Julian Dorey Podcast - #41 - Anthony D'Apolito - Flow State; Time; "Knowing How To Die"; 2Pac & Post Malone; TruckBux

Episode Date: March 31, 2021

Anthony D’Apolito is the Head of Content for TruckBux, an Austin, Texas-based startup, whose app allows customers to order pickup or delivery from nearby food trucks. Anthony is also the Founder of Dream Big & Co.––a media  company that creates content to build brands and share inspiring stories. ***TIMESTAMPS*** 4:51 - Flow States & Skydiving; Dr. Dre, Sylvester Stallone, & other celebs’ flow states; “Constraints cultivate creativity”; The War of Art by Steven Pressfield; Steve Jobs, Simplicity, & Discipline 24:41 - The hypocrisy around “authenticity” & revisiting TRENDIFIER #4; Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign analysis; Narcissism; Obama v Trump 37:17 - High School Cliques and what they say about our future environments; The power of connections; Anthony’s Positivity...real?; The evil inside of all of us; Sam Altman & the “It’s better to do more good than less bad” theory; Jordan Peterson & his theory on Hitler 54:13 - Empathy vs. responsibility; The seriousness of criminal justice; story about a father who forgave his son’s murderer & why he did it; Throwing around words like “empathy” without any meaning behind them 1:06:23 - Glasshouses in society; Cynicism towards politics and the problems with political discourse; Joe Rogan should interview all politicians; Politicians & groupthink 1:17:40 - People fear change; Revisiting the safety conversation from TRENDIFIER #33 - Brady Burkett; The similarity that ties together Skydiving, flow states, and love; Tuesdays with Morrie & “Knowing how to die” 1:32:31 - The concept of Time; NFL Legend, Tony Siragusa’s outlook on time with his hourglass collection; Revisiting TRENDIFIER #15; The problem w/ “Stay Tuned Culture” 1:38:50 - Naval Ravikant theory on your surroundings; Tupac “2Pac” Shakur and his famous poem, “The Rose That Grew From Concrete” 1:52:39 - Elon Musk’s drive towards something far greater than money; The use of negative energy as a motivator; The misconception around Gary Vee’s “loving failure” theory 2:07:33 - Anthony’s work at TruckBux; TruckBux founder Nick Nanakos’ backstory and family American Dream story 2:22:07 - Revisiting TRENDIFIER #35 - John Rondi & his Stunited / TikTok come up story that’s reminiscent of Brian Chesky & the Airbnb story; Having courage in your conviction as a startup founder;  Anthony’s early content of TruckBux founder, Nick Nanakos 2:35:20 - POST MALONE’S come up story is proof that he WANTED IT more than anything else in the world; Michael Jordan documented as a kid?; DaBaby’s work ethic; How Pele learned to play soccer with a rolled up sock and a mango; The tragedy of believing in people more than they believe in themselves; Decentralization & Opportunity 2:51:51 - Julian tells a story about an unnamed person he looks up to as an example that “it’s possible”; Closing the conversation revisiting the “time” theme again ~ YouTube EPISODES & CLIPS: Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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exclusions, and terms apply. Instacart, groceries that over-deliver. One of the saddest things I do witness in my life is when I see people who are great at things, and I'm fortunate enough to know a lot of them, and this is the downside of it, who most likely are never going to let the world know that they are because for whatever reason maybe it's not that they don't want it but they let things get in their way and they don't want it that bad they don't they aren't willing to fucking put the chips in the middle and sacrifice everything to do it you have the expectation of others. 100%. But that dude didn't give a fuck.

He wanted it. And he made White Iverson in that goddamn room. And the rest is history. That's a story for the books. Yeah. And that is the exact stuff I love talking about. Because I can, and I would love a part two just talking about straight stories of people like that

what's cooking everybody many of you often ask me who my favorite guest has been or if I have a favorite episode and I always tell you the same thing i i don't i have thoroughly enjoyed every single guest i've had in here there have been 27 or 28 so far they've all been phenomenal and i would want all of them to come back and a couple of them actually have already but there probably are a handful of episodes, maybe four or five, that for very different reasons do stack at the top. I can't really compare them, but I know they're just a little bit more special than all the other ones, to take nothing away from the other ones. This episode is definitely one of those. I'm joined in the bunker today by my friend Anthony D'Apolito. Anthony is the head of content and marketing, the new head of content and marketing for TruckBucks, which is an Austin, Texas-based startup that's rapidly growing and is in the food truck application business, among some other things. this conversation however does not focus on truck bucks i think we did talk about that and their

founder nick nanakos in towards the end of the podcast maybe for about 10 minutes and that was very compelling but instead what we focused on during our talk here were many topics that are applicable to everyone i don't care who you are what era of your life you're in or what you got going on these are all the types of things that have to do with whether it be sociocultural issues or mindset ideas that we can all take something from. And I feel like I've had three or four podcasts where I've been able to say something like that before. This one, the whole way through. The whole way through, it's all applicable.

So you're going to hear a lot of stories. You're going to hear a lot of deep moments and back and forth. And I had said a couple weeks back during when I released the Mike Spear episode that the last hour of that was the most entertaining hour that had happened in the studio to this point. And it's true. And that remains the case. But what I will say about this episode is that the last hour and a half is probably the densest, deepest, and coolest hour and a half we've done in here. So I really, really appreciated this episode.

Love this guy. And wait till you hear how old this kid is. That's all I'm going to say. Anyway, if you're not subscribed, please subscribe. We are on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and YouTube. And if you're on YouTube right now, hit that subscribe button. Hit that bell button. And leave a like and comment on the video if you would, please.

To all the people who have been leaving five star reviews with a comment on apple podcasts thank you they're amazing i say it every week i also say every week if you haven't had a chance to do that yet and can help grow our base here by leaving those for new listeners who come in and want to give the podcast a shot or decide whether to give the podcast a shot those comments go a long long So again, thank you to everyone who's done that. And if you can take a second to do it, if you haven't already, that'd be awesome. That said, you know what it is. I'm Julian Dory, and this is Train to Fire. This is one of the great questions in our culture. Where is the nuance? You're giving opinions and calling them facts.

You feel me? Everyone understands this, but few seem to do it. If you don't like the status quo, start asking questions. We'll talk about flow in one of my episodes so he can touch on it better. I won't get into like crazy. I got you right now though, so you touch on it best. I got crazy depth because I'll stay within my conscious competence. But flow is when you release any struggle and you can just be creating without any real bounds or what it seems like at the time. Because there is this one phrase where they call it a surfer.

I forget the last part of it, but it's SRFR. But it's like struggle, release, flow. And then I forgot the R, the last one. But I think it's all about that. Once you release and let go and you become vulnerable then you get into a flow state there might be some challenges but once you get after that initial challenge then you can get into just this free fall of just present experience as though you're skydiving that's a very good way of putting it because and i've never i've

never been skydiving. You have to. I'm not a fan of heights, but I will do it at some point. But you can imagine that once you've accepted what's happening, like if you were afraid, for example, there's this, I mean, it sounds like you did it, but there's this freeing thing where it's like, okay. It's the most, one of the most blissful things I ever experienced in life.

And Will Smith does an amazing job of his reflection of how he skydived. So look it up. It's a great video if people want to reference it. But it's just this like, you hold on for dear life. I remember I went only like 12,000 feet up when I skydived a couple years ago. I have a video of it on my YouTube channel too. But you have this like tension when you're at the top. And, you know, you have the guy behind you, especially if you're skydiving with someone. And he's like, all right, you know, you get into like 12,000 feet, 13,000 feet.

