Founder's Story - The Burnout Expert: "I Became A Millionaire At 23 And Felt Nothing" | Ep. 444 with Brent Freeman

Episode Date: September 16, 2026

Daniel opens the episode by asking Brent about a defining moment at 23, when he closed a $10 million commodities deal after years of work and expected to feel fulfilled. Instead, Brent says he woke up not just hungover, but “emotionally hungover,” realizing that the money and celebration did not create the joy he thought success would bring.From there, Brent explains the trap many founders fall into: deferring joy for a future milestone. He says money matters because it buys freedom, safety, food, shelter, and opportunity, but it becomes dangerous when people treat it as the final answer to happiness. His message is not that founders should stop building or making money, but that they should stop sacrificing health, relationships, presence, and meaning for an imagined “one day.”The conversation then moves into Brent’s burnout, his mother’s death when he was seven, the trauma and core narrative that shaped him, and the moment in San Francisco when he considered taking his life despite looking successful from the outside. Watching the fog cover the sun, Brent realized his dark thoughts were temporary, went to the beach, watched his first sunset in years, and wrote his first “list of joy.” That moment became the foundation for the work he now calls The Alchemy of Joy.Key Discussion PointsBrent shares how closing a $10 million deal at 23 made him a millionaire on paper, but left him feeling empty instead of fulfilled. He explains why money is important, but dangerous when founders put it on a pedestal and defer their joy, health, family, and fulfillment for a future exit or milestone. Brent breaks down burnout through the lens of neuroscience, explaining how high cortisol, fight-or-flight, constant pressure, and modern technology keep high performers stuck in overdrive. He introduces practical tools from The Alchemy of Joy, including the reset breath, the one-minute window, and the “stop, see, soften” practice to calm the nervous system and return to the present moment. The conversation explores Brent’s darkest chapter in San Francisco, when his business, relationship, and identity were falling apart while his social media made it look like he was “crushing it.” Brent explains why the biggest lie in entrepreneurship is that happiness is waiting at the exit, and why founders must learn to experience joy along the way instead of chasing the pot of gold at the end. TakeawaysMoney can create freedom, but it cannot carry the full weight of happiness. Brent says money is important, but it is not the only element of a meaningful life.Founders often confuse hustle with nervous system dysregulation. Brent explains that constant stress, urgency, and overdrive can feel like ambition, but eventually the body pays the price.Joy is not a luxury. Brent frames joy as a skill, a practice, and an investment that compounds when someone intentionally returns to what makes them feel present and alive.The nervous system needs safety before it can perform at its best. Brent’s reset breath uses a longer exhale to calm the body and create more space between stimulus and response.Success can hide deep loneliness. Brent says he had the external signs of achievement, but inside he felt empty, disconnected, and alone until he began doing the deeper work.The work is never “done.” Brent says healing, joy, meditation, and emotional regulation are part of a continuing upward spiral, not a finish line someone reaches once and never revisits.Closing ThoughtsBrent Freeman’s Founder’s Story episode is a powerful reminder that building a successful business and building a joyful life are not the same thing. His story moves from a $10 million deal in Dubai to severe burnout, a dark night in San Francisco, and a free sunset that helped him remember what joy felt like. Through The Alchemy of Joy, Brent is challenging founders to stop treating happiness as something that arrives after the exit and start building presence, nervous system regulation, relationships, and meaning into the journey itself. His message is simple: money matters, ambition matters, but there is no dress rehearsal for life, and joy cannot wait for “one day.”Today's Sponsor: Support longevity in business and life with CocoaVia, a daily cocoa flavanol supplement designed to support healthy blood flow, heart health, and brain function. Go to https://www.cocoavia.com/ and use code FOUNDERS for an extra 20% off, or find it at your local Sprouts.Turn live shopping into a real business with Whatnot, where sellers build relationships, move inventory in real time, and reach buyers across collectibles, electronics, luxury, beauty, and more. Search Whatnot in the App Store and start selling today.Stop losing deals in spreadsheets and switch to Pipedrive, the AI-powered sales CRM built by salespeople for salespeople. Get an exclusive 30 days free with no credit card at https://www.pipedrive.com/founders Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Money does not make you happy. If we knew how much pain being an entrepreneur actually was, we wouldn't do it. I had all the things, but I was empty. I was surrounded by people, but I was lonely. And my social media feed said I was crushing it. Knighted by Italy's former royal family, 20 companies, over a billion dollars in revenue, founder of the number one Airbnb experience in the world, Brent Freeman built everything, and it nearly cost him everything.

