3.5 hrs of Live Youtube with Paul Wheaton

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jacob
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3.5 hrs of Live Youtube with Paul Wheaton

Post by jacob »

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tEohCmuHoTQ (3.5 hrs of livestreaming)

Paul Wheaton, Shawn Klassen-Koop, and I (jacob) mostly talking about a chapter from their new (work in progress) Better World book.

Fish
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Re: 3.5 hrs of Live Youtube with Paul Wheaton

Post by Fish »

Would someone who has listened to the whole thing please put together a table of contents to facilitate selective viewing? Or just categorize sections of the discussion and I’ll update the list below which reflects what I have viewed so far:

0:00 - Connection difficulties, agenda, logistics
10:08 - Introducing Jacob
14:17 - Wheaton scales
19:08 - F-bomb aside
22:09 - Book chapter discussion starts
28:30 - Personal finance example (generic consumer)
32:00 - Aside: fear of retirement
38:30 - Easterlin paradox (happiness vs. income)
40:34 - ???

The talk is interesting, but not very information-dense... so any highlights or summaries would be appreciated. Also note that since this is now concluded, it’s possible to increase the playback speed to 1.25x or faster to improve viewing efficiency.

Optimal_Solution
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Re: 3.5 hrs of Live Youtube with Paul Wheaton

Post by Optimal_Solution »

I got about halfway through.

Charming but not information dense. A conversational wander. I would go back and listen to the second half if and when there is a podcast version. I'm not a fan of watching interview videos.

Is there evidence of attempts on the lives of permaculture advocates? That part sounded like conspiracy theory.

vexed87
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Re: 3.5 hrs of Live Youtube with Paul Wheaton

Post by vexed87 »

I dropped by on the off chance the Wheaton level came up, Paul's a nice guy. Great to see you guys talking. I wish I could have more conversations like this. Think I'll get a copy of the book when it's out, sounds interesting, possibly one to hand to family.

Jason

Re: 3.5 hrs of Live Youtube with Paul Wheaton

Post by Jason »

I tried but couldn't do it. Time spent on technical difficulties should be edited out. Get to the content. Everyone is nice and smart but it doesn't make them funny or interesting when they are not focused on the interview. I don't want to listen to a bunch of friends having a good time.

vexed87
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Re: 3.5 hrs of Live Youtube with Paul Wheaton

Post by vexed87 »

A little harsh @Jason, I don't think you can edit livestreams (easily) retrospectively. Having uploaded a few clips in youtube myself, I know it's a nightmare interface to work with!

Fish points out, the kinks and formalities are worked out 10 mins in.

prognastat
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Re: 3.5 hrs of Live Youtube with Paul Wheaton

Post by prognastat »

I think it was an interview that might be more interesting for Paul Wheaton's audience than it is for Jacob's. Since Paul isn't that experienced with FIRE/ERE beyond the basic concepts the discussion unfortunately never goes that deep on that front.

Being able to play it at 2x like I do on almost all informational audio/video definitely helps.

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jennypenny
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Re: 3.5 hrs of Live Youtube with Paul Wheaton

Post by jennypenny »

I loved listening into their conversation, maybe because I'm aiming for the sweet spot where ERE meets permaculture.

Anyway random thoughts ...

@35 they talk about internal and external motivation. I'm always perplexed by the obsession with financial capital within the FIRE crowd, but I can see from jacob's comments how it's an easy scorecard for those who are trainedH^H^H^H^H^H^H^used to working towards specific rewards.

@1:15 they talk about giving someone a million dollars. I liked jacob's comment about people 'buying their speed'. They also talked about hiring someone to start a garden for them. I guess I see that issue this way ... if you hire someone to build a permaculture garden for you, you've spent financial capital but haven't gained an equal amount of other capital in return. You'll have more in material capital, but you've gained nothing in skill capital. I see this as a problem whenever people focus solely on building financial capital at first, intending to throw money at all their problems down the road. They trade financial capital for material capital (and lose some value in the transactions), but they never develop skills or social capital. It's all spades and clubs with no hearts or diamonds.

Just before @2hr mark they talk about trying 100 things. I think this relates to the discussion in the other thread where people talk about doing something vs. reading about something. I personally don't think it's all or nothing. You have to get to the doing part, but if you don't also learn as you go, you won't improve your germination rate.

@2:10--They talk about jacob's income, writing, investing, and how many hours he spent learning about investing.

Towards the end they talk about commune living and group housing. One thing I don't like about American culture is the disdain for multigenerational living arrangements. Kids are taught to leave and cleave, but it's silly (and extremely wasteful given the state of the environment) for everyone to have their own housing.

