Digital Social Hour - NEVER Overwork Again: The Secret to Sustainable Success | Ezra Firestone DSH #581

Starting point is 00:00:00 Miss the point of this game we call life. If you're miserable and overworked and under fucked and working all the time and you're just like, it's like you got to take care of yourself mentally, emotionally, spiritually, physically, energetically, have hobbies, have relationships so that when you show up to your work, you can bring enthusiasm. You can bring joy. You can make it apart. It doesn't mean you don't grind.

Starting point is 00:00:18 It doesn't mean you don't work hard, but like you can bring a kind of energy that is like attractive and people want to work with you. Wherever you guys are watching this show, I would truly appreciate it if you follow or subscribe. It helps a lot with the algorithm. It helps us get bigger and better guests and it helps us grow the team. Truly means a lot.

Starting point is 00:00:36 Thank you guys for supporting. And here's the episode. All right, guys, we got an e-commerce legend here today, Ezra Firestone. Thanks for coming on, man. Thanks, happy to be here, man. I dig your whole show. Absolutely. It's been a surreal moment for me. I've been watching you for five, six years, man. Right on.

Starting point is 00:00:51 I used to be big in e-commerce, but- Jersey champs. Let's go. Jersey champs, baby. Left the space for podcasting, though. Higher margins. Yeah. And more fun. More fun. And we were just talking about that, balancing that fun with money. Yeah. And once you reach a certain amount, you know. I mean, I think that really, here's my philosophy on business number one have fun because if you are not enjoying

Starting point is 00:01:10 yourself you've missed the point of this game we call life if you're miserable and overworked and under fucked and working all the time and you're just like it's like you got to take care of yourself mentally emotionally spiritually physically energetically have hobbies have relationships so that when you show up to your work, you can bring enthusiasm. You can bring joy. You can make it a part. It doesn't mean you don't grind. It doesn't mean you don't work hard, but like you can bring a kind of energy that is like attractive and people want to work with you. First, have a good time. Second, make good shit. Make things that are truly valuable. Make something that serves the world. And you are never done making your product better. Your homie just told

Starting point is 00:01:44 me about you guys are building a studio. It's like, you are never done making your product better your homie just told me about you guys are building a studio it's like you got to keep making your product better number two make good things number three be profitable if you can do that at any scale you won the game i don't care if it's 50 000 a year 500 million a year i mean you and i are both chasing large wealth creation but it's like if you i know so many people who are shackled to these businesses that are like weighing them down and they may be big businesses but it's like, if you, I know so many people who are shackled to these businesses that are like weighing them down. And they may be big businesses, but it's like, I don't want that life. I'm not trying to live that. So it's like, have a good time.

Starting point is 00:02:11 Make good things. Be profitable. That is the winning. I've been doing this 20 years now. It's like, if you can do that, you won. I think that's important because some people just chase the profitability and they don't care about anything else that comes with it. And then what happens is they got no friends and they're all fucking miserable and they're all overworked and they have nothing in their life other than business and it's like

Starting point is 00:02:31 hey scale is cool i'm interested in scale i sold the business for a whole lot of money like but not at the expense of your life and you're told everywhere you look is like everyone is selling you how you're flawed everything you look at is how you're too fat. You're not tall enough. Your teeth aren't white enough. You don't make enough money. Whatever. Some inadequacy. Someone is selling you that you're inadequate in some way. And then, hey, we got the solution here. And people think, especially young men, that making money is going to bring them fulfillment. It's going to bring them happiness but i will tell you if you cannot have insert love uh pleasure gratitude joy appreciation presence here and now you won't get it there and then there is nothing no amount of shit that you will acquire that will make you happy that will make you fulfilled you cannot acquire your way to fulfillment. It's like fulfillment cannot be had or gotten. You can be fulfilled. And that is a mindset that is an internal thing.