We have way more failures than success. The number one lie we've been sold and told. Once I make money, it'll solve all my problems. What you're doing is neuroscience-backed. Yep. And I call it investing in joy because it is an investment of your time, your tension, and sometimes your money, but 9.5% of the time is... So Brent, at 23, you closed a $10 million deal and became a millionaire on paper.

However, though, you said that you felt emptier. take me back to that moment and let me know, does money make you happier? Full stop, money does not make you happier. 23 years old, I had been working for almost two years on this deal. I was just fresh graduated from college. I had a quarter million dollars in debt. I put myself through college at USC. My parents helped where they could.

I took out student loans. And then when I graduated, I was like, oh, my God, I got to pay this back as quick as possible. And so we started a commodities import, import, export business with the sole. purpose of making as much money as fast as possible. And we had an office in Dubai and in L.A. And we were hustling and grinding. We finally close a deal. These are large, you know, long cycle deals. We finally close a deal. And it was my best friend and I as business partners at the time. And we go and celebrate, right? It's like we're at the Burj al-Arabin. We have, you know, huge cocktails and a big five-foot hookah. And, you know, we're spending money. And, oh, my God,

we've made it. We're rich. We did it. And I woke up. the next morning, not just hung over, but I woke up emotionally hungover. And I was expecting to feel this feeling inside of my body of fulfillment, of gratitude, of appreciation. And all I did was feel empty. And I remember the feeling that I felt, my only goal in life when I was a kid, because I come from Italian heritage, was to go to Italy, meet my family, and learn the language. And when I was a kid, we didn't have a lot of money, but I had a dream of going to Italy and it was like pre-internet, you know, I was born in the 80s. And so like, it seems so far away. And I never thought that I would ever get there. And then fast forward to college, I study abroad there in Florence. And I remember

arriving and landing and having the most joyful feeling emanate from inside. It was like a balloon of happiness and joy. It was just exploding inside. It was beautiful. And when I close that deal in Dubai, I expected it to feel the same way. And man, I was, I was so, so, so wrong. And it was the first time in my professional life that I really questioned the story and the program that were told and sold of make more money and, you know, money and success, quote unquote, will make you happy. And then over the last 20 years, I've had the opportunity to learn that lesson again and again. it's almost like you have to go into business wanting to make money maybe you want to solve a problem maybe it excites you but if you don't have money the business won't run and then if you don't

have money you can't really live maybe the lifestyle that you want to live how do you balance wanting to do something because you also need to make money and you want to be happy at the same time money is very important to society makes the world go around it buys freedom right it gets It's food and shelter and all of that. It's very important. It's just as important as air and food and water, but it is not the only element. And I think we put money up on a pedestal that if once we have enough, quote unquote, and that's a moving target for many people in a lot of ways,

once we get this certain thing, we defer our joy, our happiness today for this elusive one day. One day when I have enough time, when I sell my company, when I make millions, when I do this, so we're like, no, no, no, I'll self-sacrifice. I won't do the things I love. I won't be around the people I love. I won't invest in the things that light me up. And typically it's like this one degree point of separation at the origin point compounded over time is a very different destination.

And so money is very critical, but it is not the be all end all. If you don't have enough money, it sucks. And it's impossible. And you are at the bottom of Maslow's hierarchy of needs trying to figure out how to live. What we're talking about is once we kind of get above that and we have enough. And we are in that pursuit. of self-actualization of like why are we here to live our dream life and you know that's that's really what we're talking about in this in this structure you know of don't just chase money for its own

sake but use money to allow you to enjoy the ride and that's what it's about don't you know don't I say my message to the world is you know we defer joy for one day and my message is make one day today so you founded 20 companies over a billion dollars in revenue you can continued for 18 more years. What kept you running after this, after your learning experience at 23? You know, I think it's important for all the entrepreneurs out there, founders,