Overall, thumbs up. I like Wheaton, but I'll admit it might be because I lean towards the homesteading version of ERE. And because I curse as much as he does. :D

Fish
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Re: 3.5 hrs of Live Youtube with Paul Wheaton

Post by Fish »

Thanks for your thoughts jenny, it convinced me to give it another chance. I’m now through the 2nd hour which was better as PWheaton and jacob stayed on topic and settled into a nice flow. I thought PW did a nice job with the book reading (and the passages seem reasonably polished/don’t sound as ridiculous as ERE does when read out loud), and it is making me look forward to its release. Some bookmarks:

1:04:00 - More Wheaton scale discussion
1:29:00 - Build your dream house without a mortgage
1:50:00 - Passive income stream examples

For captive time that would otherwise be spent driving, exercising, or doing housework... listening along is actually pleasant. For me, it’s an example of how interesting talk radio would be if people discussed topics that I actually cared about.

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Re: 3.5 hrs of Live Youtube with Paul Wheaton

Post by 2Birds1Stone »

I watched the whole thing, while accomplishing other tasks.

Some interesting snippets, but a lot of PW clearly misunderstanding what ERE is all about =D

FBeyer
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Re: 3.5 hrs of Live Youtube with Paul Wheaton

Post by FBeyer »

Just signed up for the How Can I Help Paul Wheaton mailing list... I really like that guy.

Also: talking about buying your own land and building on it to save money makes me so envious. If I OWNED land and a house, I'd have to pay as much in taxes for owning a house, than all my current annual expenses total... I would almost double my expenses if I did the same here in tax-o-topia.

Buying a shirt. Then pants which are a bit fancier than the shirt and now you *need* a better shirt and so on... That's called the Diderot Effect. When your stuff has to 'fit in' to some design niche, you feel a need to upgrade the rest. It's different from hedonic adaptation because HA dulls you to the effect of your current luxuries, the Diderot Effect actively drives you towards upgrading or establishing an emotional/aesthetic equilibrium with your possessions.

thegreatvoid

Re: 3.5 hrs of Live Youtube with Paul Wheaton

Post by thegreatvoid »

Great discussion. In my opinion @Jacob ´s best media appearance. Wheaton fellow sounds like a really smart guy, but I didn´t like the last part about passive income stream. I think it´s irresponsible to make people believe it´s easy to make a living selling something over the Internet. The whole e-book, affiliate link, DVD all sounds very scammy. Making money of music is very hard. My high school girlfriend is a sucessful musican, but hardly makes any money from streaming, sales.

thegreatvoid

Re: 3.5 hrs of Live Youtube with Paul Wheaton

Post by thegreatvoid »

jennypenny wrote:
Thu Jan 03, 2019 12:58 pm

Towards the end they talk about commune living and group housing. One thing I don't like about American culture is the disdain for multigenerational living arrangements. Kids are taught to leave and cleave, but it's silly (and extremely wasteful given the state of the environment) for everyone to have their own housing.
It´s not just America. My mom is from Scandinavia and my father is from Austria. Until one generation ago, it used to be common that people would live in multigenerational houses together in Austrua. This has changed in the last 15-20 years.

In Denmark people have some weird obsession about throwing their kids out the house at an early age or if they live at home past 18, the children have to pay rent. Off course this is only possible , because every student gets free money from the government each month. Smart move by the state, to redistrubute wealth to some irresponsible mini monster consumers, who will spend all their money.
No wonder the Scandinavian countries have some of the highest household debt in th world.

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Re: 3.5 hrs of Live Youtube with Paul Wheaton

Post by prognastat »

FBeyer wrote:
Fri Jan 04, 2019 5:57 am
Buying a shirt. Then pants which are a bit fancier than the shirt and now you *need* a better shirt and so on... That's called the Diderot Effect. When your stuff has to 'fit in' to some design niche, you feel a need to upgrade the rest. It's different from hedonic adaptation because HA dulls you to the effect of your current luxuries, the Diderot Effect actively drives you towards upgrading or establishing an emotional/aesthetic equilibrium with your possessions.
Yep the same is very common with media equipment. Got that fancy new TV? Now you need fancy new speakers because your audio needs to be good enough to match your video. While you're at it you'll need the new 4k blu-ray player because you can't be putting old 1080p content on that 4k screen when you could be watching in 4k etc etc.

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Re: 3.5 hrs of Live Youtube with Paul Wheaton

Post by jacob »

WRT best income strategies, I suspect we're all biased due to what has worked for us. I know that's part of the reason why I don't tend to expect more from online income than the possibility of paying for coffee.

