Rupert: Andrash, so good to see you,
Andras Lenart: Good to see you as well, Blake.
Rupert: I'm really, really excited to catch up with you and hear what's going on in your world and share some of the awesome things that we've been collecting since our last conversations.
Andras Lenart: ways.
Rupert: Before we jump in, I'd love to start as we do with some gratitude and intentions. So yeah, would you like to start or would you like me?
Andras Lenart: Yeah, I probably prefer you starting.
Rupert: Yeah, no worries. I am so grateful that here in Vancouver, ⁓ it's been, I feel like the climate is changing and there's way more California than it, than I remember from my childhood, way drier and warmer. And I'm really grateful for that because it seems to help everybody that I come in contact with feel better and more calm and empowered. And that sort of lack of stress from not being constantly under dark clouds is something I really appreciate.
Andras Lenart: Yeah, God bless climate change.
Rupert: So glad we've been working towards that for so long.
Andras Lenart: Yeah, consistent effort pays off, right? So for me... Most of the gratitude I feel right now is I've been coming out of a cold flu, something like that, and finally on the tail end of that. So it always feels like such a good reminder of the importance of being healthy and what that actually allows for you in terms of your participation with your life, or my life, I should say.
Rupert: Mmm.
Andras Lenart: Yeah. Yeah.
Rupert: Yeah, it's nice to be healthy. ⁓ My intention for this conversation is to elicit and draw out some of your unique wisdom and insights, because I know you're a wonderful collector of curious ideas, and I'm so excited to hear the stuff that you've been coming across, and to share some of those few things that I've found in my journeys with the audience so that ultimately they can be along for the ride.
Andras Lenart: Yeah, my intention... would be pretty similar, I'd say. then overarchingly, just to see how this kind of conversation flows. I this is the first time that I'm doing this kind of thing, so curious what this experience is like.
Rupert: Wonderful. And maybe we can disclose a bit some of the secret intention to the audience here is what is this thing that you're doing for the first time and that we're doing for the first time.
Andras Lenart: Yeah, we're recording a podcast on... We've historically had conversations once every few months. It's been pretty interesting, and so the thought was to do this in a recorded format.
Rupert: Yeah, so we have these phone calls where we check in with each other and we give rapid briefs about what's occurred in our lives. And so often they're not captured in a way that anyone else can hear our dirty jokes or enjoy the different insights that we're coming across. So a little homage, I guess, to the random show by Tim Ferriss and Kevin, what was his last name? ⁓ Kev Kev, we'll say. ⁓ But they do a wonderful similar thing. so hopefully here we can have fun with it. So what should we jump into? What's our getting in point?
Andras Lenart: Yeah, so the first thing that was coming to mind was this thing about internal discernment and So how to know when something is this. when a drive you're having is this older emotional pattern that might be outdated, or if it's a deeper intuition. So in the case that you're facing fear about something, is there wisdom to that fear, or is it something you might want to move past?
Rupert: Hmm. Yeah, so just so I'm hearing you correctly use this word discernment and maybe we can define what that is ⁓ specifically, but what you just said, I think is a great sort of summary there of how do you know basically if something's important or not important? How can you tell if a signal we're means something or is maybe a distraction or an inappropriate coping mechanism or something?
Andras Lenart: Hmm, absolutely, absolutely. Because it seems like it comes up, I mean, for most of the people I work with, and even in my own life, like it's a pretty pervasive thing.
Rupert: Sure. Yeah. It seems to be sort of one of the most important things, right? Like I think I love this word discernment because every time I hear it, I imagine some wizard or monk being like, ⁓ discernment sounds very wise. But I think in simpler terms, just like a knowing a confidence in the knowing and an ability to tell whether or not it's just something to be ignored or something to be really listened to. This this question of how to know whether or not something's important or valuable, I think is super common in meditation. And I'd be curious to hear a bit about your experience of like when you first started to really reflect on what discernment, how to do it well. ⁓ But where I first encountered it was in meditation, this idea to notice thoughts and let go of them. And then there were some thoughts that it was useful to listen to, to observe and to witness. And then there were others that ⁓ actually took me off the track and were distractions and led to these like eddies or whirlpools of being caught up in a narrative or some line of thinking that didn't actually lead somewhere fruitful or healthy.
Andras Lenart: And so what, I I'm curious if you want to speak more into that, what, it's just the durability of it that you found in that case that led to it being meaningful.
Rupert: Sure. Mm hmm. So credit to sort of my early teachers here, because this was really opaque. Like it was really a tricky question to figure out of like how to how do I spend my energy and focus and where I should maybe reset or let go. And maybe before I share like what's worked for me or what I've arrived at and heard through different teachers, it might be helpful if we have a story or a narrative, a structure here we can apply it to. So it's not just some hypothetical situation but something we can relate to. So I wonder, do you have a sense of a example you want to work through or I can provide one?
Andras Lenart: If you want to go ahead.
Rupert: Yeah, sure. ⁓ So I think in meditation situations is nice because it's it kind of constrains the boundaries here. ⁓ I don't know how common of experience this is, but I would imagine for some subset of the population, there has been a time where you've been in your own thoughts or maybe a sensation, and maybe still in your body. Maybe you're like staring at a phone or you're staring at a book or something. where you're sitting on a bus and there's a sense that whatever you're thinking about, whatever you're relating to is starting to hurt. And so I'm checking in with you, Andras. Have you had a situation where you're like thinking about a thing and it's starting to be, you're starting to get like agitation or strain?
Andras Lenart: Honestly, not that I can recall right now in the moment.
Rupert: Sure. So I'll give it maybe an example. I, maybe it could be something even as concrete as anxiety where we're like thinking about, I should have ⁓ asked that girl out. And you're thinking about you're sitting. So I'm picturing myself sitting on a bus, sitting on a train. And I'm thinking about the day before where I saw a girl and she smiled at me and I smiled back. And then she kind of like gestured with her head for me to come over. And I was like, ⁓ that's very exciting. And then I hesitated. And then I'm like,
Andras Lenart: Hmm.
Rupert: I can't do that. And so here I am in the present moment sitting on this bus and I'm thinking back to that. And I'm my brain is worrying about what I should have been and like, what if I had done that where it could have gone? And I'm starting to, ⁓ apart from those thoughts, also notice that my body is responding. Maybe my heart rate's increasing or I'm starting to feel tense. ⁓ like I'm starting physically to tense my muscles. ⁓ so yeah, check in there. Is that a familiar example?
Andras Lenart: Yeah, yeah, I've definitely had, definitely in cases like that.
Rupert: ⁓ And so if there's this instruction to like attend to your thoughts and like a focus based meditation, how do we know when to keep thinking about that? Keep thinking about the what could have happened if you had approached the person or keep thinking about like how much it sucks that you did in and how much you hate yourself that you're a coward. versus to let it go. And I don't know that there's this like right or wrong approach to it, but what I have heard as a general sort of principle is does connecting with the feeling, the thought, the stimuli, does it feel expansive or contractive? Does it feel resonant in the sense that it feels like it fits and it's true and it's something that's, I mean, the words get kind of wishy washy here, but aligned with your highest self or does it feel like it's you're being squeezed through a tight hole? Like you're trying to fit through your square block, trying to fit through a round hole. And so there's all these different sort of ways of phrasing it, but I think the one that I found that's most ⁓ intuitive is the, is expensive or contractive. Okay, so meditation is one thing, but I don't know that most people are meditating every day. So how would we apply this idea of discernment to something more practical and sexy?
Andras Lenart: Yeah, and I'm curious there because it seems like with anxiety, you know, the expansive, contractive heuristic will lead you one direction where, you know, would it have been more expansive to, you know, to go talk to the stranger at the coffee shop? ⁓ You know, I imagine most people's intuition will nudge them that direction. But, you know, if we take
Rupert: Sure.
Andras Lenart: kind of one of the more like avoidant withdrawing sensations, then I think withdrawal might, or that kind of like pulling back from relationship will often lead to, ⁓ or may very well lead to like this more expansive sense that there's freedom there if you withdraw from that relationship when that still might be this more deeply rooted emotional pattern of
Rupert: Hmm.
Andras Lenart: what we'd label avoided an attachment.
Rupert: Yeah. ⁓ so I'm going to try and translate that, ⁓ to something simple, just so I'm making sure I can hear the thing, but basically I'm hearing there's an impulse. The impulse is, ⁓ leading you one way. So in this case, you're, if somebody's in like a relationship or they're looking to date or whatever, and they're like, ⁓ I get the feeling that I should maybe pull back a bit. How do I know if that's healthy or wise?
Andras Lenart: Mm-hmm.
Rupert: Is that accurate?
Andras Lenart: Yeah, yeah, something something of that flavor. Yeah.
Rupert: Sure. Hmm. And so I had offered this idea that maybe you could do an internal check and see if that move feels expansive or contractive. And you're offering that, hey, maybe pulling back in this moment does feel expansive.
Andras Lenart: Yeah, because in the case, the emotional pattern of avoidance is such that, you know, like intimacy or that kind of close connection doesn't feel safe. And so naturally, when you move away from it, there is more room to breathe, right? And so...
Rupert: ⁓ interesting. Okay. So here is where language gets quite tricky because room to breathe. Like how I'm hearing that is like, there's less pressure on my chest, which feels like, ⁓ like when that's, if you're chest free and you can breathe fully, it's expensive. ⁓
Andras Lenart: Yeah, yeah.
Rupert: I wonder if there's a declination, like a clear demarcation, a clear distinction, how many obnoxious words can I use to split up? But I wonder if there's a distinction between... ⁓
Andras Lenart: You
Rupert: a reduction of tension and an increase in ⁓ personhood or an increase in wholeness.
Andras Lenart: Can you walk me through that a little bit more?
Rupert: Yeah, sure. So, so like if somebody were pointing a gun at someone, and ⁓ there was a situation where, or there was an ability for that gun to be pointed away or to remove from the situation altogether. That feels really good, I'm sure for the person who is under threat. Like it's a huge relief. And I wonder if there's a difference between there's a relief versus somebody who's like, I went to the gym today and I feel tired and I feel strong.
Andras Lenart: Yeah, right.
Rupert: So on one side we have reduction of discomfort, which is worthy and important and good. And the other, have an increasing of capacity, a promotion of vitality. an expansion as opposed to like a removal of a weight.
Andras Lenart: And so you're suggesting in the case of... avoidant attachment or you know what might be that that that person persisting in their relationship or you know connecting with what it what it feels like that there would be that they could connect with this this possibility of expanding their capacity there
Rupert: Mm-hmm. ⁓ so one of things that's really interesting about this topic of discernment is that it applies to this, this question of how to know what's true and valid is that it's completely independent of any sort of, like the facts of life. Like it's, it's a, it's a question for everybody and it's a use. It's a game that we get to play at in some ways, it might be the very game of life. Like how do you get to notice what has value and meaning for you? And so I'm not being prescriptive in that somebody who's ⁓ quote, avoidant or anxious, I'm actually not a huge fan of those labels for attachment theory. I know it's quite in vogue, especially on TikTok. ⁓ But ⁓ what I am saying is that for the person who's confronting this question of like, okay, I'm want to be in this relationship, I want to start this relationship, whatever. And I'm noticing that I have some exact what I feel is anxiety there. A check they can do sort of and I think this is neurologically neuroscientifically spiritually all true, you get to run the check of K if I want to be defensive here, like if I want to protect myself, what would it look like? And that's can be healthy and good. And that might look like stop interacting socially, limit social ⁓ surface area to make sure there's less areas to go wrong. And there might be another check to find out what would be in this moment to grow. And it might be, I'm totally agnostic here. could be, ⁓ be established boundaries with this other person. It could be, ⁓ so like get multiple relationships. with different people so I can practice quantity. I don't know. But there I think if each person has their own inner wisdom that will sort of direct them in the past in a path of discovery.
Andras Lenart: Yeah, I appreciate what you're saying there. What I'd add, what's often been my approach, you know, when I'm working with people in this is emphasizing their, like, their actually felt sensory ⁓ sense of that kind of resistance, and then having them viscerally connect, you know, when...
Rupert: Mm-hmm.
Andras Lenart: when else have they felt like this? Like is this actually the pattern that it might be in the past or does this, you know, if they have enough granularity with that, does this actually feel different? ⁓ Because that at least, you know, gives some indication of, you know, could this be this like, you broader pattern of, you know, feeling like they always need more in relationship or feeling like they always want more space in relationship or whatever else the emotionally rooted pattern that we're talking about is. And I mean, I have one more idea, but curious if you have thoughts on that.
Rupert: Thoughts on connecting to the somatic sensations or?
Andras Lenart: Yeah, like finding that kind of like sensory quality and seeing if it is reflective of the last time that they would have felt like that.
Rupert: Sure. I follow you on the somatic awareness piece. And I think that is when I'm talking about doing that internal check, I think probably the best way to do that is through doing some versions of scans internally where you notice tension or aliveness or energy in your body. ⁓ And then sit with that sensation and be like, that's where we get to employ the discernment. Like now that I've surfaced up a sensation, is this sensation expansive or is it contractive? ⁓ or maybe constricting. ⁓ I'm not sure I understand the pattern piece. And I think you and I have talked about this several times throughout our friendship. And it's something that I know that I skew less in this direction of analyzing historical precedence. ⁓ And I think of books like Already Free by Bruce Tift ⁓ and this idea that I acknowledge that our past and our history and our patterns definitely are real and they have implications. But I would just personally generally skew more towards the immediate moment. And I think that most, if not all, of what we need to know to move forward is available in the present. We just might not be accessing it yet. And so for the person who's I'm going to make up a hypothetical here, but somebody who's been dating someone for a month and they're like, ⁓ I'm feeling like I want to pull out of this. Is this just me being avoidant? Is this just me like trying to seek to ⁓ numb or make safe that part of me that's afraid of being close to another and trusting them in a way I would wonder if they do a scan if they notice like, yeah, there's a lot of agitation and tightness that I quite quickly can associate to this desire to be separate and have distance. And I wonder also if somewhere else, maybe quieter, maybe in a part of their body they don't connect with is a sense of like, it might be a very quiet voice, but a quiet voice saying like, Hey, actually, this relationship is going good right now. There's nothing wrong. And if that's true, like if they did come across some version of that voice to then they get to apply that discernment of being like, okay, well that voice, like, do I notice about it? It's quiet. It's a weaker signal. The like neurological patterns in my brain, like aren't as ⁓ set in that way. But if I check the, if I try and measure it, if I try and engage with that signal and check the quality of it, does it feel Constricting, does it feel contractive or does it feel expensive? And again, I don't have an implicit bias here that relationships are like heading into the discomfort is the way to go. It is an active question. And I think for the person who does this, their ability, their willingness to practice this in that moment is more important than what they actually do in the relationship. Can they identify, can they use the bare attention to find these signals throughout their being? And once they found them, put the spotlight of attention on them, the mindfulness to be with those sensations and then to feel into and get that sort of known sense internally. Is this the direction I want to go or is it, it feel expensive or does it feel contractive? Does it feel defensive or does it feel like I'm increasing my capacity?
Andras Lenart: Yeah, that's beautifully put. So maybe I'll speak to my own experience here, because I think that's what's kind of echoing in my mind. I had a number of relationships where my own avoidance has come up. And I only saw that really in hindsight, right? I only saw that after the relationship was over. And, you know, it was this like, oh, wow, like, you know, seeing how I wanted distance, how commitment phobia or, you know, whatever we label it was becoming present. And
Rupert: Hmm. You
Andras Lenart: So it was through recognizing that that, you know, that some degree of that was a pattern for me for whatever reason. And, so I'm not saying I need to like understand all the childhood or developmental reasons to it, but having a few relationships where I've noted that, then that gives me more pause in, you know, present relationships that, okay, you know, if I notice this
Rupert: No, but you notice a pattern, yeah.
Andras Lenart: that there's some desire to pull away or to withdraw, that, okay, then maybe there I can sit more with that, look for the quiet voice, look for what feels expansive, yeah. So that's in my mind.
Rupert: Totally. Yeah, especially if you, sorry to interrupt you there.
Andras Lenart: I'm just saying, so that's in my mind how I would marry the two.
Rupert: Yeah, gotcha. Yeah. I mean, what I'm hearing there is this, you've ran that experiment and you've seen where it's got you. And then with the advantage of hindsight been like, I wonder if there was other options available. I wonder if I missed something in my ⁓ use of discernment.
Andras Lenart: Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
Rupert: Yeah, I think that's wise. And I think, in my experience, when I've done that personally, or helped other folks with it, I think often it's that we take the most salient or visible impulses or signals to be representative of all of it, of all that we need to check. And I mean, that makes makes sense on a biological level or like practical level. If you have a really bright signal, and it accounts for like 90 % of what's going on. You're like, it's easy to say, okay, well, I should listen to that one. ⁓ But yeah, maybe the reflection and deep introspection is sort of, especially if it's something that you really care about, it's worth the extra cycles to sit there and to like investigate, hey, what am I missing? What other sort of options or inputs are relevant here? And it sounds like I just want to highlight to you based on what you're saying that this particular impulse to pull back, you've found it to be lacking. Like you've like, it's I'm hearing from you that that part of you saying like, this isn't the direction I want to go. which again, I don't give a fuck. I'm just, that's, ⁓ I'm hearing you, you started being like, ⁓ this, this hasn't been optimal.
Andras Lenart: Yeah. Yeah, yeah, that's exactly it. And at the same time, I've also had relationships where I've tried to stay in it, right? Where I'm like, okay, all the, you know, everything lines up on paper and I'm still not feeling it. And okay, is this just, you know, my like tendency to, you know, want my own space or be by myself or, you know, whatever the... whatever the thing there is. ⁓ And again, where it's never really developed or it's never really clicked. so in that case, it's like the tendency to, or the desire to withdraw or pull back was probably the deeper, maybe the deeper truth or the more aligned action.
Rupert: I want to just say though that your desire to be safe and to be feel in control and all those all those sort of impulses there that I'm hearing you say that you've chosen over time I think those are healthy and there's they're not a problem with them ⁓ and I just want to empathize that I'm sure they were really your attempts to navigate the situation in a way that was respectful not only for yourself, but for the other person and motivated from love and kindness. And I think that ⁓ both Trying to figure it out and making mistakes is an important part of the process. And, ⁓ Hmm. Yeah, I guess I'm just feeling empathy for that. That there is no like necessarily right answer and that it's hard to figure it out on the fly.
Andras Lenart: Yeah, that feels very true. I appreciate that.
Rupert: And I wonder if we, from that place of like, ultimately there's, there's no wrong answers here. I'm curious to hear from you. Like, do you have, if you do a check-in in this moment, do you have a sense of what's feeling most expansive for you on this topic?
Andras Lenart: Yeah, I mentioned to you before the call, I've gotten into a new relationship. it's, I don't know, what is that? Like a month, a month and a bit in, so it's still very fresh. And so the avoidance isn't actually coming up so much. It's still a lot of, you know, just like excitement and falling into it. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Rupert: Honeymoon.