or people wanting to be in this, to understand that those 20 companies that I was a part of or co-founded, we had way more failures than success. And we failed our way forward. And, you know, I had to adopt the mantra of, you win some, you learn some. And that's easy to say and really a lot harder to embody, right? And eventually, when we became a part

of a venture studio and marketing team and agency that was behind the growth of some very large brands, consumer brands, household brands that people would know when we helped them, you know, we catalyzed a billion in M&A and we catalyzed a billion in revenue plus plus. And we were the team kind of behind the scenes of that. I really got to see firsthand what happens when you defer your joy for this elusive one day. I lived it. I never started this. or wrote the book or any of that stuff to share. It was not about that. I built the Alchemy of Joy process for myself because I was unhappy.

I had all of the things, but I was alone. I was surrounded by people, but I felt completely lonely, right? And until I woke up one day and I said, well, what am I doing all of this for? And a friend kind of hit me on the head with a phrase, which I love, which is there's no dress rehearsal in life. And my mom died when I was seven. And so I learned that at a very early age, that we're not promised the destination. So we need to enjoy the journey.

And so when it comes to money, I do not think making money is bad. I think it is an outcome of bringing value to the world. And it is a massive jet fuel to opportunities and freedoms and giving. But when we put money on a pedestal to chase it as the false idol, that that's going to be happiness at the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. And so we're not even going to enjoy the pigments of color along the way.

We're missing the point. I know a lot of people in business that from the outside look successful. Maybe they got deals on Shark Tank. They've done different things. But the reality is they're not really taking home a lot of profit. And all the money that they're taking in is now being spent on the business.

And they do this for many years hoping for an exit. When they missed out, I'm being able to do things that bring them joy, and many times it's at the expense of relationships. Do you think there is a way to balance these things out? Or is that the only way to get to a certain level of success? I love this question. So F, yeah, there's a way.

That is my whole life's work now with the Alchemy of Joy, right? That's what the book is all about. It is the path in the way. I remember 20 years ago when Tim Ferriss released four-hour work week, and I read it and I felt like I had a roadmap. This is like that for your personal life. It is a very no bullshit roadmap to beat burnout and live the life you love, retraining your brain, your subconscious mind.

It is not bad to make money. It is not bad to have goals or sell your company. What's bad is when we self-sacrifice our health, our family, our friends, our community, our love, right, in the chase, in the pursuit of. And so I work with the highest performers in the world, entrepreneurs, CEOs, executives, right, who have had billion dollar plus plus exits or early stage startups. And they come to our workshops and a retreats and I coach them one on one. And I can tell you firsthand that the folks that have the most money typically are the ones that are undoing a lot of the trauma

from their past in a way so that they can actually enjoy it. And so there is a way. And there is hope, right? So if you're burned out or you are chasing, it actually is not this big thing of like, you need to get the exit. It is actually stopping and becoming present along the way to enjoy the journey. And I call it investing in joy because it is an investment of your time, your tension, and sometimes your money, but 90% of the time it's not money. A sunset is free, which changed my life. We can talk more about that later, right? A moment with your dog in the morning or your spouse or your partner really being present and looking in their eyes. That's free. We spend most of our lives as high performers living in the future, is where anxiety lives or ruminating about the past, which is where depression lives.

But joy is right now. I call it the absolute value of the present moment. And so to answer your question on those three ways, we can absolutely achieve along the way, but it's about being present to the journey and making sure that we are not in the balance in the pursuit of our goals and our dreams missing out on the journey because we're not promised the destination. We're just just not promised it. This reminds me if we just had Damon John and he talked about all of the things that you're saying, losing everything at the expense of his family, getting divorced, his health was terrible, getting cancer, almost dying, not sleeping, all of these things. But it's almost as if along the way no one told you there's

another way, which is great why you have this book, right? So you say that what you're doing, is neuroscience backed. What happens to the brain during burnout? So love Damon. I met him 15, 20 years ago with a program in LA, the network for teaching entrepreneurship, or we had one of our kids in a pilot program, win the national competition, and he took her out to brunch. He's an amazing human.

