Ed Latimore: boxer, physicist, and author of Hard Lessons from the Hurt Business makes his third appearance on the show to discuss hard-won wisdom about impulse control, self-forgiveness, the challenges of modern parenting and why being discerning (not judgmental) about your social circle might be the simplest rule for a better life.
I hope you enjoy it as much as I did. We’ve shared some highlights below, together with links & a full transcript. As always, if you like what you hear/read, please leave a comment or drop us a review on your provider of choice.
— Jim
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Highlights
On Impulse Control
“…everything is built to impose control. When we think about impulse control, we often think of it as stopping ourselves from doing something we would like to do, and that's part of it—that's a big part of it. But it's also making yourself do things you don't want to do. We know enough about impulse control and willpower that it's like a habit. Well, not like it—it is a habit. So if you get used to controlling yourself in one or two or three areas, then you take that approach and that mindset to other things. So people who show up on time—that is an interesting form of impulse control, because it's so easy to be late for so many reasons. But it doesn't have to be that way and happen that way, and a lot of people let it happen that way… And that seems so basic. But it's the first instance where you get impulse control, or the way I used to refer to it—and I still do, depending on the context—conscientiousness. Impulse control, conscientiousness. If you get that built into you with something as simple as ‘clean your room’, then it makes a big difference in how you approach other things”
Your Environment Matters
“I totally get why people move now for school districts, because the two things that make the biggest difference in our outcomes in life: one, our family. Funny, we have no control over that. But our family. And then second, the people we spend the most time around, which will be directly dictated for most of us by the zip code we end up in, the school district we end up in. So even if parents aren't consciously thinking about it that way, that is a downstream effect. Wherever you live and wherever you go to school, those are going to be—that's the selection of friends you got to pick from.
There was this prison YouTuber I listened to because he's just a great storyteller, and he was talking about when you go to jail, you can make some friends, but you got to remember the people you're making friends with—they're all in jail with you. And not a lot of Boy Scouts in prison. These guys have done some bad stuff, some of them not so bad, but still bad enough. He's like, "Especially at the prison I was at, which was with lifers and murderers, things like that." But when I heard that, I was like, "Yeah, it's the same idea." Where you put your family makes a big difference. And the family you have makes a big difference.”
Learning from Ed’s Experience
“I'm a big fan of "you don't need to learn everything the hard way," because if you learn everything the hard way, you might not survive long enough to reap the benefits of the lesson. With that said, there are some things that you can only learn the hard way where the value of the lesson does not exceed the cost of receiving it. Those are important. But if I was going to tell somebody who did not go through my life, what can they learn from me? What can they get? I would like to think that if someone looks at my life, they go, "Well, this guy, he's done something. And look at the starting block that he had. What is my excuse?"
I got a buddy who lost his job about two years ago, took him about 18 months to find another job. And he had just had his kid and had just bought a house…And when your friends are going through something like that, you don't go saying, "Look, man, you saw how I grew up." You can't say something like that. You definitely shouldn't. But what you can do instead is just show up and be there for them and talk, and then they remember that it could be worse.”
On Self Forgiveness
“So the hardest person to forgive is yourself because you never get a chance to step away from you. And this is really important here because when you're forgiving someone else or an event, you can find a way to get yourself there, and you get to look at them from a distance. However you do that, the point is that you can look at them and you can go—you can create a narrative that works for you to help you get there. Whether it's true or not is not really relevant. But usually to make it work, it has to be mostly true, right? But with yourself, you never realize—you never think, "Okay, I thought this way then, and only knew that then, and I did the best I could with the information I had and the way I thought at the moment." All you see is a continuum. You see that you're still that same person. And so you go, "I must—I know better now." And somehow you retroactively apply that to an action you took or didn't take then. But that's not true. And you only do that because you never step aside and walk away from your body. And you're there the whole time.”
Reading List
The Triple Package; by Amy Chua and Jed Rubenfeld
Hard Lessons from the Hurt Business; by Edward Latimore
What Works on Wall Street; by Jim O'Shaughnessy
Boxing and the Art of Life; by Edward Latimore
🤖 Machine-Generated Transcript
Episode Introduction
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Well, hello, everyone. It's Jim O'Shaughnessy with another Infinite Loops. My guest today has been on the podcast a couple of times. He keeps putting out fabulous books. His name is Ed Latimore, and the book is Hard Lessons from the Hurt Business, which you can find everywhere. As I learned in the podcast, you can even find it at Target. Please enjoy my conversation with Ed.
[Quick transition]
Edward Latimore: …So yeah, and it's awesome that you were on time. I was expecting to log in and wait a few minutes, so I had this muffin.
Jim O'Shaughnessy: That's okay with me, man. Given my other characteristics, it's one of my more unusual ones in that I had punctuality beaten into me as a child—literally. My parents were like, "It's just a matter of courtesy. It's pretty simple, Jim. If you're expected somewhere at 11, you should be there at 11." I realized it when I had a guy working for me who was perpetually late, and I was really surprised by how annoyed I got.
Edward Latimore: Oh, we're the same person. That's why I was here. This is how I am in all things. I don't know where it came from because it definitely was not a thing in my house. My mom and I constantly went back and forth about this, and most of the people around me are not like this—my wife included. She's not a late person, but I'm like, "Let me be there 15 minutes early." I'm that kind of guy, and I'm about that with everything, everywhere. If I'm going to a place I don't know, I try to build in being there 30 minutes early because I don't know the route or if I'm going to get lost.
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Right.
Edward Latimore: And apparently that's a rare trait. It reminds me of this book I'm reading right now called The Triple Package.
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Huh.
Edward Latimore: By Amy Chua and Jed Rubenfeld.
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Okay.
Edward Latimore: The whole idea behind the book is that they went and looked at America's over-performing minority groups—the Mormons, some conservative Jews (but they talk about how that's fallen off, we'll get to why), but the groups that really received a lot of attention are the Chinese and really the Asians in general, East Asians specifically. The Chinese, Korean—we don't really have a lot of Japanese immigrants in this country—but the Chinese and Korean, and then Indian and the Nigerians as well, specifically those that came over from the Igbo and the Yoruba tribes. And the Indians we have here in this country—a lot of people don't realize this, but they're from the three highest castes.
Edward Latimore: That makes sense when you think about it. If you immigrate here from all the way from India, you have the means to get here. It's not like somebody that came over from Cuba. But speaking of the Cubans, they're also another group that gets talked about a lot, particularly the ones who came over when Castro took over. Two of the three "triple package" parts are superiority complex and inferiority complex—those are important and fascinating within themselves. But the third one, in relation to what we're talking about now, is impulse control.
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yep.
Edward Latimore: And how everything is built to impose control. When we think about impulse control, we often think of it as stopping ourselves from doing something we would like to do, and that's part of it—that's a big part of it. But it's also making yourself do things you don't want to do. We know enough about impulse control and willpower that it's like a habit. Well, not like it—it is a habit. So if you get used to controlling yourself in one or two or three areas, then you take that approach and that mindset to other things. So people who show up on time—that is an interesting form of impulse control, because it's so easy to be late for so many reasons. But it doesn't have to be that way and happen that way, and a lot of people let it happen that way.
Jim O'Shaughnessy: What's interesting that I found is when—so I've started a lot of companies, as you know. I was the chairman of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center. When I took over Lincoln Center, which is volunteer—if you're on the board, it's not just volunteer, you got to give money, you got to give your time, you got to do all that stuff. When I took over as chairman, there was an epidemic of lateness for every committee meeting, for every board meeting. So the first meeting I chaired, I said, "Okay, we got a new way of doing things. We're going to give everyone a five-minute grace period and then we're going to close the door. If the door is closed, people cannot come in." People were really pissed at me because half the executive committee didn't get into the first meeting, but guess what?
Edward Latimore: I bet they showed up on time.
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Indeed they did. And it works at the board level. It worked at every level.
Edward Latimore: You know, Jordan Peterson has recently gotten a lot of flak for different reasons—some of it justified, some of it not, whatever. I've never read the book. I'm just familiar with many of the tenets in the book because they're everywhere. One of the ones that really stands out in my mind all the time is the whole idea of "clean your room" or something like that.
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Right, right. Yeah.