Usually I do it higher, but I did that height. And he's like, you know, you get into the top and the guy who you're going with is like, all right, you ready to go? We're going to hop out. We're going to hop out. And then there's another one who just opens the hatch to the plane. And I'll just go through what I experienced when I was skydiving, because I'm explaining it from like a third person perspective. But I had a friend with me and myself. He was with a skydiver and I was with the skydiver. So, we had like a third person perspective but I had a friend with me and myself he was with a skydiver and I was with the skydiver so we had like a person um guiding us through it so we didn't do it alone we get up to 12,000 13,000 feet and my friend goes first the guy opens the hatch and they kind of scooch over you know legs hanging out the the airplane and then you just see them and you they just fall

and i'm like you know get goosebumps so i'm like yeah butterflies but then i go the guy taps me he's like are you ready and i was like whatever i guess and i i have to be and we scoot over as well and when you're at the edge you're extremely tight like i was holding on for for absolute dear life onto the backpack straps where the parachute would deploy from and the release for me because we talked about struggle release flow and analogizing you know flow with skydiving once you fall there's like two seconds or a second more of tension, and then you just let go, and then you just feel whatever you feel. And it's only then that the authentic emotions that you want to feel will enter.

And that's true vulnerability. Like for me, that's, I was truly vulnerable. Laughing, tongue out, screaming. But it was the greatest feeling of my life. Free. Free. And I think everyone's seeking freedom. And that's why skydiving is one of the biggest things people put on their bucket list. It's because people want to feel that feeling of freedom.

Think about what you just said. Everybody's seeking freedom and we're starting this conversation with trying to define flow state. Flow state is freedom for everyone, regardless of how you consider it because, again, it's a little bit different for different people depending on what they do, but it's freedom. It's freedom for a specific period of time. And like I said, I'm going to stay within my conscious competence because I know some great scientists can talk about it in great depth. But for what I know and what I've heard people talk about when I interviewed them and what I've researched, it's a temporary state in which you truly do let go and then you go back into having goals and challenges and so on and so forth. But aren't we all seeking that?

Like this conversation, aren't we seeking to get into a flow experience? Absolutely. I will say that whenever I've had a podcast and I had someone over, every single podcast I have experienced flow state. And I know they have too. Every single one.

And that's what you can get out of this when you just kind of sit down because eventually, the walls come down. No matter I don't care who you are, when you are on here for three hours, you can't hide. There is an extent I talked about it with someone else, there's an extent to which the greatest people in the world could act like if Daniel Day Lewis was sitting right there. I'll bet he could probably do a pretty good acting job for three hours not many people can pull that off though and so you know the beauty of you want to talk about falling and free fall we don't know where this is going right like I mean we could be talking about crazy shit in an hour I don't know and so that unknown and then knowing like all right well there's nowhere to go the door's shut the studio's on lights are on like let's roll it it creates this feeling that eventually sometimes sometimes it's five minutes in which rare but sometimes it's five minutes in

other times it's 15 sometimes it's an hour in but there's a moment that happens that you know afterwards you may not always know it when it's happening but then you're like that was it you know yeah so i'm a huge believer in it but one of the things that i have such a respect for running this as a business and doing all these things to get it off the ground and all the day-to-day and whether it be something simple like scheduling people or doing the bullshit little editing that no one sees or cutting up different sizes for videos or reaching out to some people on a specific podcast to see what they thought of it or you know talking with people on ideas all these different little micro decision points in the day and then i also have to be able to get into flow state because i got

to get into flow state to make especially with like clips and stuff to make it look very artistic from the sense that like how, what's the first thing that it starts with? What makes someone feel something on this video? I'm starting, I'm starting on zero on YouTube. So how do I get to one? How do I get one person to be like, whoa, in that first line? The beginning is always the hardest. It's always the hardest. Always. First 10,000 customers. Oh, yeah. First $10,000. First 10,000 subscribers. Even 100 customers.

Don't even say 10,000. It's always the hardest in the beginning. It is. You have to wear those hats. And you have to do what you love, too, in order to trudge through that to then go forward to continue on to grow. And that's the thing.

The respect I have for people like you who for years have been balancing those two worlds like you built a second half of the company within your company to be able to finance your company and and build something that takes a lot of time no one gives a about what you and i have to say when we start you know like you got to do it for years no one's going to care it doesn't matter how good it is you know there's some people that go viral great the word viral is viral for a reason it doesn't happen to a lot of people if you are counting on that you're going to lose 99.9999% of the time so you know having the appreciation for balancing the two i just really wonder about the true creativity and

how some people who have to do that have to balance like actually tap into it because for me like i'm a writer by trade that that's i love that you brought that up we're going to talk about that we'll talk about right that's that's my core too well i think we have we have talked a little bit about right yeah that's the foundation of everything. Yeah. So, writing, prime example, because it is pure creativity. You want to talk about needing to get into a flow state. I can't write when I don't get into a flow state. But that's why I haven't written much because whether it be writing or whether it be editing clips and stuff, I always have such a limited time on it. And so, I talk to other creatives because I know all the stories of when creativity blossomed the best, right? Like people have heard Sylvester Stallone sat in an empty room for,

you know, like a 12 by 12 room for, I think, a full weekend and wrote the initial spec script of Rocky. We've heard, and I'm forgetting some examples. Yeah, yeah. Paul Okuyo of The Alchemist wrote the entire book on a train ride, I believe. My friend Jordan Gross came out with the book, wrote it in four days. But they were totally locked in. Like, Dr. Dre has talked about being at the soundboard for 76 straight hours and not knowing that there was days and nights going on outside, right? So, when I think of creativity, I'm thinking of the greats and the pure creatives and that's what they could lock in on.

And so, and taking nothing away from those people, by the way, nothing away. Maybe they plan those specific times because they have to balance the other stuff and they just said, yo, for four days, the world's off and I'm just gonna be there and hopefully I tap into it. Maybe that's what it is. But for the people that have to do both, have to be businessmen and blank, blank, blank, and then

also creative, it's a really, really hard thing. Yeah, they have the bandwidth to do it. Like they have, I guess, the financial bandwidth, but also like the personal bandwidth to be able to create that room for themselves. Because like you said, and what I had to do, is I had to juggle both in order to keep myself afloat and keep the business going. And I chose and willingly did that to create an arm in the company. But I still then didn't have the bandwidth to just take four days off and then write whatever I want

or write this new script for this film or plan out an original feature film we were going to do or just like anything. So that was the restriction in certain ways. And there's a lot of pressure to it. But when you have, they say constraints cultivate creativity. So when you have... What is that constraints constraints cultivate creativity so when you have guardrails though it's actually more beneficial than just having a month to do whatever you want because then you'll procrastinate then you'll take your time so if it's like all right i'm gonna book a flight to japan to write a book

and i have a round trip to come back here. We'll say we're going from Newark. You will get it done in that time because you know there's a finite amount of time that you have to get it done in. Whereas if you're like, all right, I'm going to go and just book an Airbnb and write a book in a month, you'll end up like The Shining, and you'll go crazy. You know the guy, what's the main actor in that? I forgot. Jack Nicholson. Jack Nicholson. You'll end up like the Shining and you'll go crazy. You know, the guy, what's

the main actor in that? I forgot. Jack Nicholson. Jack Nicholson. You'll go crazy like him. So that ability to create bounds for yourself is nice because then you can just pressure yourself into getting it done most of the time. You ever read War of Art by Pressfield? No. Yeah. So this was one that I remember Joe Rogan talked about. He still talks about this, I would imagine. But he talked about this for years. And so I probably heard it on like, I don't know, at one point a few years ago, 10 different podcasts where he was like, oh, I used to hand it out at the front.

So I'm like, all right, fuck it. I'll go get it. And I don't know why I never took book recommendations from him. Like he would talk about these books he's reading i never fucking read them but that one i was like okay i'll go do that and it's it's a very quick book it's about two three hours but pressfield the guy who writes it steve pressfield he was the guy who wrote legend of bagger vance he wrote chariots i think it's called chariots of fire and then like a whole series with that so it was like took place in like the Greco-Roman

Times it's fictional like storytelling so not that I've read that I know Legend of Bagger Vance, but became very successful When he was 40 he was a jerk-off He couldn't do anything like he sucked anything he wrote made no money I'd forget what he was doing to like get by, but he was borderline, not homeless, but like the next worst thing. And he conquered, he gave a name to his problem. And his problem was called resistance. And so this War of Art book, which is very quick, you get into a flow state reading it because it's boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. It talks about how you fight, you're a professional and you fight that resistance.

