Lex Fridman

You said you often feel like a hack.

Is that that self-critical part of your brain?

Is that a feature or a bug?

I had a pretty intense argument with Paul Conti, who's a legendary psychiatrist, student of the mind about this.

He worked with many famous creative people and he thinks that that negative voice is not at all needed for creative genius.

And I thought, I know awfully a lot of creative people that have that voice.

And I do think in general, as you get older, that's a real challenge for people.

You see the different trajectories people choose to take, but it's easy to slip into cynicism and negativity, into this Dostoevsky's notes from underground, nihilistic kind of worldview.

I think the heroic action to take with time is to become more optimistic, to see more good.

I think there's probably a hero's journey of being extremely self-critical at first, for the first maybe half of your life or two thirds, and then while maintaining some self-critical aspects just so you stay humble, start to see the good.

uh, in everything around you and other people in the world.

And even maybe every once in a while on a weekend in yourself.

As a brief aside, you had a wonderful conversation with Ryan McCaffrey at LA Comic-Con.

I've been a big fan of his for a long time.

He writes amazing stuff at IGN, and he has a great podcast.

Everybody should go listen to it.

I really enjoyed it.

Plus, I got to attend a Comic-Con and just be there in the audience.

And like we were saying offline, the LA Comic-Con, it's the first Comic-Con I've been to.

It's just all kinds of real, genuine nerds, good-hearted.