but those are a couple of pieces from.

[00:20:18] Paddy Dhanda: Oh, fantastic. And I'm leading onto, I think you're going to talk about belief next.

[00:20:23] Nathanael Garrett: This was the biggest one for me. Because I was trying to figure out how can I explain belief you know, briefly in terms of my findings and basically belief is anything that you assume to be true.

And there's a subset of w of belief, which you might know as knowledge, which is stuff. No to be true, because you can prove it in some way. Right? So there's beliefs in there and there's knowledge. You will always have beliefs because you can't know everything. Right. I mean, technically if you were getting super technical, you can't technically know the sun came up in the morning until you see it.

Right. I mean, you can use science. Study in fact, figure out, well, this is how the earth rotates and how it goes around the sun and everything. So this is when it's going to come up. But technically, you know, if you don't see it technically, you know, an asteroid could hit the earth or something.

You could have been flown out of orbit. It can stop. It's a rotation and the sun won't come up. So, technically, unless you're observing something at a specific point in time, you technically don't know. Technically you could reasonably conclude, but you technically don't know. So everything pretty much is a belief.

That's not factually known at the present moment. So, so what's the thing about belief? Well, there is a problem. You have to believe enough in what's current, in real, so that you don't hurt yourself. So if you jump off a cliff and flap your arms, you will die. You will not fly. On the other hand, you have to believe.

And the potential better future outcome enough where you continue to move forward for a better future. And so, the Wright brothers, while they knew, if they jumped off a cliff and flapped his arms, Die. They also knew that if they could learn the laws of physics and how to master them from birds and all these other things that they could actually create a machine that will allow them to fly.

But if they didn't believe that because at flight for human flight, manmade flight did not exist until it was invented. It did not exist before. So if you were a super skeptic and said, well, it doesn't exist at all, it will never exist. Then flight would never have been invented. Now what's interesting about that.

My, it was my biggest one. Was that I wasn't sure what I was going to say about like belief in terms of like faith, but when I thought about that definition, right? Believe in the current reality so that you don't die, but believe in the future so that you don't hold yourself back to what your full potential is.

There's one element you need to be as, as successful as possible. You have to believe in the potential for a positive outcome without, or despite evidence. That is an absolute critical, essential component to success. And what's a word for that term or for that definition. So you absolutely. I'm not saying religious faith.

I'm not saying faith in God, although that is probably the primary way that human humans get it. But you need to have faith. You need to have belief in a positive outcome without a despite Evans. So only way you will really see what your full potential is. So that's a huge, that was a huge insight for me, cause like, whoa, I'm not a famous person.

How do I get faith? Because I got it. I'm going to be more successful. I got to believe more in that potential future. You know, without necessarily the evidence up. Right. Right.

[00:23:26] Paddy Dhanda: And I guess the skeptics would say that person has, you know, blind faith but I guess what you're saying is like the Wright brothers, if they didn't truly believe in what they were doing, they would have just given up.

[00:23:40] Nathanael Garrett: Yeah. So you can have faith in yourself and you can have faith in science. You can have faith in. Other people, you can have faith that there are millions of misery minerals in the world. You'll find one that does whatever it needs to solve to cure this disease or whatever, not minerals, but like, co compounds, chemical compounds that can solve this problem.

So you can believe. And anything, it doesn't have to be anything non-physical at all. But you do have to have have faith of some sort because if you are a pure skeptic, nothing new would ever get invented. So like it's teleportation post. Well, it doesn't exist. Now, if I were a skeptic, I'd say it will never exist because it doesn't exist now.

And that's insane. It could possibly exist because someone might invent it one day. Just cause it doesn't exist today. Doesn't mean that it can't exist tomorrow. And it's the people who actually believe despite everyone else going well, that's impossible. Those are the people who succeed, go and do it.

[00:24:34] Paddy Dhanda: Okay. What's next on your

[00:24:35] Nathanael Garrett: list? Emotions. This is my favorite. This is my absolute favorite. There are two insights here. One is that you can if you not you, but talking to the audience here, if you aren't in touch with your emotions, I will teach you how to be in touch with your emotions.