Edward Latimore: And that seems so basic. But it's the first instance where you get impulse control, or the way I used to refer to it—and I still do, depending on the context—conscientiousness. Impulse control, conscientiousness. If you get that built into you with something as simple as clean your room, then it makes a big difference in how you approach other things. My mom was like, if I gave her a report card—great—like C's, maybe D-plus. Mom, I have a lot of complaints. In retrospect, I'm able to see a lot of things she did set my sister and I up for failure. We had to overcome them—one of us better than the other, but still. That's not to say it was all bad.
Edward Latimore: There were a lot of things my mom did very well, inadvertently. It wasn't like this was intentional, and one of those things was we had chores and were not paid for chores. We were expected to—I guess what she was trying to instill and failed at this too, but eventually I figured out why there was a positive correlation here. If I'm in the home and I'm consuming resources in the home and I don't contribute to resources, then I have to contribute somewhere else, and that is cleaning. Cleaning my room was a minimum. I had to sweep floors, had to mop, had to wash walls, had to do dishes. My sister and I alternated doing dishes. All of this. Now, as a kid, you're not thinking of it that way. But I look back, I'm very grateful for that.
Edward Latimore: Ultimately, the mistake here was that the behavior wasn't modeled well enough and there wasn't this link and this concept of a community that we cared about. It was just—my mom hated a mess. It's not like she was teaching, she just was like, "I'm tired. You got to do this." One thing that's really cool I'm finding even with my two-and-a-half-year-old son—that age is clear and important here—they can understand, or we can understand, reasons for things very early. Obviously there's a complexity limit that increases as we get older.
Edward Latimore: But I think one of the challenges of being a parent that we all have to meet is finding a way to make the child understand the why. Which is very counter, I think, to a lot of old school parenting, which is, "I'm the parent. You do it because I say so." Does it work? I mean, we don't know. Whenever someone says "X worked" or "Y worked well," we have to look at what we're measuring. Not just did the kids survive, and really not just did the kids survive and not go to prison—that's not enough. We need something more. But I do find that people tend to be less resistant and not just less resistant, but more enthusiastic if they know why.
Edward Latimore: Now, some things you can't explain to a child because the requisite complexity won't be there until they have reached the point where they won't need to be told they shouldn't do this. For example, anything dealing with how they handle their anger. I find, especially looking at my young child and seeing that he's young, but now he's not so young that he's the smallest—he's already a bigger kid. He got my genes. For better or worse, he's been in the 90th percentile for everything or above since the day he was born. Just seeing him around my other friends' kids who are a year younger, he looks twice as big. I mean, he is—he's a giant. And I'm like, "Okay, they are babies. They are not as big as you, so you have to help them." And he goes, "Oh, I have to help them. Okay." Instead of just telling him, "You have to share"—which is a lot easier—it's like, "No, they're babies, so you have to help them and you have to show them how to play." And it's like, "Okay, yeah." That has yielded far better results.
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Which is speaking to the why, right? That was one thing—we had our first child young, we were 24. My wife and I talked a lot about how do we want to raise our children? We really talked about it because it was important to us. The line that we ended up embracing was: our goal and our job is to raise successful and good adults. When you make that your line of code, you can't do the standard "because I said so" or just give them commands without explanation. When my kids would come to me and say, "I want to do this," I would say, "Okay, why?" And then they would say, "Because I want to." And I'm like, "Okay, so I want to do a lot of things, but the reasons that I want to do those things might not be that great. So here's the deal that I will give you. I'm not going to say you can't do it or can do it right now, but if you go away and think about it and you come back and tell me why you want to do this—" I'll give the example. My son wanted to quit karate. He might have been 8 years old. And he gave me the "Because I don't like it." And I'm like, "No, those aren't good reasons. Go away, come back and talk to me about some good reasons."
Jim O'Shaughnessy: And he came back and he gave really compelling reasons why he would like to switch sports. And I'm like, "Okay." The look on his face was he got it, instantly. From then on, my girls were the same way. If they wanted something, they would come and they'd already prepared—"This is what I want. Here's why I want it. What do you think?"
Edward Latimore: Yeah, it's really great. But you know what? That requires something I'm finding—and really kudos to you for recognizing that approach so young. I got to make sure I stay on the train of thought, but there's a really important point I have to make here. There's this big deal about people having kids older than younger now. The average age just keeps creeping up, and I think this year or last year, whenever the most recent numbers were released, for the first time in history, more 40-plus-year-olds are having children—having more children than people under, I think it was 21, or it was teen pregnancies. There are pros and cons.
Edward Latimore: The most obvious pro of having children younger is that you'll get to be around when they have grandchildren, or when they have children and you become a grandparent. There's a pretty good chance you'll be around. My wife and I have done the math. There's a chance, but it's not great. It's not abysmal, but if we said, "Okay, if he has kids the same age we had him," we'll be around. Whether we are capable and functional to be in their lives is a different story, and that's largely up to us now—health habits and things like that. So there's the big pro. The other one that some argue—obviously I don't buy into it because I'm 40 and just had a pro boxing match this Saturday, last Saturday, that I won, mind you.
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Congratulations.
Edward Latimore: Thank you. Is the health and energy thing. And I'm like, "No, that is almost directly related to that last point," which is that if you take care of your health, that's not an issue. Here's the con, though—the big con about having children younger that we never thought about until we had more research about this. Obviously, people know right from wrong, can plan things. This does not excuse things, but you have to understand what you're dealing with. Your brain is not finished developing until you're—we'll put a reasonable split difference number on it—28. Some say 25, some say 30, 28. And not only is it not finished developing, the last part to develop is your prefrontal cortex—that part that goes, "Hey, let's plan for the future. Let's figure out if this is a good idea, bad idea." That's not to say you can't do it, but you're working with limited hardware until then.
Edward Latimore: So if you have a kid when you're 22, 24 in your case, if you spend those first few years really trying to work things out and figure things out, you don't have the best approach. You might have everything in place you need for what we'll call the objective success—the objective metrics of success. You can move into a good zip code, you can provide for them and feed them, you don't have to be stressed, things like that. But in terms of what you're trying to instill in them to plan for the future, that is a big deal. And you just don't have it yet. Which is traditionally why the role of grandparents was to be there as this guiding force to help you because you're not finished. I mean, at least this is what I posit. I know that from an economic standpoint, the idea was if you need to go to work, your grandparents or the village help raise a child. So it really is cool that you guys figured that out so early and worked to keep with that.
Edward Latimore: The point I was going to make though, with that approach—we're back to this impulse control idea—that approach requires so much discipline because there are so many times, and I mean, you can speak to this. Your kids are grown, mine is on the other end, very young, and I'm already there. There are so many times where it would just be so much easier to be like, "Shut up. This is how it's going to be done. You either get on my page or go in your room." What does that teach? It doesn't teach anything. That's one of the reasons why I am so adamantly against any type of physical discipline for a child, because it doesn't teach. It is a quick corrective mechanism.
Edward Latimore: If you want to even talk about what it actually corrects for younger children, they can't even make the association between what they did and what this punishment is. If the punishments don't match the action, if you can't make the connection, you don't learn anything. You don't know what to avoid, what to do. What you do know, though, what you do learn to do is what you should do to avoid getting your ass kicked—that's what you learned. And that does not always turn out the way parents expect it to. If you always get mad at your kids coming to you with their problems, if they do something wrong, well, eventually the kid's going to be like, "I'm just not going to tell them," even when they should.
Edward Latimore: So obviously there's a time and a place for a reaction that is not positive. But even that reaction has to be tempered in a way to make sure that there is a learning element. Because ultimately, what are you trying to do? You're trying to raise—my perspective—you're trying to raise a net positive to society. No one wants to raise a serial killer. No one wants to raise a criminal. We want to raise people that, at the very least, make the world a better place. And if we can't do that, at least not mess it up. The only way, I think, to do that is to teach. That's all it is—teaching. Hopefully you teach them enough so that when the lessons start getting attacked—that's probably the wrong word—when they confront the world, the culture, things are built in to help them navigate it. And then they still have you as a teaching source because you built that relationship with them while they were growing up, while they were younger. They go, "Okay, I can talk to you about this problem."