Andras Lenart: So there's definitely threads of it that come up, but overwhelmingly, it still feels very expansive. So maybe ask me in six months or something like that, and there may be more to metabolize there. Yeah.
Rupert: Mm-hmm. I'm glad to hear it's feeling expensive. ⁓ maybe switching gears a bit. think we have, or I've got a topic I wanted to introduce that is going to sound like a bit of a pivot, but I think it is related to this. ⁓ so I recently, so I've been working at, a hospital here in Vancouver for going on almost a year and a half now. ⁓ and so I work in a complex mental health ward and I work with folks who are, you know, in a pretty tough place, complex mental health, it's long-term persistent, ⁓ pretty intense situations for these people. And. In that, in that job, I'm training them to have jobs. That's my role. It's a pretty unique role. I'm, ⁓ I manage a cafe that's specifically set up to give job training opportunities to these folks. And this is great because it blends my interest in mental health, ⁓ with training and teaching and like practical hand on skills. So how does this all tie into discernment and this question of. ⁓ noticing what's coming up for us as individuals. I've in multiple attempts to try and mentor people and help impart knowledge or help them move through different obstacles in their life. I had arrived at this sort of internal framework and recently, ⁓ and occupational therapists, my wife, ⁓ had told me about a framework that they use in occupational therapy that. ⁓ sums up and articulates a very easy way to teach people and to organize decision making about important topics. And I wonder if it might be relevant here about ideas of like using discernment as well. So the the model has a bunch of different names and stuff. I think the names suck. Honestly, ⁓ but the the main sort of points here, there's four points of how to do it and it's goal plan do review. Goal plan, do review. So what is our goal? So starting with the why, how are we going to accomplish that? What's our strategy? Okay, let's try it. And then let's review our how it went and adjust accordingly and repeat where necessary. So I'm bringing this up because what you're saying about in those different relationships, this sort of pattern of it sounds like you a goal, which is to be well, I don't want to presume what it is, but it sounds like you had an idea of what the goal is. And then you try different things and then you came up with a plan that you tried the things and then you reviewed and like, ⁓ that's didn't actually get me to where I wanted to go. Or there's off in the target. Does that sound accurate?
Andras Lenart: Yeah, absolutely.
Rupert: Were you conscious of develop or like employing a similar approach there?
Andras Lenart: I implicitly, yeah. Yeah, because I, whenever a relationship ends, I tend to reflect on it a lot. yeah, I've definitely had a, as we've discussed in the past, over her jingle, the fine partnership.
Rupert: Yeah, fair. Sure, yeah. And I feel like I'm sort of introducing a crayon here and being like, welcome to art. But this goal plan due review, I think is a really valuable and succinct way of describing a process that is really easy to slip off of or to forget in the moment. And so for instance, I'm running these, ⁓ I'm chairing these meetings at the hospital that are, ⁓
Andras Lenart: Ha ha ha.
Rupert: across all levels of the organization with like management leadership all the way down to like the grunts, other people in the lowest paid positions. And both in the preparation as well as in the process of those actual meetings, ⁓ I noticed that it's really easy for folks to jump between the sequence of those steps. So maybe we introduce a topic and we haven't defined what the goal is yet. We just have the topic and somebody's already on to the planning stage. So maybe it's like, it's like the person who's like, ⁓ yeah, dating, dating. Yeah. So I think I'm just going go out and ask a bunch of people out at the bar. It's like, wait, what's we don't know yet what your goal is.
Andras Lenart: Mm-hmm.
Rupert: Do see this in your own life? Do you see folks bouncing between those?
Andras Lenart: Yeah, I mean, what comes up for me then, as you're outlining the model, the... I guess I'm curious what... ⁓ okay, no, it clicked for me, but I was curious what you were specifying about the planning portion in this, but that would be, you know, whatever the approach is to accomplish the goal, the how, so to speak. ⁓ And yeah, I mean, in my experience of working with people, it seems like people don't get a lot of...
Rupert: Totally, yeah. Yeah.
Andras Lenart: They often don't develop lot of clarity around what they actually want. Like the goal piece is like very underspecified. Yeah.
Rupert: Yes, 100%. Say more.
Andras Lenart: Like, people have a vague sense of how they would expect to feel when they have this thing. so say a relationship, but so much of what they're actually looking for, what they envision that to be is unspecified. And so, yeah, yeah.
Rupert: Hahaha. just vague, this cloud of possibilities that are somewhat good.
Andras Lenart: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah, they expect to just fall into a relationship that somehow magically meets all their needs, and they have a honeymoon in Mexico, and whatever else.
Rupert: Mm-hmm. Sure, yeah. in that, I'm hearing you say, meets their needs without maybe even defining like, what are those needs? They're just like, well, the other person will know they'll be a great, partner and they'll love me.
Andras Lenart: Exactly. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely.
Rupert: Yeah, man, that's such a I think this is sort of the the keystone piece here is I love Simon Sinek's concept of start with why. Are you familiar with that one? Yeah. And just for the audience here, so Simon Sinek, ⁓ he's a sort of intellectual thought leader dude, ⁓ from San Fran, I believe, or like lives in San Fran. And one of his ⁓ one of his big ideas is this idea of
Andras Lenart: Mm-hmm.
Rupert: It's really, really valuable to start with why. What is the goal? What are we doing here? Because everything else follows from that. Right. And I think like on Josh, you're saying it's so undervalued. It's crazy how many problems for people could be resolved by just greater clarity and definition of what the target is you're trying to hit. Because otherwise you're just shooting arrows into the dark. If you don't have a bullseye that you're how do you even know if you did good? ⁓ the other part I would say here is that there's seems to be a magic when you're working with other people. I mean, this is different, obviously, if you're trying to figure out, ⁓ what do I want in a relationship? versus how do I, what is our goal for our business? What is our, ⁓ KPI, our key performance index or indicator or, ⁓ like, what do we want to achieve this quarter? But if you are in a group and maybe this gets more relevant for the What do want in relationship once you meet somebody? Defining the why with other people where you're actively both co-creating, like it can't be one person's being told, way increases the probability that people will actually participate because they feel ownership and responsibility. And so, yeah, I just want to underscore this. The goal definition phase is again, the keystone piece.
Andras Lenart: And curious though what you think too, because I mean there are definitely people who under specify and then there's the kind of flaw of over specifying, right? Of having a hundred items that this ideal partner needs to check off.
Rupert: Sure, Yeah. Yeah, great question. ⁓ I would just refer to this goal plan do review framework. ⁓ because I think we've all done the thing where, well, maybe not all, but I think it's not uncommon to do something like a, what are they called? A dream board or whatever, where you, this is my five year plan. And by this point, I'm to have this many dollars in the mega cat. And like you go through unlimited detail here and then you five years goes by and you look at your thing and you're like, okay, I choose some of this, but lots of this just doesn't matter. And I had the wrong idea of what, what to attend to here. So I can say,
Andras Lenart: Yeah. you
Rupert: for myself and I know that we've talked about this before. There was a stage in dating, cause this is a theme that we're talking about here. ⁓ there's a stage in my dating history where I had, I was really starting to take serious this idea of defining the why. And I'd been through enough, ⁓ relationships that had gone, they got to a similar place and they felt good in the same way. And they also felt like they kind of have the same limitations or things that weren't there. And I was just curious about what was going on. So I thought, I don't know how I arrived at it, but this idea of like, maybe I should define my bullseye a bit better. And in doing that, ⁓ I was a young man, so I can throw shade on this dude. I literally in was like asking myself, what do I want in a future wife? Or first off, I arrived at the idea I want a life partner. I don't want just girlfriends anymore. I'm starting to get to a place where I'm curious about finding a future maybe mother for my children. The biggest part was a life partner. I want someone I can go long and far and do big things with. And I arrived at this idea. I want them to be somebody who we make each other's lives better and we expand our possibilities and we do things that we couldn't have done alone. And I was like, Oh, that sounds amazing. What would that person be like? It's like they'd be smart. They'd be funny. They'd have big boobs, nice butt. They'd probably be this tall. And so I spent, I don't know, probably an hour. doing this and it was a list. It was just a bullet point list or whatever. The crazy thing is within two or three months, I found that person and I could not believe it. They literally ticked off everything that was on the list and I when I was making the list, I felt like it was way too good to be true and that I would never find someone that that incredible. And so when I finally met them, I thought like, wow, God is real. I'm done mission accomplished. And that relationship went really well. Six months into it, though, started to realize that something was off. I love them. She loved me. We were getting along quite well, but there was something missing. And so I went, I pulled that list out and I looked at it. And it honestly, I'm sure you've had this experience, you write a rough draft of something like a paper or whatever. And then you look at it later and you're like, this is garbage. Why was I, this was so basic. And what I realized was of my like, I don't know, 16 bullets, 14 of them were pretty superficial. It was sincerely embarrassing. And I was like, wow, what a, what low importance things that I indexed on that, like, I literally put down boobs and butt, like, and just noticing like, okay, I, I had a goal, I came up with a plan, I did it, I did it, I found them, it worked. And now I'm reviewing and there was something missing in my goal. As much as I did my sincere best effort at that time, in that one hour, and maybe I should have gone back and reviewed a bit more or updated it as I went along, but there was something missing. So the goal wasn't, wasn't great.
Andras Lenart: And was only through reviewing it that you realize that. Yeah.
Rupert: Yeah. And I realized it had been like however many months, like nine months since I created that and I hadn't updated or I hadn't even referenced really that goal other than I took it and I was like, okay, start sprinting. And that was good. And it worked and I got, I got benefits and I got productivity and I got results, but I realized that not updating and improving that goal as I went along was a mistake. And then also that just the humility that came from realizing the goal was half-baked.
Andras Lenart: Yeah. An interesting frame I've heard on this, which I think you were somewhat speaking to as well, indirectly, is, like I've heard the idea of not even framing what you want in a partner, but being explicit about how you want to feel with someone. And then... moving from there to, you what are those actual characteristics in a partner? Right? So, so that sense of safety or the sense of, you know, deep trust or, ⁓ you know, the growth that you guys have together, those figuring out those things first, and then moving to the actual characteristics.
Rupert: what would be the, yeah, totally. Yeah, that's it. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah. I think that's a great way of approaching it. Yeah. And just wanting to knowledge for anyone who's listening this and you're in a place yet where maybe you don't feel like you have traction or or that your attempts to keep missing something important or failing that this goal plan do review combined with taking the time to actively notice what you're feeling as a notice you're feeling something sit with those feelings and then feel like does this feel contractive expense or expensive. That whole formula there is in my experience, it's what leads to ⁓ being in touch with the quality of your decisions in your life and then being able to modify it. And I think each part ultimately is ⁓ essential. Like that, that sort of chain there is representative of my best understanding of ⁓ how to do this entire process.
Andras Lenart: And what would feel expansive for me now is to, I'm very curious to hear about what you've been thinking about in terms of AI and in relation to therapy as well.
Rupert: Sure, man. Yeah, there's so much there. AI, wow. Also, I just want to say, as somebody who's been a super fan of AI since 20, I don't know, early 2000s, like I came across Ray Kurzweil and transhumanism, and that's probably gonna be gibberish for most people, but I'm so excited that it's like the biggest thing in the world at the moment, because it's, I could spend all my time talking about AI.
Andras Lenart: you
Rupert: yeah, is there any specific directions you want to go or did you have anything you wanted to share on it?
Andras Lenart: Well, the first thing I'm curious about, because you had told me in the past, you're doing some project, some final assignment, ⁓ where you're looking at tools that assist in providing therapy. ⁓ So I am just curious to hear what those were, how you use them. ⁓ I've been using AI a bit in
Rupert: Mm-hmm.
Andras Lenart: quite a bit in the work that I'm offering clients. ⁓ So yeah, I'm curious to hear what your process is for that.
Rupert: sure. Yeah, maybe we can swap notes here. So yeah, for context, I'm in the back third of my master's of counseling degree. And so as part of that, ⁓ I'm doing what's called a capstone, which is similar to a thesis, except we don't have to do original research. So I'm get to summarize sort of the literature out in the world. And so for my capstone, I've arrived at a thesis around AI in therapy, and I think more more generally in like personal development or coaching. But for the specifics of the paper wolf, I'm going to focus on therapy, especially in a Canadian context. And so, on dress, since we've talked about this and workshopped the idea, the thesis is or the hypothesis has changed a little bit. Partly, that's just to arrive at the most, the easiest thing to write about the thing that's going to be academically grounded. But currently what the hypothesis is, is looking at how AI in a world where clinician burnout rates are soaring, and maybe just taking a pause there because it is wild how many people who work in helping roles like counselors or ⁓ social workers, or we can go across the board, how prevalent burnout is, it's such a real thing. And so with that sort of background, and the emerging relevance of AI and the capacity there. How can AI augment therapists to offload some of that the burden in their work? Hopefully so that it leads to best outcomes for clients, while also acknowledging that there's ethical and practical considerations ⁓ about how to do that in a way that's safe and honors the sacred sort of relationship between people ⁓ and not jeopardizing that quality or safety through the indiscriminate automation of the process. So ⁓ my sort of major point that I'm driving at after like lots of research is looking at policies like the BC Association of Clinical Counselors released a really helpful paper, ⁓ a guidelines on AI for clinicians. Have you got a chance to check that out?
Andras Lenart: No, no, haven't, but I, yeah.
Rupert: I would really recommend it. I can, including the show notes for anyone who's interested in this topic, this paper was really, really well done. Shout out to the author. don't have their name off the top of my head. but it's, it's a great here. I'm just going to look it up actually, cause it deserves the shout out. So this paper was authored by, of course they buried her name. That's too bad. It's not on the title page. So yeah, I'll include in the show notes, but I believe that a single researcher or clinician took point on this. And I'd love to actually have her on the podcast. ⁓ So it looks at basically in the field of counseling, the professional field, how might we go about implementing AI, and it does a sort of contemporary like a look at the current landscape. And it outlines some of the areas where There's risks, so things like privacy, data storage, et cetera. The documents are really good for being a policy for professional practice, but it gives almost no guidance on in day-to-day sessions. How should your decision-making change? Is that distinction clear?
Andras Lenart: Yes, yeah.
Rupert: So it's like more structural, like how would you assess whether or not a piece of software is safe or, but it doesn't say what decisions, what questions should you ask a LLM, which activities are appropriate for LLMs, which ones should you not include? And so what I'm attempting to do in this, in my capstone is to look at the urgent need for reducing pronoun and counselors and now that we have this amazing bicycle for the mind of LLMs like chat, GBT or Claude or any of the other ones, ⁓ where are the highest value, high burden tasks that require low human judgment that we can safely hand off to the AIs? so spoiler alert, turns out that record keeping. is the lowest hanging fruit that I've identified. So if you're not a clinician, if you haven't worked in the medical field, you probably don't know this, but most clinicians have to write clinic notes, which basically are bullet points or short paragraphs that describe what you did and why and the justifications for them. And Andras, I know that you've had experience of working in the medical system before. How did you find that process?
Andras Lenart: Yeah, I found when I was working in the actual public health care system ⁓ that the notes, I mean, they definitely had, you know, ⁓ more extensive standards for notekeeping. And so that was definitely, yeah, I mean, a real burden at that point. And then not even just in terms of the time that it takes, but in terms of task switching. And you're really having to prioritize it to a whole different set of skills that's required for that. mean, having said that, do think the summarization, I mean, there is some benefit in terms of having you conceptualize what's going on for the client.
Rupert: Mm-hmm. 100 % case conceptualization, understanding, like pulling out what are the most important features, et cetera. But I also, you use the word burden. I think looking into the research, just to put some rough numbers on it, from what I can tell, roles similar to counseling are experiencing across the board around 40 % of practitioners in America report burnout.
Andras Lenart: Yeah.
Rupert: Holy shit, almost one and two, like almost half. That's crazy. Just for those people, as well as the clients that they're probably still seeing a lot of the time, like what's the quality of care there if you're clinicians at reduced capacity, but then also surprisingly, so it's called in the literature, electronic health records, EHR. EHR is responsible for like, again, like 40 to 50 % of burnout. Maybe not that high, maybe closer to 30, but it's huge.
Andras Lenart: Yeah. Wow.
Rupert: And I think exactly what you're saying, like that between sessions, between your hours or 50 minutes or whatever you're doing with the client, clinicians are asked or required or expected to jot down, okay, what, what happened? What's the important parts? Was there risk there? What did you do to make sure the client was safe, et cetera. And that's a documentation that's a legal safety, ⁓ burden, but it's not directly set up or The main intent and design of it is not how do you give the best care to the client? It's not asking folks to case conceptualize. It's not asking them to plan out different avenues and, know, like really chew on and reflect on what might be possible. It's really to protect against lawsuits in case something goes wrong to document like, well, I tried my best. I did reasonable care. And I think most people are silently suffering under that.
Andras Lenart: Yeah, absolutely. I think that does frame it out pretty well.
Rupert: Mm-hmm. And the good news is that already and there's like, maybe because I keep searching for it, I'm getting so many targeted ads, but there's so many emerging startups that are trying to resolve this by automating that process to free up that time and provide safe notes, but then also free up the cognitive bandwidth, the emotional bandwidth, reduce the task switching so people can invest in the things actually drive quality of care in a more meaningful way.
Andras Lenart: And so that kind of note keeping is one aspect. Curious if there's AI assisted aspects.
Rupert: Yeah, for sure. So for the purpose of my capstone, I'm not going to touch on those. ⁓ but the obvious sort of next one would be, I mean, there's two directions. I think one is like, can people use AI's as clinicians? And the obvious answer is already yes, they can. Not necessarily that they should, but it's nothing stopping anybody from, from saying that or from doing that. ⁓ leaving alone the question of ⁓ the current capacity of these systems to offer good guidance and avoid just telling the people what they want to hear or ⁓ assuming of information or context and giving mistaken advice accordingly. ⁓ So leaving aside the idea of AI therapists or coaches for therapists and promoting their capacity to help clients. I think the other next level would be as what I was earlier in a previous conversations with you referring to as reflective dialogue companions or counseling assistance. And this idea of if we come like we're, we're doing version of it right now in this, in this conversation. And I'm sure in many conversations, Andras, that you and I both have with other professionals, we bounce ideas off each other. We hear different perspectives. say, Hey, I tried this. What do you think? What am I seeing? What would you have done? I think AIs in the not so distant future in the next couple of years here are going to be very useful on demand, instantly available, low cost ways of sort of refining and having a workshop partner.
Andras Lenart: Yeah, that's where I've been using AIs a little bit already in my practice and where I see there to be so more room for implementation because AIs can really make up for a lot of the... If you've been seeing a client over a year, hypothetically if you had like a...
Rupert: Mm-hmm.
Andras Lenart: and AI trained on the transcript of every conversation that you've had, everything that you've tried so far with them. ⁓ It could provide real time feedback about what direction to go, or are you considering this? Are you considering going ⁓ down that path? So I think that's where there's really a lot of ⁓ possibility. And then as well as in
Rupert: Mm-hmm. Sure.