Love that guy. We had brunch of the four seasons in Beverly Hills. He's an amazing dude. And I love the message he's putting out in the world right now, right? Which is about enjoying the ride and building and creating volume and being a variety. visioner. That is exactly the message we need to hear. But to answer your question about neuroscience, all right, so let's just do some quick basics for people so we can kind of just really kind of build a small mental model. Our body is a machine. And when we learn how to control the machine,

a high performance machine, find you, right? When we learn how to control that machine in different different ways, we can start to understand what's going on versus being the person experiencing it that is dysregulated, having an emotional experience that might be hijacked in some way, shape, or form. And so when it looks, the brainwaves that we have is we have, when you're asleep, you have delta brainwaves, the slowest. Then one step above that is theta, which is the hypnotic state, the programmable state. One step above that is alpha state. That's your flow state. And you lose track of time. You might be skiing or out of the beach or running or writing or whatever. It's a creative state. And then you have beta brainwaves. And beta brainwaves is consciousness. And in consciousness,

you have low, medium, and high. High beta is fight, flight, or freeze. Your amygdala response, right? dinosaurs chasing me, I need to get away from it, right? Oh my gosh. And then 90 seconds later, you're safe. It calms back down. That's how it was meant to fire. It wasn't built for Slack and messages and social media and emails and the constant pressures of our day-to-day.

So our organism hasn't evolved as fast as our technology has. And so what happens is in that high beta brainwave state, we normalize living there like it's okay. It's high cortisol. And when you're in high cortisol and you are running from a predator, let's say. That is not a space for a time in your body for it to digest or have the immune system operate really well or sleep. But we are living our lives there. And so what happens is we end becoming sick and our immune system shuts down and we just normalize this state of high stress and high cortisol. But it turns out if we learn how to work with our body, and this is where I say working with willpower versus flow power is the game changer, right? So all my work is based off of

working with the subconscious mind, not the conscious mind. Conscious mind is willpower, it's force, right? And I tried that for years as an entrepreneur, just bang my head against the wall until the vision works. And it turns out that hurts a lot. You burn out and half the time it doesn't get you where you want to go. But when you work with flow power, your subconscious mind is 40 to 50,000 times more powerful than your conscious mind. And when you start to understand how to work with your subconscious mind and your brainwave states, right, and you can use tools like breathwork, breathing in general, meditation, going for walks in nature's. I do something called forest baths, where I go for walks in a forest, and the Japanese are famous for this, and use nature to calm my

nervous system. We start to understand that I can take myself out of high beta brainwave down into low and medium and even maybe into alpha state or even into theta state. And that alpha and theta state is when my body actually starts to become regulated. It's like I get to go into neutral because when we're in that high cortisol state, it's like driving 100 miles an hour on the freeway in first gear. It's just, it's going to blow up at some point. And that's what burnout is. And so anybody that's listening to this that is burned out, I don't care if you're a founder, an entrepreneur, an executive, or a parent, and you're burned out, there's nothing wrong with you at all. It's just you're running an overdrive.

And so the book that I wrote was based off of the methodology that I spent almost a decade biohacking on myself, going to meditation retreats and trying different therapeutic modalities, you know, from regular therapy, CBT to psychedelic therapy, all the way through to understanding neuroscience of like what goes on in our body. And I really just wrote about the things that are actually effective because nobody has time

to read all these different things and then piece it all together. And I call it the outcome. of joy because it's about the transmutation of hardships, of when your brain spikes, of when your body is dysregulated, of things that happen seemingly to you to turn them into things that happen for you so you can have more joy in your life and you can enjoy the ride. Because it's easy to say, hey, enjoy the ride. But when you're worried about the next round of funding or the employees, like a lawsuit or whatever, I've been in all of those situations.

You're not present to the magic that happens in this present. moment. And so that's kind of the nature of the game there. Can you give me one tool from the Alchemy of Joy that somebody could use right now to change the state that they're in? Yeah. So it's something we call the reset breath and it's kind of an embedded tool and a larger tool. But the reset breath is just like how do you get present when you're pissed off, you're frustrated, you're worried, you're anxious. It's actually getting back into your body and feeling safe because what your body is telling you subconsciously is it's not safe. Something's happening and it's not safe.