I prefer general income strategies to be
  • Robust, that is, that if you start then the outcome is practically guaranteed (baring acts of god, etc.). This is the case for solid jobs and saving and non-speculative investing. These are so dependable that it's possible to map out the future with a spreadsheet. Contrast to that it's hard to predict the income from a youtube channel. A robust strategy has a uniform or bellcurved (with a narrow sigma) outcome distribution. Winners-take-most distributions are not very robust for the random individual. You can judge the robustness of a strategy by it's median outcome. Ignore the winners. Blogging is a terrible strategy because the Pareto effect is strong!
  • Scaleable, that is, when recommending a strategy I want to be sure that it doesn't change once more people start adopting it. This means that "the potential market has to be deep". A good example of a failed strategy is drop shipping. This was a really smart strategy 15 years ago when only a handful of people were doing it. However, each new entry into the field meant another competitor, and seen economic profit from drop shipping dropped to ~zero. Most of the money made on the dropshipping strategy these days are established players and people coaching on how to dropship. What this means is that marginal returns better not be decreasing as more people enter the field. If they do the field should be big enough to absorb them all. Contrast the common 'fallacy of composition' objection to FIRE in that it would fail if we all did it. True, but the chances of that are nil because it would requires high hundreds of millions of people to move the needle. Conversely, an online dropshipping strategy would only require a few thousand adopters before market efficiency obliterates it.
Non-robust strategies can be made robust if you're the rare kind of person who can and will pursue a very large number (>20+) of them. The reason is the central limit theorem (law of large numbers) which turns the sum total of many highly asymmetric rockstar distribution outcomes into a bell curve as long as you add in enough of them. You need to be much more exuberant than the average person(*). This is why we talk so much about internal drive vs external drive and the effect of the school system and how it successfully excises the internal drive in most humans.

(*) Consider the 1-9-90 rule of the internet. You better be the 1%-type. I incidentally do not think that one joins the 1% randomly but that it's practically innate.

prognastat
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Re: 3.5 hrs of Live Youtube with Paul Wheaton

Post by prognastat »

Most of the possibilities PW mentioned seem like they end up with a Pareto distribution. However some of this can indeed be mitigated by having many ventures as once one goes from 0 to 1 so to speak it becomes much easier for that one to get to 100 as opposed to relying one one where the odds of even getting to 1 is very low.

Another thing that PW doesn't seem to realize is once you have become successful in one field it is so much easier to become successful in another as you've already built a network. For example it's much easier for him to become successful at selling mugs than random guy on the internet because he already has some level of fame online. Thus effectively he isn't starting at 0 in a new venture such as that.

FBeyer
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Re: 3.5 hrs of Live Youtube with Paul Wheaton

Post by FBeyer »

I don't believe in the dead-set-failure scenario when engaging in a Pareto distributed venture. The trick should be to study what works for the best of them and apply whatever knowledge you find. I believe a large part of failures are due to not studying the outliers enough.

Does anyone have stats on the failure rate of startups who do no preliminary market analysis and those who do?

Always study the outliers. It's why 'were' here in the ERE forums after all: what specific behavior do I need to adopt to be successful with this pareto distributed venture (what percentage of the world's population is truly financially independent). It turns out there was an actual recipe! I mean, we have several people here with close to 100 years expenses invested, a crazy-high proportion on INTJs, as well as SEVERAL successful authors. That probably makes the ERE forums the most unicorn-like place on the internet.

You can study, and apply, successful behavior. Even if it's within a difficult field of study.

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Re: 3.5 hrs of Live Youtube with Paul Wheaton

Post by prognastat »

Question is how much of a selection bias is there towards people that are successful finding some kind of FIRE community? I myself would have been unlikely to find out about FIRE if I wasn't looking at investing for retirement/401ks which was due to having a reliable job that offered those things and paid me well enough that I even thought I should be doing investing.

Of course being of the INT* types and being so planning focused it likely going to make you far more likely to be thinking about such things.

FBeyer
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Re: 3.5 hrs of Live Youtube with Paul Wheaton

Post by FBeyer »

My point was that you can actively seek out, and work to emulate, best practices. The specifics are less important :D
It's not that I necessarily want to start a nerd fight over this, I just dislike off-the-cuff dismissal of certain goals when there are applicable ways for open-minded people to increase your chances of success.

AnalyticalEngine
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Re: 3.5 hrs of Live Youtube with Paul Wheaton

Post by AnalyticalEngine »

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