Andras Lenart: ensuring kind of like ongoing accountability or know action items or you know between sessions I think that there's a lot of you know role or like possibility for further use of those tools there.
Rupert: Yeah. So that second piece getting into the more of the AI therapist for clients or like a tool, but yeah, I, I'm totally on board with that. And I think those are just, ⁓
Andras Lenart: Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Rupert: it's going to be a slower uptake for the system, which is probably fair, given like you and I are on the bleeding edge. We're early adopters of things. We are willing to try out new software developments and fringe concepts. And we have the discernment and the capacity to sort of play with those edges. Whereas maybe the average clinician doesn't have the technological expertise or like know-how. ⁓ And so it's I think it would be unwise to sort of recommend that recommend. ⁓ Most clinicians use something like chachi BT carte blanche to like, what should I do with this client? Because yeah, it might rob them of their own opportunities to learn or to to engage meaningfully. But I but I totally agree with what you're saying. And I think that that future is really intriguing to me. And I would honestly, this is a very tender and precious dream to me and I'm thinking about it often. I have since I was a teenager and I don't have many avenues to discuss it, but the idea of being part of a team that helped create those sorts of things that would be so amazing. would love, love, love, love, love, love to help being one, the guiding hands to help the world benefit from a tool, a companion that increases therapist efficacy as well as is on demand and low cost for clients while delivering reliable high value. Like, wow, what a better future that would be.
Andras Lenart: Yeah, I mean that would be about as high impact as it gets.
Rupert: And to that end, I really appreciate and admire that you are one of those people who are trying to find ways of interfacing with the AIs and ⁓ building that relationship and learning the discernment of where the edge is, what feels good and expansive here, so that you can ⁓ provide better outcomes for the people you work with. And I hope that they are seeing the benefits and are ⁓ appreciative of it.
Andras Lenart: you sharing that.
Rupert: Yeah, we got a bunch of I got a bunch of other ideas that we can go into for AI stuff. ⁓ One thing I got two real quick ones that I want to share. And then I would love to hear you talk about Claude a bit because I'm not super familiar with Claude. I've tried it out a couple times. But I'm a chat GBT guy open AI for the win. First got super search on open AI when they released their hide and seek program. Long, long time ago. ⁓ and I feel a certain infinity. But quick practical tip for you and the listeners because this this shit just blows my mind. If you ever have a syllabus, or you're given like a list of dates for something that you need to participate, maybe it's a workshop or whatever, like, let's say you sign up for a workshop, they don't create a Google Calendar for you or whatever. But they're like, Hey, you need to be in this place on these dates. Here's the zoom link, even maybe whatever. And amazing thing you can do is feed it into an LLM and say, Hey, create a Google calendar entry for me based on the information in here. And then you can, it will literally create, I think it's an ICS file and you can save it to your desktop. then in Google calendar, upload that file and auto populate your calendar with all the entries. And so when you're doing that, you can even say like, here's how I like it to be structured. Like the name, I want an emoji at the front or whatever it is. Give me a notification a day before so I don't forget. You can define all those parameters and it will auto do it for you based on the information that's in whatever you submit, which is a huge time saver.
Andras Lenart: Yeah, I hadn't even thought of that. Yeah.
Rupert: Dude, it's crazy. It's so useful. Like I'm managing. So I'm working at the hospital. I'm doing a practicum at UBC in the clinical counseling department. I'm attending school. I'm doing an extra course to do my capstone. And then I'm ⁓ managing all my like personal things. And basically each of those I can now just throw at the AI when something comes up where it's a recurring or multiple like event. And it just I don't have to go into manually process any of it.
Andras Lenart: Beautiful. Yeah.
Rupert: Dude, I love it. Other quick hit is in chat, GBT, there's this option to do called projects, which is essentially like you define a little workspace and then you can give it separate instructions. This is like a folder basically. And so I've created one called communications manager. And in the instructions for that specific folder project, I said, Hey, act as my communications manager. I really like these kinds of messages. And then I gave a bunch of instructions for the tone and the style. So I can include that the prompt I use in my, ⁓ in the show notes. But then when I get say an email or a correspondence that I need to respond to, rather than me drafting the message out, I can throw it into a new chat in that folder. and give it a little bit of context. It'll be like, Hey, this is my boss asking me for a meeting. I want to respond with a possible availability. It can be really, my response can be very superficial, like very limited details. And it will write out in my voice in the voice that we've co-created ⁓ an eloquent response that's often superior to my own. And I have gotten to the point where ⁓ I don't need to do many revisions because I've spent so much time defining that voice. ⁓ And this solves the problem that if you just say, write a message to my boss, there's a lot of back and forth and stuff. But at some point in the future, I see this being baked into just like every texting app we have. ⁓ I w you won't have to copy and paste back and forth, but yeah, just putting it out to people. If you're doing a lot of corresponds through text messages or emails or whatever, this is, ⁓ holy cow. I'm really impressed by the, quality and the ease, the speed of the communications. It helps me feel more articulate.
Andras Lenart: And I use it for something similar. Yeah.
Rupert: Cool. Do you with I've heard, and maybe we can pivot to the Claude piece here. I've heard that Claude just out of the box has a better tone for how it writes and it sounds more human and stuff. Has that been your finding? And are you just using like the sort of default voice or
Andras Lenart: Yeah, that's definitely been my experience. yeah, because I used ChatGPT kind of for the first couple of years, and it's been over the last maybe six months that I've switched to Claude primarily. ⁓ And so what I prefer about Claude is, yeah, the writing tone. Like, it just feels like it writes better. And so that's even if I'm writing, wanting to write something out. or even in just when I'm interacting with it, it feels more natural, it feels more human. ⁓ And then I have found that it seems better at challenging me. And this is even, you know, like I've given Chachi Petit and Claude the same kind of prompts where I'm, you know, I am telling it to, ⁓ like, I think there was some interpersonal thing that I was talking to it about at some point.
Rupert: Mm-hmm. ⁓ nice.
Andras Lenart: And, you know, so I was curious what the differences would be. gave them, I told them both to challenge me. And again, like ChatGPT just didn't seem to do a very good job or didn't really like critically. Yeah, exactly. It didn't really critically push back. Whereas ⁓ Claude was, was doing much more of that. So it, I've just come to enjoy using it more given, given both the tone, which I think just kind of.
Rupert: Yes, man. Mm-hmm.
Andras Lenart: bleeds into everything else. some of the pushback or the analytical dimension of it. ⁓
Rupert: Mm-hmm. Cool. Yeah. And just defining here this, this problem, at least at the end of 2025 of sick of fancy, which is one of those words that we probably heard once in a fucking, I don't know, William Shakespeare play or something, but I don't know the term sick of fancy is, was all that commonplace. ⁓ but now it's so relevant for LLMs because they all have this problem just trying to please us, just trying to be Yes, man. And it's so aggravating. Like, God, like, shut up. Stop telling me every idea that I have is perfect. ⁓ I know it's not. That's why I'm trying to workshop it.
Andras Lenart: You
Rupert: So yeah, I'm stoked that you're finding better results there with Cloud.
Andras Lenart: The one thing that I still preferred with Chad GPT was the UI and the speed of it. That just feels preferable.
Rupert: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And I know that Claude's doing right now a bunch of stuff with like MCP, like, ⁓ trying to get different skills and access to different tools and stuff. But man, OpenAI is crushing it with like, they have a study mode baked in that to Chach-BT that I think most folks don't even know about this stage. Its memory ⁓ is incredible. It works really well. ⁓ well, it still obviously has huge faults, but it, it's as far as I'm aware, the best in class at the moment. ⁓ I mean, there's a lot to like about. Touch WT. ⁓ Any other thoughts on LLMs?
Andras Lenart: No, no, mean, think that's it.
Rupert: ⁓ one other use case is really useful. So somebody that I'm close friends with was having a problem in, I say problem, I was having a problem with the way that they are conversations were going because they had a habit of in sentences or paragraphs, losing the sort of specific name that they were referring to of so if they were talking about someone or something, at some point, they would just start saying like it or they but there'd be multiple nouns in the sentences or the paragraphs. So it was really hard to follow which one they were actually referring to. And so in talking to them, they acknowledged that it was ⁓ an issue that other people had had that difficulty articulating themselves being clear. ⁓ So long story short, I asked if they would like some help, because I remember the lessons from my early days in like English class and stuff where we learned about how to do this. And they're like, ⁓ yeah, I didn't ever, I never had those. I would love to learn a bit more. And so in the course of like 30 minutes, 45 minutes with Chachi BT, we made a three page workbook complete with images that told a story of this person going on like a quest to learn it. And then they, Chachi BT came out with like a lesson plan of like, okay, here's the five lessons we want to hit increasing. levels of difficulty that introduced first introduces the concept provides early wins gets into a bit more nitty gritty stuff then gets a really hard one thing that gets to a really hard like final boss battle. And dude, it was incredible, like the lesson planning capacity there mixed with like having images of the person interacting with some of their favorite objects and the images and stuff as in this narrative structure. So like, there was a dog that joined them because they love dogs. And then It had like them wearing running shoes because they're they love trail running like all these different things. And when I was nervous that when I gave them this workbook that they were going to be offended that I used AI, and they loved it. They didn't care because they're like, ⁓ my god, it's me and I'm on this quest. And they sat down and they did the whole workbook. And they like had fun with it. And importantly, it worked like they they demonstrated by the end of it way better understanding the concept than previously.
Andras Lenart: Yeah, another another great use case. One more actually comes to mind for me on that is the use of LLMs for like, kind of Socratic dialogue. So having it ask you questions, say you're trying to learn about some topic. ⁓ know, recently I was doing this for ⁓ predictive processing and
Rupert: Mm-hmm.
Andras Lenart: And, you know, so it would be as easy as just like putting in the theme and like help me learn about this through, you know, Socratic questioning. And so it'll, yeah, yeah. So it would be like asking you questions to query what you know and then giving you like guidance based on that. So the learning becomes much more of an active, ⁓ you know, by
Rupert: which is just defining it.
Andras Lenart: bidirectional thing as opposed to just having like feed you information.
Rupert: Give and take, yeah. Sure. So there's didactic teaching or which is somebody's lecture ring. ⁓ So chronic, which is this back and forth use of questions. Yeah, great. On that note, have you used notebook LLM or sorry, notebook LLM?
Andras Lenart: Yeah. Yeah. It's not one that I use a lot. I've tried it a couple of times.
Rupert: Sure. So the recent iterations of it, if you're trying to learn, people out there, if you're trying to learn anything, try notebook LM. It's a Google's response to this and it's really aimed squarely at the education space. Not only does it do this sort of Socratic questioning, it can do flashcards and surface like different key ideas that it then quizzes you on, cetera. But also you can generate podcasts where you give it prompts. So like if you give it a chapter from a book, you can ask it to create a podcast and you can tell it in this podcast, focus on ⁓ like these specific questions or this element. And recently they introduced the ability, it can create PowerPoints. And so it can create visuals as well. ⁓ Holy crap, it's so useful. On a similar domain, ChatGBT has now a study and learned, which is specifically set up for. So chronic questioning, but yeah, man, just generally hear that that personal tutor space is so rich for ⁓ development. And I'm so excited for all the people who are going to be able to learn. Man, so good.
Andras Lenart: Yeah, I wish I had that in school. Yeah.
Rupert: Sure. Very quick recommendation. And if folks are interested in that specific topic of learning and tutoring, especially for youth, there is a really interesting book that I found. I'm just going to double check the name, but I think it's, it's got a nauseous title. So the book is ⁓ called The Diamond Age and it's by Neil Stevenson. It's not the best book. I'm just gonna be honest. ⁓ I finished it, no problem. And I thoroughly enjoyed it, but there's lots of points where I found it to drag or kind of like just feel a bit bloated. ⁓ But it is ⁓ the concept underneath it all is this idea of what if you had a personal companion? that was an AI that sole job was to mentor and tutor you to be the best human possible. And the way it presents this like sort of genie or companion ⁓ is just like, I can totally see it happening. And I think we're not far away. And as a quick sort of connection there, this book is where the idea of a Kindle came from. Because this AI that ⁓ in the book, a young lady gets a little girl. is an e reader basically that can change its shape and can re like change all the words on his page and can actually like do videos and sound and stuff. And man, I've fucking 10 years, kids are going to have things like this little iPads that ⁓ engage with them and try and mentor them and it's going to be magic. So if you want to cite a vision of the future, check it out.
Andras Lenart: Speaking of visions of the future, I'm curious about the... I did mention this to you before, but you've spoken to me at length about Tesla in the past, so I'm... Yeah, I'm curious if you can speak to Tesla, the Tesla bots, and I guess the...
Rupert: Mm-hmm.
Andras Lenart: what your sense is of the advantage that they have versus all the Chinese ⁓ manufacturers where I think they have industrial advantage.
Rupert: Okay. Um, so just quick synopsis, my theory and hypothesis with Tesla leading me to seriously explore investing in them, uh, going back to their debut in 2016. Um, or sorry, my, my first investment in them 2016, um, was that autonomous driving was a huge industry that had a lot of value that was ready to be captured and that Tesla was uniquely situated to, do that. with the advent of electric vehicles and the cost declines there and how they this robot basically like an electronic car that had a brains and everything ⁓ was seemed like it was on track to take that crown. So right now, I think the biggest thing that matters for Tesla is Robo taxi, like 90 % like most of their value is predicated on this idea that they're going to introduce robo taxis that are nearly ubiquitous. And what I mean by that is that they cover like most of say North America in the next 10 years. And I think they'll eliminate like most of Uber and stuff. ⁓ That's still my hypothesis. And I think we're probably about two years out, I would say by 2027, where most people in most cities can reliably get a robo taxi from Tesla, similar to how they do today with Uber. ⁓ we can go into all the math and the reasons why I think that, but, ⁓ that's, would just highlight for myself. It's all about robo taxi. The idea of bots, ⁓ I think is looking ahead 10, 15 years. I don't think they're relevant right now. I don't think they're doing any meaningful work. ⁓ and maybe I'm just a cantankerous old man. ⁓ but the limitation there largely is the dexterity of hands. The hands on these robots don't work. They just don't have the articulation and, ⁓ the strength that, ⁓ human hands do like, and I actually know somebody who's an engineer at a startup for humanoid robots here in Vancouver. And he specifically works on the hands. And I knew about this sort of constraint before, like, I don't know if you know this, but one of open eyes very first projects was building a robot hand. That was like, literally that one of their first main cracks at how to create a GI artificial general intelligence was can we create a robotic hand? And they fucked it up. It was really hard. ⁓ And right now, it, they just can't do meaningful work. Like we're seeing examples of them folding laundry and stuff and they do it quite shoddily. But where I think robotics right now is, is they can do, ⁓ things like moving cars around or automated assembly lines can pick and have you specialized tools to pick up specific audit objects in repeatable fashions. But the sort of, ⁓ primary sort of engagement with the worlds if we want them to be moving things around of hands. I think this is a really hard just engineering task. It's not to do with intelligence or batteries. It's just like we don't actually know how to build something that meets all the criteria that a human hand does. We know how to make pincers or suction cups.
Andras Lenart: Yeah, okay, so. I guess I'm asking specifically about the bots because I had heard that Elon Musk in some of the presentations he was giving, he was saying that his sole focus is, or his primary focus is on bots, and he thinks that that's gonna be 90 % of the future. ⁓ And I don't know if that was including the taxis ⁓ or if that was independent of it, but...
Rupert: Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah. Mm-hmm.
Andras Lenart: ⁓ So, yeah, you're right, that might be, you know, five, 10, 15 years into the future. But
Rupert: Just for context here, in 2017, Elon was saying that we're on the verge of solving self-driving.
Andras Lenart: Right.
Rupert: Yeah. And there was a lot longer of a lead up of, ⁓ other projects trying to solve self-driving before, compared to trying to solve humanoid robots that there was a lot of different organizations that were on the world having thrown a lot of brain power at that already. But we're starting from a smaller base with humanoid robots and maybe AIs will come in and be some Oracle that like provides a God, a sky hook and like pulls us to some new height magically. ⁓ it's possible. But also self-driving was a software problem, not a hardware problem.
Andras Lenart: in your mind it really is the hands that are the constraint because I mean I so I assume you've seen the I think figure two had done a demonstration where it had the had the robot picking up eggs even and not not crushing them like having enough like sensitivity in terms of the pressure that it provides
Rupert: Mm-hmm. Sure. You know, I'll put in the show notes ⁓ in 2000, I think it was 15. There was a robot that, surgery robot that can cut within some ridiculous tolerance, like a micron thick or whatever, like it has a scalpel and autonomously it can do surgery where it peels a grape just by cutting the skin on the grape with a scalpel. Incredibly, incredibly fine dexterity there. but in the real world, it's not a controlled laboratory situation where a grape is being suspended perfectly, the perfect size grape in the perfect size container without wind or dust or all that stuff. ⁓ And from everything that I've seen, the hands, so like, We have to really get into the biomechanics of how hands work, but you have, it's so easy to take them for granted because everybody, most people have them overborn with them, et cetera. But you have. Strength across like the number of degrees of articulation, like the points in which they change or bend is wild. Like there's very few mechanical things in the world that move with such, ⁓ so many points of change. And so. what they're doing right now is like, okay, we can't do 100 points of articulation. We can do 18. We can do like we can put that many little motors in it or whatever. But then to have them all have the ability to, to exert force reliably, like, we haven't solved that yet. We're not even close, like talking to the engineers, like it's really, really hard. The other part says your hands have pressure sensors. So your skin tells you when you're applying force to something, which you can kind of mimic by resistance of applying force and then, ⁓ but that's really hard to get onto a robot as well. They don't have skin that can touch as accurately. There's also heat and cold and pain. Those things are all like really hard to mimic. ⁓ So I think that as far as I'm aware right now, from everything that I've looked at, Like we've seen examples of humanoid robots doing backflips to doing like dense moves, break moves, all those things. Those are really easy to do in demos. They're really hard to do in real life. I'm not aware of any demonstrations that show robots doing these things in situations that aren't artificially controlled. And so maybe it'll be useful to frame this rather than me just making assertions in the seventies or eighties. they thought they came up with true AI. And they showed it by having this little robot in this like toy world. And the toy world had like, there was a ball and there's a bed and all these different things. And they would put the robot down at starting point and they'd say, Hey, go move the ball to the basket. And the robot would walk over and it was kind of clumsy, but it walked to like a tin man picked up the ball, turn around, walked four pieces and put the ball in the box. And everyone applauded and they're like, Holy shit, like We've just solved the economy. Wow, Tom, you did a great job. And then they're like, let's see it again. And then the grad students were like, okay. And so they picked up the robot and they're like, well, hopefully the battery doesn't die this time. And they put the robot down. And then this time when they hit play, one of the people watching who was leaning over his pen fell out of his pocket and fell into the world. And the robot walks over and it completely misses the pen and just trips over it and then falls over and starts kicking his legs on the ground. And so this is a apocryphal story, but it's also representative of this finding of what's called toy worlds, which in if you because at that time, all they were doing was hard coding like each step and under certain constraints in certain environments with everything kept neutral, it can solve the problems. But in the messiness of the real world, It turns out they don't have the adaptability, the flexibility. I mean, they can conceptually they can, there's nothing stopping them. But currently the software is both like not finished, but also the hardware, like specifically the hands. It's like we're nowhere close to having those where we'd want them to be. And I could be wrong. I'd love to be wrong. ⁓ And I've seen the figure thing and also I've seen it try and fold laundry. I don't know if it was figure, but I've seen many, of these humanoids try and do manually dexterous tasks and they just don't work.