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah. And the other thing that seemed to work for me and my wife was treat them like they're sentient creatures, even though they're not. By that, I mean the point you made about the prefrontal cortex not being developed until anywhere between 25 and 30. That doesn't mean that you can't give them—and I look at it as a form of respect. You can give your kids respect by listening to them, correcting or having a conversation with them about things they might want. Kids often want a lot of things that are not going to be good for them. So rather than just say, "No, that's not good for you," you have a dialogue, teaching, right? "Hey, let's say I let you do that. What would happen if you got really badly injured?" Say they want to go do something extreme. And then really listen to what they say to you. Again, to underline what you said, that takes patience because literally you're sitting there and you're like, "I can't believe I'm having a Socratic dialogue with a six-year-old."
Edward Latimore: And not only does it take patience, it also forces you to examine some things that you have—some systems you have been operating on.
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Bingo.
Edward Latimore: And go, "Okay, is this a real thing or is this just something I feel strongly about?" As they feel differently than you about things, you'll realize very quickly what's an opinion that you have that doesn't make a difference in how another person lives, what's an opinion you have that you've drawn the line in the sand on—"This is how we're going to live in this house, and I need you to understand why I feel that way. Now you're free to go off and do what you want when you're an adult, or a little younger, but right now, that's how it's got to be." And other things, they really are problems. And I need to explain why that is.
Edward Latimore: It's like every challenge in your life, and kids are very much a challenge. I won't say the hardest thing I've ever done. It's like it raises the overall difficulty level of life. There are no large spikes, like a heavyweight boxing match—that's a large spike of difficulty. Kids just raise the level. So you're always thinking, "I'm wearing this or that." But what you end up figuring out—what I found so far in my new journey—is you got to be willing to let yourself develop and become a better person. A more knowledgeable person, a more worldly person, but also one with stronger boundaries as well. Because you go, "Okay, that's not going to work. This isn't going to work." It's amazing, the number of things I have to have—not necessarily an opinion on, but now an awareness of. I didn't have to think about these things before because just a perfect example—I never, I won't say never, but yeah, never, because I'm very good about not letting the news get in my head and letting it even get me close to forming an opinion if there's nothing I can do about it and it won't affect me. I understand the world—there are horrible things in the world, but there are so many horrible things in the world that I can do nothing about that I'm going to focus on what I can do something about. This has been my thought process for a long time and it's really got me through some rough spots in my life just by remembering I can only control some things and other things I can't. We're not going to worry about those and we're not even going to know about them.
Edward Latimore: But now I got to think about—there are the big issues or the debates that are revolving around what is being taught in schools. Okay, I have to think about this now. I have to decide, one, I got to decide if it's true or not, because the Internet is the Internet. And then once I decide what's true and what isn't true, then I got to figure out where I stand on it and what I'm going to do about it because I have to do something about it now. Just because the world says it's okay—I'll be very specific here because this was the first time I was like, "This is a crazy world we live in." I can never remember the exact numbers of the bill because I can't, but I know it made large headlines when the Florida bill came out. They called it the "Don't Say Gay" bill, which, once I learned the details of the bill, I'm like, "That's not even close." That's an incredible example of media manipulation right there. Because that's not what the bill covered.
Edward Latimore: What the bill covered, once I looked into it, is they wanted to prohibit—or they are prohibiting, I don't know what the state of the bill is now—the ability to talk about sexual education in classrooms. Now my first thought when I heard this was, "Okay, we had sex ed in high school. There's a clear point where you need it for no other reason than you're capable of reproduction, and that comes with all types of negative downstream effects if you do it wrong or get into the wrong position." But that was all I thought about. Then, back when John Oliver wasn't so political, I was a bit of a fan of his. Then I stopped watching once his show really just became overly political. This isn't left or right—I can't stand anything. I hate CNN just as much as I hate Fox News. It's the same thing. It just so happens that John Oliver is heavily left-leaning. So on his heavily left-leaning show, he comes on in defense of the bill, and in his defense he explains what it actually is, which is that the bill didn't want to allow them to discuss sexual education or those concepts—anything around that related to gender or sex—in classrooms of third grade or lower. I said, "Hold up, pause. Everybody's freaking out about this." When I was growing up, that wasn't the thing. You couldn't talk about that for good reason in classrooms because then it's adults who ideally have been vetted introducing a concept to people who aren't even anatomically or neurologically there yet to deal with it.
Edward Latimore: So that was my initial reaction or argument. And then someone else was like, "Well, but the fact that kids are being taught that, there's the instance where the girl's able to identify what actually has happened to her at home and get a bad person out of there." And I'm like, "That's true too." But these are the things I have to think about now. I got a whole new way of thinking about things.
Edward Latimore: So if something like that is in my school district, I have to decide, "Okay, do I want to stay in this district? Do I want to move?" I totally get why people move now for school districts, because the two things that make the biggest difference in our outcomes in life: one, our family. Funny, we have no control over that. But our family. And then second, the people we spend the most time around, which will be directly dictated for most of us by the zip code we end up in, the school district we end up in. So even if parents aren't consciously thinking about it that way, that is a downstream effect. Wherever you live and wherever you go to school, those are going to be—that's the selection of friends you got to pick from.
Edward Latimore: There was this prison YouTuber I listened to because he's just a great storyteller, and he was talking about when you go to jail, you can make some friends, but you got to remember the people you're making friends with—they're all in jail with you. And not a lot of Boy Scouts in prison. These guys have done some bad stuff, some of them not so bad, but still bad enough. He's like, "Especially at the prison I was at, which was with lifers and murderers, things like that." But when I heard that, I was like, "Yeah, it's the same idea." Where you put your family makes a big difference. And the family you have makes a big difference.
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah. And you point out in your memoir, Hard Lessons from the Hurt Business, that in your own case, when you went to the new high school, that made a massive difference because it shifted your zip code, as you would put it, and you found yourself in a completely different environment. And environment does matter, right? Not everything is genetic. Who you're around and who's influencing you have a huge impact on you. And it's interesting to me—that just seems to be one of the plainest and easiest to understand facts in the world.
Edward Latimore: Oh, it is. But a lot of things in the world fall under the "simple but not easy" category.
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah, no, you're right.
Edward Latimore: That realization and many realizations about human nature fall into that category. The problem is that for you to accept the truth of something, you have to accept all sides of that truth. You can't simultaneously say that environment matters and then blame—or ignore—legal or governmental structures, or ignore what's happening on the ground and say that doesn't matter. The "defund the police" movement, which I think is ridiculous. Anybody who's ever lived in a lower—you don't even have to live in a low-income area to know that cops are imperfect, they don't catch everything. I'm a strong believer in "a gun in the hand is worth the entire police force on the phone." Big believer in all these ideas.
Edward Latimore: At the same time, I know the bad guys don't want to go to jail and the cops take them there. So if you have a police presence, you tend to decrease or disincentivize criminal activity. That's just an obvious idea to me. But when I look at my experience, you got to remember when I went to that new high school, I didn't change my zip code. I effectively changed it, but not actually. And it was such a different new world. I mean, I felt like an alien. And that stuck with me my entire life. But it wasn't because of how people treated me or anything—I mean, good people, best people. Many of my—if not many, all of my friends not from the boxing world—all of my friends from childhood are from high school era. I don't have any friends earlier than 14. It just doesn't happen.
Edward Latimore: But seeing how people treated me and how they treated themselves and how their families interacted and just seeing their approach to life and their approach to their children compared to everything that I had seen and knew, that was just mind-shifting. I didn't even—I knew these things probably existed, is a good way to put it. But until you see it and live it and you get to experience it, and then whole parts of the city I've never gone to, but now I get to go to these places because my friends live there. My friends weren't rich. It's not like this was a rich private school. I mean, some of the kids could have easily gone to a private school if the parents wanted them to, but they were all upper middle class, stable families, both parents in the house. I didn't know anybody whose mom and dad lived with them until I got to high school. That was mind-blowing. Two people here in the house? It's great.