Starting point is 00:03:30 It's not something you can get from the outside. So I see a lot of these young dudes coming up in the game and they feel like, oh, as soon as I make some money, then I'm going to be happy. It's like, nope, wherever you go, there you are. And you're going to be that same person chasing that thing. And it's like, whatever it is that you want in your life, you've got to figure out how to have it now. And if you can be gratified by your life,

Starting point is 00:03:48 what's interesting is then that somehow attracts all the shit that you want. I agree. And the thing with money is when you set these goals, it's never enough once you hit it. And your lifestyle expands. I went from being on the very low end of the economic spectrum growing up. I mean, like for real to now i'm like one of the wealthier people that i know and money will buy you comfort and it's nice to be comfortable i like to be comfortable you know it's like but there's a certain level i'm going to say maybe half a million bucks a year that like after that it's not doing anything for you from a happiness standpoint but you know under if you're making under a couple hundred grand a year there's a lot of comfort that you can buy you can take care of your family you take care of your community take care of your

Starting point is 00:04:27 parents you can like you know get yourself some support with child support you can get like physical you know uh trainers like yes a certain amount of money is going to make your life way less intense but then but there's like there is that level and there was some study that came out and i'm going to quote it because it was like seven years ago it said after 75 000 but it's like that's not that's too low it's like after probably like 250 grand i agree for me it was when i had to stop looking at the check at restaurants that was like a big thing for me because i used to always worry about it i love seeing your instagram you're always posting all the rest of them i hit you up like yo dude like where should i go try them out no i'm, I'm going to Lotus Asayam tonight.

Starting point is 00:05:05 That's a good one, man. You'll enjoy it for sure. Did you always have this mindset? Because I feel like when. So I grew up on a hippie commune and it's an alternative lifestyle experiment. It's a group of people who sort of checked out of society and said, hey, we're going to do something different. We're going to like explore how to live pleasurably in a group. And they are one of the only groups of people like you. So do you know anything about the commune movement in the late 60s early 70s in america i just know they

Starting point is 00:05:30 did a lot of acid yeah they did good times man let me give you just a quick brief overview okay so here we are we're post the great depression uh i think eisenhower is president he's looking for a way to stimulate the economy and uh they come up with this idea of military tract housing, which is what we now know as the suburbs. If you look at America, it's developed east to west. The houses on the east coast are like Victorians. They were big. They fit the whole family. The west coast is like single family units, you know, two in a box, white picket fence. The reason they did that was because they could repurpose the sort of like factories that were being used to make tanks and all that to make consumer durables washers dryers toasters and then they had a mass broadcasting system that was visuals like this is the the late 50s so you've

Starting point is 00:06:13 got tv so you can promote this idea of hey if if you know the leave it to beaver the pleasantville the if every single family unit uh lives separate from one another you don't have your you know grandparents and all that every house is going to need a washer going to need a dryer going to need a toaster and then they wrote the gi bill which gave the mostly white soldiers coming back from the war access to affordable housing boom greatest economic stimulus plan in the history of america then the baby boom happened that's my parents generation but these baby boom happened. That's my parents' generation. These baby boomers, you know, the flower children, they came of age in the late 60s, early 70s. We are pre-AIDS, post-penicillin. There's no STD that can kill you, baby.

Starting point is 00:06:53 Free love. Let's go. It's a good time to be alive. And so this group of individuals, they decided to, groups of them on the coast of America said, hey, you know what? This whole nuclear family thing, we're going to rebel against this. We're going to start communal living. We're going to go back to living in communes. And you had, you know,

Starting point is 00:07:10 a few thousand communes spring up on the coast of America. You get a group of people together. Commune, intentional community, it's just a group living together. And like where I grew up is not like, some of these places, like you have to buy into some ideology

Starting point is 00:07:22 or whatever. Like this is just like a commune of hippies. Okay. What happens when you get a group, two people as a group, right? Let's imagine a relationship across the gender line, across the intimacy line. You got two people. Things come up. Jealousy, money, possessions, communication, sensuality, power dynamics, gender dynamics,

Starting point is 00:07:38 money dynamics. Most groups of two fail. They just don't make it right because it's like you fail at any one of those things. You're going to fail at the relationship. Now imagine stacking multiple people and the relationships between all of them and multiple couples. It's like these things fall apart so quickly. Think about a business, how hard it is to even retain employees. And that's like there's no emotional stakes on the line.