With one simple formula. It is the only formula you will ever need in your entire life emotions, equal desire, plus belief plus experience. That's it. Now, you know exactly how to figure out your emotional state and then to give the situation. I'll give you an example. So that's not just kind of vague.

So if you're jealous, right. Jealousy is a combination of wanting a person or thing, believing that you deserve that person or thing more importantly, believing some other person who doesn't, who has that person or thing doesn't deserve it. And then seeing. Person that you don't believe deserves it with that person or thing you want.

And if you want to get rid of your jealousy, you just need to affect one of those three pieces of the formula. You can either not want that thing. Your jealousy goes away. I'm not jealous of people who climb Mount Everest, because I don't want to climb down ever. So I'm good. You can change the belief. You could either say.

I don't deserve that all that wouldn't recommend that, but you can, with a better belief to changes that person does deserve it. Or some things are just random. You can still do it, whatever, any way to change the belief. If you believe that other person deserves it, you immediately change your emotional state from jealousy to.

Period full stop. That's how emotions can change on a dime. And then finally the experience you could just leave and not look at the person, you know, don't look at it, right. If it's making you feel bad, don't do it. So that's how you can figure out your emotional state. But my big contrarian insight for the chapter is really about happiness.

Happiness is objectively, and I can say this with a hundred percent certainty. Happiness is not the meaning of life. The more accurate statement which many people do stay do say is the meaning of life is defined. What makes you happy? That is accurate. The meaning of life is to be happy, which I know like John Lennon said And so now everyone thinks it's it's fact is not true. And I can tell you, in fact, I'm going to, we'll play a game here and I'll show you how it becomes obvious when you see it. What is the point of going to school?

[00:26:52] Paddy Dhanda: Oh. To acquire knowledge.

[00:26:55] Nathanael Garrett: Yeah. To learn, right? Yup. Why did you not immediately go? Oh, it's to get an a because the a is an indicator that you've learned. And as we know, it's not perfect. So you could have learned, but not got an A if you're like a bad test taker or you can cheat and get an a, but not have learned.

Yeah. Absolute happiness is the A godliness this day. That's why it's just logically and scientifically wrong. That it's the beginning of life. It is an indicator that you are growing. If you are growing and thriving, you are happy. If you are hurt, you are not happy. If you're being harmed, you're not happy.

So. You don't need to be happy all the time. In fact, that would be insane. Only crazy people are happy all the time. I'm kidding. But because you have to have other emotions or else you would never change. Right? So like if you let's assume the fairytale right. And happily ever after, if you lived happily ever after.

Then you wouldn't need to do anything else. I'm happy. Oh, do I need to go to the, do I need to go to the gym? No, I'm happy. I don't need to get fit his screw that, you know, do I need to go, you know, paint a picture of don't I'm happy. I don't need to do anything else. So like, you don't want to be happy all the time because otherwise your life would be just nothing.

You'd be sitting there. There's this old oh, I forget that euphoria machine or something. There's a short story. I read the English class as a kid called the foreign machine. It was like a, some sort of a. What is it called? Parable or whatever about like television, how was turning people into zombies?

It was just like, you just sat there and you felt euphoria and you didn't have to do anything. Now that was a little extreme about referencing television, but I mean, literally that's, you're just as sitting there as a zombie, you don't do anything if you were happy all the time. So, emotion so happiness, not the meaning of life it is the indicator that you are growing.

And so doing what makes you happy, which is more accurate description is basically saying, finding the growth areas to pursue and doing those will make you happy. And that's. That is correct. Just like going to school to learn and getting a name to prove that you've learned is find way, describe the point of going to school.

But if you said the point of going to school is an a you'd either see yourself as acidic, like who cares if you learn, just give me the grades so I could get more money or you're kinda missing the point of like, you know, you, you're not there just to have other people like praise you're there to actually uh,

[00:29:07] Paddy Dhanda: Got it.

I love that. I love the way you simplified that in a way that I think is very tangible for someone to grasp and understand because before you'd given him that example, I was thinking, of course the meaning of life is all about being happy because everyone talks about being happy. So, yeah. I

[00:29:22] Nathanael Garrett: love that.