Edward Latimore: But just being there easily altered—that's one of the watershed moments in my life. I got four, maybe five of them. But that's one of those watershed moments in my life where I don't—not only can I not imagine what my life would be like had I not gone to that particular high school, it's almost like a cliche—nothing will ever be the same again. I don't know, I can't reconcile my old world, or I can—I know it existed. I went through it, obviously grew up in it. But to me, it's so weird that—I found the words for it as I'm talking—it's a level jump in consciousness. It's like when you see somebody—I worked at a homeless shelter once. I did security. Really great—not great job, but great stories.
Edward Latimore: I got out of that place and I can't imagine what it takes to get to that point because so many things have to go wrong in so many different ways over a long enough period of time that you don't have a place to live. A lot has to go wrong. It's when people talk about—I'm talking about the real—I won't say the real homeless, but there's the phenomenon in the Bay Area where people are sleeping in their cars because the property value is too high, but the jobs are good, but they're not good enough to cover a house. I'm talking about the guys that got to go to a shelter. And if you've ever been to a shelter, they're terrible places. A lot of homeless guys are like, "I'd rather sleep on the street. It ain't worth it." So to get to that point where you got to do that—I wasn't making a bunch of money or living this great life, but it was definitely not at my level of consciousness or experience. When I got to see that and experience it, I just looked and saw—I was like, "Wow, this is just—you see the world a completely different way."
Edward Latimore: I got a cousin who just got out of jail after 33 years. That was in 2023. He got out. So that's since like '91, I think. That's a whole world. They're missing three decades of change. And not just missing it, but you live in a prison environment. So sometimes when I'm hearing stuff he says or I'm listening to him, I'm just like, "That's—you think a certain way and you'll probably never be able to unthink that. It's been too long." And life is short. I mean, it's long if you do something dumb like get life in prison, but it's short. All of these—I bring these up just to show the comparison between thought levels and thought processes. And that change in my school was a big thought level process. It made me mad. It made me angry, because that's when I became really harsh. I've always held parents to a high standard, but that's probably where it started, I think, because I said, "Okay, I'm looking at all of these other people, so I know it doesn't have to be that way."
Edward Latimore: I didn't know that before because that's all I had seen. Everybody kind of like me. But now I'm meeting all these other people and I'm seeing all these different advantages, and they're not even really advantages. It's more like I'm disadvantaged and I'm seeing all of this. And I'm like, "It ain't got to be this way. Why is it this way?" Nobody had an answer for me, and my mom really didn't like that I was now in this crowd and seeing this new world. It was a really big point of contention.
Edward Latimore: So I didn't spend any time at home, or rather, I spent as little time at home as I possibly could. Stuff that people get excited about—I wasn't home for Christmas or Thanksgiving. I went to my friend's house. I said, "I don't—" because I just knew it could be better. Once I seen that, I was like, "What am I doing here?" And I guess some people think that's kind of harsh, but it's not like my house was full of love, right? Because we got great studies on this. When I was writing Hard Lessons from the Hurt Business—just a side note story how I got all this information in my head. Now it's a memoir, which means there's not a lot of research or studies in that. It's my life story. I didn't know I was writing a memoir in the first draft. It's a great piece of content. I learned a lot, but it just isn't the type of book I was supposed to write.
Edward Latimore: But we know that there's this poverty effect. The poorer you are growing up, the more likely you're going to be poor when you get older. That is almost completely nullified if both parents are in the house. So love and relationships prove to be this incredibly protective armor against the adverse outcomes in life. We see that in addiction—if you don't deal with abuse and you have both parents in the house, your odds of becoming a drug addict drop to single percent, no matter how poor you grow up. But I say that to say it's not like my house is full of love, man. I talk about this in the book and talked about it in different ways. My mom was abusive. She didn't think it was abuse, but it was. I mean, between the physical injuries and my mom always cussing me out. I didn't realize even at the time—that's how crazy it is until you get around people who don't do that—you think it's normal.
Edward Latimore: And I'm like, "Yo, my mom—they don't cuss at their kids, they don't even really yell at their kids." So it's crazy. My dad wasn't around and then there's the whole environment in general that infects everybody. My mom and sister would have full-on fights and we had the police called multiple times. So this is the type of environment I'm deciding to not stay in when I'm always spending my time in this new high school, in this new world and in that environment. It easily changed my life, man. I can't imagine without having done that.
Jim O'Shaughnessy: And you mentioned other watershed moments, and I have to guess that you recognize those retrospectively. In other words, you probably didn't—and correct me if I'm wrong—did you have a moment where you were like, "Holy shit, this is a whole new thing for me"? Or did the watershed moment happen and then later you kind of look back and thought, "Oh, I see what happened there"?
Edward Latimore: Yeah, yeah. I mean, look, I almost said when my son was born, that's the only one where I was like, "Oh, wow." But that's more of me knowing that things are going to be different. So it's an expectation, but I still have no idea. I wasn't aware of the ways I changed in the first six months he was here. So I don't know what's going to happen six years or 20 down the line. I do know I'll change and everything I do has been changed because he exists now. But on other ones that are not so clear and obvious, the way I described going to that high school—and this will apply to the other ones—it's like, here's your path. You're going on the line. And that line is the one you're supposed to go on if you keep doing what you're doing, and then you change course by a degree or two. At first there's not much of a difference. You don't realize. And it's only after a long enough time that you're able to go, "Wow, not only am I not on that path, I'm all the way over here." And that is taking me through different events that I would have never done. And those events have exposed and opened things in my life, and I am now as a direct result of that little change that didn't seem significant at the time.
Edward Latimore: So where I went to school, boxing—I had no clue. I certainly hoped I do okay. But in terms of the other peripheral benefits and the people it's exposed me to and the life it's built for me and the opportunities it's brought for me outside of boxing, no idea that would happen. Couldn't imagine my life right now. My book is called Boxing and the Art of Life. Who would ever have thought that, right? That's one of those things. Me and my wife—no big deal, big difference maker. And getting sober. Getting sober—whenever I talk about getting sober, I say it like this, because now it'll be 12 years this December. Thank you. Easily the best thing I've ever done for myself, by far.
Edward Latimore: But I go, "Look, there's a whole set of events on the 'Ed still drinking' timeline that I didn't have to deal with." And many, if not all of those events are negative and destructive, not just to me, but to other people in my life. This is one of the reasons why I say my wife is the other one, because I met her and I just happened to meet her when I was wrestling with the tail end of drinking. But what I was doing, I didn't just click it off, because very rarely does that happen. I was like, "Oh, let me do five days sober, two days, or I'll just get wasted on my mom." But it never is just two days. On our first few dates, they were all those days where I wasn't drinking.
Edward Latimore: So she's never even seen me drunk. And because of that, one of the things I said to myself when I was like, "I'm going to get sober," I said, "Look, Anna's a really nice girl. She was—I mean, she still is. Since she's a really nice girl, she doesn't deserve to be around somebody like this. And I don't really want to give her up. So what am I going to do? Well, I guess I got to give up booze." That was one of the three reasons that I had to get sober. But she also—really just because she's never been like, "All right, we got to get you to AA" because I was never drinking around her. But what she did do is create this environment where I could just be myself.
Edward Latimore: I tell her all the time, "The best part about being with you to this day is that I just get to be myself. And you're fine with that." Because you're fine with that, I've never felt any compulsion to drink to fit in. It's always a supportive environment, all the things she likes to do. It's not like she likes to go out to bars or always drinks at events or anything like that. What's our favorite activity? Not much has changed since having a kid. That's how stable the only thing that's really changed—we can't travel as much and we can't travel together as much. This October coming up will be our first trip across the ocean together. We went to Canada for a birthday a year ago.
Edward Latimore: But yeah, we used to travel all the time because of what she does. She's involved in travel. She plans a lot of high-end trips for people, very good at her job, which is how we get a lot of invites to places or reasons to go places. But with the baby now she's had to cut back. But now we both don't go. Now as he gets older we'll probably start both going again. But the flying—kids—it'll probably be better this time because now he's got focus and can look at stuff for an hour. But flying, we flew down to Sarasota where her sister lives in Florida a few times. Even that flight to—well, it's right outside of Quebec City, it's a place called Charlevoix. That's where we went for a birthday. Even those flights just aren't fun. And I don't care about kids yelling, whatever. That's what kids do. They cry, they're out. If you can't handle it, put some headphones on or something. It's more about me—he needs to be constantly entertained. I didn't realize before how relaxing flying was until it was no longer relaxing. And I was like, "Man, you always need something. Can't you just sit here? Go to sleep?" No, he's not that tired, but now he can talk and explain when things are wrong. He can watch things.