Andras Lenart: Yeah, I've seen some of the laundry folding as well and that was in a pretty sight.
Rupert: No, like Amazon, like Amazon would be so stoked to have this stuff, right? But it's just not, if you look at the robots that are actually using, they're like, ⁓ they look like battle bots where they rip around on wheels and then they have a plank on the top and a platform comes on and then the plank tips to throw the package off, but they don't have any grippers or ⁓ they have very minimal ones, very rudimentary because that's what works at this point.
Andras Lenart: Mm-hmm.
Rupert: And if you have a bunch of boxes that are the same size, most of the time are similar sizes. That's a, you can do that.
Andras Lenart: Yeah, okay. I mean, we'll see. I'm still somewhat optimistic, but yeah. Yeah.
Rupert: Yeah, sure. And I would love to be wrong again. And I think I think they will work. I just think it's going to take based on Elon time, which is a very real thing. I think it's won't be until what is it? I'll call it right now. 2040 will align. Yeah, we're gonna I'm gonna align with Kurzweil here. I think we'll have some versions of it in 2035. But I think it won't be like ubiquitous until 2040. And I think in the short term, like
Andras Lenart: 2040, okay. Okay.
Rupert: that ⁓ robot taxis are gonna be way less sexy and magic because they're just replacing cars. But I think that will radically change the world.
Andras Lenart: maybe reformulating the original question there. ⁓ What is the advantage of you that Tesla has versus again all these other like Chinese BYD or all those other companies that are also intending towards similar projects?
Rupert: Sure. So BYD, one of the biggest companies in the world based in China, they're responsible for some absurd number of the amount of vehicles produced in the world. Now, if you're living in the States, you probably don't know about them because we have embargoes that stop them from coming over basically same with Canada. ⁓ Just on that note, there's some really sketchy things happening in Canada with some organizations that are probably funded by the Chinese Communist Party to try and convince Canadians as if it's a grassroots movement. So like literally intellectual cyber warfare. ⁓ that we should allow BYD to sell cars in Canada, which if we did that, say goodbye to our whole auto industry, cause they, ⁓ for a bunch of reasons, Chinese cars are way cheaper. ⁓ so please don't vote Chinese cars into North America. ⁓ so BYD is very, very, they have the advantage of having their nation state behind them. They're literally a strategic branch of the Chinese government and China a long time ago. going back to our goal plan, due review, came up with 15 year plans where they identified key emerging markets that they wanted to capitalize on. And so they basically took their brightest minds and said in 15 years, what are going to be the new bottlenecks of the world productivity? And so a bunch of those weren't real, but some of them were. And China's done really, really, really well at getting a monopoly on them. And the biggest one is batteries. China makes pretty much all the batteries in the world. And they have all the plants, all the machinery that does the refinement. they like a battery in China costs like 30 % of what it would cost to make in Canada or the US, maybe even less. ⁓ Same with like solar panels. And yeah, it's pretty alarming based on the world's increasing direction of electrification. So shout out to Tesla because they're really the only ⁓ well, not the only, but they're the main sort of not Chinese company that's, ⁓ trying to keep pace and lead the field. And I don't think they get enough credit for that. ⁓ so with that B O B O I D and companies like Xiaomi, ⁓ X I A O ⁓ I are doing a really, really good job of sort of discovering new ways of building electronics, things like cars and, ⁓ and big large machineries. ⁓ so they're. They are pushing the envelope and they're a real threat. And I would threat in the sense like competitively. ⁓ and I would not say that they should be counted out on any of these things where they're maybe not as advanced is generating novel intellectual property. Cause the Chinese playbook right now is to take the research and development from Europe and North America. And then they don't care about. copyright or that sort of thing. So they take their information, they steal it, like literally, and then they iterate on it, having not had to sink all that cost into discovery and experimentation. And then they expand it from there. And so we're seeing like in the AI space, things like Gwen ⁓ by Alibaba or ⁓ Kling K2, these different models that are cost pennies to make literally like pennies compared to the money that companies like open AI are putting in or Microsoft or Google. And they perform like 70 % is good. 80 % is good. And it's like, oh, wait, one person paid $1,000, one person paid $1. And it does 70 % of it. Like, that's a huge advantage. And so when it comes to industrial manufacturing of things like robots, if There was a, if it was a solved problem, they would be able to create probably a version of it. That's not as good, but maybe better in some ways. And it would cost a lot less. So that's a real concern. wouldn't, I wouldn't ⁓ write that out. Like to put this in perspective, if we in Canada today, we're allowed to buy Chinese EVs. There would be no more Honda. There would be no more, like people would be very reluctant to buy. EVs from any other company, maybe Tesla, but Kia Hyundai, these, the value comparison compared to Chinese EVs is like, it costs half as much and they're better. It's wild how, how far ahead they are. It's really easy to downplay this because so long China has been this like third world or whatever, but they're, they're not anymore. They're big, big boys on the international stage and they're, they're quite formidable. Yeah, so ⁓ if Optimus, the bot from Tesla, becomes the first one that works, which I think is a high chance, ⁓ they would be just trying to stay ahead in the same way of continuing to push the envelope in terms of the software. But ⁓ their costs just would never be as cheap. They wouldn't have as much support and access to raw resources.
Andras Lenart: Yeah, okay. Okay. So there's no, there's no like definitive advantage. Competitive advantage. Yeah, right.
Rupert: embargoes. So like right now, the American government's really trying to push DJI, the drone manufacturer who makes like, again, like 90 % of the world's drones, trying to stop them from being sold in North America, because they're friggin drones, they're flying around everywhere. And there's good reason to believe that they could very easily be weaponized by the Chinese government, they could be collecting data, like all this different stuff. And also, if there was a war, If you have the company in your home turf that makes all the world's like the next wars are going to be fought with drones. So, ⁓ yeah, there's real concerns there. Like that they've, like I said, it got a monopoly on these key industries already.
Andras Lenart: This is some good optimism.
Rupert: Yeah, straight up. ⁓ I'd love to pivot a little bit to, ⁓ another sort of maybe financially connected idea, but I'm going to giggle. Just, just even thinking about this, ⁓ the NFTs, which nobody's talking about NFTs right now, but of a cock punch. So for the audience, folks who may not know cock punch, ⁓ which is a hilarious name, ⁓ and also childish and inappropriate is from, ⁓ Tim Ferris. ⁓ He released it a couple of years ago, like three or four years ago now. ⁓ I think, and Andre and I have talked about it a few times because different people, as with all NFTs claim this to be a scam. ⁓ they talked about it being a fad and just a money grab. And I would like to say that now is a great time. If you have any spare cash to maybe consider, ⁓ purchasing a cock of your own. ⁓ so yeah, these are little JPEGs, ⁓ NFTs that you can find on sites like OpenSea. They live on Ethereum and each, I can't keep saying this, but each rooster, each cock, ⁓ is like a rooster that has different traits. So they're basically warriors that are set in a world where there's like gladiator battles and stuff. And nobody's talking about them. They are, it's basically dead. Except for Tim Ferriss, if those of you who don't know him, productivity guru dude. ⁓ all around nice guy, is been hinting low key that he has huge plans for this and that he's going to revive it and turn it into, ⁓ turn it into something big, not financial advice. I don't know what he's going to do. There's no guarantees here. He's very explicit about, please do not spend money. You can't afford to lose. This is a game. It's fun. It's silly. ⁓ and he's not promising to make anyone money at all. But based on his rock record, I have the sense that ⁓ there might be some games that come out of this. think it's likely going to be a game of some kind. And at that point, I can see the value of these little assets ⁓ going from a place where nobody cares about them, and there's maybe a couple hundred people who remember them and are still thinking about it, to being like a couple thousand, maybe more. And at that point, the price might change.
Andras Lenart: What's the... Do you have a sense of the current floor price?
Rupert: Yeah, it's a 0.04. So it's a couple hundred dollars. And the hard thing is that most of the good ones, like there's people who hang out and try and scoop up if good ones go on sale. And I'm a part of a couple of discords and stuff where a a couple of groups where like there's collectors and people are really paying attention to people who have staked a lot of money on this very quietly. But the thing that's quite nice is as opposed to most crypto is it's very much not hype driven. Like there's a sense of like people are patient and like love their relationship with this human, artist who's creating this project. And they're just excited to have some way of supporting and being a part of it. ⁓ so I, yeah, I've scooped up for them and, ⁓ probably paid too much for what they were worth. And maybe I'm just trying to inflate, inflate the price so I can get out from it. But, ⁓ I generally I'm looking forward to see what just happens with the project. And I'm excited for the possibility of like having some very small exposure to it, especially if it's only a couple hundred dollars.
Andras Lenart: Wonderful. That was such an interesting project, so I am curious to see how that plays out.
Rupert: And just, ⁓ yeah, I know when I give you a recommendation about things like getting your name registered and how that paid off for the air drops and stuff, ⁓ I think this is one of those moments where people aren't looking, but I think it's a seed that at some point might blossom.
Andras Lenart: Yeah, I do remember you convinced me on Tesla way back, so that proved good.
Rupert: Sure. ⁓ Just being mindful of time here, want to maybe start to move towards a wrap up, but I wonder if you, I've got a bunch of other things that I think every time we talk, there's a sense that I'd to hear more about what's going on in your world and yeah, do you any other topics you want to
Andras Lenart: Nothing that feels alive or pressing right now.
Rupert: I'm curious to hear just like a little synopsis on like, what's your world looking like at the moment? Do you have any, do you have any big projects on the go or any aspirations that you're working towards that you want to share? I'm sure you've got lots of stuff, but.
Andras Lenart: Yeah, lots of stuff. Nothing I'm actually feeling inclined to share right now though. Yeah.
Rupert: OK, yeah, fair enough. ⁓ I've got ⁓ just a random recommendation that I thought you might like. ⁓ And that's been so valuable to me. Have you ever gone down the rabbit hole of trying to figure out like how to speak or engage, like sort of charisma work or like, I don't know, there's so many different ways of arriving at this topic.
Andras Lenart: Yeah, I've definitely looked into or at times practiced at different approaches for that, but yeah, curious what your recommendation there is.
Rupert: ⁓ have you ever looked at specifically like versions of that for teaching teaching or presenting? Like being in front of a group or whatever.
Andras Lenart: Not as far as I can recall.
Rupert: Okay. Yeah. one of, found this YouTube video many years ago and I keep going back to it and then I'll forget about it go back and be like, ⁓ my God, this is, this is the best thing ever. It's called how to speak, how to speak. And it's, ⁓ released on YouTube by MIT MIT courseware. I'll put in the show notes, but it's just like, this professor? don't remember his name. He's got a punch. He's got a big belly. And he's got like his slacks pulled up above his, above his belly button. And he's at the front of the lecture hall and he just gives a masterclass. Like the whole purpose of the lecture is how to speak. If you're trying to be like a teacher giving her a lesson. And the cool thing is that he just embodies it. He, the whole lesson is him talking about it conceptually, but then also doing it in practice. And so I was curious. ⁓ I didn't know how that. aligns with your goals or like projects that you got going on. But ⁓ if there's ever a desire to increase those skills, I think that's a really awesome resource.
Andras Lenart: Yeah, I appreciate that. mean, better communication is always helpful.
Rupert: Mm-hmm. He's got a line in there, which is the quality of your life will be determined by how you speak, how you write, and how you think in that order. And don't know, I agree with that, but I think that those three things are, I agree with the sentiment that they're essential for. quality presentations and communication and connection with the world.
Andras Lenart: What have you taken away from it in terms of how you communicate, how you speak?
Rupert: Hmm. It comes up for me mostly around what I see people doing on a day-to-day basis, things that we were taught in school. like a PowerPoint and having bullets and like how to structure your thoughts and seeing the ways that those are effective and useful and easy to implement and valuable for all those reasons. But then how they diverge from how I best engage with or hear other people and just feeling that. that constant tension of like, I don't actually enjoy this PowerPoint right now. And then like, well, what would be a better version of it? And this guy, this wonderful, pantalooned fellow, ⁓ he seems to have a very intimate understanding of the grammar of our minds and our hearts for engaging with information. And so he demonstrates like 13 different small adjustments you can make. Um, and so for instance, one of them is, um, he's very visual. He's very, uh, he's using demonstrations and drawings and moving around in space. He's not standing in the center of the stage, stationary and static, but he's constantly moving and he'll just pick up an item. And sometimes he won't refer to it and it won't be relevant. but it's intentional and it retains and engages our intention. And so in a world where there's like TikToks and reels and all these different arenas where people are practicing how to engage attention, he does so in a way that I think is very organic and feels less ⁓ like I'm being hijacked and more like it's a storyteller, somebody who's ⁓ inviting and meeting me where I'm at and is able to deliver the information they're intentionally designing, but respectfully and creatively. And if you even watch the first 10 minutes, I'd love to hear sort of like your immediate response. Like you should live tweet it and give me your, I'd love to hear that.
Andras Lenart: Yeah, I'll take a look at the first 10 minutes at least.
Rupert: Cool. Um, one of the things I really want to thank you for the recommendation a few years ago of, um, using Nicorette as a neurotropic or a focusing aid. I've, um, thanked you before, but this is my first time publicly and just, yeah, it's been the biggest change in my life legitimately.
Andras Lenart: Yeah, yeah, of course, of course, I get the affiliate payments from the nicotine companies for that.
Rupert: Thanks for getting me hooked on nicotine, Andras. Five cents from every piece of gum I chew.
Andras Lenart: What are you using it for in what context?
Rupert: Do you to give a quick spiel? I'm not asking you to endorse anything, but like the way that you shared with me that you personally use it or that I might try out. If not, I can do it, but.
Andras Lenart: Yeah, I honestly can't recall what I said. ⁓
Rupert: Yeah, sure. ⁓ My understanding or my recollection was that you had said like, ⁓ it's really your you'd been experimenting with it based off probably some obscure blog or I'm not sure where you found that information. I know you did a bunch of research on neurotrophics or ⁓ these memory and focusing tools. ⁓ But Nicorette you can buy it's usually for gum or sorry for smoking cessation. So quitting smoking, but Interestingly, it's also a very low toxicity way of ingesting nicotine that doesn't have the same sort of health concerns that smoking or vaping does. So you get nicotine in your ⁓ blood system without a bunch of the toxic chemicals that are commonly associated. And nicotine has been used for thousands of years because it tightens our focus. So with the neurosciences, it reduces acetylcholine, which is like you can think of the spotlight in your mind. Is it a tight beam like a flashlight or is it like a wide beam, like an ambient glow and a set of calling from nicotine helps you like look at a page and keep your eyes on the page. And Jesus, wow, for me and my ADHD, that's, um, that is definitely the biggest thing that I get distracted by. can just bounce between so many topics. And so now between, uh, before a focus work session, maybe once every two days or so I'll take a piece of Nick rat, but you recommended I get the four milligram one and then I'll usually bite that in half. It's the most cost effective ⁓ tuck it in my cheek. And then the nicotine from that gets absorbed in my bloodstream and I'm just focused and I feel like I'm it's a way easier access point to flow.
Andras Lenart: Yeah, that's, that's, that's really good to hear. The, the one thing I'd add that, that I like the reason that I found it so helpful is that it helps you focus, but it doesn't, it doesn't really drive that. Like it's a calm focus. And yeah, which is, which is distinct from, you know, what might happen with, with other psycho stimulants or caffeine or anything like that. So it does seem to, ⁓
Rupert: Mm-hmm, which is the goal.
Andras Lenart: Like even for athletic performance, find it can help get in into a more of a flow or even more of a of like sense of embodiment at times as well.
Rupert: Yeah. it narrows the aperture and narrows, it tightens the focus And so I don't know about you, Andres, but ⁓ if I take something like Ritalin, which I've been sometimes I get way too agitated. It's like taking meth. It's very similar molecularly to speed. And like, yeah, I can run through a brick wall and I'll work harder, but also I can be like irritable. can be destructible. I'm like very aroused, like hyper.
Andras Lenart: Yeah, same drawbacks I notice. And then versus caffeine, ⁓ caffeine I just find, if I ingest it anything other than the first third or first quarter of the day, it can impact my sleep. so I find the, because of the half life, the duration of effect for nicotine is so much shorter. ⁓ It's like the tolerance for taking it is much ⁓ greater.
Rupert: Mm-hmm. Yeah, a hundred percent. And that's one of wonderful things like at the end of the day, it's 6 PM, 7 PM, 8 PM. I can still take a piece of Nicorette. One of the beautiful things is like the half-life I find is like 60 to 90 minutes. And it just, so it's very like, okay, I need a focus work out right now. I need to drive. I'm a bit fatigued. It's wonderful for that. It also suppresses appetite. So I'm not going to be distracted by like, Oh, am I a little bit hungry?
Andras Lenart: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Rupert: It just times the focus to what I'm doing. So yeah, again, thank you. I'm not recommending to other folks that they necessarily get addicted to big old tobacco, but the health risks here for myself personally are quite minimal. find the biggest concern would be the habit forming. And I know that you've talked about different people starting to just recreationally do a bunch of nicotine or zins like pouches. ⁓ And so I think for myself, I have to be quite careful about setting rules and how much I use it and avoiding using it just recreationally indiscriminately. Cause that there is definitely a temptation there. It's quite a, like you said, a calm focus and that's a really nice state to be in.
Andras Lenart: Yeah, and I have noticed it with some others that I've introduced it to, where it is easy to over-consume it, to over-rely on it.
Rupert: Mm-hmm. Yeah. What's your sort of consumption? Like how much?
Andras Lenart: It varies widely, but I just make sure I don't take it every day, that I have at least a few days off a week. And then there might be weeks where I don't use it at all, and then some weeks where I rely on it a lot.
Rupert: Mm-hmm. Nice. That's great, dude. That's wonderful. Yeah. So it's great lover for folks who can use it that way. Well, then anything else before we wrap up?
Andras Lenart: No, no, I think this has been great.
Rupert: ⁓ it's so nice to talk to you, dude. And yeah, it's, it's a difficult being in different cities. I know we don't cross paths that much at the moment in real life, but I can't wait till the next time we do, we get to either adventure or party or do whatever feels good.
Andras Lenart: Absolutely. I'm looking forward to that as well.
Rupert: Thanks for the conversation, Andres.