So, oh, you plan to write at 6.30, it's 6.35 and you haven't put the pen to paper, that resistance is fucking you. So, fuck it back. Like, he is, he's like in its face about it. And then there's also, he sets those guardrails. So, he pointed out, if I'm remembering correctly, I've read it three times, I think, but I haven't read it in seven or eight months. I love that you reread books. Well, that one definitely. But I would love to talk to you about the reading. Yeah, we'll get into that.

But, you know, there is – when he was going through it, he figured out that his best time, I think, was he was shitty after 3 p.m. writing every day. It was never hit a good flow state then. So he was like, that's my guardrail. 3 p.m., I'm outie. Done. I don't care if I'm in the middle of a sentence. Bye. It's over.

Right? And then the next day, that resistance is going to be fighting me at 6 a.m. Whatever it is. It could be how you feel physically, how you feel mentally, what time of of day it is what you're worried about in your life what's going on over here whether your coffee's cold or hot or whatever and that resistance is the combination of all those things and you got to drown it all out and just start fucking doing it yeah i read atomic habits and i forget exactly i can't recollect what um the tit for tat was but basically if you're a night owl it's something like you work best in like the afternoon but if you're like an

early bird you work best are sorry if it's you're a night owl your productivity and like analytical side is best in the afternoon or something like that whereas if you're an early bird, it's like maybe the evening. So it's like knowing what you are, you can then reverse engineer, when can I tap into creativity? Because you're already setting yourself up for success. James Clear from Atomic Habits that I just brought up, he's the author. Unbelievable intellect on habit building and just goal setting and so on and so forth. Like unbelievable. If I can recommend one book to people, I can't,

it's hard to recommend one. I'd recommend that, but there's other ones. Like I got Principles by Ray Dalio. There's a ton, but he says you, you rise to the level of your systems and you fall to the level of your goals or vice versa.

You fall to the level of your goals. You rise to the level of your systems. What does he mean mean by systems systems is like the processes you set in place so like my morning routine okay um or like being a practitioner in business like setting your operations up your systems so you guys can flow accordingly and like get stuff done productively so by goals it's like you set something but the system is the how you get there. So it's like the journey more than the end destination. But I'm big on the systems part. I'm big on that. That's why I like discipline. I don't like discipline because I enjoy being a disciplined person. It's nice. But that systemizing of things and processes that you set in place for yourself

will set you up for success down the road. And you're rigid about it too. And I could tell that early on knowing you. I remember the first time I really noticed it and I was like, wow, was I think two days in a row we were doing different clubhouse rooms and it was at different times. And both of them, one we had planned out where we were going different clubhouse rooms and it was at different times and both of them one we had planned out where we were going to run it together and the other one was one you were running

and then asked me to come in and so you were a moderator and both point being and the first one was maybe i don't know nine o'clock at night we were talking for about an hour and you mentioned at 9 55 that you had to cut off at 10 not because you had something to do or somewhere to go but like i need to do this and then go to bed because tomorrow i have blank blank blank and then the next day it was a call it was a room maybe at three o'clock in the afternoon something like that and you mentioned i think it was going for close to an hour and a half and then you mentioned it like 4 20 or 4 25 you're probably going to smoke wait that's fine that's probably why you're a little late but you mentioned you had a hard

stop at 4 30 which all the corporate speak and everything but you did and you were you were very nice about it even though you were moderating the room and technically leaving while it was still going on but you were like no like i i have to set that if you let people just step over your your your line then you're gonna let it happen over and over and over and over again. And that's what I did with, you know, Dream Big & Co. because I was in a phase of building for so long that I was willing to do those all-nighters or stay up late or just kind of have the routines fall out of place because I needed to go the extra mile to make the pathway for us to actually like run. And that makes sense when you don't have stuff aligned and like set up early on.

But I failed for so long on going to bed on time. And I mentioned to you focus, and I mentioned how that's so important. But when you have so many things pulling you, you really need to make sure you're in check. Because if your health diminishes or you just put it to the side, then the way you operate will decrease too. And then how you show up in a meeting will be terrible. How you show up for a podcast will be terrible. That's why I'm big on health. I mean, that's the main reason I like to be disciplined is i get in my like meeting with myself and i get my mind and my body and my soul in check because then when i

show up any for anything else um i'm sound or i'm ready right so that's a big thing but a lot of people think of discipline as addition what do you mean like addition they think discipline is like you have to do things or you have to like hit markers whereas and i you know steve jobs big on this focus is about subtraction and i think discipline is that too simplicity simplicity and like going to bed on time was that for me because i'm ambition is my default like i'll just do and go and try to achieve, but to take a step back and be patient is huge. And to go to bed on time is that for me. To subtract the amount of things I do and go to bed at a certain time and be like,

guys, I'm serious about this. I'm religious about this. I'm not letting this room go over this amount of time. You can stay, but I have to go because I know what happens if I repeat that. And it's like the Seinfeld rule if you if the two-day rule if you let it happen twice it's gonna happen a third time and a fourth time and it goes on and then you just x calendar where he puts yeah exactly that and it's just like you know you call an undisciplined life is basically people can just like say it's you know fate but like there's a there's a quote on

that too of like people just let things go and then they'll attribute it to fate but like i think you set up your feet right and i'm big on creativity i'm big on like the flow experience i'm big on vulnerability and i want us to get into vulnerability i want us to come back to that because that's so important in life especially now for content creation episode four of your podcast you talked about authenticity watch the whole thing i loved it you love that but it's like a science to it like you have to be very structured yeah that was i'm i'm glad you bring that up though that was that's everything because that's what you are and that's what everyone should strive to be but sorry to cut you off they hold themselves back that was cool

no one's brought that one up but yeah yeah I mean it has to be acknowledged it's like it's deserving and it's kind of funny too that you have an episode

about authenticity and authenticity spoke so much to me that I'm bringing it back up again there's a lot of people that say that they're authentic though they go out of their way to say like I'm in authentic sales and blah blah blah if you have to say you're authentic you're not exactly yeah and so i i don't even know i think i said in that episode i didn't want to use the word

authenticity because i fucking hated it and it's true and i felt like when i was doing that one again i'm that was before i launched the podcast i was building up these episodes and i had to experiment and whatever and it was a topic i was passionate about, so I'm like, fuck it. I'll do it. It's whatever. I'm glad it resonated with you because I do walk the talk, or at least I hope to God I do with what I said in that. I'm all about – I mean, look, when you roll the camera – You're standing up.

You're so into it. Yeah. Well, that day I was like, holy shit. I drank like, I don't know, 32 ounces of coffee a little too fast right before. I was like, I can't sit down. But there is such a problem with that because so many people think they're authentic or probably know they're not and just talk about how they are. And they throw around these buzzwords like authenticity and transparency and all this stuff. And it's like, just say it how the fuck you want to say it don't put the guardrails down the days of like what you are in society's eyes they're done i

want i want us to double down on this because i used to fall victim to trying to sound smarter than i was or trying to appease people because i wanted them to like me so i would try to sound a certain way i'll try to use big words i would try to, I would like read the dictionary and try to use that word that I had in the dictionary. Like, no, just like speak as you would if you're talking in a group chat, right? And I think that's marketing too. They talk about that.

Like people try to market and sound, find your voice online. What is your brand identity? How would you speak in a group chat? Do you want that to be the way that people see the way you are? Because at the end of the day, business brand is reputation. Personally, reputation is reputation.