Starting point is 00:08:00 It's just salary and then work environment. So it's hard to keep a group of people together and this place i grew up um has successfully navigated living together as a group and is one of the only examples really in america of like successful long-term group living and so i was raised in this environment where it was like about these concepts that i'm talking about now and it is what has made me successful in business i'll give you one more little run and then i'll stop which is up until about a year ago, I did the speech. I have a mastermind for e-commerce business owners. I did a speech and I was like, I have 180 employees across five brands. And in 17 years as a CEO, not a single person has ever quit because they were unhappy or they weren't paid well,

Starting point is 00:08:41 or there was some conflict we couldn't navigate yeah, and then fucking five people left like I can't say that anymore But I can say that keeping a group together is very difficult And I think still what we have done which is very few people have ever left is pretty uncommon very uncommon Especially in the workplace feel like it's like people get a new job every year these days totally and also like you're gonna have conflict And you're gonna have you know you're gonna managers bulldogging and power dynamic on the people underneath them. You're going to have people stealing from you. Like there's going to, shit's going to go down. People are going to people on each other and you got to figure out

Starting point is 00:09:14 how to handle that because you keep a group together over time. You can be pretty successful. Yeah. Cause that's like our grandparents generation where they would get the same job every day for 40 years and never leave. That doesn't happen anymore. So how do you think you were able to do that? Well, for one, I treat my team members. So like as human beings, you and I, we are of equivalent value is my viewpoint. Now, in a corporate hierarchy, I am above the people on the team.

Starting point is 00:09:40 But as humans, I'm like, look, we're of equal value. And I say three things when people join the team. But as humans, I'm like, look, we're of equal value. And I say three things when people join my company. One, if you see something, if you see a way we could make our products better, that we could serve our customers better, that you could be enjoying your work life more, please tell somebody because you're the only person who can see from your vantage point. And I want to know what you see and I value what you see. Hey, we may not take your feedback every time, but like I want to know. And if people feel like they have autonomy and freedom to know what you see and i value what you see hey we may not take your feedback every time but like i want to know and if people feel like they have autonomy and freedom to share what they think and that it will be listened to there is nowhere nobody is listening to anybody who's low

Starting point is 00:10:15 down on an organizational chart usually in leadership if people feel like these people will listen i have agency within this company to direct. If you see a system within our company that is not serving you, some meeting that's boring or stupid that we don't need to be doing, tell your manager or tell me, and we will take that into account. And it's like, people feel like, wow, I can affect change in this organization. Second thing I do is I set goals and say, look, within three years, you are going to be the best social media manager in the world. Here's how, so I give them a goal. Here's how we're going to get you there. We're going to have a Slack channel and it's going to populate all the best social media blogs and you're going to read it four hours a week.

Starting point is 00:10:50 You're going to take notes. We're going to meet once a week or you're going to meet with your manager and we're going to figure out what, what did you learn that we could implement in the business? And we're going to let you cut your teeth on that. We're going to go through these courses. We're going to send you to these events. We're going to give you a path towards growth. And we have other, other ways, but it's like you you have people feel

Starting point is 00:11:05 heard listened to acknowledged valued and you have an a clear way in which you are supporting their professional development dude nobody is fucking leaving and then you also put you pay as generously as you can you have as good benefits as you can you don't micromanage them all crazy like you treat them the way you would want to be treated if you were working somewhere and And if you do all that shit, and there's more we can talk about. I don't want to waste the whole podcast. But it's like people are loyal to you. The other thing I did, I mean, look how many of my cousins are here right now. My dad's.

Starting point is 00:11:35 I hired all my friends and family, all their friends and family. Downside of this is you end up with a homogenous group because your friends and family tend to look and think like you. And that is bad in a business. So eventually you've got to like go out from that. But I also feel like, Hey, I want to work with people that I love because do you know how much time you spend working a lot and you want to work with random cranksters and you want to work with people that you know and like and trust. I had to fire cousins. I had to, you know, you doesn't, business isn't a charity. Some people have to show up and do a good job, but like I like working with people that I know. That's

Starting point is 00:12:04 interesting because a lot of people advise not to mix the two. I know. Well, a charity some people have to show up and do a good job but like i like working with people that i know that's interesting because a lot of people advise not to mix the two i know well a lot of people suck at communication at the end of the day communication is everything it is how you convert because at the end of the day if i'm gonna sell you something i gotta have a commute most people communicate and it goes kind of doesn't quite land it doesn't get there communication is not what you say it is what they hear and perceive and feel and if you take responsibility for what someone heard then you win at communication you ask them at the end of the meeting so what did we just cover what did you get out of this what did you hear you get reinforcement like you get good at communication so it's interesting this hippie commune that i