Edward Latimore: We've been doing this thing where we're just seeing how long he would last on The Muppet Christmas Carol. Last Christmas it was 15 minutes. Now, though, man, this guy watches Bluey for—they do these Bluey loops and it's a good cartoon. Sit there and watch it for an hour and a half. Now, the good news is that when I say it's time to turn it off, as long as he gets to press the button, he's pretty good about it. He tries to negotiate back like, "No, I got to set my timer first." Like, "No, no, it's time to go now." And then I explain why. But yeah, the whole point of me bringing that up is that not much has changed. That's how—and that's fine because I love the fact that she's always like, "Let's go for a walk" or "Let's go to a museum."
Edward Latimore: We had a membership to the Botanical Gardens before he showed up. Now we use it all the time because it's a great little place to go. He walks and plays, and it's a good time, and it's just fun. It'll be even more fun when he's like—right now, he enjoys the museum because it's just a place with new things. But in terms of "Oh, let me learn stuff and read stuff," that'll be even more fun. But all that to say, this is the type of person I ended up with. Not much changes in terms of social life after kid. Same fun shows we watch. I don't know if you know about All Creatures Great and Small. It's a—oh, man, I love that show. I love Masterpiece Theater in general.
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah.
Edward Latimore: She's the one that got me into Downton Abbey. All of these shows. And that's the type of content we consume and the activities we do. And you don't realize how great it is when you can—when you've been so performative, which is how I would describe how I was dating before, kind of performative. And then I meet somebody right in the transition of my life, and it's like, "Oh, this is the person you need to—you can make a choice. You can go back to what you've been doing. How good has that been working out for you? Or you can follow along with what the universe has laid in front of you and take a hint?" And I did. I'm extremely happy. Just really happy. And that makes a big difference.
Jim O'Shaughnessy: So you did not have an easy road, right? And your memoir makes that very clear.
Edward Latimore: Clear.
Jim O'Shaughnessy: What can somebody who didn't have a rough time of it, right, and didn't have these watershed moments that you saw retrospectively made a huge difference in your life—when they read your book, give me advice for them. My guess is that everybody, no matter where they are in society, everybody has struggles, and everybody has doubts about themselves or just a whole host of things. Can people learn, truly learn by the experience of others, or is it something that they've got to go through themselves?
Edward Latimore: Okay, so that's a great question. I'm a big fan of "you don't need to learn everything the hard way," because if you learn everything the hard way, you might not survive long enough to reap the benefits of the lesson. With that said, there are some things that you can only learn the hard way where the value of the lesson does not exceed the cost of receiving it. Those are important. But if I was going to tell somebody who did not go through my life, what can they learn from me? What can they get? I would like to think that if someone looks at my life, they go, "Well, this guy, he's done something. And look at the starting block that he had. What is my excuse?"
Edward Latimore: So okay, things are a little bad right now. It's a little down. Maybe I got laid off my job, okay? But I can still get a job, and I've got all this support system. And look, because I wasn't raised in the hood, I've got a good relationship with money, and I saved. So I'm going to be okay for a minute. I got a buddy who lost his job about two years ago, took him about 18 months to find another job. And he had just had his kid and had just bought a house. But let me tell you, because he comes from—he's one of those friends I made in high school. He had a bunch of money saved. He had no debt because his parents made sure he went to school the right way. They saved for him. Both of his parents are alive and they were helping with the baby. And he had skills. He just had to find the right opportunity that wouldn't force him to relocate after he had just got a house or something like that. Just took a little time, but he figured it out. He got it done.
Edward Latimore: And when your friends are going through something like that, you don't go saying, "Look, man, you saw how I grew up." You can't say something like that. You definitely shouldn't. But what you can do instead is just show up and be there for them and talk, and then they remember that it could be worse. But since I'm not talking—everybody reads the book or knows me—that's what I think a person can take from the book, really take from it: perspective. Not just a perspective on their life, but kind of a roadmap for how the thinking or how my thinking process goes. And I can't speak for everyone that's moved out of or changed their situation, but kind of a roadmap for the thought processes that go into someone who makes a change like that. I think there's a lot of value in stories.
Edward Latimore: On a related note, back to how I wrote the book—and there's no weirdness in how I wrote the book—is that I didn't know I was writing a memoir. And when you write a memoir, what you're really doing is you're telling a story, you're writing a story. You're writing about your life as a story. And stories do so much better, in my opinion, at relaying values, because I can tell you all the research and tell you what you should do, and it's like, "Huh." But if we watch a character do that, whether that character is fictional or not, then we are really transmitting the principle in action, the lived value. So that's really the cool part.
Edward Latimore: Just some of the feedback I've gotten from early readers on it is—well, I've gotten two pieces of feedback, which is really cool. One, they're like, "Oh, man, this is really well written." I'm like, "Thank you." I've been working on this writing thing for 10 to 12 years at this point, and getting better each time because some of my stuff was bad. But the other thing I hear, though, is it's engaging. It's a good story. One guy said, "I couldn't make this up as a script." I'm like, "Okay, that's a good sign." Because what do they say? Mark Twain says, "The difference between reality and fiction is that fiction has to make sense."
Edward Latimore: Unfortunately, there's been a good ending and it's mostly consistent, but people don't—yeah, I get the question so many times. For example, "Boxing guy that does physics. How does that work?" And I'm like, "Well, I'll tell you how it works. You learn one and you learn the other." But when they find out it was a late start, they're like, "Okay, so it's not even like you were groomed to do this." Not only was I not groomed to do it, but you're not going to believe what I did in high school. I didn't really graduate. So there are all these lessons here, and you get to see them live and you go—oddly enough, when they're editing, and they're not really editing at this point, what they're doing is going line by line. So proofreading. But they're also fact-checking, which I didn't realize, but they fact-check everything. And they can fact-check the memoir, which makes you feel good. It's like, "Hey, this is also a real story." Real names, people, someone can verify different angles. So it's a good time.
Jim O'Shaughnessy: The process of writing it—did it—did you get any new insights that are going to influence what you do going forward? In other words, so before you wrote the book, you're doing things. You're doing really well. You're doing a lot of stuff that is really working for you. Did writing the book make you think, "Oh, man, I—okay, now I'm going to change X, Y and Z"? Or no?
Edward Latimore: Okay, so I guess I'll answer that in two ways. One, in terms of activities to do in the future. While this was not a pure fiction book, it was a story. And I've always wanted to write fiction. And this has been an incredible confidence booster for me moving into fiction. So I'm going to work on fiction. It's really giving me a lot of faith in myself. In terms of maybe an insight into me that will change how I do things moving forward—maybe not forward, but in the epilogue, I write about what I learned about my dad because my dad wasn't really around. My mom used to get mad that I would always criticize her, but he was the one not around.
Edward Latimore: I would say, "Look, man, I don't have any memories of him to be angry about. Got a lot of you, though." And then my son was born. For timeline reference, he was born November 2022, signed the book deal February 2023. So a three-month period in between. But I was already working on the proposal and everything in the interim. I remember holding him one night—crying with newborns or infants at this point do—and I remember thinking, "Man, this really sucks. This is really miserable. You won't sleep. I'm tired and need to sleep, but I can't sleep. But I would rather be no place else because I love you. You're my kid, you're my son."
Edward Latimore: And then I started thinking about my dad and I was like, "Wow, how—what is wrong with a person?" Because I knew my dad, he just wasn't around. He moved over to Philadelphia and I'm in Pittsburgh, so he spent his whole life over in Philadelphia. He'd come over once, maybe twice a year. We'd see him for an hour or two when he was here. So I couldn't understand how a man could move so far away intentionally from his kids, and it really bothered me because I understand people not staying together. I don't blame him—I wouldn't stay with my mom either. But to leave and not be part of our lives, that fired me up.
