The Self-Destruct Button

Charlie Sheen was making $100 million a year and blew himself up, and Charlie Sheen is hardly unique. Hugh Grant. Josh Duggar blew himself up twice, spectacularly. The list goes on.

What I am talking about here is the subconscious desire for self-sabotage. We all have it. We have good lives, we’re making lots of money, we have a happy marriage, and then we have to go do something dumb. We saw this recently, with the Michigan football coach, who blew up his marriage and his job by trying to put it in a soft, warm place. Now, I actually have a little sympathy for that guy, because it takes two to tango, and his paramour had full awareness that he was married, etc., and she torched him. But when you do something like that, you have to know something like that is a possibility, when you invite that chaos and irrationality into your life.

It is okay to have thoughts. It is okay to find the bartender attractive, and to indulge in all sorts of perverted fantasies with the bartender, but it is not okay to mack on her and try to get her phone number. We can’t control our thoughts; we can only control our actions.

People blow themselves up in all sorts of different ways. They manage to find the one thing that would take them to zero and they do it, with the full knowledge of the consequences going into it. Robert Kraft, for example, but Kraft had the resources to fight it. Still, he’s never going to be able to fix that Wikipedia page, and when he passes, they’ll mention the massage parlor thing on TV. Reputation is such a funny thing—it takes years to build up, and only a minute to blow up. I have fears, but losing money is not one of them. You can always make more money. My fear is loss of reputation, which usually keeps me out of trouble. There was the incident with the guy about 15 years ago who was insider trading, and his wife knew he was insider trading, and they got divorced, and it ended up in the divorce papers, and that was the end of him (and the hedge fund he worked at). How fragile everything is.

I get a fair bit of mileage out of being on the straight and narrow. I’m not perceived as a threat to either sex—I just do my thing and write stuff and people trust me. But it could all be gone in an instant. I mean, yes, people get away with things all the time, and maybe this will be the time that you get away with something, but getting away with something is worse than getting caught. I don’t know about you, but I have an overactive conscience, and if I don’t want to experience guilt, then I shouldn’t do things that cause me to experience guilt. This is really the purpose of therapists and priests—there is nothing worse than taking something to the grave, so you offload it on someone who is supposed to keep your secrets. I think I would make a pretty good therapist, but therapists are human beings, and having everyone unload their misdeeds on your all the time probably gets a little taxing. I am friends with a priest, and he works in the judicial wing of the Catholic church (whatever that is called), and he has been investigating the misdeeds of priests for at least a decade now, and to say that he is jaded would be an understatement. When I was at the Coast Guard Academy, some officer told us that we should live our lives in such a way that we could stand up on a table in the middle of the wardroom and yell to everyone in public what we had been doing. And back then, I had little to be ashamed of aside from some binge-drinking and cranking my hog.

You’re only as sick as your secrets, the saying goes. I don’t have any secrets anymore. Secrets are exhausting, trying to remember what you said to whom, lying all the time, destroying the evidence. I hardly even peel the carrot anymore. What I am trying to do here is to give you some life advice—life is a whole lot easier when you’re not sneaking around all the time, being a sneaky scumbag. We are all human. None of us are saints. We have all made bad life choices from time to time. Everyone has regrets. Someone who decided at age 12 that they were going to run for president and have unimpeachable conduct for their entire lives also has secrets. I’m sure that if I were nominated for the Supreme Court, people would come out of the woodwork with all sorts of allegations. And as Billy Joel said, only the good die young. Fun song, but actually, in my experience, the good go on to live long, happy, fulfilling lives.

This is about your soul, and there is nothing worse than a soul that is being tortured. Living in the wreckage of the past, living in the wreckage of the future—for what? For 15 seconds of bliss? This is the first time that I have mentioned Epstein in a newsletter, but what we all those people thinking? The sheer asymmetry of risk and return. Most people find this hard to comprehend, how someone can make a decision like that, but I am telling you that we all have a self-destruct button, and it is installed in an easily accessible place. We get to feel morally superior to Bill Gates, saying, no, no, we’d never do something like that, but don’t be so sure that you wouldn’t. In our weakest moments, we have moral failings beyond comprehension.

So the goal here is to never have that weakest moment. The goal here is to have unassailable character, and the only way you get that is to come to the realization that there is no such thing as a free lunch, that if you do this bad thing, it is like the first law of thermodynamics, and you will pay for it in some fashion later in life. Not saying that you will get caught (but you might), but that it will weigh on your conscience forever. So unless you are a true psychopath, and there aren’t many of them out there, don’t do things that you will regret—maybe even five minutes later. I think about that scene in Private Parts when Howard Stern was rolling around on the floor with Jenna Jameson in her birthday suit. Not a position I ever want to be in, so don’t put yourself in that position, for the sake of your mental health. It’s just not worth it.

So far we have mostly been talking about sex, but there is more to it than that. If you derive pleasure from stealing things, don’t steal things. If you derive pleasure from lying to people, don’t lie to people. There is wisdom in the world’s major religions. It’s not just a prescriptive code that you have to follow—it’s about your spiritual well-being. But it seems like people (men, mostly) hit the self-destruct button with their own hammer. There is a part of the male psyche that is in acquisition mode—even if you have a good partner, you are always in search of another one, if only for a while. It’s the getting, not the having. Conquests, or whatever you want to call it. I can tell you that it’s a big relief to get off that treadmill. Sometimes I can’t figure out if I’ve actually become a better person, or it’s just because my libido disappeared in middle age. There was a movie a few years back called Shame, where Michael Fassbender plays a sex addict. I like Fassbender in just about anything, but it was not a very illuminating movie about sex addiction, with the exception of one scene.

The self-destruct button can apply to professional misconduct, too—if you push this button, you will get ahead your career? I will push the button. I will push all the buttons. The SEC and FINRA send out notices periodically about the people they nabbed—all of it falls into this category. I always used to get a good laugh out of the ethics section of the CFA exam—it was all on arcane bullshit like fund performance reporting. But it didn’t ask any existential questions about acting ethically, broadly speaking, which would be the important thing to ask. I spent 2 years studying those ethics questions and I never got closer to the meaning of life.

Maybe you have nothing to lose, so none of this applies to you. I doubt it. We all have something to lose—our souls. But yes, if you have cash and prizes, a house and a brokerage account and a car and a boat, you have something to lose. Don’t fuck it up. You might recall that I have a cardboard cutout of Pat Sajak in my office at home, and I stare at him every day, to remind myself not to screw up a good thing. Pat Sajak was the king of not screwing up a good thing—the guy is my hero. Out of all the times he could have pushed the self-destruct button, he didn’t. So no giving phone numbers to girl bartenders. There is an invisible line you should not cross. If you want to fantasize about it, go ahead—it’s free.