Starting point is 00:12:37 grew up on right um one of the areas of their study is sensuality the potential of the human nervous system for sensation um and everybody wants to come to us for sex information but it's like yeah well it's sensuality sex like your ability to perceive sensation in your body sex sensuality whatever okay but it's like look your sex is going to be as good as your communication you spend 99.9 of your time communicating and 0.01 of your time sexing is like sex is not your problem, but that's what people think. Wow. Interesting way.

Starting point is 00:13:10 So you're saying to have more sex or I'm saying have as much sex as the two people in the relationship feel is pleasurable and fun. But at the end of the day, the quality of that sex and we'll get back to business in a second. But like the quality of that experience is going to come down to your communication ability, not your technique. Or I mean, look, you got to be you have to know where the clitoris that you got. If you're a guy, you got it. You guys, there's some things you got to know. But at the end of the day, it's like it's not really about that. It's about your intention and your communication.

Starting point is 00:13:37 And that is ultimately what is going to result in a winning relationship, whether it is one that includes sensuality or not. I could see that because they're sexless marriages. And when you look deeper into it, it's because of the communication isn't there, right? Yeah. And people don't connect the dots there. Wow. That is fascinating. You recently stepped down a CEO, you said, right? Yeah. Was that a tough choice for you? No. I think everybody would do it once they see the other side of the game. And it's like, I was a CEO since 2007. So I don't know how many years that is, but that's when I, I got into e-commerce in 05 before the iPhone. I made my first, I sold a Fu Manchu mustache wig to some woman in Arizona off a couch on the Lower East Side, Chinatown,

Starting point is 00:14:16 New York City. And I was like, if this woman had any idea who she just bought from on the internet, she would be shocked. I'm just some kid, you know? So it's like, I've been running companies so long and I sold one of my companies for over 50 million bucks back in 2020 to a private equity firm. And I always thought, never sell your company. Why would you? You don't want a boss. You don't want to deal with somebody. If you're making money and having fun and being profitable, why would you ever sell? I got a whole bunch of reasons I sold we can get into. But once I sold and I was like, oh, what these people are doing is strategically advising me on how to grow this company. But they're not operating it. I am operating it with my team and they own the majority now.

Starting point is 00:14:53 They own 70 percent. I only own 30. And so when this thing is successful, they get most of the upside, but they're not doing the daily grind of it. And I thought that is very smart. And I already had a CEO from one of my other companies and was going well. And I was like, okay, my new strategy is buy or build. And I'm building takes too long. So I buy and then advise because there is like ultimately you get into entrepreneurship because you are chasing some form of freedom, freedom of time, freedom of not going to a shitty job that you hate, that you're running away from pain, the pain of your parents not being able to pay their bills, like the pain of growing up poor, whatever it is. I had all these things. And so then a company gets so big that the freedom that you were chasing is reduced because

Starting point is 00:15:37 the structure and systems and processes it takes to run a hundred million dollar company do not allow for the kind of schedule and freedom in your schedule that we started that we were chasing as as do-it-yourself virtual entrepreneurs and so i got to a point where it's like you see my daughter here yeah she passed away nine months ago almost to the day and throughout her life it was her life was not a tragedy it was a love story it was really beautiful um one of the things i learned is that it seems to me that expansion kind of happens in all directions so it's like our capacity to feel pain and fear and anxiety and loneliness and anger and all of that was like stretched to a point that i cannot describe but then on the flip side our capacity to feel presence and love and beauty and um

Starting point is 00:16:27 gratitude were equally stretched it was like the most beautiful experience of my life and it was on paper tragic i mean it's a little girl born at one pound 11 ounces who spends you know half of her life in an icu unit across four different states she made it home she's a little miracle baby um who dies of cancer but i sort of lost my train of thought now i'm sorry uh what were we talking daughter was born and it was so why did i pull that so so through that experience i realized like hey i i kind of like everybody has blind spots and i have built my whole um business life i'm all virtual i have no office deliberately i never have um to like have a lifestyle that i was interested in which was