And so we use this reset breath of an inhale for six, you hold it for four seconds, and you exhale for eight. And you have a little audible exhale. Because when you do that, the exhale that's longer than the inhale, it calms your nervous system and tells your nervous system you're safe. That audible sigh in exhale actually stimulates the vagus nerve in your body that tells your nervous system you're safe. Do that for one minute, just that for one minute.

If you're in a board meeting, you're with an investor, you're with your family, your spouse says something, your kids pissing you off. You have for one minute and it changes your entire neurology to come back down to create a bigger gap between stimulus and response. And that's what it's all about. Victor Frankel and his Man Search for Meaning Book, the best book in the whole wide world said, when you lose everything as a human,

the one thing that nobody can ever take from you is your response, the gap between stimulus and response. response. And that's what that breath can do. If you want to have extra credit, we're all high achievers on this, right? You do something called the one minute window. You stop. You get into your breath that way. And then you zoom in, almost like you've never seen something before. Like, you just get really focused on a detail. I have this wood inlaid pen as a really good example. And I got it in Italy, right? In Sorrento. And if I just pass by this, it's like, okay, cool, it's beautiful. But if I really zoom in, I'm like, man, the amount of things that went into this,

to make this, the hands, the architecture, the design, the artistry, the wood, it's pretty magic. And that is a tiny moment of joy. It is something that brings me into the present moment. I can't actually see that unless I'm present. And then you go into this soften. You bring up an elevated emotion of love and gratitude. And when you do that stop, see, soften, that's what I did my TEDx talk on last year. It changes everything. And it only takes 60 seconds. And so, So joy, I say, is a skill. It's a practice, right? It's our birthright.

But as adults, we lose touch. It's like Peter Pan, right? We forget how to fly. And we have to just reconnect to presence and to our bodies in order to experience the joy that is all around us all the time. We are just not tuned into it. Do you think we mix up fight or flight in high cortisol with hustle? Yes. I think the hustle culture has become very toxic. I think there is something important to understanding that when you are building, there is a level of exertion in creation that needs to happen to get something from A to B. That's important, right? It's creation energy, right? Creating human life. There is energy exertion in that. It makes sense, right? So hustle when you're creating a company from scratch that's important, but where it's kind of gone off the rails,

is hustle at the expense of everything else. This hustle and grind culture of hustle, hustle, create, hustle, create, sacrifice your days, your nights, your weekends, your body, your family, your friends, your spouse, or this, then, the other, all in the means of what? An ROI for your investors or for you. If you get to the top of the mountain one one day and you look around and no one's around you,

or the people that around you don't like, or you don't have your health, what does it matter? And so that's that message of like, don't sacrifice today for this one day. and you know energy is important but doing it there's taoist philosophy called woo way of flowing with the river right not against it not upstream not lying down and dying and drowning and all of that but flow with the current of the river in you know with effort to create and i think that it's very important for entrepreneurs to understand when is it time to create when is it time for them to invest

in themselves their joy their happiness their presence their family their children how many kids are out there trying to get their parents' attention who are wrapped up in their phones or emails? You never get those moments back. I'm always fascinated how somebody came up with a phrase, a statement, thousands of years ago. Like meditation has been around for thousands of years. And yet it is more needed now than ever.

It makes me wonder about how far along have we as humans really developed? I think every generation we evolve a little bit in certain ways and in some ways we forget. And I think as energy, as technology rather has evolved, we have forgotten some of the more ancient wisdom over time. And, you know, when the light bulb was invented, it changed our circadian rhythms as an entire society, right? And then as technology has come online and screens have come online, that. changed it again and again, right? And so our organism hasn't had enough evolutionary time to be able to adapt to the changes in technology. And so the hijacking that happens is really to our dopamine system for our attention, right? And so all of the dopamine hijackers, whether it be fast foods or