Edward Latimore: And then I thought more about it and I was just like, "Yeah, my mom would date these guys that would beat on us and really hurt us and hurt your daughter really bad. And you didn't do anything about it and rescue us." So either you didn't know and that means you were so disinterested in our lives that you couldn't tell when something was wrong or something was going on, or you didn't care. That got me angry. And then I had lunch with my uncle, his brother. My dad died when I was 18. He's been gone a while. Then I had lunch with his brother, my uncle. And he told me that when they were younger, he was 4 when his mom died of pneumonia, his dad just deserted, went to start a new family, no interaction whatsoever.
Edward Latimore: And I was like—and I'm always looking for, you got to give me something. I err on the side of understanding and forgiveness. You got to give me something to grab onto though, so I'm not just forgiving anybody and everybody. Some people—I mean, if you wrong me, I have to. But some things, we got to be vigilant. So when I learned that, I was like, "Oh, wow. Okay." So my dad probably saw the little bit of help and support he gave in my life as a dramatic upgrade on what he experienced. That does not excuse it, but moves the action from neglect to—what's the word I want?—just kind of continuing on autopilot maybe, and not really trying harder.
Edward Latimore: And then I always remember it could be worse because even though—which sometimes can weaken you and allow you to deal with a lot of bad stuff, but at this point, I'm an adult and I got my own kid to raise and he's been dead for, at this point now, 20 years. I'm like, "Yeah, it could have been a lot worse. He could have been around and been abusive. He could have been completely absent, like never interacted whatsoever." I know a lot of kids who were in that exact situation. So I'd say it has helped me continue to work on forgiveness. It's like everything in life—every challenge is an opportunity for you to improve yourself in some way or the other, if you want to meet that challenge and not be consumed.
Edward Latimore: Because I was walking around with this—it was like this low-level combination of sadness and anger and I didn't know what I was going to do and I had to find a way to deal with it. Having that lunch with my uncle, which was not like I just wanted to see my uncle—that's all I was—and I asked him different questions and stuff, and that really helped me, really helped me hearing that because it gave me something to hold onto because no longer was it neglect. I mean, it still was neglect, but I could find a way to understand it, find a way to make sense of it.
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Do you think—one of the things that I believe pretty passionately is whoever angers me, controls me. And it doesn't mean I don't get angry. I do. But the way I try to think about it is like, who am I doing more damage to here? Myself, because I'm letting that anger control me, or the object of my anger? And in almost every time I look at that, it's I'm doing much more damage to myself.
Edward Latimore: Way more. I tell—I get a lot of kickback. Not a lot, but I get some. I get enough when I tell people that they have to work on forgiveness. It's really important. And the kickback I always get is like, "Oh, no, that's weak. People got to pay." And like, first off, I'm not telling you to replace justice with forgiveness. I'm a firm believer in justice. You got to get some people off the street, but the damage they do to you—getting them off the street, that's not going to help. That won't fix the problem. And I always say, "Look, if you believe that, you haven't held a grudge against someone who died yet, because when they die, you're not going to feel better." People think they will.
Edward Latimore: Not only does the research show this, but there's quite a bit of anecdotal stories. It does not make you feel better. And depending on how the person is gone, it can make you feel worse. So you got to figure out a way to deal with all the damage that you've got. And you're walking around from an emotional standpoint, from a psychological standpoint, and no amount of physical justice can repair that. So you need to do something. And forgiveness, I found, is the only way forward with that because otherwise, like you said, you're going to be controlled by a ghost. Something you can't do anything about, you can't interact with. They win from beyond the grave.
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yep.
Edward Latimore: And—
Jim O'Shaughnessy: And I agree about forgiveness, but I often find that sometimes with a lot of people I know and love, the hardest person to forgive oftentimes is yourself. How do you deal with that?
Edward Latimore: It's funny, man. I wrote a section about that too, in the epilogue and stuff. So the hardest person to forgive is yourself because you never get a chance to step away from you. And this is really important here because when you're forgiving someone else or an event, you can find a way to get yourself there, and you get to look at them from a distance. However you do that, the point is that you can look at them and you can go—you can create a narrative that works for you to help you get there. Whether it's true or not is not really relevant. But usually to make it work, it has to be mostly true, right? But with yourself, you never realize—you never think, "Okay, I thought this way then, and only knew that then, and I did the best I could with the information I had and the way I thought at the moment." All you see is a continuum. You see that you're still that same person. And so you go, "I must—I know better now." And somehow you retroactively apply that to an action you took or didn't take then. But that's not true. And you only do that because you never step aside and walk away from your body. And you're there the whole time.
Edward Latimore: So you have to remember—what's helped me a lot because I walked around racked with guilt for a long time after I got sober. It was the type of guilt you couldn't experience until you got to look at your actions and behaviors under the influence. First I tried remembering that this was me drinking. And alcohol makes you act and behave a different way than you would otherwise. I don't buy that whole concept that a drunk mind speaks a sober heart. It's not—it's scientifically not true. We know what alcohol does to a person's ability to regulate, a person's ability to read people, to remember the body language they're sending out, to make decisions. It's poison in every way. I mean, we understand this with everything. That's why vehicular—driving under the influence is—is not a modifier. Typically, I don't want to—don't quote me on this if I'm incorrect, but typically, driving under the influence does not modify vehicular homicide. It's either one or the other. If you drive your car over somebody intentionally, that's the thing. But you're typically not drunk when you do that, which is why they're two different things.
Edward Latimore: In most cases, that worked for a little while, though, seeing that it was me drinking, but because of the type of person I am—and I think a lot of people who struggle with this, they tend to be the same way—I go, "Okay, but I chose to drink." And I'm like, "What do you mean?" Now I'm back to square one. I did choose to drink. And so you got to keep digging. And you go, "Why were you drinking? What were you hoping to accomplish?" And that helps, but what ultimately helped the most—and this is what I recommend to everyone struggling with guilt in general through this specific principle—what helped the most was me doing something to undo anything that I had done. And you can't turn back the clock. You can't change the past. Can't do that. What you can do is try and make the future better and be responsible for your actions under the influence.
Edward Latimore: So when I was sober, I wrote letters to my drunken self. While I was writing that, man, I must have wrote, I think, five people who I still was able to contact. And I was like, "I'm sorry I treated you this way or did this. I was drinking heavily and this is not an excuse. This is me owning my actions." Three of them were like, "Alright." One person was like, "Cool," but being cool. And the other person was like, "I get it. I didn't understand and you were dealing with stuff and all that." That was me owning my responsibility. And then writing the book was me trying to make the world a better place from what I experienced. You can't think your way through this thing. You got to act your way through it. Through actions. That's the only way you can convince yourself that you are not the same person. Trying to convince yourself you're not the same person when all you did was let time pass—that doesn't work.
Edward Latimore: Trying to convince yourself you're a different person and you do different things now—it's a big deal. It's one of the reasons why I stopped drinking and why sobriety helps as well. Because although I can only experience the guilt under sobriety, it would mean nothing if I was still drinking. Nothing. Me writing the book, that's me trying to help someone deal with the same issue and do what I can. Me writing to those people, that's me recognizing that I had an issue and I affected them negatively. And I felt so bad about it that I couldn't let it go after five years. So what I'm writing to you is to let you know that I'm that aware of what I've done. I'm not asking for your forgiveness. I'm owning my responsibility. And then I'm letting it go. So all I had to say. If you're having trouble forgiving yourself, you need to act in a different way and you need to make a personal amends. And the only way to make a personal amends is to live a different life or to take actions that signal to yourself that you're not the same person.
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah. I'm a huge believer in Jung's statement that you are not what you say you will do, you are what you do. And you've just underlined that for me. It's not—intentions are great, right? And some of them are wonderful, etc. But if you take no action against that intention, it's a daydream. It doesn't affect you. It doesn't affect anyone in your life. And you got to—it's a cliche, but it's a cliche because it's true. You've got to walk the walk and there's just no way getting around that. "Oh, I'm going to do this and this and this." And you can yap, yap, yap. And if you don't take any action against what you're yapping about, you're just a yapper and an annoyance.
Edward Latimore: Yeah, it's—actions do a lot. That's the only—I don't know what you're thinking. I don't know what anyone is thinking. I only know what they're doing.
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yep.
Edward Latimore: And if they repeatedly do something, that builds my thought of them, that builds my opinion of them, so you could do the same thing for yourself. This is one of the reasons why I'm so big—and I think a lot of people are big on this. It's not an original idea by any means—that how you talk to yourself matters because if you keep saying negative things about yourself, you're going to believe them. Why else wouldn't you?