Yeah. And I, no one will believe me until that's why I came up with that example because it still, I give people the example where they obviously say learning, no one has ever said to get an a and as soon as you go, happiness is the, a people. Oh, my God. You're right. Yeah. But anyway, the whole chapter explains all that.

So we can go on to ethics, but but that's, those are my two favorite emotions, piece pieces. Got it.

[00:29:47] Paddy Dhanda: Got it. So we're moving on to ethic. Sounds interesting. I guess that was one that you mentioned is that the biggest chapter you've spent. I was, and I was on that one,

[00:29:56] Nathanael Garrett: Yeah. Weeks and months.

And I still feel pain thinking about it but yeah a couple of insights on this one, the first one, is that a why or ethics? Even a thing? I will say that ethics are not universal. I'm chaining, changing and divinely bestowed upon you. They are not that 100%. And I given, I have to get an example to back this up cause people don't believe me.

So I usually give the example that kind of plan on the whole eighties, teenage coming of age films, where they do that all the time. Is it ethical for a parent to try to persuade or push his or her child into the same field that they went in? And, you know, I've referenced the eighties films. It's always like making the kid be the captain of the football team or whatever, or the star quarterback at like, you wanted me to go to this.

I want to get into dancing, you know, and yet they're feeling pressure. And the answer everyone today only said in the United States, I guess can't speak globally, but and more, and the most advanced societies from an economic state. Okay, would you say, oh no, that's terrible.

You should never do that to your kid. That's borderline child abuse. But what about the 14 hundreds? Let's say you have a small business. You're a blacksmith or something. I don't know. And you know, you have 10 kids and you know, a bunch of people are sick and you know, it's hard to create a small business cause you got like, I dunno, monarchs and things, telling you what to do and taking all your money with taxes or whatever.

Is it ethical to say, no family screw you. I'm going to go dance and it doesn't make any money and they'll probably die of starvation. And so will you, but I want to do what I want to do. No, you're going to take on the damn blacksmith's job. So. Yeah, so like ethics change. So as life gets safer and better ethics change.

And so you keep pushing the lines of ethics. That's why we have things like a lot of people are making debates around like, treatment of animals and things like that because ethics evolved from ethics. It used to be, just do whatever is best for yourself. Then it was like, well, now that you evolve to work with in groups, it's like, well, now I got to do what's best for myself.

And my usually re when you reproduce, you do what's best for your kids, right. Then it's why you gotta do it. But what's best for my family. Then what's best for my family and friends that what's best for my tribe or community. Then it's now it's, what's best for society because we. Relatively leave it live in peace.

And so you have to treat everyone equally in terms of laws and rules and things. So, ethics, aren't unchanging. That's a big one there, but the other insight about ethics. So just a little bit of background there are two types of ethics that are negative ethics and positive ethics. I did invent those terms so that you look them up and you won't find them except in my book.

But the reason why I do that is because ethics are telling people not to harm people and positive ethics are saying. To do something to achieve an outcome optimally. Right. So, but that's why I differentiate the two because laws are usually focused on negative ethics. There are exceptions, like, things like, well, modern is like things like vaccine mandates, but they're modern and a little less controversial is stuff like jury duty, right?

It's like you have to go and participate in jury duty. Is that right? Am I hurting anyone? I'm like no. Someone else hurts someone. You have to enforce it by, by doing jury duty. Okay. That's a positive ethic. That's mandated by law, but most laws are they try to stick in the realm of negative.

Right? Imagine having a law that said, thou shall run three times a week, or that will shell you know, three servings of vegetables a day. It would be insane. And people are like, screw you. Like, I don't need that. And so. Ethics. The reason why that I had described that is because the whole point of ethics is to maximize or optimize your own growth while minimizing harm to other people.

And it's the fundamental or foundational component to all cooperation between intelligent. Yeah, living organisms. It doesn't have to be intelligent because technically bacteria cooperate. I won't get into that, but they can. So, so you have you have that ethics are absolutely necessary because without ethics, you don't have trust without trust.

You can't cooperate. And there are actually three, I don't say I don't give anyone specific ethics to follow. In fact, I say every ethic has exceptions. So like, honestly, it has an exception. If someone's knocking on your door, trying to kill someone and you have the person in your house and they ask you if they're there you say no, that's a lie.