Andras Lenart: Thank you.
Andras Lenart: Good to see you as well, Blake.
Rupert: I'm really, really excited to catch up with you and hear what's going on in your world and share some of the awesome things that we've been collecting since our last conversations.
Andras Lenart: ways.
Rupert: Before we jump in, I'd love to start as we do with some gratitude and intentions. So yeah, would you like to start or would you like me?
Andras Lenart: Yeah, I probably prefer you starting.
Rupert: Yeah, no worries. I am so grateful that here in Vancouver, ⁓ it's been, I feel like the climate is changing and there's way more California than it, than I remember from my childhood, way drier and warmer. And I'm really grateful for that because it seems to help everybody that I come in contact with feel better and more calm and empowered. And that sort of lack of stress from not being constantly under dark clouds is something I really appreciate.
Andras Lenart: Yeah, God bless climate change.
Rupert: So glad we've been working towards that for so long.
Andras Lenart: Yeah, consistent effort pays off, right? So for me... Most of the gratitude I feel right now is I've been coming out of a cold flu, something like that, and finally on the tail end of that. So it always feels like such a good reminder of the importance of being healthy and what that actually allows for you in terms of your participation with your life, or my life, I should say.
Rupert: Mmm.
Andras Lenart: Yeah. Yeah.
Rupert: Yeah, it's nice to be healthy. ⁓ My intention for this conversation is to elicit and draw out some of your unique wisdom and insights, because I know you're a wonderful collector of curious ideas, and I'm so excited to hear the stuff that you've been coming across, and to share some of those few things that I've found in my journeys with the audience so that ultimately they can be along for the ride.
Andras Lenart: Yeah, my intention... would be pretty similar, I'd say. then overarchingly, just to see how this kind of conversation flows. I this is the first time that I'm doing this kind of thing, so curious what this experience is like.
Rupert: Wonderful. And maybe we can disclose a bit some of the secret intention to the audience here is what is this thing that you're doing for the first time and that we're doing for the first time.
Andras Lenart: Yeah, we're recording a podcast on... We've historically had conversations once every few months. It's been pretty interesting, and so the thought was to do this in a recorded format.
Rupert: Yeah, so we have these phone calls where we check in with each other and we give rapid briefs about what's occurred in our lives. And so often they're not captured in a way that anyone else can hear our dirty jokes or enjoy the different insights that we're coming across. So a little homage, I guess, to the random show by Tim Ferriss and Kevin, what was his last name? ⁓ Kev Kev, we'll say. ⁓ But they do a wonderful similar thing. so hopefully here we can have fun with it. So what should we jump into? What's our getting in point?
Andras Lenart: Yeah, so the first thing that was coming to mind was this thing about internal discernment and So how to know when something is this. when a drive you're having is this older emotional pattern that might be outdated, or if it's a deeper intuition. So in the case that you're facing fear about something, is there wisdom to that fear, or is it something you might want to move past?
Rupert: Hmm. Yeah, so just so I'm hearing you correctly use this word discernment and maybe we can define what that is ⁓ specifically, but what you just said, I think is a great sort of summary there of how do you know basically if something's important or not important? How can you tell if a signal we're means something or is maybe a distraction or an inappropriate coping mechanism or something?
Andras Lenart: Hmm, absolutely, absolutely. Because it seems like it comes up, I mean, for most of the people I work with, and even in my own life, like it's a pretty pervasive thing.
Rupert: Sure. Yeah. It seems to be sort of one of the most important things, right? Like I think I love this word discernment because every time I hear it, I imagine some wizard or monk being like, ⁓ discernment sounds very wise. But I think in simpler terms, just like a knowing a confidence in the knowing and an ability to tell whether or not it's just something to be ignored or something to be really listened to. This this question of how to know whether or not something's important or valuable, I think is super common in meditation. And I'd be curious to hear a bit about your experience of like when you first started to really reflect on what discernment, how to do it well. ⁓ But where I first encountered it was in meditation, this idea to notice thoughts and let go of them. And then there were some thoughts that it was useful to listen to, to observe and to witness. And then there were others that ⁓ actually took me off the track and were distractions and led to these like eddies or whirlpools of being caught up in a narrative or some line of thinking that didn't actually lead somewhere fruitful or healthy.
Andras Lenart: And so what, I I'm curious if you want to speak more into that, what, it's just the durability of it that you found in that case that led to it being meaningful.
Rupert: Sure. Mm hmm. So credit to sort of my early teachers here, because this was really opaque. Like it was really a tricky question to figure out of like how to how do I spend my energy and focus and where I should maybe reset or let go. And maybe before I share like what's worked for me or what I've arrived at and heard through different teachers, it might be helpful if we have a story or a narrative, a structure here we can apply it to. So it's not just some hypothetical situation but something we can relate to. So I wonder, do you have a sense of a example you want to work through or I can provide one?
Andras Lenart: If you want to go ahead.
Rupert: Yeah, sure. ⁓ So I think in meditation situations is nice because it's it kind of constrains the boundaries here. ⁓ I don't know how common of experience this is, but I would imagine for some subset of the population, there has been a time where you've been in your own thoughts or maybe a sensation, and maybe still in your body. Maybe you're like staring at a phone or you're staring at a book or something. where you're sitting on a bus and there's a sense that whatever you're thinking about, whatever you're relating to is starting to hurt. And so I'm checking in with you, Andras. Have you had a situation where you're like thinking about a thing and it's starting to be, you're starting to get like agitation or strain?
Andras Lenart: Honestly, not that I can recall right now in the moment.
Rupert: Sure. So I'll give it maybe an example. I, maybe it could be something even as concrete as anxiety where we're like thinking about, I should have ⁓ asked that girl out. And you're thinking about you're sitting. So I'm picturing myself sitting on a bus, sitting on a train. And I'm thinking about the day before where I saw a girl and she smiled at me and I smiled back. And then she kind of like gestured with her head for me to come over. And I was like, ⁓ that's very exciting. And then I hesitated. And then I'm like,
Andras Lenart: Hmm.
Rupert: I can't do that. And so here I am in the present moment sitting on this bus and I'm thinking back to that. And I'm my brain is worrying about what I should have been and like, what if I had done that where it could have gone? And I'm starting to, ⁓ apart from those thoughts, also notice that my body is responding. Maybe my heart rate's increasing or I'm starting to feel tense. ⁓ like I'm starting physically to tense my muscles. ⁓ so yeah, check in there. Is that a familiar example?
Andras Lenart: Yeah, yeah, I've definitely had, definitely in cases like that.
Rupert: ⁓ And so if there's this instruction to like attend to your thoughts and like a focus based meditation, how do we know when to keep thinking about that? Keep thinking about the what could have happened if you had approached the person or keep thinking about like how much it sucks that you did in and how much you hate yourself that you're a coward. versus to let it go. And I don't know that there's this like right or wrong approach to it, but what I have heard as a general sort of principle is does connecting with the feeling, the thought, the stimuli, does it feel expansive or contractive? Does it feel resonant in the sense that it feels like it fits and it's true and it's something that's, I mean, the words get kind of wishy washy here, but aligned with your highest self or does it feel like it's you're being squeezed through a tight hole? Like you're trying to fit through your square block, trying to fit through a round hole. And so there's all these different sort of ways of phrasing it, but I think the one that I found that's most ⁓ intuitive is the, is expensive or contractive. Okay, so meditation is one thing, but I don't know that most people are meditating every day. So how would we apply this idea of discernment to something more practical and sexy?
Andras Lenart: Yeah, and I'm curious there because it seems like with anxiety, you know, the expansive, contractive heuristic will lead you one direction where, you know, would it have been more expansive to, you know, to go talk to the stranger at the coffee shop? ⁓ You know, I imagine most people's intuition will nudge them that direction. But, you know, if we take
Rupert: Sure.
Andras Lenart: kind of one of the more like avoidant withdrawing sensations, then I think withdrawal might, or that kind of like pulling back from relationship will often lead to, ⁓ or may very well lead to like this more expansive sense that there's freedom there if you withdraw from that relationship when that still might be this more deeply rooted emotional pattern of
Rupert: Hmm.
Andras Lenart: what we'd label avoided an attachment.
Rupert: Yeah. ⁓ so I'm going to try and translate that, ⁓ to something simple, just so I'm making sure I can hear the thing, but basically I'm hearing there's an impulse. The impulse is, ⁓ leading you one way. So in this case, you're, if somebody's in like a relationship or they're looking to date or whatever, and they're like, ⁓ I get the feeling that I should maybe pull back a bit. How do I know if that's healthy or wise?
Andras Lenart: Mm-hmm.
Rupert: Is that accurate?
Andras Lenart: Yeah, yeah, something something of that flavor. Yeah.
Rupert: Sure. Hmm. And so I had offered this idea that maybe you could do an internal check and see if that move feels expansive or contractive. And you're offering that, hey, maybe pulling back in this moment does feel expansive.
Andras Lenart: Yeah, because in the case, the emotional pattern of avoidance is such that, you know, like intimacy or that kind of close connection doesn't feel safe. And so naturally, when you move away from it, there is more room to breathe, right? And so...
Rupert: ⁓ interesting. Okay. So here is where language gets quite tricky because room to breathe. Like how I'm hearing that is like, there's less pressure on my chest, which feels like, ⁓ like when that's, if you're chest free and you can breathe fully, it's expensive. ⁓
Andras Lenart: Yeah, yeah.
Rupert: I wonder if there's a declination, like a clear demarcation, a clear distinction, how many obnoxious words can I use to split up? But I wonder if there's a distinction between... ⁓
Andras Lenart: You
Rupert: a reduction of tension and an increase in ⁓ personhood or an increase in wholeness.
Andras Lenart: Can you walk me through that a little bit more?
Rupert: Yeah, sure. So, so like if somebody were pointing a gun at someone, and ⁓ there was a situation where, or there was an ability for that gun to be pointed away or to remove from the situation altogether. That feels really good, I'm sure for the person who is under threat. Like it's a huge relief. And I wonder if there's a difference between there's a relief versus somebody who's like, I went to the gym today and I feel tired and I feel strong.
Andras Lenart: Yeah, right.
Rupert: So on one side we have reduction of discomfort, which is worthy and important and good. And the other, have an increasing of capacity, a promotion of vitality. an expansion as opposed to like a removal of a weight.
Andras Lenart: And so you're suggesting in the case of... avoidant attachment or you know what might be that that that person persisting in their relationship or you know connecting with what it what it feels like that there would be that they could connect with this this possibility of expanding their capacity there
Rupert: Mm-hmm. ⁓ so one of things that's really interesting about this topic of discernment is that it applies to this, this question of how to know what's true and valid is that it's completely independent of any sort of, like the facts of life. Like it's, it's a, it's a question for everybody and it's a use. It's a game that we get to play at in some ways, it might be the very game of life. Like how do you get to notice what has value and meaning for you? And so I'm not being prescriptive in that somebody who's ⁓ quote, avoidant or anxious, I'm actually not a huge fan of those labels for attachment theory. I know it's quite in vogue, especially on TikTok. ⁓ But ⁓ what I am saying is that for the person who's confronting this question of like, okay, I'm want to be in this relationship, I want to start this relationship, whatever. And I'm noticing that I have some exact what I feel is anxiety there. A check they can do sort of and I think this is neurologically neuroscientifically spiritually all true, you get to run the check of K if I want to be defensive here, like if I want to protect myself, what would it look like? And that's can be healthy and good. And that might look like stop interacting socially, limit social ⁓ surface area to make sure there's less areas to go wrong. And there might be another check to find out what would be in this moment to grow. And it might be, I'm totally agnostic here. could be, ⁓ be established boundaries with this other person. It could be, ⁓ so like get multiple relationships. with different people so I can practice quantity. I don't know. But there I think if each person has their own inner wisdom that will sort of direct them in the past in a path of discovery.
Andras Lenart: Yeah, I appreciate what you're saying there. What I'd add, what's often been my approach, you know, when I'm working with people in this is emphasizing their, like, their actually felt sensory ⁓ sense of that kind of resistance, and then having them viscerally connect, you know, when...
Rupert: Mm-hmm.
Andras Lenart: when else have they felt like this? Like is this actually the pattern that it might be in the past or does this, you know, if they have enough granularity with that, does this actually feel different? ⁓ Because that at least, you know, gives some indication of, you know, could this be this like, you broader pattern of, you know, feeling like they always need more in relationship or feeling like they always want more space in relationship or whatever else the emotionally rooted pattern that we're talking about is. And I mean, I have one more idea, but curious if you have thoughts on that.
Rupert: Thoughts on connecting to the somatic sensations or?
Andras Lenart: Yeah, like finding that kind of like sensory quality and seeing if it is reflective of the last time that they would have felt like that.
Rupert: Sure. I follow you on the somatic awareness piece. And I think that is when I'm talking about doing that internal check, I think probably the best way to do that is through doing some versions of scans internally where you notice tension or aliveness or energy in your body. ⁓ And then sit with that sensation and be like, that's where we get to employ the discernment. Like now that I've surfaced up a sensation, is this sensation expansive or is it contractive? ⁓ or maybe constricting. ⁓ I'm not sure I understand the pattern piece. And I think you and I have talked about this several times throughout our friendship. And it's something that I know that I skew less in this direction of analyzing historical precedence. ⁓ And I think of books like Already Free by Bruce Tift ⁓ and this idea that I acknowledge that our past and our history and our patterns definitely are real and they have implications. But I would just personally generally skew more towards the immediate moment. And I think that most, if not all, of what we need to know to move forward is available in the present. We just might not be accessing it yet. And so for the person who's I'm going to make up a hypothetical here, but somebody who's been dating someone for a month and they're like, ⁓ I'm feeling like I want to pull out of this. Is this just me being avoidant? Is this just me like trying to seek to ⁓ numb or make safe that part of me that's afraid of being close to another and trusting them in a way I would wonder if they do a scan if they notice like, yeah, there's a lot of agitation and tightness that I quite quickly can associate to this desire to be separate and have distance. And I wonder also if somewhere else, maybe quieter, maybe in a part of their body they don't connect with is a sense of like, it might be a very quiet voice, but a quiet voice saying like, Hey, actually, this relationship is going good right now. There's nothing wrong. And if that's true, like if they did come across some version of that voice to then they get to apply that discernment of being like, okay, well that voice, like, do I notice about it? It's quiet. It's a weaker signal. The like neurological patterns in my brain, like aren't as ⁓ set in that way. But if I check the, if I try and measure it, if I try and engage with that signal and check the quality of it, does it feel Constricting, does it feel contractive or does it feel expensive? And again, I don't have an implicit bias here that relationships are like heading into the discomfort is the way to go. It is an active question. And I think for the person who does this, their ability, their willingness to practice this in that moment is more important than what they actually do in the relationship. Can they identify, can they use the bare attention to find these signals throughout their being? And once they found them, put the spotlight of attention on them, the mindfulness to be with those sensations and then to feel into and get that sort of known sense internally. Is this the direction I want to go or is it, it feel expensive or does it feel contractive? Does it feel defensive or does it feel like I'm increasing my capacity?
Andras Lenart: Yeah, that's beautifully put. So maybe I'll speak to my own experience here, because I think that's what's kind of echoing in my mind. I had a number of relationships where my own avoidance has come up. And I only saw that really in hindsight, right? I only saw that after the relationship was over. And, you know, it was this like, oh, wow, like, you know, seeing how I wanted distance, how commitment phobia or, you know, whatever we label it was becoming present. And
Rupert: Hmm. You
Andras Lenart: So it was through recognizing that that, you know, that some degree of that was a pattern for me for whatever reason. And, so I'm not saying I need to like understand all the childhood or developmental reasons to it, but having a few relationships where I've noted that, then that gives me more pause in, you know, present relationships that, okay, you know, if I notice this
Rupert: No, but you notice a pattern, yeah.
Andras Lenart: that there's some desire to pull away or to withdraw, that, okay, then maybe there I can sit more with that, look for the quiet voice, look for what feels expansive, yeah. So that's in my mind.
Rupert: Totally. Yeah, especially if you, sorry to interrupt you there.
Andras Lenart: I'm just saying, so that's in my mind how I would marry the two.
Rupert: Yeah, gotcha. Yeah. I mean, what I'm hearing there is this, you've ran that experiment and you've seen where it's got you. And then with the advantage of hindsight been like, I wonder if there was other options available. I wonder if I missed something in my ⁓ use of discernment.
Andras Lenart: Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
Rupert: Yeah, I think that's wise. And I think, in my experience, when I've done that personally, or helped other folks with it, I think often it's that we take the most salient or visible impulses or signals to be representative of all of it, of all that we need to check. And I mean, that makes makes sense on a biological level or like practical level. If you have a really bright signal, and it accounts for like 90 % of what's going on. You're like, it's easy to say, okay, well, I should listen to that one. ⁓ But yeah, maybe the reflection and deep introspection is sort of, especially if it's something that you really care about, it's worth the extra cycles to sit there and to like investigate, hey, what am I missing? What other sort of options or inputs are relevant here? And it sounds like I just want to highlight to you based on what you're saying that this particular impulse to pull back, you've found it to be lacking. Like you've like, it's I'm hearing from you that that part of you saying like, this isn't the direction I want to go. which again, I don't give a fuck. I'm just, that's, ⁓ I'm hearing you, you started being like, ⁓ this, this hasn't been optimal.
Andras Lenart: Yeah. Yeah, yeah, that's exactly it. And at the same time, I've also had relationships where I've tried to stay in it, right? Where I'm like, okay, all the, you know, everything lines up on paper and I'm still not feeling it. And okay, is this just, you know, my like tendency to, you know, want my own space or be by myself or, you know, whatever the... whatever the thing there is. ⁓ And again, where it's never really developed or it's never really clicked. so in that case, it's like the tendency to, or the desire to withdraw or pull back was probably the deeper, maybe the deeper truth or the more aligned action.
Rupert: I want to just say though that your desire to be safe and to be feel in control and all those all those sort of impulses there that I'm hearing you say that you've chosen over time I think those are healthy and there's they're not a problem with them ⁓ and I just want to empathize that I'm sure they were really your attempts to navigate the situation in a way that was respectful not only for yourself, but for the other person and motivated from love and kindness. And I think that ⁓ both Trying to figure it out and making mistakes is an important part of the process. And, ⁓ Hmm. Yeah, I guess I'm just feeling empathy for that. That there is no like necessarily right answer and that it's hard to figure it out on the fly.
Andras Lenart: Yeah, that feels very true. I appreciate that.
Rupert: And I wonder if we, from that place of like, ultimately there's, there's no wrong answers here. I'm curious to hear from you. Like, do you have, if you do a check-in in this moment, do you have a sense of what's feeling most expansive for you on this topic?
Andras Lenart: Yeah, I mentioned to you before the call, I've gotten into a new relationship. it's, I don't know, what is that? Like a month, a month and a bit in, so it's still very fresh. And so the avoidance isn't actually coming up so much. It's still a lot of, you know, just like excitement and falling into it. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Rupert: Honeymoon.
