 Good morning, John. You may have noticed several videos in a row. There's this big, empty area. Do you know why that is? It's because over here, I was making a video for wizard school, and that was my tripod. Ten years, John, you'd think I'd have bought a second tripod. There it is. That's better. So, John. I think it is important for us to talk about the things that we disagree with our old selves about. So, I wanted to talk about this train that I used to be on called the Machiavellian train. I don't know why it's a train. I decided just now. The idea is that good people have to be willing to do all the same stuff that bad people are willing to do in order to get a good outcome, because otherwise the bad people are going to do all their bad stuff and they're going to get their bad thing done. This was a very appealing idea to me as a younger man. Partly, yes, because it allowed me to excuse me doing things that maybe weren't in concert with my values. But I think it was mostly because it played into this thing that I wanted to believe about myself, that if I could only use my brain enough, I could manipulate other people in the world to an eventual positive outcome. Like, I was the protagonist in a lot of the books that I liked. Like, I was Imdir Wigan or Frank Chalmers or Paul Atreides. We don't know what those things are. That's fine. We don't read the same kinds of books. As I have gotten more power, you hear people in social media circles call this influence, but let's call it what it is. I've gotten way more wary and even sort of afraid of that perspective. So I want to give you some reasons why I think like the Machiavelli train is made of BS. So first, healthy societies rely on trust. And if we are all seeing each other as pawns, that trust will never exist. And when I saw people more as pawns to be moved to my will, I was able to trust other people less because I thought they saw me that way too. And that, among all the other bad stuff that comes with that, is just a bad feeling. Second, you are never 100% that the thing you're trying to accomplish is actually gonna have a positive effect on the world. There are lots of examples of people having big revolutions against really oppressive things and then it getting even worse afterward. There are also examples of people having revolutions in the outcome being good. But you never really know. So if you're headed along to this eventual goal and you're just destroying everything on the way there, if this turns out to not have the intended effect, then you've done a lot of bad stuff to get to a bad outcome. Third, you gotta remember that there's a really high chance that you're not gonna get to the desired outcome. You're never gonna get there. So you could do a whole bunch of bad stuff on the way to trying to get there and then fail. And that happens all the time. And lastly, I have come to realize that this thing doesn't exist. There is no final end goal. Every single decision along the path of your life is an end in itself. And if the entire world lived as if the ends justify the means, then the means in themselves are gonna be a terrifying end. So I jumped off that train and now I do not see an idea as a good idea if it requires me to defy my values or my ethics. Doesn't matter how good it's gonna be in the end or what all the stuff I could do with that money if I got it. And I kind of needed to get okay with discarding ideas because I couldn't figure out how to do them and still be living the right way. And that was surprisingly hard because I think throughout my life I praised ideas above reality in a kind of way. I don't know if that made sense. And I needed to get over that and it's kind of been a liberation for me because one, limitations are actually good for ideas. Like being able to do anything to get to your desired goal can be really paralyzing. And two, it means that when I fail, which I will do over and over and over again and we all will do, at least along the way to that failure, I did a bunch of things that I believed in. And honestly, I've come to accept and believe that it's those millions of tiny, sometimes invisible actions more than any huge accomplishment that really makes humanity work. John, in the last 10 years of doing this with you and with this community, this is one of the best and most helpful, most important lessons I've learned. Thank you for that. Memento mori and I will see you in Boston.