Starting point is 00:17:12 being at home with my lady and hanging out on my piece of land and like just you know specifically and deliberately building towards a particular lifestyle and i realized when my daughter um i had to step back for the year or two that was like caring for her. I was kind of like, you know, I don't think I'm interested in going back to a 40 to 50 hour CEO work life. So I hired some CEOs and now I'm doing, you know, investment advising strategy. I like it better. I love that. Yeah. It's kind of ironic, right? You build up the company at a certain point and it restricts your freedom that you fought your whole life getting. Exactly. So it's about finding that sweet spot yeah and we were talking earlier i think the

Starting point is 00:17:47 sweet look i think it's different for everybody and i think ultimately there is no right answer there's only what is pleasurable for you and by the way hey when i was in my 20s i'm late 30s now right i had more energy and desire to grind a 12-hour day was no problem right i can't be doing that now dog i'm not you know it's like you so you kind of like there's there's seasons of your life like you know you're young you're pretty young but yeah i'm sure when you were 10 years younger the grind was a little easier 15 hour days yeah you know and so i feel like there's those seasons and some people never get out of that and they build their whole infrastructure around needing uh you know that as the backdrop

Starting point is 00:18:24 of their existence they're just working all the time and it's like you're going to get to be 40 years old 50 years old and like what do you have to show for it yes you maybe made some money you got a cool business but like what else that life has to offer have you explored the compound effect too on your health is nasty yeah i mean i have bad anxiety and panic attacks from just working all day every day you need to get out there man yeah i mean there's there you know it's like success is a very important part of feeling like you are contributing is a very important part of the human psyche and of your own ability to be fulfilled but like it's like when you extract vitamin c from the orange you just cannot absorb it the same way as if you ate the

Starting point is 00:19:00 orange with everything else in it yes you can take can take the vitamin C tablets. It doesn't work the same. So it's like you need rest and human contact and hobbies and things that you're interested in. You need the whole picture if you want to be fulfilled. Love it. You mentioned buying is quicker than building earlier. Yeah. How much quicker is it in your opinion? Building is so hard.

Starting point is 00:19:20 Like the way I think about it with entrepreneurs is most people, they start a business and they start judging it at like year one.'s like no do not judge your business until you have put in 36 months and you've worked at it at least a couple hours couple hour blocks three four times a week and you've been at it for three years i don't want to hear nothing like you can't you gotta give it time it's like gardening you ever grown anything like when i've grown i've tried i failed okay well gardening is um i just did the speech for the million dollar sellers event where You can't, you got to give it time. It's like gardening. You ever grown anything? Like when I've grown, I've tried, I've failed. Okay.

Starting point is 00:19:45 Well, gardening is, um, I just did the speech for the million dollar sellers event where it's like people garden, right? Or people start a diet or a workout program and they start and they stop and they start and they stop. But what's happening with gardening is like you plant a seed and you water it. Nothing happens. You water it. Nothing happens.

Starting point is 00:20:01 And you water it. Nothing happens. Some people just give up, but what's happening is below the soil, the seed has sprouted and it's starting to travel up, but you water it nothing happens. Some people just give up but what's happening is below the soil The seed has sprouted and it's starting to travel up, but you don't see anything. So you give up and it's like Give yourself three years before you judge the thing I think now once you have money it makes so much sense to buy because when you buy you've established product market fit You're building you don't know if there's going to be product market fit I know there's some sales when I buy something i'm like I can see the profit margin i can see the sales i can see the customer

Starting point is 00:20:27 it's like yo and so now i buy companies in the five to forty million dollar a year revenue range and you care about the profit margins profit margin is everything in business and profit margins are eroding post covid yeah post uh ios 14.5 that the reduction of the digital ad effectiveness uh all these wars going on in the world fuel cost increasing like you used to be able to in e-commerce buy for one and sell for five pretty effectively if i bought something for five bucks sell for 25 bucks plenty of margin in that you kind of need to buy for one and sell for seven or eight unless you're buying for expense if you're buying for 50 bucks okay you can buy for one and sell for three because there's a hundred dollar margin there if you're buying for five bucks, okay, you can buy for one and sell for three because there's a $100 margin there.