Andras Lenart: So there's definitely threads of it that come up, but overwhelmingly, it still feels very expansive. So maybe ask me in six months or something like that, and there may be more to metabolize there. Yeah.
Rupert: Mm-hmm. I'm glad to hear it's feeling expensive. ⁓ maybe switching gears a bit. think we have, or I've got a topic I wanted to introduce that is going to sound like a bit of a pivot, but I think it is related to this. ⁓ so I recently, so I've been working at, a hospital here in Vancouver for going on almost a year and a half now. ⁓ and so I work in a complex mental health ward and I work with folks who are, you know, in a pretty tough place, complex mental health, it's long-term persistent, ⁓ pretty intense situations for these people. And. In that, in that job, I'm training them to have jobs. That's my role. It's a pretty unique role. I'm, ⁓ I manage a cafe that's specifically set up to give job training opportunities to these folks. And this is great because it blends my interest in mental health, ⁓ with training and teaching and like practical hand on skills. So how does this all tie into discernment and this question of. ⁓ noticing what's coming up for us as individuals. I've in multiple attempts to try and mentor people and help impart knowledge or help them move through different obstacles in their life. I had arrived at this sort of internal framework and recently, ⁓ and occupational therapists, my wife, ⁓ had told me about a framework that they use in occupational therapy that. ⁓ sums up and articulates a very easy way to teach people and to organize decision making about important topics. And I wonder if it might be relevant here about ideas of like using discernment as well. So the the model has a bunch of different names and stuff. I think the names suck. Honestly, ⁓ but the the main sort of points here, there's four points of how to do it and it's goal plan do review. Goal plan, do review. So what is our goal? So starting with the why, how are we going to accomplish that? What's our strategy? Okay, let's try it. And then let's review our how it went and adjust accordingly and repeat where necessary. So I'm bringing this up because what you're saying about in those different relationships, this sort of pattern of it sounds like you a goal, which is to be well, I don't want to presume what it is, but it sounds like you had an idea of what the goal is. And then you try different things and then you came up with a plan that you tried the things and then you reviewed and like, ⁓ that's didn't actually get me to where I wanted to go. Or there's off in the target. Does that sound accurate?
Andras Lenart: Yeah, absolutely.
Rupert: Were you conscious of develop or like employing a similar approach there?
Andras Lenart: I implicitly, yeah. Yeah, because I, whenever a relationship ends, I tend to reflect on it a lot. yeah, I've definitely had a, as we've discussed in the past, over her jingle, the fine partnership.
Rupert: Yeah, fair. Sure, yeah. And I feel like I'm sort of introducing a crayon here and being like, welcome to art. But this goal plan due review, I think is a really valuable and succinct way of describing a process that is really easy to slip off of or to forget in the moment. And so for instance, I'm running these, ⁓ I'm chairing these meetings at the hospital that are, ⁓
Andras Lenart: Ha ha ha.
Rupert: across all levels of the organization with like management leadership all the way down to like the grunts, other people in the lowest paid positions. And both in the preparation as well as in the process of those actual meetings, ⁓ I noticed that it's really easy for folks to jump between the sequence of those steps. So maybe we introduce a topic and we haven't defined what the goal is yet. We just have the topic and somebody's already on to the planning stage. So maybe it's like, it's like the person who's like, ⁓ yeah, dating, dating. Yeah. So I think I'm just going go out and ask a bunch of people out at the bar. It's like, wait, what's we don't know yet what your goal is.
Andras Lenart: Mm-hmm.
Rupert: Do see this in your own life? Do you see folks bouncing between those?
Andras Lenart: Yeah, I mean, what comes up for me then, as you're outlining the model, the... I guess I'm curious what... ⁓ okay, no, it clicked for me, but I was curious what you were specifying about the planning portion in this, but that would be, you know, whatever the approach is to accomplish the goal, the how, so to speak. ⁓ And yeah, I mean, in my experience of working with people, it seems like people don't get a lot of...
Rupert: Totally, yeah. Yeah.
Andras Lenart: They often don't develop lot of clarity around what they actually want. Like the goal piece is like very underspecified. Yeah.
Rupert: Yes, 100%. Say more.
Andras Lenart: Like, people have a vague sense of how they would expect to feel when they have this thing. so say a relationship, but so much of what they're actually looking for, what they envision that to be is unspecified. And so, yeah, yeah.
Rupert: Hahaha. just vague, this cloud of possibilities that are somewhat good.
Andras Lenart: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah, they expect to just fall into a relationship that somehow magically meets all their needs, and they have a honeymoon in Mexico, and whatever else.
Rupert: Mm-hmm. Sure, yeah. in that, I'm hearing you say, meets their needs without maybe even defining like, what are those needs? They're just like, well, the other person will know they'll be a great, partner and they'll love me.
Andras Lenart: Exactly. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely.
Rupert: Yeah, man, that's such a I think this is sort of the the keystone piece here is I love Simon Sinek's concept of start with why. Are you familiar with that one? Yeah. And just for the audience here, so Simon Sinek, ⁓ he's a sort of intellectual thought leader dude, ⁓ from San Fran, I believe, or like lives in San Fran. And one of his ⁓ one of his big ideas is this idea of
Andras Lenart: Mm-hmm.
Rupert: It's really, really valuable to start with why. What is the goal? What are we doing here? Because everything else follows from that. Right. And I think like on Josh, you're saying it's so undervalued. It's crazy how many problems for people could be resolved by just greater clarity and definition of what the target is you're trying to hit. Because otherwise you're just shooting arrows into the dark. If you don't have a bullseye that you're how do you even know if you did good? ⁓ the other part I would say here is that there's seems to be a magic when you're working with other people. I mean, this is different, obviously, if you're trying to figure out, ⁓ what do I want in a relationship? versus how do I, what is our goal for our business? What is our, ⁓ KPI, our key performance index or indicator or, ⁓ like, what do we want to achieve this quarter? But if you are in a group and maybe this gets more relevant for the What do want in relationship once you meet somebody? Defining the why with other people where you're actively both co-creating, like it can't be one person's being told, way increases the probability that people will actually participate because they feel ownership and responsibility. And so, yeah, I just want to underscore this. The goal definition phase is again, the keystone piece.
Andras Lenart: And curious though what you think too, because I mean there are definitely people who under specify and then there's the kind of flaw of over specifying, right? Of having a hundred items that this ideal partner needs to check off.
Rupert: Sure, Yeah. Yeah, great question. ⁓ I would just refer to this goal plan do review framework. ⁓ because I think we've all done the thing where, well, maybe not all, but I think it's not uncommon to do something like a, what are they called? A dream board or whatever, where you, this is my five year plan. And by this point, I'm to have this many dollars in the mega cat. And like you go through unlimited detail here and then you five years goes by and you look at your thing and you're like, okay, I choose some of this, but lots of this just doesn't matter. And I had the wrong idea of what, what to attend to here. So I can say,
Andras Lenart: Yeah. you
Rupert: for myself and I know that we've talked about this before. There was a stage in dating, cause this is a theme that we're talking about here. ⁓ there's a stage in my dating history where I had, I was really starting to take serious this idea of defining the why. And I'd been through enough, ⁓ relationships that had gone, they got to a similar place and they felt good in the same way. And they also felt like they kind of have the same limitations or things that weren't there. And I was just curious about what was going on. So I thought, I don't know how I arrived at it, but this idea of like, maybe I should define my bullseye a bit better. And in doing that, ⁓ I was a young man, so I can throw shade on this dude. I literally in was like asking myself, what do I want in a future wife? Or first off, I arrived at the idea I want a life partner. I don't want just girlfriends anymore. I'm starting to get to a place where I'm curious about finding a future maybe mother for my children. The biggest part was a life partner. I want someone I can go long and far and do big things with. And I arrived at this idea. I want them to be somebody who we make each other's lives better and we expand our possibilities and we do things that we couldn't have done alone. And I was like, Oh, that sounds amazing. What would that person be like? It's like they'd be smart. They'd be funny. They'd have big boobs, nice butt. They'd probably be this tall. And so I spent, I don't know, probably an hour. doing this and it was a list. It was just a bullet point list or whatever. The crazy thing is within two or three months, I found that person and I could not believe it. They literally ticked off everything that was on the list and I when I was making the list, I felt like it was way too good to be true and that I would never find someone that that incredible. And so when I finally met them, I thought like, wow, God is real. I'm done mission accomplished. And that relationship went really well. Six months into it, though, started to realize that something was off. I love them. She loved me. We were getting along quite well, but there was something missing. And so I went, I pulled that list out and I looked at it. And it honestly, I'm sure you've had this experience, you write a rough draft of something like a paper or whatever. And then you look at it later and you're like, this is garbage. Why was I, this was so basic. And what I realized was of my like, I don't know, 16 bullets, 14 of them were pretty superficial. It was sincerely embarrassing. And I was like, wow, what a, what low importance things that I indexed on that, like, I literally put down boobs and butt, like, and just noticing like, okay, I, I had a goal, I came up with a plan, I did it, I did it, I found them, it worked. And now I'm reviewing and there was something missing in my goal. As much as I did my sincere best effort at that time, in that one hour, and maybe I should have gone back and reviewed a bit more or updated it as I went along, but there was something missing. So the goal wasn't, wasn't great.
Andras Lenart: And was only through reviewing it that you realize that. Yeah.
Rupert: Yeah. And I realized it had been like however many months, like nine months since I created that and I hadn't updated or I hadn't even referenced really that goal other than I took it and I was like, okay, start sprinting. And that was good. And it worked and I got, I got benefits and I got productivity and I got results, but I realized that not updating and improving that goal as I went along was a mistake. And then also that just the humility that came from realizing the goal was half-baked.
Andras Lenart: Yeah. An interesting frame I've heard on this, which I think you were somewhat speaking to as well, indirectly, is, like I've heard the idea of not even framing what you want in a partner, but being explicit about how you want to feel with someone. And then... moving from there to, you what are those actual characteristics in a partner? Right? So, so that sense of safety or the sense of, you know, deep trust or, ⁓ you know, the growth that you guys have together, those figuring out those things first, and then moving to the actual characteristics.
Rupert: what would be the, yeah, totally. Yeah, that's it. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah. I think that's a great way of approaching it. Yeah. And just wanting to knowledge for anyone who's listening this and you're in a place yet where maybe you don't feel like you have traction or or that your attempts to keep missing something important or failing that this goal plan do review combined with taking the time to actively notice what you're feeling as a notice you're feeling something sit with those feelings and then feel like does this feel contractive expense or expensive. That whole formula there is in my experience, it's what leads to ⁓ being in touch with the quality of your decisions in your life and then being able to modify it. And I think each part ultimately is ⁓ essential. Like that, that sort of chain there is representative of my best understanding of ⁓ how to do this entire process.
Andras Lenart: And what would feel expansive for me now is to, I'm very curious to hear about what you've been thinking about in terms of AI and in relation to therapy as well.
Rupert: Sure, man. Yeah, there's so much there. AI, wow. Also, I just want to say, as somebody who's been a super fan of AI since 20, I don't know, early 2000s, like I came across Ray Kurzweil and transhumanism, and that's probably gonna be gibberish for most people, but I'm so excited that it's like the biggest thing in the world at the moment, because it's, I could spend all my time talking about AI.
Andras Lenart: you
Rupert: yeah, is there any specific directions you want to go or did you have anything you wanted to share on it?
Andras Lenart: Well, the first thing I'm curious about, because you had told me in the past, you're doing some project, some final assignment, ⁓ where you're looking at tools that assist in providing therapy. ⁓ So I am just curious to hear what those were, how you use them. ⁓ I've been using AI a bit in
Rupert: Mm-hmm.
Andras Lenart: quite a bit in the work that I'm offering clients. ⁓ So yeah, I'm curious to hear what your process is for that.
Rupert: sure. Yeah, maybe we can swap notes here. So yeah, for context, I'm in the back third of my master's of counseling degree. And so as part of that, ⁓ I'm doing what's called a capstone, which is similar to a thesis, except we don't have to do original research. So I'm get to summarize sort of the literature out in the world. And so for my capstone, I've arrived at a thesis around AI in therapy, and I think more more generally in like personal development or coaching. But for the specifics of the paper wolf, I'm going to focus on therapy, especially in a Canadian context. And so, on dress, since we've talked about this and workshopped the idea, the thesis is or the hypothesis has changed a little bit. Partly, that's just to arrive at the most, the easiest thing to write about the thing that's going to be academically grounded. But currently what the hypothesis is, is looking at how AI in a world where clinician burnout rates are soaring, and maybe just taking a pause there because it is wild how many people who work in helping roles like counselors or ⁓ social workers, or we can go across the board, how prevalent burnout is, it's such a real thing. And so with that sort of background, and the emerging relevance of AI and the capacity there. How can AI augment therapists to offload some of that the burden in their work? Hopefully so that it leads to best outcomes for clients, while also acknowledging that there's ethical and practical considerations ⁓ about how to do that in a way that's safe and honors the sacred sort of relationship between people ⁓ and not jeopardizing that quality or safety through the indiscriminate automation of the process. So ⁓ my sort of major point that I'm driving at after like lots of research is looking at policies like the BC Association of Clinical Counselors released a really helpful paper, ⁓ a guidelines on AI for clinicians. Have you got a chance to check that out?
Andras Lenart: No, no, haven't, but I, yeah.
Rupert: I would really recommend it. I can, including the show notes for anyone who's interested in this topic, this paper was really, really well done. Shout out to the author. don't have their name off the top of my head. but it's, it's a great here. I'm just going to look it up actually, cause it deserves the shout out. So this paper was authored by, of course they buried her name. That's too bad. It's not on the title page. So yeah, I'll include in the show notes, but I believe that a single researcher or clinician took point on this. And I'd love to actually have her on the podcast. ⁓ So it looks at basically in the field of counseling, the professional field, how might we go about implementing AI, and it does a sort of contemporary like a look at the current landscape. And it outlines some of the areas where There's risks, so things like privacy, data storage, et cetera. The documents are really good for being a policy for professional practice, but it gives almost no guidance on in day-to-day sessions. How should your decision-making change? Is that distinction clear?
Andras Lenart: Yes, yeah.
Rupert: So it's like more structural, like how would you assess whether or not a piece of software is safe or, but it doesn't say what decisions, what questions should you ask a LLM, which activities are appropriate for LLMs, which ones should you not include? And so what I'm attempting to do in this, in my capstone is to look at the urgent need for reducing pronoun and counselors and now that we have this amazing bicycle for the mind of LLMs like chat, GBT or Claude or any of the other ones, ⁓ where are the highest value, high burden tasks that require low human judgment that we can safely hand off to the AIs? so spoiler alert, turns out that record keeping. is the lowest hanging fruit that I've identified. So if you're not a clinician, if you haven't worked in the medical field, you probably don't know this, but most clinicians have to write clinic notes, which basically are bullet points or short paragraphs that describe what you did and why and the justifications for them. And Andras, I know that you've had experience of working in the medical system before. How did you find that process?
Andras Lenart: Yeah, I found when I was working in the actual public health care system ⁓ that the notes, I mean, they definitely had, you know, ⁓ more extensive standards for notekeeping. And so that was definitely, yeah, I mean, a real burden at that point. And then not even just in terms of the time that it takes, but in terms of task switching. And you're really having to prioritize it to a whole different set of skills that's required for that. mean, having said that, do think the summarization, I mean, there is some benefit in terms of having you conceptualize what's going on for the client.
Rupert: Mm-hmm. 100 % case conceptualization, understanding, like pulling out what are the most important features, et cetera. But I also, you use the word burden. I think looking into the research, just to put some rough numbers on it, from what I can tell, roles similar to counseling are experiencing across the board around 40 % of practitioners in America report burnout.
Andras Lenart: Yeah.
Rupert: Holy shit, almost one and two, like almost half. That's crazy. Just for those people, as well as the clients that they're probably still seeing a lot of the time, like what's the quality of care there if you're clinicians at reduced capacity, but then also surprisingly, so it's called in the literature, electronic health records, EHR. EHR is responsible for like, again, like 40 to 50 % of burnout. Maybe not that high, maybe closer to 30, but it's huge.
Andras Lenart: Yeah. Wow.
Rupert: And I think exactly what you're saying, like that between sessions, between your hours or 50 minutes or whatever you're doing with the client, clinicians are asked or required or expected to jot down, okay, what, what happened? What's the important parts? Was there risk there? What did you do to make sure the client was safe, et cetera. And that's a documentation that's a legal safety, ⁓ burden, but it's not directly set up or The main intent and design of it is not how do you give the best care to the client? It's not asking folks to case conceptualize. It's not asking them to plan out different avenues and, know, like really chew on and reflect on what might be possible. It's really to protect against lawsuits in case something goes wrong to document like, well, I tried my best. I did reasonable care. And I think most people are silently suffering under that.
Andras Lenart: Yeah, absolutely. I think that does frame it out pretty well.
Rupert: Mm-hmm. And the good news is that already and there's like, maybe because I keep searching for it, I'm getting so many targeted ads, but there's so many emerging startups that are trying to resolve this by automating that process to free up that time and provide safe notes, but then also free up the cognitive bandwidth, the emotional bandwidth, reduce the task switching so people can invest in the things actually drive quality of care in a more meaningful way.
Andras Lenart: And so that kind of note keeping is one aspect. Curious if there's AI assisted aspects.
Rupert: Yeah, for sure. So for the purpose of my capstone, I'm not going to touch on those. ⁓ but the obvious sort of next one would be, I mean, there's two directions. I think one is like, can people use AI's as clinicians? And the obvious answer is already yes, they can. Not necessarily that they should, but it's nothing stopping anybody from, from saying that or from doing that. ⁓ leaving alone the question of ⁓ the current capacity of these systems to offer good guidance and avoid just telling the people what they want to hear or ⁓ assuming of information or context and giving mistaken advice accordingly. ⁓ So leaving aside the idea of AI therapists or coaches for therapists and promoting their capacity to help clients. I think the other next level would be as what I was earlier in a previous conversations with you referring to as reflective dialogue companions or counseling assistance. And this idea of if we come like we're, we're doing version of it right now in this, in this conversation. And I'm sure in many conversations, Andras, that you and I both have with other professionals, we bounce ideas off each other. We hear different perspectives. say, Hey, I tried this. What do you think? What am I seeing? What would you have done? I think AIs in the not so distant future in the next couple of years here are going to be very useful on demand, instantly available, low cost ways of sort of refining and having a workshop partner.
Andras Lenart: Yeah, that's where I've been using AIs a little bit already in my practice and where I see there to be so more room for implementation because AIs can really make up for a lot of the... If you've been seeing a client over a year, hypothetically if you had like a...
Rupert: Mm-hmm.
Andras Lenart: and AI trained on the transcript of every conversation that you've had, everything that you've tried so far with them. ⁓ It could provide real time feedback about what direction to go, or are you considering this? Are you considering going ⁓ down that path? So I think that's where there's really a lot of ⁓ possibility. And then as well as in
Rupert: Mm-hmm. Sure.