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Right. It's really simple. That's why if you study propaganda, the rule number one is repetition, repetition.
Edward Latimore: Right.
Jim O'Shaughnessy: And if you can't see through your self-talk, you're basically using your own propaganda. And guess what? That's what you're going to end up believing. Whether it's true or false or just crazy. If you just keep saying the same thing over and over again, that's what you become. And the thoughts turn into actions and the actions are what really cements it, right? The minute that thought becomes an action and that action becomes a habit—if it's going in the right direction, you're going to have a pretty good life probably. If it's going—people don't understand that compounding works both ways. You can positively compound things and you can negatively compound things.
Edward Latimore: Man, this rule of compounding in terms of actions, positive or negative, it applies. The corollaries of it apply in other areas too. It's the people you keep around you. It's a lot easier to keep good people around you if you keep good people around you. And this is simplistic for language reasons—good and bad—but if you have one bad friend, the chances of you being introduced to somebody else bad increases. And now, what's that, the average of five people? Well, now you got another person to lower the average. And you're only going to become what you're around. It's the environment, all of these things compound. The actions you take compound. The environment you live in compounds. And by environment, I mean in this case, the people who make up that environment.
Edward Latimore: But yeah, once you accept—were saying—simple but not easy to accept. This is so simple because that really leaves you with only a few options. Assuming you want to do something, assuming you don't want to have a low quality of life. Option one, you just stop spending time with people. But that's not really the best one. Certainly preferable to spending time around people who are going to get you jammed up in legal issues or betrayal or trust issues. That is preferable. No time around people. Or you become selective in who you hang out with, but that forces you to be judgmental. And nobody wants to do that. They don't want to be seen as judgmental. Everyone wants to be tolerant. "Nah, man, some of these people—no, they're not so bad they need to be in jail, but they're not really on the frequency I'm trying to exist on. So I'm going to have to cut them out."
Edward Latimore: And that is a very simple rule for living that if you can just be discerning enough to not end up around detrimental, destructive influences, your life is guaranteed—almost guaranteed—to not get worse. Not necessarily get better, but it won't get worse.
Jim O'Shaughnessy: And notice what you did there, Ed. You changed the word—"judgmental" is one thing, but "discerning," that's a very different thing. And so if you're trying to get people to understand this, using the word "discerning"—that opens up the whole, "Oh, I'm not judging, I'm not sitting and saying, 'You're bad' and blah, blah. I'm just being discerning and for my own life, that's not going to work for me." And that's really interesting to me because labels are useful, but they can also be incredibly destructive. If you live your life through labels, you're not thinking about things. Once you've labeled it, you stop thinking about it. And so to become discerning is going to open up that message to a ton more people.
Edward Latimore: Yeah, much more so. Words matter. They matter so much that—look, the only way I know what's in your head or anyone else's head are the actions you take. And speaking is an action. But the flip side of that is the only way I can get something to your head is with an action. And speaking is an action. If you want to change how a person or culture speaks, make certain words against the rules to say, change the meanings of words, use new words that don't mean much, but now they have a meaning. And it is—so people don't understand why being forced to use certain words or not use certain words in our society now in America is such a big deal. You get a lot of pushback about this.
Edward Latimore: People with the pronouns—every signature now has a pronoun in it. We don't understand how—and look, this is—I got to be clear here because your audience is intelligent, but I got to cover my ass. Look, whatever you want to be is what you want to be, man. I really don't care as long as it doesn't affect me and my child. When it affects my child, then I have to care. And that's a different discussion. But until then, you do you, I do me, everybody's happy. We can even sit down and break bread together. My kid won't be there, but then I—
Edward Latimore: But the idea that we can now redefine everything from what a proper pronoun is for a person—because language, you could choose the pronoun, that's kind of the idea of language. But we have to collectively agree this word means this. Otherwise it's useless to transmit a message. Or that we're at a point where people don't want to define clearly what a man and woman is. Again, whatever you want to be is what you want to be. But we have definitions of words to represent ideas or observations and go, "This is what we're looking at. This is what this means. This is standardized." But it's not just there. I've always thought it was a hilarious sleight of word that we're no longer "colored people," you're "people of color."
Edward Latimore: Never mind the hilarity here, that's a term for diversity. But when we make it okay, you're either white or a person of color, we've eliminated all of the different ways you could be of color. This is important because this is me thinking about how these words affect. And I think—but if you just keep hammering it home, what you see is you start seeing people—you see this in the polls—the younger the generation, the less likely they are to support the idea of free speech. That's a big deal because that means that they've bought into the application of it so well, the action that now they think that there is some good here. And now that's a thought.
Edward Latimore: Even though we have all the history books in the world to show us what happens when people can't express themselves freely. Do I think it's perfect? Do I think there are some negatives to it? Absolutely. But this is one of those things where you kind of have to accept a little bad to avoid a much greater one. But these are just my opinions. The main point I'm bringing up here that we're talking about is that the ideas that come out of your mouth in the form of words, they put ideas in someone else's head and vice versa. You need to be able to control that—or not control—be intentional with it.
Edward Latimore: And if you don't have the intentionality with it and the awareness of how one word, even though it means the exact same thing as the other word or are close enough to be indistinguishable in common colloquial speech, you can make your life a lot harder than it has to be. So much more difficult than it has to be. Judgment versus discernment. That's a big deal.
Jim O'Shaughnessy: And the other thing that you're bringing up, which I think is very true, is that if your argument is so weak or your belief is so weak that your go-to strategy is to try to shut down any conversation that conflicts with your belief, you should have this self-awareness to understand that maybe I better look at this belief. There's a great quip from Jed McKenna which goes, "If you're having a little tea party with Lord Lion and Lady Gazelle and somebody comes along who doesn't buy your fantasy narrative, it isn't because they're mean. It's because you have a very fragile belief system."
Edward Latimore: That's a great point. That's funny. That's a really funny way to put that. But we—and I mean, I guess society as a whole, but some of the kickback I've received, and this is in my personal life too, is as we define what a racist is, what racism and prejudice is, we cannot make that race specific. That in of itself is in the most ironic way possible that no one seems to get when they do this—is racist. And I bring this up to say, so when you have organizations that are events that are only for one race and just because it's not white, it's okay—ask yourself if you flip this…
Edward Latimore: The big news I think that broke today or yesterday was that Uber is offering passengers—women passengers, female passengers—to select a female driver. And I'm like, "Okay, my first thought was they're probably not going to, but they should—and this is how I would criticize this—they should offer men the same option, but they won't do that." And I had this argument with my wife once because there was this—they call them familiarization trips, "fams." There was this fam that was for "agents of color." So they could experience other things. And I guess it came up—the way this came up to me is because there were people in the forum that were calling it racist and I agreed with them.
Edward Latimore: I thought, "Look, you can't exclude someone based on one trait just because they're the minority trait or are the flavor of the week depending on our generation. It's still the same thing." And what I worry about is that—you can only attack—if this is me, a black guy who is able to rationally explain this, that any exclusion or preference because of race is inherently racist just by definition. It doesn't matter what the race is. That just is what it is. If you base it on race, that's what it becomes.
Edward Latimore: If I'm able to sit here and explain that rationally and it would benefit me to turn a blind eye to it and just allow myself—if I was a white guy, it would make me angry. How long does it take before you make people angry enough to—we'll say white people angry enough to—where you end up with a new problem? You wind up with people who are not necessarily any type of prejudicial or racist at all. But now they actively have to become one, if for no other reason than they feel like they are under some attack or exclusion. You swing the pendulum back the other way. There was a point where we needed the NAACP, right? Why then? Okay, because there was active exclusion and discrimination.
Edward Latimore: Imagine if we had the white NAACP version of that. I can't work out the acronym. People would lose their minds. But would they be—and then how would I argue back? I go, "Oh, you got that, we got that." No, that's segregation. And that's not okay. It's a weird place. And it's just the words that people use. "Oh, a Caucasian," "white." Well, there's no safe word because the idea is still the same. And "all white space," "all female space," "all male space." In this case, keeping with who would not be able to do these things and that equal application.
