John Mayer

And I made it worse.

Someone said to me years ago, you're trying to eat the monster that's trying to eat you.

I've never heard a more true thing said to me.

And I look at other people right now and I go, Elon Musk, you're trying to eat the monster that's trying to eat you.

I see it and I have grace for other people trying to do it.

We haven't learned much.

that retreat is an option.

Retreat is an option.

I don't know where this idea of stubborn fight to the death stuff came from.

You'll lose everything.

Yep.

Your reality is stronger than their ability to distort it.

And at first, when it's not, it's one of the most sickening, frightening, painful things to have your reality distorted.

And if you're smart, theoretically, you start coming up with a plan to engineer how to undistort the reality that's been distorted.

And that's the beginning of the failure because your behavior stops being natural and starts being what I did.

If you're going to distort me, I'm going to distort me.

I lost myself in that.

The idea of I'm going to be more like you think I am as a way to somehow phase cancel what it is.

As if playing into it would make everyone in the world who shares my exact thinking go, oh, he can't be that because he's acting like that.

He's in on it.