sugar or social media or porn or whatever, right, it is these things that hijack our dopamine system for an instantaneous moment of a drip of dopamine that makes the natural dopamine systems that we used to get dopamine from from like a hug or seeing a loved one or looking out at the sunset feel less intense or sweet. And so I say it's like if I gave you a candy bar right now, if I gave you a Snickers bar and you ate that and then I gave you a Fuji apple, one of the sweetest apples, the apple would not taste as sweet, even though it's natural, right? So I think what's happened is we, this generation has lost a little bit of touch,

but it's waking up in different ways. There is an awakening that's happening around plant medicine, around meditation, quicker than we think, because Gen Z is very attuned and tapped into this way more than, I would say, kind of gen X and above was, and millennials are kind of a hybrid, right? We got caught kind of in between on the millennial side of like, go change the world. Then we all got hit in the face by 10,000 things, right? But the millennials are hitting midlife crisis faster than any generation. And so I think we are coming back to ancient wisdom, ancient, call it technology and connection, you know, faster than than some of the other

generations did. What were some of the early warning signs that you missed? It was like a frog in boiling water. All of my businesses were also social enterprise businesses. So how do I use business to create for-profit impact around the world. And we did a lot of impact. And impact can be from a form of currency as well, where you get lost in that. I said like a scoreboard also. I think, and I did enjoy the ride along the way. However, I had a tech startup fail. And when it failed, I was in a really bad financial situation. And I was getting married. And then my relationship became on the rocks. And then I started a new business. And then the business. And then those business partners fell out.

And I think what I missed along the way was how disregulated my nervous system was, how I really needed help and I didn't know where to go. I needed mentors that were more than just once a quarter, once a year calls. I needed coaches. And I needed someone to give me hope that what I was feeling and what I was experiencing was normal because I felt that was the only one in the whole world experiencing it because you look on social media and it's all fucking crushing I raised this round I did that but blah blah blah but I had just had a company fail and I remember trying to find a therapist and that was an awful process

and I couldn't afford this and so I just kind of gave up and I I retreated into myself I can handle it that's what men have been told right I can handle it I'll just bottle it up I'll just I'll just push through I'll just make more money I'll start another company I'll just blah blah blah blah and what I realizing that process is that I self-abandoned and self-sacrificed myself along the way, so much so that I woke up one morning and had a dark night of the soul and thought about taking my life in San Francisco. I had all the things, but I was empty. I was surrounded by people, but I was lonely. And my social media feed said I was crushing it, right? But I was actually going through a divorce, business partner and life partner. Business wasn't doing so well, the new business at the time.

and I just felt like a fraud. And it was that day as I was in the penthouse apartment in San Francisco and I watched the suns get covered by the fog. You know, it's one of the most beautiful views in the world, but I was totally unpresent to it because I was wrapped up in my own internal reality. And it was more dark and real than the external beauty around me. And as I watched the fog roll in and cover where the sun had just been, I realized that my dark thoughts were like the clouds.

They were only temporary. They were always just passing, and the sun is always shining behind them. And that day, I asked myself, you know, if I need everything to change, then maybe I need to change everything. And that's the day that I took control of my life because I took ownership. It was my behaviors, my actions, not a victim. No one did this to me. And I'm going to do something different. And so I broke from the program that day and I went to the beach and I watched the sunset.

And it was my first sunset in years. And as I watched this beautiful orange ball descend towards the horizon at Baker Beach in San Francisco, I cried. Bro, I cried, and I was taken off guard by how much I was crying because I thought there were tears of sadness, but I quickly realized it was tears of joy, of relaxation, of presence, of my God, if, you know, why haven't I done this? I lived a mile from the beach. And I remembered how much joy watching a sunset had brought me when I was a kid.

My dad, my brother and I, when my mom had passed away, would go watch the sunset in a nearby area. We didn't have much, but we had each other. and we had the sunset. And I just, it's free. And I sat there that day, my dark Tuesday of the soul, and I watched this sunset. I let my nervous system exhaled.