That's. So, you know, every ethic has its every like universal ethic has its exceptions, so they're not universal, but there are three that are biological. And those are fairness reciprocity and minimal harm. And those three are biological. I can actually say them because there's a evolutionary evidence drive because those are the three things you have to do to have trust, to cooperate with other living organisms.

If you don't have those those three things. Like if I basically let's say let's take a. If you thought I was going to harm you, you wouldn't be talking to me. If you were didn't think I would reciprocate you, wouldn't like give me money or, you know, treat me to a round of beers or whatever.

Like you wouldn't do it. Cause you were like, well, if he's not going to do it for me, I'm not going to do it for him. And then fairness, if you didn't think that we were going to be treat each other fairly. Like if you, if I said something and you were going to try to take it the absolute worst way humanly possible every time then I couldn't trust you.

We couldn't associate. So you need those three things. They're both built in and they're necessary for cooperation. Oh,

[00:34:53] Paddy Dhanda: As you were talking about the first example there, I was just thinking back to kinda my parents when they, so, so they're from India originally.

And when they came to the UK in the kind of the sixties, They based on the ethics. Exactly what you're saying there, they couldn't say, Hey, I want to become a footballer or, you know, some left-field sort of create a choice. It was very much we got to do what's right for the family because, you know, it's bigger than just us.

It's about the people around them. And then as I was growing. It was, well, you do what you think is right for you, right? Don't feel obliged to do what we would want you to do. And now my kids, they won't even ask me the question. They'll be just like, I want to be an influence. And it doesn't matter what you say.

That's what I want to do. We have the luxury,

[00:35:46] Nathanael Garrett: you have the luxury because us, our career choices are unlikely to harm other people but hundreds of years ago, you make the wrong one. You are likely to cause harm to other people. So you can't do it. And in the future, it's going to be even a weirder.

What could possibly be harmful, right? I mean, we're already reaching a point where we're debating whether words can hurt people enough where we need to. Restrict them and you know, I know in the U S that's a big deal cause we have freedom of speech. And so they're like, wait a second, we got freedom of speech.

And they're like, well, yeah, but you know, it could hurt someone's feelings. So don't say it. So, I mean, I'm not here to judge, I'm not here to draw lines. So when I hear her say anything about it, I have my own opinions, but I don't say them in the book and I don't say them here. But just note that people are going to have these ethical debates for all time, because of.

The S by the way, if you're curious if you ever want to, just for the audience. I won't get into the politics, but just to to kind of, help you think through politics and the easiest simplest way possible, that will help you figure everything out pretty quickly. Every decision from a government or political perspective is a trade off between individual freedom and public say.

So, if you are, if you want to be more free, you're going to be less safe. You want to be more safe. You're going to be less free to give a non-controversial example. If you were in the middle of the woods and there was a bear out there somewhere, and you were afraid of it, you have a choice. You can either be free and just kind of run the woods and hope it doesn't hurt you.

Or you can build a wall around you to protect yourself from the bear. You build the wall, you are more safe from the bear. The bear can't get in, but you are less free. You can't just walk through the wall, you have to climb over it and maybe credit the somewhere. And you're like, But you are more safe. And so everybody's political persuasion is going to be, this is how safe I want to be.

This is how free I want to be. Some people want to be more free. Some people want to be more safe and those people fight. And that's it. That's politics today in a nutshell, it's just, I want to be more free and other people, I want to be more safe.

[00:37:42] Paddy Dhanda: Yeah. Oh, wow. That's such a. Debate terms of COVID at the moment, isn't it in terms of and there's this whole safe versus you know, what's the right thing to do so just before we run out of time, Nate we've got two more to get through. So, if we could hear the light.

[00:38:01] Nathanael Garrett: Yeah. So, I'll just give you the short version for the last two. So support the insight is that support gets you exponentially more growth with other people's help or even non physical things out.

And men not, sorry, not non-physical. Excuse me. Okay. Although you could get for help from the office go. But see, I went around from I'm an inanimate objects. I meant like, if, you know, you can use a ladder to climb up a wall, you couldn't by yourself. But yeah, so, support helps you grow exponentially more than you could by yourself.