So is this a person you want to become? And this is how I'll speak and just let it be. Who cares if people don't align with it? They're not your type of people then. I hate using this example. I think I did use it in that episode though, number four. But I believe that everything in culture – everything is downstream to and from culture. It's a continuous circle. it affects everything up to the office of the president of the united states and so trump say everything you want about him when you when you take away who he was as president or as a candidate and whatever and take away whatever his stances were forget the politics what are some of the

things that made him appeal so much to people on a personal level he was him yeah the the guy said in a campaign rally before new hampshire and won and i'm not and and again i'm not saying you should say that right i'm not saying like oh that's the key just get up get up at the mic the same thing right the theme is like he wasn't thinking about it he said you know what i am not gonna telegraph exactly what i'm gonna say i'm just taught these are people man i'm gonna talk to people and like oh that popped into my head i probably shouldn't have said that but you know what you probably just said something in in the last room or or an hour ago why are you judging why are you judging someone and and put the right and left aside yeah why are you judging someone for being themselves

and if they're not why are you still judging them then because then that just means they have an insecurity of some fashion or a fault they haven't ironed out with themselves interpersonally so I think I know what you mean one of the big

if I can just come through this video camera or mic or whatever and tell people like just like i want to reach across tell you it's like it's a huge lesson i learned last year it's not right or wrong yes morally or ethically there's there's right or wrong right but it's more about understanding understand where someone's coming from instead of trying to assume or judge the right or wrong immediately or impulsively so with with authenticity the point of trump you can bring up david portno with barstool sports elon musk with tesla portnoy is the best example anyone portnoy i know yeah in that episode four you talked about Portnoy too. Like he is just unapologetically himself.

And if someone was to judge that, then usually what you hate in others is what you hate in yourself. So it's like, you know, what can I actually do to look at why I hate something like this? Am I not authentic? Am I doing something wrong? Just because I don't like what he does.

I think that's the biggest case a lot of people have to look back into what they're thinking and feeling internally and that will reveal more than we were trying to project to other people or what they're doing do you think it's a society problem I think it's an individual problem

I think yes it amounts to individual individual individual and comes to society's way of being but I think an amalgamation of individuals dispositions and stuff Yes, it amounts to individual, individual, individual and comes to society's way of being. Okay, you know what I asked. But I think an amalgamation of individuals, dispositions and stuff. I asked that question wrong. That was way too broad. What I mean by that, I agree with what you just said.

It is on the individual at the end of the day to make decisions for themselves and figure out who they are and how to project that without trying. That's the whole point, right? But when I say society, I mean the guardrails, to use that vision again for something else, the guardrails that are put up that say, no, no, no, this is how things are done. Now, an important connotation or addendum, I don't know the word, something like that, to this that needs to be said that I would love your thoughts on is where people use authenticity as a cloak. And I don't mean the people who just say, you know, authentic such and such and such and such in their fucking profile, which means they're not authentic. I mean the people who decide to be such an individual that they claim they're just being authentic and they try to go crazy.

It's like narcissism. They go crazier and crazier and crazier in whatever it is. It could be how they act. It could be what they're wearing. It could be what things they like and then project out to public that eventually it's not about authenticity. It's about how I am so fucking insecure. How can I get the most attention on myself to make me feel better about myself that's a slippery slope to that yeah we're i mean we're all trying to feel better about

ourselves but they're just doing it the long way they're just like all right let me act a certain way to wear a mask to then appeal to people to then get them to like me for what I'm doing here. Instead, they can just put that all aside and why not be like Eminem in 8 Mile? Just put all your faults up front because then no one can judge you for anything and you put it out into the open. So if I were to talk about right now everything that I used to not like about myself

or that I'm bad at, yeah, I have to have more patience. Yeah, my teeth could be a little more straightened on the bottom right i didn't get braces when i'm younger like you put it all on the line just let it go you're not judging yourself anymore who were the guys you said you said i know outside of trump you said elon elnoy. Elon, David Portnoy. There's so many. I mean, you could talk about Gary. You could talk about Aubrey.

You could talk about Joe Rogan. Yeah, okay. You just named them. Those guys, in particularly, one of the reasons you can't really go at them is because they lead with that. And it was another problem with Trump, too. Like, Trump's been a coup town his whole life. There should have been a lot of things to take him down, frankly. Because, you know, I think he's cheated on every wife he has he's had like three not that that's like horrible but he's had three wives i think he's cheated on all of them and yet that

never stuck and he even got evangelical voters and stuff and they're like oh he's a man of god like you know the whole nine and you ask yourself well why is that it's because he's up front with it he tells you exactly what it is i remember my grandfather told me back in this is in 2016 during the election he he did not like obama or trump and he was just kind of like sitting back like all right whatever's gonna happen here and then it was obviously hillary run against trump but obama was still president at the time and he said you know his opinion was i think trump and obama are perfect examples of narcissists the difference is obama real and i'm not saying he's right about this this was just his take obama plays passively he doesn't tell you he's one he's very passive

aggressive and it all kind of comes back to him in his opinion and then trump in his opinion tells you everything and literally says like i am a big narcissist no no no like listen me right okay got it good and he said for some reason even though that's a total asshole move there's something about the fact that he says it that makes people go oh at least he's self-aware about it and that guard goes down whereas they may not put their finger on in his example obama being a narcissist because he doesn't tell you and so they they get more pissed about it you know and he's like you could apply this to a lot of different people it just happens to be these two there's a dichotomy there and he was like i think he was saying hillary's different hillary he had some kind of like psychological explanation for her

but he's like the perfect opposites are trump and obama and that always struck me because then now i look across society and i see trump's and obama's in in his in his viewpoint there and i'm like oh wow there's a lot that i didn't realize i just kind of accepted that this guy was like that I see Trump's and Obama's in his viewpoint there. And I'm like, oh, wow. There's a lot that I didn't realize. I just kind of accepted that this guy was like that because he's in my face. And then, oh, I didn't even realize that's why this person kind of pissed me off. And I couldn't figure out why. It's crazy when you look into it. Especially on the Obama front with his disposition, a lot of people might make assumptions.

So yet again again not saying uh left or right whatever side's wrong we're talking about we're talking about behavioral stuff here we're talking about personalities just to set the standard straight but like with him a lot of people in today's world make assumptions based off of stuff or information they might not have right and i think that's a huge mistake because the four agreements is a great book um who wrote that don miguel ruiz uh he talked about his toll tech upbringing and tradition religion and uh in that he has four agreements and one of them is don't make assumptions the other ones are be impeccable with your word don't take anything personally um and obviously there's one more i'm blanking did you just pull it up i didn't no frick i'm

pulling it but don't make assumptions was one of the biggest ones because if you stop making assumptions you then go to my point again of you're seeking understanding. You're not seeking right or wrong, or you're not seeking to justify your own biases. And that's where you can come to a point of really starting to dissect the actual truth here. And that's why I love conversation. Conversation matters. What you're doing here is important. If you were to have any politician on here, they can talk for themselves. And then that can be the truth. That can be the measure at which they can be held. Because like you said, nothing's holding you back now. There's no real cuts. Like, there's no commercials. There's none of that. It's just like, talk talk to me and like kind of be like a therapist in a way right

like you're like therapeutic nature yeah yeah i think when we are growing up the younger we are but let's use the stereotype which is high school we are so concerned with the clicks right so where do you fall what how does you think that high school at the time, you think high school is going to define. High school is the best time of your life. Right. But you, you think it's going to define what type of tribe you're in for the rest of your life when couldn't be further from the truth in the future.

But you don't know that then. And for me, I think I always probably by accident did a good job being friends with all different types of people even if that meant I had less best friends like I had a few best friends right I probably didn't have like 10 like some other groups did um but when you do that you like or I'm sorry when you don't do that in high school and when you worry about, well, which clicker you went, which is still, I don't care who you are, whether you're me or anyone else, it's still in your head. You start to limit yourself on the types of people you get exposed to. Yeah. You start to limit perspectives.

You start to define people by, to use exactly what you're talking about with assumptions of exactly what they are. Okay, that kid talks like this. He's the smart kid. He hangs out with them. Boom, that's how it is. So exposure early on is the thing that will help mitigate that. Correct. So as I got older, I noticed that if I had been doing a decent job of that, in my opinion, in high school, I got way better at it.