Andras Lenart: ensuring kind of like ongoing accountability or know action items or you know between sessions I think that there's a lot of you know role or like possibility for further use of those tools there.
Rupert: Yeah. So that second piece getting into the more of the AI therapist for clients or like a tool, but yeah, I, I'm totally on board with that. And I think those are just, ⁓
Andras Lenart: Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Rupert: it's going to be a slower uptake for the system, which is probably fair, given like you and I are on the bleeding edge. We're early adopters of things. We are willing to try out new software developments and fringe concepts. And we have the discernment and the capacity to sort of play with those edges. Whereas maybe the average clinician doesn't have the technological expertise or like know-how. ⁓ And so it's I think it would be unwise to sort of recommend that recommend. ⁓ Most clinicians use something like chachi BT carte blanche to like, what should I do with this client? Because yeah, it might rob them of their own opportunities to learn or to to engage meaningfully. But I but I totally agree with what you're saying. And I think that that future is really intriguing to me. And I would honestly, this is a very tender and precious dream to me and I'm thinking about it often. I have since I was a teenager and I don't have many avenues to discuss it, but the idea of being part of a team that helped create those sorts of things that would be so amazing. would love, love, love, love, love, love to help being one, the guiding hands to help the world benefit from a tool, a companion that increases therapist efficacy as well as is on demand and low cost for clients while delivering reliable high value. Like, wow, what a better future that would be.
Andras Lenart: Yeah, I mean that would be about as high impact as it gets.
Rupert: And to that end, I really appreciate and admire that you are one of those people who are trying to find ways of interfacing with the AIs and ⁓ building that relationship and learning the discernment of where the edge is, what feels good and expansive here, so that you can ⁓ provide better outcomes for the people you work with. And I hope that they are seeing the benefits and are ⁓ appreciative of it.
Andras Lenart: you sharing that.
Rupert: Yeah, we got a bunch of I got a bunch of other ideas that we can go into for AI stuff. ⁓ One thing I got two real quick ones that I want to share. And then I would love to hear you talk about Claude a bit because I'm not super familiar with Claude. I've tried it out a couple times. But I'm a chat GBT guy open AI for the win. First got super search on open AI when they released their hide and seek program. Long, long time ago. ⁓ and I feel a certain infinity. But quick practical tip for you and the listeners because this this shit just blows my mind. If you ever have a syllabus, or you're given like a list of dates for something that you need to participate, maybe it's a workshop or whatever, like, let's say you sign up for a workshop, they don't create a Google Calendar for you or whatever. But they're like, Hey, you need to be in this place on these dates. Here's the zoom link, even maybe whatever. And amazing thing you can do is feed it into an LLM and say, Hey, create a Google calendar entry for me based on the information in here. And then you can, it will literally create, I think it's an ICS file and you can save it to your desktop. then in Google calendar, upload that file and auto populate your calendar with all the entries. And so when you're doing that, you can even say like, here's how I like it to be structured. Like the name, I want an emoji at the front or whatever it is. Give me a notification a day before so I don't forget. You can define all those parameters and it will auto do it for you based on the information that's in whatever you submit, which is a huge time saver.
Andras Lenart: Yeah, I hadn't even thought of that. Yeah.
Rupert: Dude, it's crazy. It's so useful. Like I'm managing. So I'm working at the hospital. I'm doing a practicum at UBC in the clinical counseling department. I'm attending school. I'm doing an extra course to do my capstone. And then I'm ⁓ managing all my like personal things. And basically each of those I can now just throw at the AI when something comes up where it's a recurring or multiple like event. And it just I don't have to go into manually process any of it.
Andras Lenart: Beautiful. Yeah.
Rupert: Dude, I love it. Other quick hit is in chat, GBT, there's this option to do called projects, which is essentially like you define a little workspace and then you can give it separate instructions. This is like a folder basically. And so I've created one called communications manager. And in the instructions for that specific folder project, I said, Hey, act as my communications manager. I really like these kinds of messages. And then I gave a bunch of instructions for the tone and the style. So I can include that the prompt I use in my, ⁓ in the show notes. But then when I get say an email or a correspondence that I need to respond to, rather than me drafting the message out, I can throw it into a new chat in that folder. and give it a little bit of context. It'll be like, Hey, this is my boss asking me for a meeting. I want to respond with a possible availability. It can be really, my response can be very superficial, like very limited details. And it will write out in my voice in the voice that we've co-created ⁓ an eloquent response that's often superior to my own. And I have gotten to the point where ⁓ I don't need to do many revisions because I've spent so much time defining that voice. ⁓ And this solves the problem that if you just say, write a message to my boss, there's a lot of back and forth and stuff. But at some point in the future, I see this being baked into just like every texting app we have. ⁓ I w you won't have to copy and paste back and forth, but yeah, just putting it out to people. If you're doing a lot of corresponds through text messages or emails or whatever, this is, ⁓ holy cow. I'm really impressed by the, quality and the ease, the speed of the communications. It helps me feel more articulate.
Andras Lenart: And I use it for something similar. Yeah.
Rupert: Cool. Do you with I've heard, and maybe we can pivot to the Claude piece here. I've heard that Claude just out of the box has a better tone for how it writes and it sounds more human and stuff. Has that been your finding? And are you just using like the sort of default voice or
Andras Lenart: Yeah, that's definitely been my experience. yeah, because I used ChatGPT kind of for the first couple of years, and it's been over the last maybe six months that I've switched to Claude primarily. ⁓ And so what I prefer about Claude is, yeah, the writing tone. Like, it just feels like it writes better. And so that's even if I'm writing, wanting to write something out. or even in just when I'm interacting with it, it feels more natural, it feels more human. ⁓ And then I have found that it seems better at challenging me. And this is even, you know, like I've given Chachi Petit and Claude the same kind of prompts where I'm, you know, I am telling it to, ⁓ like, I think there was some interpersonal thing that I was talking to it about at some point.
Rupert: Mm-hmm. ⁓ nice.
Andras Lenart: And, you know, so I was curious what the differences would be. gave them, I told them both to challenge me. And again, like ChatGPT just didn't seem to do a very good job or didn't really like critically. Yeah, exactly. It didn't really critically push back. Whereas ⁓ Claude was, was doing much more of that. So it, I've just come to enjoy using it more given, given both the tone, which I think just kind of.
Rupert: Yes, man. Mm-hmm.
Andras Lenart: bleeds into everything else. some of the pushback or the analytical dimension of it. ⁓
Rupert: Mm-hmm. Cool. Yeah. And just defining here this, this problem, at least at the end of 2025 of sick of fancy, which is one of those words that we probably heard once in a fucking, I don't know, William Shakespeare play or something, but I don't know the term sick of fancy is, was all that commonplace. ⁓ but now it's so relevant for LLMs because they all have this problem just trying to please us, just trying to be Yes, man. And it's so aggravating. Like, God, like, shut up. Stop telling me every idea that I have is perfect. ⁓ I know it's not. That's why I'm trying to workshop it.
Andras Lenart: You
Rupert: So yeah, I'm stoked that you're finding better results there with Cloud.
Andras Lenart: The one thing that I still preferred with Chad GPT was the UI and the speed of it. That just feels preferable.
Rupert: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And I know that Claude's doing right now a bunch of stuff with like MCP, like, ⁓ trying to get different skills and access to different tools and stuff. But man, OpenAI is crushing it with like, they have a study mode baked in that to Chach-BT that I think most folks don't even know about this stage. Its memory ⁓ is incredible. It works really well. ⁓ well, it still obviously has huge faults, but it, it's as far as I'm aware, the best in class at the moment. ⁓ I mean, there's a lot to like about. Touch WT. ⁓ Any other thoughts on LLMs?
Andras Lenart: No, no, mean, think that's it.
Rupert: ⁓ one other use case is really useful. So somebody that I'm close friends with was having a problem in, I say problem, I was having a problem with the way that they are conversations were going because they had a habit of in sentences or paragraphs, losing the sort of specific name that they were referring to of so if they were talking about someone or something, at some point, they would just start saying like it or they but there'd be multiple nouns in the sentences or the paragraphs. So it was really hard to follow which one they were actually referring to. And so in talking to them, they acknowledged that it was ⁓ an issue that other people had had that difficulty articulating themselves being clear. ⁓ So long story short, I asked if they would like some help, because I remember the lessons from my early days in like English class and stuff where we learned about how to do this. And they're like, ⁓ yeah, I didn't ever, I never had those. I would love to learn a bit more. And so in the course of like 30 minutes, 45 minutes with Chachi BT, we made a three page workbook complete with images that told a story of this person going on like a quest to learn it. And then they, Chachi BT came out with like a lesson plan of like, okay, here's the five lessons we want to hit increasing. levels of difficulty that introduced first introduces the concept provides early wins gets into a bit more nitty gritty stuff then gets a really hard one thing that gets to a really hard like final boss battle. And dude, it was incredible, like the lesson planning capacity there mixed with like having images of the person interacting with some of their favorite objects and the images and stuff as in this narrative structure. So like, there was a dog that joined them because they love dogs. And then It had like them wearing running shoes because they're they love trail running like all these different things. And when I was nervous that when I gave them this workbook that they were going to be offended that I used AI, and they loved it. They didn't care because they're like, ⁓ my god, it's me and I'm on this quest. And they sat down and they did the whole workbook. And they like had fun with it. And importantly, it worked like they they demonstrated by the end of it way better understanding the concept than previously.
Andras Lenart: Yeah, another another great use case. One more actually comes to mind for me on that is the use of LLMs for like, kind of Socratic dialogue. So having it ask you questions, say you're trying to learn about some topic. ⁓ know, recently I was doing this for ⁓ predictive processing and
Rupert: Mm-hmm.
Andras Lenart: And, you know, so it would be as easy as just like putting in the theme and like help me learn about this through, you know, Socratic questioning. And so it'll, yeah, yeah. So it would be like asking you questions to query what you know and then giving you like guidance based on that. So the learning becomes much more of an active, ⁓ you know, by
Rupert: which is just defining it.
Andras Lenart: bidirectional thing as opposed to just having like feed you information.
Rupert: Give and take, yeah. Sure. So there's didactic teaching or which is somebody's lecture ring. ⁓ So chronic, which is this back and forth use of questions. Yeah, great. On that note, have you used notebook LLM or sorry, notebook LLM?
Andras Lenart: Yeah. Yeah. It's not one that I use a lot. I've tried it a couple of times.
Rupert: Sure. So the recent iterations of it, if you're trying to learn, people out there, if you're trying to learn anything, try notebook LM. It's a Google's response to this and it's really aimed squarely at the education space. Not only does it do this sort of Socratic questioning, it can do flashcards and surface like different key ideas that it then quizzes you on, cetera. But also you can generate podcasts where you give it prompts. So like if you give it a chapter from a book, you can ask it to create a podcast and you can tell it in this podcast, focus on ⁓ like these specific questions or this element. And recently they introduced the ability, it can create PowerPoints. And so it can create visuals as well. ⁓ Holy crap, it's so useful. On a similar domain, ChatGBT has now a study and learned, which is specifically set up for. So chronic questioning, but yeah, man, just generally hear that that personal tutor space is so rich for ⁓ development. And I'm so excited for all the people who are going to be able to learn. Man, so good.
Andras Lenart: Yeah, I wish I had that in school. Yeah.
Rupert: Sure. Very quick recommendation. And if folks are interested in that specific topic of learning and tutoring, especially for youth, there is a really interesting book that I found. I'm just going to double check the name, but I think it's, it's got a nauseous title. So the book is ⁓ called The Diamond Age and it's by Neil Stevenson. It's not the best book. I'm just gonna be honest. ⁓ I finished it, no problem. And I thoroughly enjoyed it, but there's lots of points where I found it to drag or kind of like just feel a bit bloated. ⁓ But it is ⁓ the concept underneath it all is this idea of what if you had a personal companion? that was an AI that sole job was to mentor and tutor you to be the best human possible. And the way it presents this like sort of genie or companion ⁓ is just like, I can totally see it happening. And I think we're not far away. And as a quick sort of connection there, this book is where the idea of a Kindle came from. Because this AI that ⁓ in the book, a young lady gets a little girl. is an e reader basically that can change its shape and can re like change all the words on his page and can actually like do videos and sound and stuff. And man, I've fucking 10 years, kids are going to have things like this little iPads that ⁓ engage with them and try and mentor them and it's going to be magic. So if you want to cite a vision of the future, check it out.
Andras Lenart: Speaking of visions of the future, I'm curious about the... I did mention this to you before, but you've spoken to me at length about Tesla in the past, so I'm... Yeah, I'm curious if you can speak to Tesla, the Tesla bots, and I guess the...
Rupert: Mm-hmm.
Andras Lenart: what your sense is of the advantage that they have versus all the Chinese ⁓ manufacturers where I think they have industrial advantage.
Rupert: Okay. Um, so just quick synopsis, my theory and hypothesis with Tesla leading me to seriously explore investing in them, uh, going back to their debut in 2016. Um, or sorry, my, my first investment in them 2016, um, was that autonomous driving was a huge industry that had a lot of value that was ready to be captured and that Tesla was uniquely situated to, do that. with the advent of electric vehicles and the cost declines there and how they this robot basically like an electronic car that had a brains and everything ⁓ was seemed like it was on track to take that crown. So right now, I think the biggest thing that matters for Tesla is Robo taxi, like 90 % like most of their value is predicated on this idea that they're going to introduce robo taxis that are nearly ubiquitous. And what I mean by that is that they cover like most of say North America in the next 10 years. And I think they'll eliminate like most of Uber and stuff. ⁓ That's still my hypothesis. And I think we're probably about two years out, I would say by 2027, where most people in most cities can reliably get a robo taxi from Tesla, similar to how they do today with Uber. ⁓ we can go into all the math and the reasons why I think that, but, ⁓ that's, would just highlight for myself. It's all about robo taxi. The idea of bots, ⁓ I think is looking ahead 10, 15 years. I don't think they're relevant right now. I don't think they're doing any meaningful work. ⁓ and maybe I'm just a cantankerous old man. ⁓ but the limitation there largely is the dexterity of hands. The hands on these robots don't work. They just don't have the articulation and, ⁓ the strength that, ⁓ human hands do like, and I actually know somebody who's an engineer at a startup for humanoid robots here in Vancouver. And he specifically works on the hands. And I knew about this sort of constraint before, like, I don't know if you know this, but one of open eyes very first projects was building a robot hand. That was like, literally that one of their first main cracks at how to create a GI artificial general intelligence was can we create a robotic hand? And they fucked it up. It was really hard. ⁓ And right now, it, they just can't do meaningful work. Like we're seeing examples of them folding laundry and stuff and they do it quite shoddily. But where I think robotics right now is, is they can do, ⁓ things like moving cars around or automated assembly lines can pick and have you specialized tools to pick up specific audit objects in repeatable fashions. But the sort of, ⁓ primary sort of engagement with the worlds if we want them to be moving things around of hands. I think this is a really hard just engineering task. It's not to do with intelligence or batteries. It's just like we don't actually know how to build something that meets all the criteria that a human hand does. We know how to make pincers or suction cups.
Andras Lenart: Yeah, okay, so. I guess I'm asking specifically about the bots because I had heard that Elon Musk in some of the presentations he was giving, he was saying that his sole focus is, or his primary focus is on bots, and he thinks that that's gonna be 90 % of the future. ⁓ And I don't know if that was including the taxis ⁓ or if that was independent of it, but...
Rupert: Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah. Mm-hmm.
Andras Lenart: ⁓ So, yeah, you're right, that might be, you know, five, 10, 15 years into the future. But
Rupert: Just for context here, in 2017, Elon was saying that we're on the verge of solving self-driving.
Andras Lenart: Right.
Rupert: Yeah. And there was a lot longer of a lead up of, ⁓ other projects trying to solve self-driving before, compared to trying to solve humanoid robots that there was a lot of different organizations that were on the world having thrown a lot of brain power at that already. But we're starting from a smaller base with humanoid robots and maybe AIs will come in and be some Oracle that like provides a God, a sky hook and like pulls us to some new height magically. ⁓ it's possible. But also self-driving was a software problem, not a hardware problem.
Andras Lenart: in your mind it really is the hands that are the constraint because I mean I so I assume you've seen the I think figure two had done a demonstration where it had the had the robot picking up eggs even and not not crushing them like having enough like sensitivity in terms of the pressure that it provides
Rupert: Mm-hmm. Sure. You know, I'll put in the show notes ⁓ in 2000, I think it was 15. There was a robot that, surgery robot that can cut within some ridiculous tolerance, like a micron thick or whatever, like it has a scalpel and autonomously it can do surgery where it peels a grape just by cutting the skin on the grape with a scalpel. Incredibly, incredibly fine dexterity there. but in the real world, it's not a controlled laboratory situation where a grape is being suspended perfectly, the perfect size grape in the perfect size container without wind or dust or all that stuff. ⁓ And from everything that I've seen, the hands, so like, We have to really get into the biomechanics of how hands work, but you have, it's so easy to take them for granted because everybody, most people have them overborn with them, et cetera. But you have. Strength across like the number of degrees of articulation, like the points in which they change or bend is wild. Like there's very few mechanical things in the world that move with such, ⁓ so many points of change. And so. what they're doing right now is like, okay, we can't do 100 points of articulation. We can do 18. We can do like we can put that many little motors in it or whatever. But then to have them all have the ability to, to exert force reliably, like, we haven't solved that yet. We're not even close, like talking to the engineers, like it's really, really hard. The other part says your hands have pressure sensors. So your skin tells you when you're applying force to something, which you can kind of mimic by resistance of applying force and then, ⁓ but that's really hard to get onto a robot as well. They don't have skin that can touch as accurately. There's also heat and cold and pain. Those things are all like really hard to mimic. ⁓ So I think that as far as I'm aware right now, from everything that I've looked at, Like we've seen examples of humanoid robots doing backflips to doing like dense moves, break moves, all those things. Those are really easy to do in demos. They're really hard to do in real life. I'm not aware of any demonstrations that show robots doing these things in situations that aren't artificially controlled. And so maybe it'll be useful to frame this rather than me just making assertions in the seventies or eighties. they thought they came up with true AI. And they showed it by having this little robot in this like toy world. And the toy world had like, there was a ball and there's a bed and all these different things. And they would put the robot down at starting point and they'd say, Hey, go move the ball to the basket. And the robot would walk over and it was kind of clumsy, but it walked to like a tin man picked up the ball, turn around, walked four pieces and put the ball in the box. And everyone applauded and they're like, Holy shit, like We've just solved the economy. Wow, Tom, you did a great job. And then they're like, let's see it again. And then the grad students were like, okay. And so they picked up the robot and they're like, well, hopefully the battery doesn't die this time. And they put the robot down. And then this time when they hit play, one of the people watching who was leaning over his pen fell out of his pocket and fell into the world. And the robot walks over and it completely misses the pen and just trips over it and then falls over and starts kicking his legs on the ground. And so this is a apocryphal story, but it's also representative of this finding of what's called toy worlds, which in if you because at that time, all they were doing was hard coding like each step and under certain constraints in certain environments with everything kept neutral, it can solve the problems. But in the messiness of the real world, It turns out they don't have the adaptability, the flexibility. I mean, they can conceptually they can, there's nothing stopping them. But currently the software is both like not finished, but also the hardware, like specifically the hands. It's like we're nowhere close to having those where we'd want them to be. And I could be wrong. I'd love to be wrong. ⁓ And I've seen the figure thing and also I've seen it try and fold laundry. I don't know if it was figure, but I've seen many, of these humanoids try and do manually dexterous tasks and they just don't work.