And I give the example in the book of imagine, starting from scratch millions of years ago, and you had to build a self-driving car by yourself. It would literally take you in eternity. I mean, literally an insanity. You'd have to invent math and physics and fire by yourself in a wheel and then invent steel molting, and then you'd have to invent computers and then code them and then you'd have to throw all that together and then invent a car.

It would take you literally trillions and trillions of years. I'm sure. And because we have billions of people on the planet and they can all specialize in different things, they can come together. That thing they can make it. And, you know, I took a couple thousand, right. Or a few thousand and guess depending on where you start the clock, so to speak with the civilized society.

But yeah, so, so that's really, it for support is just get help and give help. And that's pretty much the big insight there. And by the way, that's the second half of cooperation. It's in conjunction with ethics. Ethics is in. And in short ethics is don't hurt people, support a self, help them.

And then the last one, a choice is that. Basically it says, I know there's a debate between free will and determinism. I totally get that. And I hate that debate because my opinion, it's one of my few things. I'm just like, oh, this is a dumb debate. There are some things you can't control. There are some things you can, and you know, not to paraphrase the serenity prayer here, but the wisdom is knowing the difference and doing what you can with what you can control and doing and not worrying about what you can't control, but there is a cool insight.

I kind of, I didn't write in the book, but I kind of wrote a blog post later. And the blog post is I think it was some funny thing, like a buy insurance, and then I put in parenthesis and other ways to control your reality. And yeah, literally that title of call it call by insurance. But but basically there are three.

Definitions of reality there is like the physical world physical universe, right? And you can't control the laws of physics. Right. But you can like work within them. Right. You learn how to explore. Right there, society societal rules, which are made up completely and you can change them, but not by yourself, usually.

You know, you can't just like, I can't just like draw, build a fence around my house and say, I declare this a sovereign state or anything like that without getting arrested or killed or something, but and then or put into sane asylum. And then the third reality is. Is your perception of reality, how you know, you live in your own reality kind of thing.

Right? And what's cool about this is first of all, you can completely control your own perception of everything. So you can control your own emotions. You can choose what you focus your attention on. You can choose what you do with your life. So you can control pretty much your own perception of most things, right?

You control that for the most part. The second one society, you can't control it by yourself, but you can either drive change to what you want, or you can. Move or associate with people who have similar beliefs, so you can shape the society. How you want the example in the U S is there are a lot of people have a certain certain belief system that moved all.

I'll move to San Francisco. So they can be with people who are like them good for them. You know, that's how you shape society in Europe or not just society, but you shape your reality in your own image or your belief system that literally your own image. And then finally physical reality.

So. You can't control things like the weather or whether the sun comes up or anything like that, but you can work within the system to control as much as possible. So we have shelter, right? You build houses to keep you out of the rain, so you can't control the weather, but you could either move yourself physically to a place where you like the weather.

And you can, you know, now today in modern society with wealthy people, you can have two houses and go wherever the weather is good.

And then on top of that, you can for things you can't control, you can mitigate the risk, which is hence the term, the name of that blog post was called buy insurance is because if you can't control random stuff happening, then you can prepare for random stuff happening and then be able to control your ability to manage this.

Brisk happening. So you can control like 90, maybe over 90% of everything that happens to you. If you look at it through those three lenses and identify, well, what can I control about this ignoring what you can't control or identifying, and then mitigating the risk of it happening or the impact of it happening and then controlling everything else.

So choice is such an important thing because you want to feel empowered at the end of the book to say, well, what can I do differently to to use these other seven? And so while you have the choice to. Decide which growth areas you pursue, which experiences you have what you want, what you believe, what ethics you hold, what what emotions do you feel even you can choose that by changing those three factors in the equation, you can choose what help you get and choose to do things, to get more support.

You can choose most of that. So most of your life is within your control. There are some things that are not, and you have to accept that and figure out what you can do to get.

[00:43:14] Paddy Dhanda: Wow. Fascinating. I think this whole episode has been so fascinating for me, Nate. There is so much there that I just want to deep dive on and obviously we don't have that much time.

So I was going to say, you know, if anyone does want to go further and read further Nate, how can they find your book? And I know your full name, I can't pronounce it. So I'm going to let you pronounce it so that people can find.