And I was just – the types of friends i would make were all over i would make friends with people young people old women men people who were interested in this interested in that people who physically look like this physically look like that and i i had a moment maybe a year ago where i thought about going through like you know keeping in touch with everyone when quarantine began just to check in on everyone and i had a moment where i looked back and i was like wow you can't really define like what type of person i'm friends with i mean this is this is great all these people are way different and so one of the coolest things that you you know with the assumption point is that i love when i can bring these people together

like different types of people and because maybe just because there's the trust of like oh julian introduced me to this person all those assumption walls go down and they they immediately click like i had you in a room with my buddy chris a few weeks ago right and it's not even like you've met chris in person yet. Clubhouse, yeah. Thanks to COVID. But you and Chris were going back and forth for like an hour and a half. You and Chris could not be further from different people, like in every way. And that's not a negative or a positive. It's just like you're entirely different individuals. You're not the types of people that would supposedly on the surface gravitate towards each other because

of the assumption of what that is. Oh, I'm like's like that okay you go your way i go mine yeah yeah but you don't have that guard up he didn't have that guard up hopefully you wouldn't have had that guard up if i hadn't introduced you and you just met and yet you can have that you see what i'm saying so it's like the bridge yeah i agree with you completely it's not like you're friends with him yet i'm just using that one little example but i have seen situations like that where those people become best friends it is the most beautiful thing because you get you are going whether you are from different ethnic background backgrounds economic backgrounds geographic backgrounds experience backgrounds environment backgrounds whatever you get another experience and now it's like oh wow i

never thought of that that way it's the coolest fucking thing yeah i i'm the same way i mean a lot of my friends are just not they're not caucasians to be honest well i have a good amount of friends that are caucasian but if you do like ratio based more friends are colored or different ethnicity than american or um caucasian and it's just like, it's beautiful because I get so many different perspectives on life. And the more I can like grow my unknowingness of certain things, the better off I can be. I like that word.

It's like Ray Dalio talks about, it's like you're not knowing of what you don't know. That's kind of like the non-conscious part of the mind, right? It's like the same thing in society maybe a lot of people are just in their own echoes or avenues and they don't want to expose themselves to anything else because they don't they've never done it before especially as you grow older it's harder it's like as you're older it's hard to learn spanish too it's just like as things go on it's harder to get back into that so yeah one of the best things I did

is like early on is travel more, you know, be in a city. When I went to a university, you know, in Philadelphia, it was just the greatest... Drexel. Yeah. And it was just a great thing for me.

And I don't know how we got to the topic of talking about clicks, but as before I was saying, you know, high school is the greatest time of your life. I said that jokingly because so many people say it, but not in a judgmental way. And I just want to acknowledge that because a lot of people say that and it's just because, especially if they say it in their 30s, 40s, 50s, so on,

it's just because they're not as happy with their life now because I think every day you live going forward should be the greatest time of your life and if it's not, you need a true assessment of why you're doing what you're doing that's a different pathway I was bouncing here but I wanted to bring that up

I like this, are you actually that positive? what do you mean? that's the cynic in me talking. Because I actually, I do think you are. Yeah. Because I've known you now for several months. I've seen all the- I'm so happy we get into this.

Yeah. All the content you put out, which also like with facing the lens too, where you can't really hide. I've talked with you in long conversations where we talk about life, talk about business, talk about aspirations. I've seen you have a lot of success now too again we'll get to that but there is there is the cynic that goes when the lights go off and no one else is home do they really think of it that way like dude will you really be saying not that you are but will you really be sitting there at age 40 going oh the best days are tomorrow. I

Don't know. Yeah, some people might not some people who truly set up a good destiny for themselves might But for the people of not or the people might think that the best day is not tomorrow That's their own thinking and that's okay But I'm so glad you brought up the positivity point because yes, I'm super positive. And I think it's important to spread that because the world needs more positive, but it's not to dismiss that the world shouldn't be without evil or negative. Because I saw one of your episodes in your TikTok. You said, do no evil or like something like that and the fact that a negative connotation with don't be evil or do no evil or do no harm the fact that a negative connotation is used before a negative um well you could say just a word like a double negative yeah it's not

a you're trying to go away from a shadow that you should actually learn because once you know the evil parts of you then you can be positive the reason i'm so positive because i went to the depths of my own darkness and i haven't been through a lot and like crazy mountain life compared to what a lot of people go through but i truly understand myself in the bad side so if i know the bad side to a high degree then i know i probably won't go there what do you mean that then your personal bad side is that like my like our own what's the correct word to use our own faults or shortcomings or things that might allow us to be like malice in the world so you're talking about the things that i want to make sure i understand here because you got you got complicated on me there which is fine i just

want to i want to make sure simplify because you talked about you talked about like i think you started off with seeing knowing that there is evil that exists in the world or something like that yeah so there's a good to a bad in yourself so yeah i started at that exists in the world or something like that yeah so there's a good to a bad in yourself so yeah i started at the macro with the world like you have to realize that um and i brought up to do no evil because everyone has like or not everyone there's a large degree of people who have a negative connotation to like evil acts which is good that's when judgment comes into play and you know it's morally or ethically wrong and to get to give context for people just so they know you're referring to from the episode with bill where we talked about how google's tagline for like the first 20 years

of their company was don't be evil yeah and what i was trying to say in that clip going back and forth with him on it was that when your reminder at the top of your company effectively your mission statement instead of saying like do good or like be positive even if something so simple and almost cliche like that instead of that you are using the negative of don't be evil which then reminds you every day that like oh i'm very capable of being evil and it's kind of that, I forget the psychological term, but it's like that mirror effect that like you see something for so long that eventually you become that thing. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. Exactly.

You're talking about going inside. Self-fulfilling prophecy. Yes, yes, yes. You're talking about going inside and still recognizing that. So, I'm a little confused where you're going, but I like this. Yeah, so I'll touch on the macro one more time, but I'll give an example too. So there has to be like black to white. There has to be salt to pepper. There has to be good to bad.

So that's what I was just saying in general. I brought to that example because some people might not, if they're especially not enjoying their life, they don't like to think of the good or if they're in a good place and they want to keep it that way they don't want to think about the bad but it's important to acknowledge both sides that it exists because you need one for the other but the reason and then the example i'll give before i get to interpersonal level

is sam altman came out with a article recently on his website. It's called The Moore's Law for Everything, or The Moore's Law of Everything. Can you tell people what Moore's Law is? I wish I could. Ooh. Yeah. You'll feel that.

Moore's Law is effectively the, and I hope to God I'm thinking of the right one, and I'm not mixing up Moore's and Newton's. No, I'm definitely, I think I'm right on Moore's. Moore's law is often used to refer to technology about how technological growth is exponential. I assume if it's Sam Altman. Yes, that's what it was.

Yeah, he was talking about that. But he was talking about technology, growth, inclusivity, spreading wealth because AI is going to take over a lot of tasks that we have to do manually. But basically he talked about this one part of the article where he said, it's better to create more of something or more opportunity than to create less bad. And that's something deeper to get into, but it's like, what if everyone just, what if there's a larger port,

like a larger pie in general, instead of smaller slices? I don't even know if you know what you just walked into. Do you know what you just walked into? No, but... Keep going. We'll come back to that. No, no, no, no, keep going.

Yeah, but the reason I brought up the macro is I wanted to get to the micro because everything like on the outer world is most certainly what you um is similar reflection of the inner world um so the reason i said like i'm so positive or i have positivity you know i exude that i embody that my parents taught me that you know so well. My dad's such a big heart, such a kind guy. He loves people. And my mom too, she's just such a kind person, like so sincere. Like she'll do anything for my brothers and I, seriously. But they taught me that. But when it came to my learning of it on my own, I had to, I couldn't just know positivity. I had to know the bad side of myself.

I had to know like little parts of malice that was within me or. Like what? And that's a real question. Yeah. You could say like the thing a lot of masculine men struggle with, or maybe they're not masculine, but just self-indulgence you know that that of that of masturbation like crazy like you have to know that part of yourself in that you can be addictive to certain things of that nature you know a lot of people watch porn

one of the worst things you can do to be honest in this life is watch porn. And if you don't know those depths of your darkness, just for that example we're using. Do you watch any porn? You don't. I used to, but not anymore. Not anymore. And one of the greatest things I ever did. When did you quit? I would say sometime last year.