And I wrote my first list of joy. And I said, if a simple sunset can make me so happy, what else am I not doing that brings me joy? And that changed everything because I looked at that list and I realized why I was so depressed. I wasn't doing anything on that list. And so I committed that day for the rest of my life

to every single day to invest in, something that brought me joy every single day for the rest of my life. And that has created a compounding return on joy that is just astronomical. Maybe your mom guided you to the sunset. Yeah. I know that's true now. And she has been guiding me all along. I've called her my guided and, you know, the deep healing work that I've had to do, the trauma work around my mom's passing and my internal, we work with something in the book called the core narrative. And the core narrative is the story we tell ourselves as children through usually trauma of some way, shape, or form, even if it's not like a big acute trauma, could be a chronic period of time

where we felt hurt or unseen or unsafe. And that core narrative is subconscious because when we're young, our brain hasn't fully developed yet. We're only in theta or alpha brainwaves. We haven't even developed beta brainwaves yet. And so we tell ourselves this story unconsciously to keep us safe. And it's a survival story. But it's the same survival story as our childhood, that kept us safe that's keeping us from thriving. And so that core narrative that I told myself is that I was abandoned, that was unsafe. And the truth is that I was never abandoned and that it is safe to love.

And my mom has been with me my entire time. But it wasn't until I identified that story and then reframed it and reprogram my subconscious mind, which is what this exactly the book, the process of Alchemy of Joy is all about. It's all about understanding that you can reprogram and retrain your brain no matter where you are, to live the life you were put here to live, to enjoy it further. And for me, my story was that my mom had left me. She had abandoned me. And I now know to be very fundamentally true that she's been with me this entire time guiding.

Yeah, I was listening to someone talk about how the trauma is how we deal with things. It's not necessarily the thing. Because what could be traumatic for you might not be traumatic for me. It's all in how we handle the situation then becomes like a trauma point. I'm wondering if ignorance is bliss in business, because I think most people knew when they first started a company what was going to happen if they did, I don't know if they would have ever started it. Ignorance is not bliss. And I've been there, right?

Like, I think those two things are separate. I think what you're saying there is right. And I think if we knew how much pain being an entrepreneur actually was, we wouldn't do it. But something happens. It's like women in childbirth, man. I mean, women are the most incredible species on earth. What women go through in life, we should be worshipping them way more than we are as society because it's just incredible what they have to go through in life to bear children

and then the process of bearing children and then wanting to maybe do it again and have a second child. It's this thing where I think as humans we have a need to create. obviously don't, we don't bear children. We don't get that gift. But we are also creators in different way. We have creation energy, right? And so we also have this need to create. And when men and women, you know, are in the entrepreneurial world, it doesn't matter if you're a man founder or female founder, this need to create knowing what's ahead is, are two different things. And so the vision is what pulls us through. And the ignorance being bliss, I think, is one of these maxims that a similar to like, oh, people never change.

I just don't believe it. And I know for fact in my work that people freaking change. I see it every day. I work with them all day long. And this is, you know, I changed. And so I think ignorance may be bliss for a moment. And I think ultimately it leads to a lot of pain. I can see why, yeah, I mean, men, we can't get pregnant.

Like, I stub my toe and I'm done for a week. There is no way that I could go through childbirth. And you're right. And to do it a second, third, some people, five, six children. They're just the most incredible. What they have to go through all of that, you know, prior. And then, you know, it's just, it's just incredible. And then, you know, women who then also not just raise a family,

I think the hardest job in the world is being a full-time, full-time parent, man or woman, you know, because it's the most important job that we can do in there. And, you know, and then the parents that have kids that then also go off. and have careers at the same time. You know, it's just, it's just remarkable. And, you know, just big props and shout out to all the women out there who are raising families, who've had children, who are in the struggle and who are building or creating companies or as executives and founders, you guys deserve so much more worship than we give you.

I like that. I do think that if women ruled the world more, more leaders, I think we might be in a better place. I 100% know that we would. The 100% know that we would in that. I think men think we know best, but we don't. And, you know, it's just, it's just, I can't even find my socks in the morning. But so you, you've now built businesses and you've done the inner work. If you could go back and hand your, the 23 year old self, if you can hand yourself one sentence the morning after the deal, what would you say? Follow your gut, brother.