Starting point is 00:21:09 If you're buying for $5, you kind of don't have enough margin. If you buy for one and sell for five, so you buy for five, you sell for 25. It's only a $20 margin. It's not enough. With ad cost. Yeah, think about it this way. For e-commerce, okay, I can give you the breakdown. I run an information publishing business, software as a service business, agency business.

Starting point is 00:21:29 All those are in the $ million dollar a year range yeah um but for e-commerce in particular let's imagine you got a million dollars a year in revenue 300 grand's going to cost of good 200 grand's going to general and administrative costs salary and shit like that 300 grand's going to marketing you got 200k left in profit 20 profit margin if you're lucky if you're not losing money on shipping if you don't have other crazy insurance it's like like you have to buy for one, sell for five at a minimum. What would your advice be to me? So this podcast has about $3 million a year in revenue. Let's go. I want to scale to 10, though.

Starting point is 00:21:53 Let's talk about that. Yes, sir. Let's go. I want to scale to 10, though. You know what I mean? So what would your advice to me be? Well, so the interesting thing about – so what you have that's really awesome is the attention of a lot of eyeballs, right? Like we're in the attention aggregation business. If you can garner attention and leverage that to promote products, promote services, build your own brands, I think it's going to be hard to get to 10 million on just sponsorship alone unless you get much bigger, which maybe you will.

Starting point is 00:22:19 And I mean, obviously, like I follow your Instagram. You're having big names on all the time. Like you're compelling. So some people are trying to be creators. And it like yo you're just i'm sorry you're boring it's like you may have information but it's like nobody wants to listen to your boring ass dude it's like you know it's like i'm sorry you know you have to have that thing whatever that is the enthusiasm the the spirit you have that right but when you look at a business i'm gonna look at you objectively as a business you got three million how much of it's coming from sponsorship i'd say

Starting point is 00:22:48 40 okay and then what else you got you got products you got paid guests events and views from like youtube and stuff paid guests events views from music great so high ticket in an information business is always the right answer so if they're so for example you know we we have an agency we do services for people. I'm not telling you you should do services, but I've got a company that sells a hundred million dollars a month and they check, they write to me to run their ads about 200 grand a month. So it's like the, anything that you can sell that is high ticket, a mastermind, like my mastermind business is my best business. It's 1500 bucks a month. So it's like 18 K a year.

Starting point is 00:23:22 And I make maybe a million, million and a half in revenue on it. 40% or so profit margin. It's $1,500 a month, so it's like $18,000 a year. And I make maybe a million, million and a half in revenue on it, 40% or so profit margin. It's not that hard. It's super valuable for the members. Not that hard for me to do. It's like, that's a great business model. So product expansion. So here you have sponsorship. You got guests paying you.

Starting point is 00:23:39 You got events. And then I can't remember what else you said. What else can you add on? Well, you could add on the development of your own physical products and you could sell i mean you would you you came from the physical product game you know what's the margin scare me though not for apparel or i mean apparel dude apparel has you can get some real high margins for apparel any consumable like how many people listen to this are digital creators like the dude was just telling me out there which is

Starting point is 00:24:04 your guy is awesome bobby bobby fucking love that guy he's he's the man but uh he was like yeah we've been we've been we've been going hard this last week i'm tired like i'm gonna take an energy shot any physical product that has that is you notice everything i sell is consumable that's deliberate i only sell consumables because once i get a customer i know i'm gonna get a repeat customer so for you i'd look at how can i add a high ticket how can i sell my own product or service to this audience that is watching me and then just keep doing what you're doing i mean what year are you in on this uh a year you're a year in you already had three million yeah i'm here dog you're good you're good you're golden i got big goals man i'm trying to get those joe rogan numbers yeah you'll get there

Starting point is 00:24:42 you know yeah i love that though um what are you up to now because you stepped down to ceo so are you working full hour 40 well i'm trying to figure that out you know it's like i i i i'm definitely not working 40 hours a week anymore i started a foundation for my daughter um for to support other you know the interesting thing about i don't know if you've ever been in icu or then let alone an icu with all sick and dying or some hopefully not dying babies. But it's like it's a very psychically intense environment. It tends to affect people on the lower end of the economic spectrum. The people who have babies in there tend to have other kids at home and not be able to

Starting point is 00:25:14 visit them. And so you're in there. There's 100 babies. The doctors and nurses are doing the best they can. There's no parents. There's nobody there. And you've got all these crying babies. I was trying to take some of them.