Because quarantine humbled me. Humbled the fuck out of me it caused me to really get in check with myself and you have to know those parts of yourself because then you can realize that's not the way to go let me go to another spot let me be more positive let me let me use this side of things because i know where the intentions of that can lead it seems like some of the things when you're looking internally on this are less and we're this is more semantics they're less evil than it is negative and slippery slope effect from it right whereas when when i talk about evil not the guy who's jerking off four times a day to like sinful acts right like stuff that doesn't

help you with your health long term whereas i mean evil is evil is hurting other people yeah so i was like killing someone yeah like, like well, that's the extreme. Yeah, exactly. Knowing that like we're as Jordan Peterson says, Jordan B. Peterson, this is a better example. Put aside the sinful acts, knowing that you could be Adolf Hitler. We all have the possibility to do bad. And once you know you can, then you control. You would rather, ah, and Bruce Lee said it. He said, I would rather be a warrior in a garden than a gardener in a war. And it's exactly that. Yeah. And I want to clarify.

I know exactly what you just said. I just want to clarify i know exactly what you just said i i just want to clarify for you it's not it's not saying like we all are going to be hitler but it's saying that hitler was a child at one point he was a little two-year-old that you pass someone oh cute whatever so there are things that he chose and then also factors that led to putting him in positions to continue to make those choices that made him be the sexadistic individual he is. nature side in all of us that if we are given the wrong impedi and then also double down on making the wrong choices on top of those impedi, we go down that slope and become something that we never imagined we could. That's an amazing explanation of it. I'm glad you clarified that too because it's the... I don't want you being Hitler. I don't want anyone being Hitler. It's the Hanlon's razor is what they call it.

It's that principle of don't attribute bad actions to a bad actor. And it's better to attribute, instead of attributing malice to someone, attribute it to stupidity or ignorance. Because that's another line to get into but it's like a principle i've been thinking a lot about is make this new decision with you know we'll get into austin texas and all of that but it's it's yes it's the person's fault and they have to take responsibility if they were to do something bad aka like adolf hitler in this sense

but you have to realize the things that caused him to get into that state or realize that it's the motives behind the action instead of just the action itself it's the motives behind me like why did he do what he did and then you have to think all right what influenced him okay what was his upbringing like what is he was he beat when he was younger so on and so forth you know okay i i see exactly what you're saying and i i don't even know where your opinion is on this you're more or less just stating high level facts right now so let's let's dig into opinions so there's a fine line between empathy and responsibility and i agree with you in the sense that one of the things i'll do one everyone's got their little

rabbit holes they go down one of the rabbit holes that i'll go down once or twice a year just kind of happens is i will i don't know where it starts maybe it's like some kind of weird headline like oh it looks interesting and then suddenly i'm watching the internet yeah i will watch – of course on the internet. I will watch videos of people who committed bad crimes. I'll watch the court and I'll watch a 10-minute video of like the sentencing or something. how crazy that concept is and how some some guy sitting on a seat is going to tell you you're going to spend the rest of your life in jail but you hear about what these people did and and they're horrible they're the worst things you can do and yet there's still that fear when you see that like imagine if i were in that seat even though i wouldn't do those things but something happened to get that person to that point not something a lot of things happen to get that person to that point where they became that guy or that girl sitting in that seat and they're now never going

to be free again they're going to be living in a box and you don't look if you had a society of because we're all just a big tribe if you had a society of people where it's like oh when you did something really bad no there's redemption for you in the sense that like oh you can be free in like a year or something like that well there'd be a lot of fucking people killing a lot of fucking people out there you don't you would you would incentivize actions like that or not do enough to disincentivize them i should say not incentivize them but you also have the other side of it of like well these judges who you know whatever background they come from they could come from all different backgrounds at least where they are now they're a judge they're

successful they live in a good environment most likely and they're sitting there saying you should have done this and blank blank blank and like this is who you are i hope you die you know sometimes they'll be like i hope you die in that fucking box and they'll say fucking but you know what i mean like i've seen judges flip out about that and i'm thinking myself well did they ever think about what happened did they ever yeah and if they said that they're inserting their own personal opinion which probably isn't the best at the time sure right before someone goes in jail for the rest of their life and sometimes we cheer it too let's be honest like i'll admit i was like when larry nassar was on trial that that judge, at the time, I mean, she was great. Like, that was really fun.

She was like, she was taking this horrible, horrible man and horrible crimes and yet making it feel like this powerful moment. And she was almost like funny in her, as crazy as that sounds, in her delivery of some of it because she had attitude behind it. She's like, as a woman judge, she took it even more personally. Then I think about it from the objective point of law and order and how they're supposed to look and I'm like, well, hey, I don't, if I were in that seat, I might have been the same way, right? But if we're looking at it objectively, we probably shouldn't be like that. But you see these situations where they make these determinations on people and they don't consider it. And one of the videos in a recent, I went down that rabbit hole probably three, four weeks ago.

It happened. That was a recent one I did. But one of the videos I saw was a father got on the stand during sentencing and there was a father of the victim. And there was, it was a capital crime. And I think the death penalty was on the table. had been convicted and it was this young man he was 22 years old who had he had been a basketball star in high school but came from a broken home never had a shot you know didn't make it into you know within the college ranks and had nothing in life and he was desperate he had no money he ran with the wrong people he got involved with drugs all these things that

happened because of you know look there has to be that level of personal responsibility you can't just fucking kill people and shit but all these things happen and he ended up they wanted to rob a pizza pizza delivery guy and then something went wrong, and he killed him. And the father of the pizza delivery guy got up there, and it's sentencing again. I think death penalty on the table. Definitely going to jail for life, right? This 22-year-old, life over. He got up there and said something along the lines of, you know, what happened to my son is terrible, but you need to think about where this kid came from. This kid, you know know my son was young

and he had his life taken from him and it's tragic but this kid did not have the opportunities that my kid did or that the normal middle class kid does he was he was forced to have to make decisions at a way younger age where you're not primed to make those decisions and I don't he didn't want to kill my son it just kind of happened he's like the answer here is not to put this guy this kid in jail for a system that failed him the answer is to make sure he takes responsibility for it but give give life a chance we don't want to we took a life we don't need to take another one here and the judge was like in tears and she gave the kid like 25 years and he's got a shot at parole and he was and and he felt it

they hugged in the courtroom the father and and whatever and i'm just watching this and i'm like tearing up watching it and i'm going yeah i want to tear right now i'm serious it's like crazy you see the empathy in that and to me that was a perfect example of the fine line of understanding and also still casting the judgment of hey we can't accept this stuff you know like just because you had it really bad and just because you had a much higher chance of being that guy who would do that thing there's still a level to which you know you got to take responsibility like my kid's gone right he ain't coming back and that's because of what you did but it's not like rotten hell yeah so so what needs to happen then is the incarceration in the process people go

through needs to be a better reflective process instead of just putting people in a box because yes sitting with your own thoughts is good but a lot of the times these people in these prisons they don't know how to think through certain things. So instead of just putting them in incarceration centers, let's educate them. Let's do some like therapy. I know there's more to that. And I've yet to do like research in that.

And like, to be honest, I would love to get a gig in like a prison to learn more about the psychology of those inmates and like because if you learn the extreme of that then you can obviously deal with like you know quote unquote normal people right because you know that one side you know this side you know both but for what i know now with these incarceration centers it's not set up in the best way to teach people why they did what they did. And they're kind of, they're so morbid, you know, it's like, it's gray. It has that gray feeling to it. And yes, you're right. You're right. Responsibility is important, but

if you don't want things to happen again, invest in educational programs or something that can diminish the amount in which these things will recur after people are let out of prisons or so on and so forth. I want you to think about that from the other side though. And fuck if I know the answer,

I'm just, I'm playing devil's advocate here. Your kid, forget, pretend you're not a goddamn angel like that dad I just mentioned, which frankly, if a father got up there and said i hope you rot i totally get it i would say the same thing i would say i want you to die yeah but i would say xyz after that you know what i mean like in my heart i would want

the person right say i had a son i if he killed my son i would say you should die too in like immediately obviously that's how i would feel sure but i wouldn't want to act on that and that's like i said with knowing the malice or evil inside like knowing that if i had a gun and someone killed my son later in life i would shoot him too but knowing the evil to then know the positive of oh what if instead i hugged this kid and tried to understand where he's coming from because what if like i said someone beat him when he was younger and all he knows is beating other people it always always always goes back to the history in the background and the intergenerational

like passing on of someone's dna not that you would ever want to be in that position. Not that I would ever hope for you to be in that position. But I do... I actually feel like if I were taking a straw bet on who would be the closest to that dad, you'd be a guy that would be at the top of my odds making lists there. Because you do have that... You're very calm.