Andras Lenart: Yeah, I've seen some of the laundry folding as well and that was in a pretty sight.
Rupert: No, like Amazon, like Amazon would be so stoked to have this stuff, right? But it's just not, if you look at the robots that are actually using, they're like, ⁓ they look like battle bots where they rip around on wheels and then they have a plank on the top and a platform comes on and then the plank tips to throw the package off, but they don't have any grippers or ⁓ they have very minimal ones, very rudimentary because that's what works at this point.
Andras Lenart: Mm-hmm.
Rupert: And if you have a bunch of boxes that are the same size, most of the time are similar sizes. That's a, you can do that.
Andras Lenart: Yeah, okay. I mean, we'll see. I'm still somewhat optimistic, but yeah. Yeah.
Rupert: Yeah, sure. And I would love to be wrong again. And I think I think they will work. I just think it's going to take based on Elon time, which is a very real thing. I think it's won't be until what is it? I'll call it right now. 2040 will align. Yeah, we're gonna I'm gonna align with Kurzweil here. I think we'll have some versions of it in 2035. But I think it won't be like ubiquitous until 2040. And I think in the short term, like
Andras Lenart: 2040, okay. Okay.
Rupert: that ⁓ robot taxis are gonna be way less sexy and magic because they're just replacing cars. But I think that will radically change the world.
Andras Lenart: maybe reformulating the original question there. ⁓ What is the advantage of you that Tesla has versus again all these other like Chinese BYD or all those other companies that are also intending towards similar projects?
Rupert: Sure. So BYD, one of the biggest companies in the world based in China, they're responsible for some absurd number of the amount of vehicles produced in the world. Now, if you're living in the States, you probably don't know about them because we have embargoes that stop them from coming over basically same with Canada. ⁓ Just on that note, there's some really sketchy things happening in Canada with some organizations that are probably funded by the Chinese Communist Party to try and convince Canadians as if it's a grassroots movement. So like literally intellectual cyber warfare. ⁓ that we should allow BYD to sell cars in Canada, which if we did that, say goodbye to our whole auto industry, cause they, ⁓ for a bunch of reasons, Chinese cars are way cheaper. ⁓ so please don't vote Chinese cars into North America. ⁓ so BYD is very, very, they have the advantage of having their nation state behind them. They're literally a strategic branch of the Chinese government and China a long time ago. going back to our goal plan, due review, came up with 15 year plans where they identified key emerging markets that they wanted to capitalize on. And so they basically took their brightest minds and said in 15 years, what are going to be the new bottlenecks of the world productivity? And so a bunch of those weren't real, but some of them were. And China's done really, really, really well at getting a monopoly on them. And the biggest one is batteries. China makes pretty much all the batteries in the world. And they have all the plants, all the machinery that does the refinement. they like a battery in China costs like 30 % of what it would cost to make in Canada or the US, maybe even less. ⁓ Same with like solar panels. And yeah, it's pretty alarming based on the world's increasing direction of electrification. So shout out to Tesla because they're really the only ⁓ well, not the only, but they're the main sort of not Chinese company that's, ⁓ trying to keep pace and lead the field. And I don't think they get enough credit for that. ⁓ so with that B O B O I D and companies like Xiaomi, ⁓ X I A O ⁓ I are doing a really, really good job of sort of discovering new ways of building electronics, things like cars and, ⁓ and big large machineries. ⁓ so they're. They are pushing the envelope and they're a real threat. And I would threat in the sense like competitively. ⁓ and I would not say that they should be counted out on any of these things where they're maybe not as advanced is generating novel intellectual property. Cause the Chinese playbook right now is to take the research and development from Europe and North America. And then they don't care about. copyright or that sort of thing. So they take their information, they steal it, like literally, and then they iterate on it, having not had to sink all that cost into discovery and experimentation. And then they expand it from there. And so we're seeing like in the AI space, things like Gwen ⁓ by Alibaba or ⁓ Kling K2, these different models that are cost pennies to make literally like pennies compared to the money that companies like open AI are putting in or Microsoft or Google. And they perform like 70 % is good. 80 % is good. And it's like, oh, wait, one person paid $1,000, one person paid $1. And it does 70 % of it. Like, that's a huge advantage. And so when it comes to industrial manufacturing of things like robots, if There was a, if it was a solved problem, they would be able to create probably a version of it. That's not as good, but maybe better in some ways. And it would cost a lot less. So that's a real concern. wouldn't, I wouldn't ⁓ write that out. Like to put this in perspective, if we in Canada today, we're allowed to buy Chinese EVs. There would be no more Honda. There would be no more, like people would be very reluctant to buy. EVs from any other company, maybe Tesla, but Kia Hyundai, these, the value comparison compared to Chinese EVs is like, it costs half as much and they're better. It's wild how, how far ahead they are. It's really easy to downplay this because so long China has been this like third world or whatever, but they're, they're not anymore. They're big, big boys on the international stage and they're, they're quite formidable. Yeah, so ⁓ if Optimus, the bot from Tesla, becomes the first one that works, which I think is a high chance, ⁓ they would be just trying to stay ahead in the same way of continuing to push the envelope in terms of the software. But ⁓ their costs just would never be as cheap. They wouldn't have as much support and access to raw resources.
Andras Lenart: Yeah, okay. Okay. So there's no, there's no like definitive advantage. Competitive advantage. Yeah, right.
Rupert: embargoes. So like right now, the American government's really trying to push DJI, the drone manufacturer who makes like, again, like 90 % of the world's drones, trying to stop them from being sold in North America, because they're friggin drones, they're flying around everywhere. And there's good reason to believe that they could very easily be weaponized by the Chinese government, they could be collecting data, like all this different stuff. And also, if there was a war, If you have the company in your home turf that makes all the world's like the next wars are going to be fought with drones. So, ⁓ yeah, there's real concerns there. Like that they've, like I said, it got a monopoly on these key industries already.
Andras Lenart: This is some good optimism.
Rupert: Yeah, straight up. ⁓ I'd love to pivot a little bit to, ⁓ another sort of maybe financially connected idea, but I'm going to giggle. Just, just even thinking about this, ⁓ the NFTs, which nobody's talking about NFTs right now, but of a cock punch. So for the audience, folks who may not know cock punch, ⁓ which is a hilarious name, ⁓ and also childish and inappropriate is from, ⁓ Tim Ferris. ⁓ He released it a couple of years ago, like three or four years ago now. ⁓ I think, and Andre and I have talked about it a few times because different people, as with all NFTs claim this to be a scam. ⁓ they talked about it being a fad and just a money grab. And I would like to say that now is a great time. If you have any spare cash to maybe consider, ⁓ purchasing a cock of your own. ⁓ so yeah, these are little JPEGs, ⁓ NFTs that you can find on sites like OpenSea. They live on Ethereum and each, I can't keep saying this, but each rooster, each cock, ⁓ is like a rooster that has different traits. So they're basically warriors that are set in a world where there's like gladiator battles and stuff. And nobody's talking about them. They are, it's basically dead. Except for Tim Ferriss, if those of you who don't know him, productivity guru dude. ⁓ all around nice guy, is been hinting low key that he has huge plans for this and that he's going to revive it and turn it into, ⁓ turn it into something big, not financial advice. I don't know what he's going to do. There's no guarantees here. He's very explicit about, please do not spend money. You can't afford to lose. This is a game. It's fun. It's silly. ⁓ and he's not promising to make anyone money at all. But based on his rock record, I have the sense that ⁓ there might be some games that come out of this. think it's likely going to be a game of some kind. And at that point, I can see the value of these little assets ⁓ going from a place where nobody cares about them, and there's maybe a couple hundred people who remember them and are still thinking about it, to being like a couple thousand, maybe more. And at that point, the price might change.
Andras Lenart: What's the... Do you have a sense of the current floor price?
Rupert: Yeah, it's a 0.04. So it's a couple hundred dollars. And the hard thing is that most of the good ones, like there's people who hang out and try and scoop up if good ones go on sale. And I'm a part of a couple of discords and stuff where a a couple of groups where like there's collectors and people are really paying attention to people who have staked a lot of money on this very quietly. But the thing that's quite nice is as opposed to most crypto is it's very much not hype driven. Like there's a sense of like people are patient and like love their relationship with this human, artist who's creating this project. And they're just excited to have some way of supporting and being a part of it. ⁓ so I, yeah, I've scooped up for them and, ⁓ probably paid too much for what they were worth. And maybe I'm just trying to inflate, inflate the price so I can get out from it. But, ⁓ I generally I'm looking forward to see what just happens with the project. And I'm excited for the possibility of like having some very small exposure to it, especially if it's only a couple hundred dollars.
Andras Lenart: Wonderful. That was such an interesting project, so I am curious to see how that plays out.
Rupert: And just, ⁓ yeah, I know when I give you a recommendation about things like getting your name registered and how that paid off for the air drops and stuff, ⁓ I think this is one of those moments where people aren't looking, but I think it's a seed that at some point might blossom.
Andras Lenart: Yeah, I do remember you convinced me on Tesla way back, so that proved good.
Rupert: Sure. ⁓ Just being mindful of time here, want to maybe start to move towards a wrap up, but I wonder if you, I've got a bunch of other things that I think every time we talk, there's a sense that I'd to hear more about what's going on in your world and yeah, do you any other topics you want to
Andras Lenart: Nothing that feels alive or pressing right now.
Rupert: I'm curious to hear just like a little synopsis on like, what's your world looking like at the moment? Do you have any, do you have any big projects on the go or any aspirations that you're working towards that you want to share? I'm sure you've got lots of stuff, but.
Andras Lenart: Yeah, lots of stuff. Nothing I'm actually feeling inclined to share right now though. Yeah.
Rupert: OK, yeah, fair enough. ⁓ I've got ⁓ just a random recommendation that I thought you might like. ⁓ And that's been so valuable to me. Have you ever gone down the rabbit hole of trying to figure out like how to speak or engage, like sort of charisma work or like, I don't know, there's so many different ways of arriving at this topic.
Andras Lenart: Yeah, I've definitely looked into or at times practiced at different approaches for that, but yeah, curious what your recommendation there is.
Rupert: ⁓ have you ever looked at specifically like versions of that for teaching teaching or presenting? Like being in front of a group or whatever.
Andras Lenart: Not as far as I can recall.
Rupert: Okay. Yeah. one of, found this YouTube video many years ago and I keep going back to it and then I'll forget about it go back and be like, ⁓ my God, this is, this is the best thing ever. It's called how to speak, how to speak. And it's, ⁓ released on YouTube by MIT MIT courseware. I'll put in the show notes, but it's just like, this professor? don't remember his name. He's got a punch. He's got a big belly. And he's got like his slacks pulled up above his, above his belly button. And he's at the front of the lecture hall and he just gives a masterclass. Like the whole purpose of the lecture is how to speak. If you're trying to be like a teacher giving her a lesson. And the cool thing is that he just embodies it. He, the whole lesson is him talking about it conceptually, but then also doing it in practice. And so I was curious. ⁓ I didn't know how that. aligns with your goals or like projects that you got going on. But ⁓ if there's ever a desire to increase those skills, I think that's a really awesome resource.
Andras Lenart: Yeah, I appreciate that. mean, better communication is always helpful.
Rupert: Mm-hmm. He's got a line in there, which is the quality of your life will be determined by how you speak, how you write, and how you think in that order. And don't know, I agree with that, but I think that those three things are, I agree with the sentiment that they're essential for. quality presentations and communication and connection with the world.
Andras Lenart: What have you taken away from it in terms of how you communicate, how you speak?
Rupert: Hmm. It comes up for me mostly around what I see people doing on a day-to-day basis, things that we were taught in school. like a PowerPoint and having bullets and like how to structure your thoughts and seeing the ways that those are effective and useful and easy to implement and valuable for all those reasons. But then how they diverge from how I best engage with or hear other people and just feeling that. that constant tension of like, I don't actually enjoy this PowerPoint right now. And then like, well, what would be a better version of it? And this guy, this wonderful, pantalooned fellow, ⁓ he seems to have a very intimate understanding of the grammar of our minds and our hearts for engaging with information. And so he demonstrates like 13 different small adjustments you can make. Um, and so for instance, one of them is, um, he's very visual. He's very, uh, he's using demonstrations and drawings and moving around in space. He's not standing in the center of the stage, stationary and static, but he's constantly moving and he'll just pick up an item. And sometimes he won't refer to it and it won't be relevant. but it's intentional and it retains and engages our intention. And so in a world where there's like TikToks and reels and all these different arenas where people are practicing how to engage attention, he does so in a way that I think is very organic and feels less ⁓ like I'm being hijacked and more like it's a storyteller, somebody who's ⁓ inviting and meeting me where I'm at and is able to deliver the information they're intentionally designing, but respectfully and creatively. And if you even watch the first 10 minutes, I'd love to hear sort of like your immediate response. Like you should live tweet it and give me your, I'd love to hear that.
Andras Lenart: Yeah, I'll take a look at the first 10 minutes at least.
Rupert: Cool. Um, one of the things I really want to thank you for the recommendation a few years ago of, um, using Nicorette as a neurotropic or a focusing aid. I've, um, thanked you before, but this is my first time publicly and just, yeah, it's been the biggest change in my life legitimately.
Andras Lenart: Yeah, yeah, of course, of course, I get the affiliate payments from the nicotine companies for that.
Rupert: Thanks for getting me hooked on nicotine, Andras. Five cents from every piece of gum I chew.
Andras Lenart: What are you using it for in what context?
Rupert: Do you to give a quick spiel? I'm not asking you to endorse anything, but like the way that you shared with me that you personally use it or that I might try out. If not, I can do it, but.
Andras Lenart: Yeah, I honestly can't recall what I said. ⁓
Rupert: Yeah, sure. ⁓ My understanding or my recollection was that you had said like, ⁓ it's really your you'd been experimenting with it based off probably some obscure blog or I'm not sure where you found that information. I know you did a bunch of research on neurotrophics or ⁓ these memory and focusing tools. ⁓ But Nicorette you can buy it's usually for gum or sorry for smoking cessation. So quitting smoking, but Interestingly, it's also a very low toxicity way of ingesting nicotine that doesn't have the same sort of health concerns that smoking or vaping does. So you get nicotine in your ⁓ blood system without a bunch of the toxic chemicals that are commonly associated. And nicotine has been used for thousands of years because it tightens our focus. So with the neurosciences, it reduces acetylcholine, which is like you can think of the spotlight in your mind. Is it a tight beam like a flashlight or is it like a wide beam, like an ambient glow and a set of calling from nicotine helps you like look at a page and keep your eyes on the page. And Jesus, wow, for me and my ADHD, that's, um, that is definitely the biggest thing that I get distracted by. can just bounce between so many topics. And so now between, uh, before a focus work session, maybe once every two days or so I'll take a piece of Nick rat, but you recommended I get the four milligram one and then I'll usually bite that in half. It's the most cost effective ⁓ tuck it in my cheek. And then the nicotine from that gets absorbed in my bloodstream and I'm just focused and I feel like I'm it's a way easier access point to flow.
Andras Lenart: Yeah, that's, that's, that's really good to hear. The, the one thing I'd add that, that I like the reason that I found it so helpful is that it helps you focus, but it doesn't, it doesn't really drive that. Like it's a calm focus. And yeah, which is, which is distinct from, you know, what might happen with, with other psycho stimulants or caffeine or anything like that. So it does seem to, ⁓
Rupert: Mm-hmm, which is the goal.
Andras Lenart: Like even for athletic performance, find it can help get in into a more of a flow or even more of a of like sense of embodiment at times as well.
Rupert: Yeah. it narrows the aperture and narrows, it tightens the focus And so I don't know about you, Andres, but ⁓ if I take something like Ritalin, which I've been sometimes I get way too agitated. It's like taking meth. It's very similar molecularly to speed. And like, yeah, I can run through a brick wall and I'll work harder, but also I can be like irritable. can be destructible. I'm like very aroused, like hyper.
Andras Lenart: Yeah, same drawbacks I notice. And then versus caffeine, ⁓ caffeine I just find, if I ingest it anything other than the first third or first quarter of the day, it can impact my sleep. so I find the, because of the half life, the duration of effect for nicotine is so much shorter. ⁓ It's like the tolerance for taking it is much ⁓ greater.
Rupert: Mm-hmm. Yeah, a hundred percent. And that's one of wonderful things like at the end of the day, it's 6 PM, 7 PM, 8 PM. I can still take a piece of Nicorette. One of the beautiful things is like the half-life I find is like 60 to 90 minutes. And it just, so it's very like, okay, I need a focus work out right now. I need to drive. I'm a bit fatigued. It's wonderful for that. It also suppresses appetite. So I'm not going to be distracted by like, Oh, am I a little bit hungry?
Andras Lenart: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Rupert: It just times the focus to what I'm doing. So yeah, again, thank you. I'm not recommending to other folks that they necessarily get addicted to big old tobacco, but the health risks here for myself personally are quite minimal. find the biggest concern would be the habit forming. And I know that you've talked about different people starting to just recreationally do a bunch of nicotine or zins like pouches. ⁓ And so I think for myself, I have to be quite careful about setting rules and how much I use it and avoiding using it just recreationally indiscriminately. Cause that there is definitely a temptation there. It's quite a, like you said, a calm focus and that's a really nice state to be in.
Andras Lenart: Yeah, and I have noticed it with some others that I've introduced it to, where it is easy to over-consume it, to over-rely on it.
Rupert: Mm-hmm. Yeah. What's your sort of consumption? Like how much?
Andras Lenart: It varies widely, but I just make sure I don't take it every day, that I have at least a few days off a week. And then there might be weeks where I don't use it at all, and then some weeks where I rely on it a lot.
Rupert: Mm-hmm. Nice. That's great, dude. That's wonderful. Yeah. So it's great lover for folks who can use it that way. Well, then anything else before we wrap up?
Andras Lenart: No, no, I think this has been great.
Rupert: ⁓ it's so nice to talk to you, dude. And yeah, it's, it's a difficult being in different cities. I know we don't cross paths that much at the moment in real life, but I can't wait till the next time we do, we get to either adventure or party or do whatever feels good.
Andras Lenart: Absolutely. I'm looking forward to that as well.
Rupert: Thanks for the conversation, Andres.
Andras Lenart: Thank you.
