Guillaume Verdon
speaker
342 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2023
last heard Dec 2023
Guillaume Verdon’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
So you're on a keto diet? I've done keto before for football and whatnot. But I like to... have a meal after sort of part of my day is done. And so I can just have extreme focus. You do the social interactions earlier in the day. Right. Without food. Front load them. Yeah. Yeah. Like right now I'm on ketones and Red Bull. Yeah. And it just gives you a clarity of thought that is really next level.
Because then when you eat, you're actually allocating some of your energy that could be going to nutrition. neural energy to your digestion. After I eat, maybe I take a break an hour or so, an hour and a half, and then usually it's like ideally one meal a day like steak and eggs and vegetables, animal-based primarily, so fruit and meat. And then I do a second wind usually, that's deep work. And
Because I am a CEO, but I'm still technical. I'm contributing to most patents. And there, I'll just stay up late into the night and work with engineers on very technical problems.
Yeah. Yeah, that's the perfect time. The emails, the things that are on fire stop trickling in. You can focus, and then you have your second wind. And, you know, I think Demis Hassabis has a similar workday to some extent. So I think that that's definitely inspired my workday.
But yeah, I started this workday when I was at Google and had to manage a bit of the product during the day and have meetings and then do technical work at night. Exercise, sleep, those kinds of things.
Yeah, I used to play American football. I've done all sorts of sports growing up. And then I was into powerlifting for a while. So when I was studying mathematics in grad school, I would just do math and lift, take caffeine. And that was my day. It was very pure, the purest of monk modes.
Um, but it's really interesting how in powerlifting you're trying to cause neural adaptation by having certain driving signals and you're trying to engineer neuroplasticity through all sorts of supplements. Um, and you know, you have all sorts of, you know, brain derived neurotrophic factors that get secreted when you, when you lift.
So it's funny to me how I was trying to engineer, uh, um, um, neural adaptation in my, uh, nervous system more broadly, not just my brain, while learning mathematics. I think you can learn much faster if you convince yourself to care a lot about what you're learning and you have some sort of assistance, let's say caffeine or some cholinergic supplement to increase neuroplasticity.
I should chat with Andrew Huberman at some point. He's the expert. But yeah, at least to me, it's like you know, you can try to input more tokens into your brain, if you will, and you can try to increase the learning rate so that you can learn much faster on a shorter timescale. So I've learned a lot of things. I followed my curiosity.
You're naturally, if you're passionate about what you're doing, you're going to learn faster. You're going to become smarter faster. And if you follow your curiosity, you're always going to be interested. And so I advise people to follow their curiosity and don't respect the boundaries of certain fields or what you've been allocated in terms of lane of what you're working on.
Just go out and explore. and follow your nose and try to acquire and compress as much information as you can into your brain. Anything that you find interesting. And caring about a thing. And like you said, which is interesting, it does, it works for me really well.
Yep.
Right. And so at least part of my character as Beth Jesus is kind of like... Yeah, the hype man. Yeah, but I'm like hyping myself up, but then I just tweet about it. And it's just when I'm trying to get really hyped up and like an altered state of consciousness where I'm like... ultra-focused, in the flow, wired, trying to invent something that's never existed.
I need to get to unreal levels of excitement. But your brain has these levels of That you can unlock with like higher levels of adrenaline and whatnot. And I mean, I've learned that in powerlifting that actually you can engineer a mental switch to like increase your strength, right? Like if you can engineer a switch, maybe you have a prompt, like a certain song or some music where...
suddenly you're like fully primed, then you're at maximum strength, right? And I've engineered that switch through years of lifting. If you're going to get under 500 pounds and it could crush you, if you don't have that switch to be wired in, you might die. So, that'll wake you right up. And that sort of skill I've carried over to like research when it's go time, when the stakes are high.
Somehow I just reach another level of neural performance.
I think it was interesting in the early days. I think in the early days, I thought it was truly compartmentalized. Like, oh yeah, this is a character. You know, I'm Guillaume. Beth is just the character. I like take my thoughts and then I extrapolate them to a bit more extreme.
But, you know, over time, it's kind of like both identities were starting to merge mentally and people were like, no, you are, I met you. You are Beth. You are not just Guillaume. And I was like, wait, am I? And now it's like...
fully merged but it was already before the docs was already starting mentally that you know i'm at i am this character um it's part of me would you recommend people sort of have an alt absolutely
It's fun. It's like writing an essay and taking a position, right? It's like you do this in debate. It's like you can have experimental thoughts. And by the stakes being so low, because you're an anon account with, I don't know, 20 followers or something, you can experiment with your thoughts in a low stakes environment. And I feel like we've lost that in the era of everything...
Showing 301–320 of 342 · page 16 of 18
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