Starting point is 00:25:23 We have this little neighbor baby. I wanted to adopt her but it's like so this this foundation is um providing financial grants to families so they can not work and be with their babies because uh when a baby has nobody with it it's so much more likely to not make it if the mom can be there holding the baby yeah the numbers go through just from holding holding them wow yeah so it's an energy thing well it's like you need it's like you ever seen the study where they have the monkey that they gave the stuffed animal as the mom and then the monkey that they gave the real mom i didn't see the stuffed animal monkey is a psychopath because it's like you got to look this up you need contact you need touch and there and for men in particular as well i do jujitsu i grew up and

Starting point is 00:26:01 doing judo and jujitsu it's like the beautiful thing about jujitsu for young men is it is a safe and societally acceptable way for men to have contact with one another just so fucking important you have any lonely men there are committing suicide like we have an epidemic of lonely men between 25 and 45 with no friends it's like go join jujitsu dude um so i'm doing that and i am back to look i'm out on the road i'm speaking again i haven't made a piece of content in like six years when when boom blew up and my other businesses blew up it's like oh i can't be a digital creator anymore i got i got real businesses that need my attention so i hired a ceo put them in place and i haven't done any content it turns out i kind of like this shit i like podcasts i like videos i like speaking at the events so i think i'm gonna do a little more of that and And we bought this company called Navage, which is a really big company.

Starting point is 00:26:47 It's in all the drugstore brands, drugstores and everything. And I'm doing digital strategy for that brand, which is really fun. Nice. What's the product? It's a nasal irrigator. It's like a powered neti pot. So it's basically pushing. Actually, it was good timing for us because because turns out all the epinephrine

Starting point is 00:27:06 and all that stuff you put up your nose doesn't actually work the fda just came out and said wow ours is natural it's just a saline solution that pushes through your nose i'll send you a link i love that i snore and i actually tape my mouth at night now you do the dog you gotta try navaj really it's a really phenomenal yeah i always feel like i'm like i don't know if it's the desert air because there's no trees out here but i feel like i'm lacking air out here yeah i mean who knows allergies food i don't know what you eat you're constantly at fancy restaurants i'm pretty good i just tested my biological age man what are you 21 oh shit you ever do that test i haven't no you are you into health yeah i mean i'm i'm i'm more on the eastern medicine same to western than what's all natural you know uh but i would do it

Starting point is 00:27:43 yeah yeah i had to do some blood work here and there for stuff yeah you know key man insurance yeah when they when someone buys your company they want to make sure you're not going to die so they buy insurance on you so if i die they get paid because i'm an integral part of this yeah so they had to do this whole crazy thing on me where they took all my blood and they did everything wow just so they could assess how likely is this guy to die so we can figure out what kind of insurance policy to put on him i did not know that i wonder if uh steve jobs had that 100 everyone has it any big ceo there is key man insurance on that team member for sure that must have been a billion dollar i mean he died from cancer right i don't know that that one never

Starting point is 00:28:18 made sense to me because when you have all that money but think about it he was a fruitarian for like six years and there's all these studies now that are linking high sugar to, it feeds cancer. And like, what do I know? I don't know what I'm talking about, but I will say, you can't just eat fruit for.

Starting point is 00:28:32 I actually had a fruitarian on the podcast. And did they look any kind of healthy? No. Yeah. To be honest. No, he didn't. He did it for eight or 10 years.

Starting point is 00:28:40 Now he eats vegetables with it because he said it was just. Yeah. Look, here's what I will say. I was a raw foodist for many years. I was I followed a vegan diet and like I'm the kind of guy it's like one of the things that I do have going for me is I will do whatever the thing is like I have. I'm into willpower challenges. I drank only water for 21 days, 21 day water fast. I like the idea of challenging my will and saying, can I do this? And so I will do the thing, whatever it is.