And it's more than that. By making lists, what do you mean by if i were making a list of people who would be most likely to be like that dad was in that courtroom you'd be at the top of that odds making list appreciate that and you know who knows like we god forbid we never want to be in that type of scenario where we have to do that but i'm saying that the people who wouldn't be able to do that I empathize with them too yeah yeah 100 and it's like yeah it's it's like you have to remember when we talk about like education stuff and I had Terrence Jones in here on number 10 one of the first podcast I did see that oh yeah

he's amazing and he works he's a trial attorney he yeah he is he started he started law school late because he was involved in a lot of stuff so So he's like almost done law school now, but he's been in, I mean, he's been involved in a million organizations. And one of the, like his systems and so he's a huge advocate for figuring out how we can form better systems that actually seek to correct right they're called correctional facilities there's no correcting going on you know the closest thing is butt fucking i mean that's that's that's really that's that that's that's what this shit is i don't mean to be like totally crude about it but they don't give a fuck about the people in there and the other side of it is if you were that father and let's say you didn't you couldn't about the people in there and the other side of it is if you were that father and let's say you didn't you couldn't have the empathy in the moment what do you want them

reading fucking read the rainbow in in in the in in the prison you know with with the people that killed your kid that's a it's a hard concept to fathom it's a hard concept to fathom man yeah yeah i and not to be remiss that I don't acknowledge the other side, but I love the thing you pose with empathy and responsibility. Because it's a tough line, but there can be more. Instead of just empathy, there should be more respect for someone's model of life and their framing and perspective. You don't always have to have sympathy

or empathy or be sincere to people, but you can respect that that's the way they think because of a certain reason from their past. And that's what I said in 2020 was a big breakthrough for me, where instead of trying to project a right or wrong onto people that I wanted to fix or change or help and with me, vice versa, for other people to me, it was more so how do I seek understanding? And instead of trying to empathize, let me respect. And then from there, we can assert some responsibility or initiate some type of change that needs to occur in like a pragmatic sense wow well it takes a very introspective person to be and this isn't a word but to be extrospective of other people which just to bounce them off each other and

that's that's really like everyone talks about empathy and and i think people sometimes don't really think about what that means but to me that's how it's just being thrown around but yeah people are throwing around it they're throwing around these words empathy and such because they want it to be more commonplace in culture but then there's no like stickiness to it it's like it's like authenticity yeah like you said throw it around it's like how do you do that yeah and and not enough people get in touch with like you do about what's everything that's right and wrong with me naturally like as a human yeah like why yeah so then how if you can't do that if you can't look inside your own temple how are you going to look at someone else's and cast a stone we have a lot of people in society living in glass

houses and one of the topics that i'm obsessed with is the discourse in society. Because look, so many people turn everything to politics right away. I can't believe I ever liked that world. But there was a time where I did. And I come one of the things I like about this forum is I've had people from across the political spectrum. I've had people who are kind of like, I don't really care, which it and I won't speak for you. I want you to speak for yourself. But it has seemed to me that you're very like not really in that world as much, and you can correct me on that in a bit. But no one has the ability to talk to each other anymore. And with my own political journey where I figure out how I fell into where I did. I have been on both sides of those spectrums.

I talk about it like I was an Obama guy and then a Trump guy in back-to-back elections. How does that happen? How do you do that? And then I was a nobody guy in the last election, you know, and I feel I get very angry about the politics that it's, I'm cynical about it because I just see all the flaws because there's just, it all starts with the people around them. And then the politicians who are like the megaphones for the people that are fighting and they're all doing it in the open online for the first time in human history. They're trying to get their pull. Exactly. Everyone, you want to talk about never having the ability to even have a conversation? It is bad. And it's not like everyone talks about, especially with the is not a one-side problem in discourse. The rights discourse has become, in my opinion, largely very much the same as the left's.

I think the left's still has more volume to it, and I think that has a lot to do with there tends to be a larger amount of younger people with more energy on the left, more technical savvy, whereas there's less of that on the right. They're more middle-aged, like just very stereotypically not it's it's the the exception not necessarily the full rule here but or you know what i mean yeah but you know there's besides that the vitriol and the inability to even entertain that you know maybe there is something that they're thinking about that that could be right is disgusting to me and so even outside of politics it's all downstream to culture like we said earlier with other stuff so even the simple opinions could be over like who your favorite movie character is people are brutal man yeah yeah i to to assert where I'm at and then interject on that. Yeah. I'm, I'm the same way. Obama, Trump, nowhere. I'm everywhere. Like I'm kind of in the middle and I've tried different sides and different, tried to understand both, but yes, there's so much fog because there's an inability to communicate because there's so many biases and so many people out for their own good, a lot of lobbying,

so on and so forth. And I can't touch on this too much because I would have to understand politics more and have that be my realm. My realm is more so what I can touch on is media and communication and so on and so forth. So what I was going to get to is if, if like the fact that Joe Rogan is doing so well with what he's doing, he can have presidents on his podcast and they can talk long form. And that would help if he had every single politician come on his podcast, it would be more helpful because then people can understand where someone's coming from through a long formform discussion with no edits.

Yes, then people go on Twitter or social media and still say stuff. But we need people like Tony Robbins or Jordan B. Peterson or stuff of that nature to get into the realm of politics. Because they've done it with business. What incentive do they have to do that? I know. I think I heard, like I talked to you pre-recording, I've been taking notes on Tony Robbins since I first started getting into personal development.

But I remember him saying he wanted his 20s or 30s to be focused on people, then whatever, 40s, businesses, and then he wanted his 50s, 60s, 70s to get into politics. And they don't have any incentive, to be honest. How old is he now? I don't know. He's gotta be 50, 55, right?

Yeah, probably 50s or 60s. And he looks great, but he's not young. Sorry, Tony. Oh, we gotta watch the skydiving video. I can't because it's on his official channel. Oh, true, true true true yeah i was checking that yeah but if someone like them can go in and help 61

yeah if someone like him or jordan can go in and help people on a deeper psychological level that'll be helpful helpful. Because Jordan, like, he did that with, like, the amendment they were trying to pass with, like, a certain speech in Canada. And I don't know the complete bill, but I watched his court case and what he was trying to say. When he went before the parliament or whatever in Canada. But, like, people like that that have such a deep understanding of psychology can really help because this thing is rooted in so much more than just policies.

And I would love to talk about education and I would love to talk about literally everything with you. But for education to change, because that's going to have a huge storm and that's going to have a flood. Sorry, can you turn the mic over? That's going to have a huge storm and that's gonna just turn them sorry can you turn them like that's gonna have a huge storm and huge flood but like politics needs that too with the coming transformation of tech with ai there needs to be policies in place that help um distribute the wealth that'll come and like the effects that come with that ripple but these politicians need to have their mental in check and need to do more you can say say introspection, to be honest, before they assert such things on the world.