[00:43:39] Nathanael Garrett: Sure. So the name of the book is called the meaning of life, a guide to finding your life's purpose.

The author name, full name is Nathaniel Garrett, Nova cell. Although anyone can call me Nate, I just wanted to look fancy. And then I, your meaning in life.com is where all the info on the book is and all the awards at one. And my blog is on there. bunch of links to things and so forth.

Life, the book is my social media handle for most of them. You can probably find the meaning of like books somewhere if it's not. And then I also came out with a book recently called it's not, it's a multi author book called the X factor spiritual success, secrets of successful executives and entrepreneurs.

I hope I got that. Right. I wrote one chapter in it and it's actually how I ended the book the meaning of life. And then I just wrote a chapter to kind of expand on it because the funny part about the meaning of life book, I ended it by saying with one word. If you want to feel more, meaning your life, you just have to do one simple.

Care and that's it. I didn't put that all throughout the book because that would have been a cop out because if you know, the definition of the word care is effectively to assign meaning to something. Right. And so if you care, you were at, you were acting in the and the capacity of the one who assigns, meaning to say to your life or to, to your family or your friends or to whatever it is in your life.

And so I do tell people that all you need to do is care more about what about your life and your growth areas and your. And you'll find more meaning in them, in that book, the X-Factor I write one chapter and it talks about how to care more about your job to either care more about it in the moment.

So you enjoy it more again, enjoying the journey, that loving date, late day, as I said earlier, Or the second piece is finding out what you like, and don't like about your job and finding ways to move in your career or in your job, or whatever bore to doing more things you like and trying to either make the stuff you don't like either less.

Disliked distasteful or to do less of it somehow. Like they go into a role that does less of it. And if you follow that system, you'll find you care more about everything in your life, because you are either finding reasons to care or finding ways to get to do more things that you care about. Wow.

[00:45:43] Paddy Dhanda: So Nate, final question.

The big question. What is the meaning of life?

[00:45:51] Nathanael Garrett: The meaning of life is growth through experience and areas that you want and belief using your emotions as a guide to see how you're doing things ethically so that you don't detract from the meaning, like, people in the steroidal era of baseball, you know, cheating.

And then, and one's like, well, that's not significant achievement anymore because he cheated to get help where he can grow as much as he possibly can and the best way possible, and to make choices every day to make your life. If you do those eight things, you'll find your life to be me. Oh,

[00:46:20] Paddy Dhanda: nice. I love that.

I love the way you weave the whole book into that one definition right at the end. That was beautiful. So now I do want to just thank you so much. I mean, this conversation, I could have probably done 10 episodes on this and we still wouldn't have had enough time. So I really do appreciate you.

Spending the time and sort of, you know, giving us that insight from the book. I'll leave you with the final word, any bits of final advice for anyone. It could be one of your biggest lessons learned in life, or just some general advice will be fantastic to leave on.

[00:46:54] Nathanael Garrett: Well, you asked me before we started this to name my superpower.

If you can't tell my superpower, obsessing might be a super power, but we're not going to use that one. I, my super power, I always say is understanding. I am obsessed with how things work and trying to understand it. I blame my mild Asperger's for that. Cause that's what they obsessed over a SAS piece.

I think I only care about how things work, but but in all seriousness you know, make your superpower to care or make your superpower. To find meaning your life or make your superpower to know exactly what your goals are or that that you balance your life so that you feel fulfilled, not just in one area, but and as many areas as possible.

So that's what I would recommend to you. So use my obsession. Don't go and study for 20 some years. Like I did read my book save yourself all that time. Fill out the stuff, get your meeting and move on.

[00:47:45] Paddy Dhanda: And read the ethics chapter thoroughly

[00:47:47] Nathanael Garrett: Or skip past it if it's too much. It's I don't deny I, I did have creative control over my book and chose to write that long beast, but I'm okay.

If people are like, I get it, Nate, I'm just going to move on and we'll come back later.

[00:48:00] Paddy Dhanda: Oh, fantastic. No, thank you so much. Once again Nate and best of luck with the book.

[00:48:05] Nathanael Garrett: Thank you.