Starting point is 00:29:06 I will show up every day with a positive attitude and consistently put attention on growing my business. I will eat the diet however we say we're going to eat it. And I'm going to tell you about Korean 8 constitution medicine in a second. It's pretty sweet. But basically here's what I found with the vegans. And hey, if you're a vegan or raw food, rock and roll, man. I support – I am the guy who thinks you're doing it right, who thinks you're perfect as you are, who is in support of however you want to party as long as you're not hurting anybody. So this is not meant to attack you.

Starting point is 00:29:31 But I will say my experience was that many of these people are so fucking neurotic about what they're going to eat. They're so caught up in it. It's like, yo, if you just chilled fuck back yeah and just ate whatever you thought was pleasurable and tried to eat in a good way and relaxed you would be healthier this neuroses around i can't eat this i can't eat this the titan it's like that is not good there was a mental i gotta find the study but it's like how you feel when you ingest food is very important if you're all freaked out that's what you're getting into your system i agree yeah people don't factor in the mental side of it they just so important see it as black and white but there's more to it

Starting point is 00:30:08 but with the fruits and vegetables man if you're not eating it organic there's just so much pesticides all that bullshit in it yeah it's not goes with me too but it's it's scary to eat right now yeah from any grocery store you heard this korean eight constitution stuff no tell me about all right so check this out i'm a sucker i'm looking to be sold any good hustle someone's No, tell me about that. and the way they think about it is that your bone structure your eyes your sort of hardware as a human comes from both parents but your software which is your blood your organs um you know all that comes from just one and you get sort of one of these eight different softwares and they measure you based on the relative strength of your internal organs so they call me like a colonotonia which means i have strong lungs and a strong colon. And then I've got like weak liver and weak kidneys. And so that's kind of like,

Starting point is 00:31:08 these are your strong organs. These are your, your weak organs. And what I like about it is, so then they say, Hey, based on your profile, we're going to rank meat, you know, grains, fruits, everything from this scale, double positive, positive, neutral, negative, double negative. They're not saying don't eat meat don't eat grains don't eat fruits they're saying if you eat them and you eat the positive ones you're gonna feel better and so they tell you eat 80 positive foods and you're gonna feel really good i've been doing this now for a couple years yeah i feel really good wow it's the best now is it a placebo effect is it just because i believe and i bought into this i don't know

Starting point is 00:31:42 but i really like it and it's like i like it because it's not trying to exclude shit from you. It's saying, look, for your profile and your blood and all that, we think this is righteous. And then they got another, the dude I went to, he like did a whole sales webinar and I was like, this is my guy. I kind of fell asleep halfway through it, but I was like, I like you because you're pitching. So basically his viewpoint is there's only a few things affecting humans.

Starting point is 00:32:01 Mold, virus, fungus, EM emf and i don't know something else and he's like essentially if you're messed up it's like one of these things then he's got some upsell and how he clears i don't know wow and that's korean korean eight constitution medicine i'm looking at that how did they measure your organ health they get your pulses and do all this stuff and they got this electromagnetic i don't know i'm into trying weird health things well it's kind of like look if you have a diet that you believe in and you follow it and you feel good about it you're probably doing better than most and but but then if you're like excluding a million things you might be deficient in certain things so what i

Starting point is 00:32:39 like about this one is it's like there's no exclusions there's just these ones are better than these ones i love that ezra it's been fun man anything you want to close off with um what do i want to close off with my motto in business is serve the world unselfishly and profit and i think that is a description of how it goes i'm not saying that because i think you should do it i'm saying that that my experience is if you show up in a role of service for your team members, for your business, for your family, for your community, if you look to, if you are intending for a contribution of spirit to your world, you're going to profit in every sense of that word, financially, karmically, energetically.

Starting point is 00:33:20 And so, um, you know, for the young people's, I know a lot of young people watch this podcast coming up. It's like, it is not about how much you work. It's about what you produce. It is not about how much you pull out. It's about what you put in. What you invest into your world will ultimately result in what you can get out of it. And if you look around and you say, how can I have a good attitude, show up and contribute to whatever is going on, you're going to be

Starting point is 00:33:45 successful. I love that. Thanks so much for coming on, man. Thanks for watching guys. As always, see you next time. Boom.

Digital Social Hour - NEVER Overwork Again: The Secret to Sustainable Success | Ezra Firestone DSH #581

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