Edward Latimore: If we can't get to that point as a country where we kind of have to go—this is where that forgiveness thing comes in, bringing all the conversation around—kind of have to go, "Look, man, we messed up. It was a bad place. But going forward, what we're worried about is swinging the other way. So why don't we just start over again? Look, everybody is merit-based. Everybody's equal opportunity. Look, some of y'all ain't going to make it, but it's got nothing to do with your race." And see where we go from there. But that probably won't happen, sadly, because a meritocracy is an uncomfortable, simple truth. And sometimes when you have a—again, this book Triple Package I referenced at the beginning—the overrepresentation of Asians in American orchestras.
Edward Latimore: Does that mean the orchestra is racist? No, this is how it goes. The overrepresentation of Mormons in CEO positions. They look like regular white guys. This is culture that's built. The overrepresentation of Indians who win the spelling bee. Does that mean the spelling bee is racist? No, that's just what they decided to do. Could you imagine any merit-based thing? That's how it's got to be. But then that's what that book talks about—is that some cultures just put a different premium on different things. Could you imagine if the NBA all of a sudden invented a white quota? "We got enough brothers this draft. We're going to need to draft some—" I don't know who. I don't care what. "Oh, he didn't even make it to college. We got to bring him in."
Jim O'Shaughnessy: I laugh at that because it's funny. But there is that sense that, particularly with black people, like hundreds and hundreds of years of slavery, man—you got to make—I understand the impulse to be like, "Wow, like you just said, we fucked up really badly."
Edward Latimore: Yeah.
Jim O'Shaughnessy: And we've got to make amends. Surely when the pendulum goes, as your example—having a white quota for the NBA.
Jim O'Shaughnessy: I just think about how people would react to that. They would react violently, I would guess.
Edward Latimore: Oh, it would be unsustainable. You know what people would think? "Oh, this is clearly a joke."
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Exactly. That's right. Well, you remember Chappelle's racial draft, right? Did you ever see that?
Edward Latimore: Yeah, that was a brilliant skit.
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Totally brilliant. Because he's pointing out exactly why what you just said is funny.
Edward Latimore: But this is the world we live in. And when it comes down to, for me again, back to talking about the things that I have control over and what I have to think about—I don't go picking these arguments because I'm not really interested in having them. With that said, when they find me, I just cannot abandon rational thought. It's the same thing. For other points, I got a buddy who's always sending me stuff about vaccines and conspiracies that come out and I'm like, "Look, man, I don't know. Here's what I do know. I know that Instagram is not a great source for information. And I know that looking at the research that I've looked at—and it's not just vaccines, it's all types of stuff."
Edward Latimore: He was one of the people that sent me—he sent me a reel about how the government would direct the hurricanes. And I'm like, "I don't think you understand how not possible this is. We can influence—we've tried cloud seeding, we tried that. But the precision level, it doesn't work this way. I don't know what to tell you." And stuff like that. But that's the thing. I push back on all types of bad ideas when they find me, but I don't go looking for them. There was this one phase I guess I went through where I was tired of flat-earthers showing up on my timeline and so I went actually looking for flat-earthers. I found out there's a whole flat-earther YouTube community.
Edward Latimore: It was really fascinating because I guess one of the flat-earthers, he accepted a challenge to go to Antarctica and observe the 24-hour sun. And the whole flat-earther community, they were yelling at him like, "Don't do it, you're a shill." All this stuff. They didn't want to put their belief at risk because this is a nice falsifiable test—either you won't see a 24-hour sun or you will. And if you don't, you got to stop saying the earth is flat. But this—that's one of those personality traits of mine. I really—I don't care what you believe when you just tell me you believe something, okay? I can't affect your feelings, and I'm not interested in affecting your feelings.
Edward Latimore: But when you start presenting things to me as fact or you send me enough things where I got to have—where I have to treat this as an intrusion into my thought process and you're cool enough for me where I wouldn't be like, "Stop sending me this," then I got to—then I have to use my brain.
Jim O'Shaughnessy: I've always thought that the truth should be predictive. And if you are using—everybody has a series of mental models that they operate their life by. And you should pay special attention to models that get you into a dead end. What the—how did that just happen? And then if you notice that it's the same model—can you imagine having a GPS in your car that kept sending you to the wrong place?
Edward Latimore: You would say—
Jim O'Shaughnessy: You would go and get that GPS fixed, right?
Edward Latimore: But that's—I won't say a failure of the education system, though it's really easy to put it there because I didn't learn about the concept of falsifiability probably until the second time I went to college. So when I was in my late 20s, the idea that—I have a buddy of mine, and I'm paraphrasing this because I haven't said it in a while, so I forget. But the idea is, he's like, "Say, what is science, right? Science should produce—science makes predictions that are measurable, falsifiable and verifiable, both with math, or repeatable—falsifiable and verifiable with math." If you can't—if it doesn't reach those three, it doesn't hit those three criteria, then you are—then you're not dealing with something scientific. And I think I said verifiable. What he meant was objectively verifiable.
Edward Latimore: It doesn't matter who sees it. We should be able to gather some data that we can go, "Okay, this is five, this is seven." It should always be repeatable. And then you should be able to predict it or verify it with math. Those are the three criteria. That is not a complicated concept, but it's not a simple one, because there are a lot of things you got to understand to get to that point. And once you have it, then everything that you look at in your world, you can immediately kind of snuff out. "Okay, is this pseudoscience outright? Or might there be something here?" But that's a way to think.
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah, I agree. And that's the way I tried to approach everything I did in the books I wrote. For example, in my book, What Works on Wall Street, I essentially spell out the—here's the game plan here. I want the rules that I'm testing to be so clear that somebody reading the book can go test them on the same data or expanded data and get the same result. That seems like being a pedantic idiot by calling that out. But what you're underlining here right now is the fact that most people don't think like that and the idea that your belief systems are also testable.
Jim O'Shaughnessy: And the way I look at it is like if I have new information that is better predictive for what I'm trying to achieve, guess what I'm going to do? I'm going to get rid of that other mental model that is not nearly as predictive and I'm going to replace it with the one that is. But that's a continual process. That's called learning. And as you continue up that scope, guess what you've got to get good at? Deleting beliefs that no longer serve.
Jim O'Shaughnessy: But you remember that we—first off, your book's out. When this is released, your book will already be out. Available everywhere.
Edward Latimore: Available everywhere. Even Target. I didn't know you could—
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Oh, how cool. Available at Target. Wow, look at you.
Edward Latimore: I got a receipt for a pre-order at Target. And I said, "Wow, that's really awesome."
Jim O'Shaughnessy: That is actually really cool. If you're available at Target, you really are available everywhere.
Edward Latimore: Because I don't—I'm trying to think, man. I don't know. I mean I've seen books for sale in Target, but I don't know anyone that's like, "I'm running down to Target to grab this book."
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Nor do I. But that's great. That's awesome. From your other times on the pod, you remember we're going to make you the emperor of the world for just a minute. You can't kill anybody and you can't put anybody in a re-education camp. But what you can do is we're going to give you a magical microphone and you can say two things into it that is going to incept the entire population of the world. The next morning they're going to wake up and they're going to say, "Man, I just had these two great ideas, and unlike all the other times, I'm not going to just think, 'Oh, good idea,' and not act on it. I'm going to act on these two ideas." What are you going to incept in the world to make it a better place?
Edward Latimore: One, if you can't make the world better, don't make it worse.
Jim O'Shaughnessy: I love that one.
Edward Latimore: And two, your relationships with people are the most important thing. You need to nurture those and take care of those more than anything in the world.
Jim O'Shaughnessy: I love both of them. Ed, as always, I really enjoy chatting with you. I wish you the absolute greatest success with this book. But, man, if it's available at Target, that says something already.
Edward Latimore: Yeah, it's a great time. I'm excited, man. Let's see where it goes. This whole process is a surprise. It's fun and it's stressful. It's all at the same time.
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah. Well, you're an inspiring guy, man, so best of luck to you.
Edward Latimore: Hey, thank you for having me on. I really appreciate that.
Jim O'Shaughnessy: All right, man. Cheers.
Edward Latimore: See you, Jim. I really appreciate this, man.
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Oh, it's my pleasure. I love chatting with you.
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