You know. And what I mean by that is right after that morning a deal, I knew in my gut, I knew in my gut that I was chasing a false idol and there was something else deeper and bigger that I needed to go after. And so, you know, I did. I did. That company eventually went under in the global financial crisis and I went and reorganized my life into becoming a for-profit social entrepreneur. How do I use business to create social impact and actually have meaning behind it? But really it was about, you know, we have this innate intelligence inside of our bodies. We do.

We have this knowing. And the problem is we get too busy and we're too loud to listen to it. You know, the intuition is soft. Intuition whispers, right? Fear yells. And so we need to get quiet. So I might also tell them, hey, buddy, start your meditation practice. practice, right? Because that changed my life when I started my meditation practice, my daily practice

of getting quiet and going inward. And the only thing I would change from your intro to that question, brother, was I am doing the work. There's no done. And it's a semantics thing that's important because it's a never-ending upward spiral. And I think sometimes people think, oh, you know, there's some place to get to or why is this still happening? And what I talk to the folks who my work with, the executives, entrepreneurs, and CEOs, and my, you know, my private coaching and retreats is that it's, it's not that you're never going to get triggered again. It's that it's the intensity of the triggers and the intervals. We want to increase the intervals, so we have less, and decrease the intensity. So, you know, and have more arrows in your quiver to be able to

transmute them, which is the alchemy process. What's the most joy-killing lie that the entrepreneur community sells. That happiness is at the end of the rainbow, at the exit. It is, you know, the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow is, is where her happiness lies. And so, you know, we, we, we get blinders on to really experiencing the pigments of joyful color along the way in pursuit of this pot of gold. It is the, in the entrepreneurial world, the number one lie we've been sold and told. Once I make money, it'll solve all my problems. I've been telling people, go work at a tech company, get some stocks and shares, become a millionaire, and you have like 180 hours of vacation time a year. That sounds way better.

And then maybe invest in somebody else's business or do something that requires, I don't know, do something after. But why even become an entrepreneur at this stage? Just go work for somebody. Be happy, make millions. It seems easier. I don't know. Maybe that's just me. But it's interesting. So we have two cohorts and two avatars who kind of come into the work with me.

And one is from like the tech cohort world, you know, and one is through kind of the entrepreneurial cohort. And they're a little different, right? But they have the same problem, which is, I just went and I got the job at Facebook or Google and I got the house and I'm living Silicon Valley and I have the car and this, but I'm suicidal. I'm sad. And I don't know why I'm happy. Right. And it's the same thing. So yes, we're talking about two different things. So one is like it's easier probably in some ways to go through that pipeline than the zero to one creation energy because that's freaking hard. And I think people who are creators, and I'm going to put artists in there, right? Like artists are creators, entrepreneurs are creators, right?

We have a, and I'm more of an artist than an entrepreneur, it's been expressed through entrepreneurship. But, you know, we have a need to see and do and build the world differently. But the problem is the same for both cohorts, which is when we put that pot of gold up on the pedestal, that that's the answer to our prayers of happiness. We miss the pigments of color along the way. And the pigments of color, by the way, it's the smile on your child's face in the morning. It's the rays of sunshine inside of your window in the morning. It's the first sip of coffee, a bite of a first meal, right? It is just being present in your body, being out on nature.

It's like the things that bring you joy, it's tuning into them. They're all around you all day long. You just have to be present. And that is what it's, all about. It doesn't matter where you are, what you're building and creating. But your point remains about, yeah, going in through the tech pipeline is easier than building a company. I would make a bad employee. I don't think I would be a good employee at this point. So maybe, maybe there's just no option. Like, I'm not going to go yet a job at some tech company anymore. So the only other way I can do is to create my own thing. But Brent Freeman, the alchemy of joy, I hope a billion people find joy at some point. what you're saying.

That's what we're working on. That's the mission. We need it. Thank you for. We need it now more than ever. Even though we've been talking about meditation for thousands of years, at this point, we need it more than ever. So I appreciate what you're doing.

I appreciate a lot, man. The book's a roadmap to that. We have 11 meditations all for free and I can find it on my website, Brentfremann.com or hit me up on Instagram at Joy with Brent. And just thank you for this. And if you're out there, I want you to know if you're listening to this and you're struggling, that there is hope. Shoot me a DM and we will help you out.

Amazing. Thanks, Brent.