Are they incentivized to do that? No, in terms of Tony and them or politicians? No, politicians. No, not at all. They can do what they want. So that's the hard thing. It's like, how do you get through to them that if they work on themselves, it'll help the world? They're incentivized to, and I'll just use-

Get the most money, do what they want, get their side. Sure, but how do they get to the most money? But by getting their side that, by the way, isn't their side, they have to stick to a groupthink ideology. Do you really think that in the modern day world with all the fucking shit around us that there are two schools of thought and you must share every single thing in those two schools of thought with whatever side you're on absolutely fucking not and i'll and i'll use this one and i'm not going to say whether it's right or wrong or whatever but let's look at what they just did to what's her face dick cheney's kid liz cheney because she was one of the she was one of the, she was one of the Republicans who

voted in the House for impeachment, they're trying to destroy her. Now, to be clear, I'm really not a fan of her dad, but I don't want to define her by her dad, right? I don't know who the fuck she is. But, you know, for whatever reason, she voted for impeachment, right? So maybe she thought, like, in her opinion, based on her vote, I made the determination that the president did enough for impeachment, so I'm going to vote for that. And instead of saying, you know what, she shares a different opinion than us, we don't have to like it, and we can call her out for it in public. Instead of doing that, the right side is essentially trying to cancel donor, big major grassroots donor campaigns to get her out of office. And they, as far as I can tell, aren't even giving her the opportunity to speak. So we see that all the time on these two political parties. That's just a recent one. But that's the point.

That woman, Liz Cheney, is incentivized to win her next election. We have created this House and Senate where guys can be in office for 50 fucking years their career they never even have a job in some cases their career politicians and so then if they're always thinking about well how do i win the next election they're always thinking about well what is the most what have you done for me lately thing that i could possibly do wrong right now let me do the opposite of that regardless of whether the opposite is what's right or what's wrong. Yeah, so just a better system and a way to incentivize people correctly so that it leads to good. But then again, when they created the U.S. Constitution, people, they tried to make it out for their own good early on.

And then they had to like make amendments to it and adjust it so that it could fit with like the contextual happenings at that time. What do you mean? I read a very short introduction to the U.S. Constitution, which is a really good series. It's like a very short introduction blank. But I know when they established the U.S. Constitution, or not the U.S. Constitution, which is a really good series. It's like a very short introduction blank. But I know when they established the U.S. Constitution, or not the U.S. Constitution, it's like the Declaration of Independence, I believe it was. There were certain like, or the Bill of Rights,

there were certain things in there that people took abuse of and then they had to correct it and make it right. Yeah, like the amendments. The amendments, yeah. So like there was a ton of amendments that happen, but then again, even if, like you said, there's certain incentives that are changed within the Senate or political sphere now,

people will still then again try to make it out for their own good. So if that's the case, it's a deeper-rooted problem. It's more of people's own psychology and how they go about thinking about doing things so yeah you can create a good system but if like your second nature is for your own good all the time then what that what's the different system going to do how is that going to help it's not it's more so rooted in people's internal that's why i keep bringing that up and i'm not someone

to talk on the u.s constitution or like government related things that's not my sphere well but i would argue with that because i think what you just said people should listen to three times that's but that's what i can say i can say though that it needs to come down to a more stop making so complicated and so like surface level like just the individuals just need to do some deep work everyone needs some mass therapy everyone needs an understanding of their spiritual side of their mental right and i'm not saying any of this and you agree to like judge anyone it's just like this is the damn truth this is what's happening right now so you've tried so many different things before it all has not worked why not go a different route and have

and have like a math therapy session with people in which conversation can lead to that and deeper discussion and so like even more things but people like existing systems we fear change yeah more than anything you said something a little bit ago i mean it's probably a half hour ago at this point i like conversations like this because a guy like you, you could find anything surface level and think all the way down to the core of it. And so it gets really complicated and sometimes we go on tangents with things, but they're all great because we're addressing all kinds of things that whether people realize it or not, we're all thinking about, right? But you had talked about in some kind of context, and that just reminded me of it, what you were just referring to with, you know, figuring out how we're going to change up so that we prioritize those things and prioritize the individual and having health among each other and then having it be injected into how our politicians act and therefore govern. Yeah, it started small and that got to that. Exactly. 100%. And it's not okay, it's not bad to enter into the categories of that when conversing like i'm glad you mean i'm glad we started out like the micro level oh yeah and then

we got to that like and then when we talk about it people are like oh let's hedge away from that talking about politics the fact that you're trying to hedge away from talking about that is bad that's something they see back because you got to be open to talking about everything it yeah 100 and it affects all of us so it's not politics of like well what's a democrat or republican it's like well what the fuck are we doing here you know and you talked about it what i was getting at was you talked about the fear of loss being so much i don't know if you even said the second part but it was completely inferred being so much bigger than the possibility of gain yeah Yeah, yeah.

And so when you think about anything, like it's easy to think about innovation with this. Imagine if we lived in a world, and in some ways we do a little bit right now, but imagine if we lived in a world where the innovators were always just thinking about loss instead of possible gain. We'd innovate nothing.

And so I remember Brady Burkett, number 33 on this podcast, brought this up. And I had never thought about this before. I think he saw it like Naval Ravikant was the one talking about it. But Naval talks about how a lot of our progress in the last 20 years, most of it, is software and ether-based. We don't do a lot in the physical world. So like we landed on the moon in 1968. Why weren't we on Mars in 2005 or 2010? Because our fear of risk taking and our over emphasis on what could possibly go wrong is taking away from our ability to imagine what could possibly go right and take the chances including some things where you know people die or like bad

shit happens on the way to getting somewhere if we had had this mentality in the 1400s or 1300s no one would have discovered america you think they wanted to go on a fucking wood boat across some sea that they probably thought was you know a million miles long and probably die out there? No. But they did it because they're like, well, shit, maybe we'll find something. So I think about it a lot from the sense that it's injected into everything. And I look at it with COVID too, man. We don't look at it like – well, actually, we don't think about like what we're losing by all the

craziness and what we continue to just normalize but we don't think about what we can possibly do out there instead we are constantly saying what if you die right so we don't say to the kids going to high school who have like a point i'm not going to say the number because i'll get in trouble but a very low chance of ever fucking dying from COVID. We don't say that. We just say, what if you're the one? What if you're the one? And I've talked about this before,

but it's like the Joker theory in The Dark Knight, the scene where everything's tying together from what you brought up today. But you talk about people whose environment shapes them to do stuff. It's just interesting that I'm bringing this up and it's marrying it but the scene where he's in the hospital with Harvey Dent who's had half his face blown off yeah laying in the hospital bed yeah and his

girlfriend died and he turns him he turns him evil right this this savior of Gotham the Joker turns him because he's finally enough has happened in that guy's life that it's possible to do it right he didn't start a bad guy he started the best guy but now he he's bad he got so angry at things that fuck things that happened to him enough that the worst person in the world the joker could turn him so that was on a separate point but the reason i bring it up is because the joker says everything's got a plan to it and when that's the case people accept right so he said if i say that i'm gonna blow up a food store or i'm gonna blow up i think he says like a one caravan of soldiers

or whatever people look at it on the news and they go okay that's not me in all likelihood unless you're a soldier or somebody going to that grocery store it's not you so you go about your day because it's all part of the plan but he goes but if if i said one little innocent mayor it's going to die you know like people they lose their fucking minds right and that's that's it we all think it's gonna be us or like what if what if what if it's us and it affects every single thing we do and if people aren't asking the question of what that's going to mean for the future of humanity and what, you know, we as a people continue to progress and the things we got to figure out, if we got to figure out how to get to the next planet, as an example, because this one's heating up too much. Well, there's a

lot of risks we got to take there. So, what does it say about us that, you know, with a virus that we now at least understand it's not good i mean let's be honest like it's not good but it's not killing 10 of the population what does it say about us that we are still you know social distance stay inside don't fucking see people don't do anything do all these things that are unnatural that take us away from being able to do anything in the physical world, period. These are wide macro trends that you've introduced all these different themes that meet each other at the same time here. I love when themes meet.

Dude, no one's talking about this. I'm all about themes and meta themes and how things can be tied together like that. I'm big on that. I literally think of themes because I wish I can, or not wish, I can and hope I can create the space for myself in the next life to just like learn through my first 30 years of life and just do straight education. But I had a different path with creating my own and all this stuff.

So I have to like learn as I go and through action but like that's why i like themes and meta themes like i love principles i love um how things intersect with each other because like that's how i learn it's like one thing in business relates to business our relationships it's like uh the thing i tweeted today you retweeted um what was it in talking about i retweet a bunch of things yeah tweet it was so i'm not sure i'm on the i'm in the clouds now with my phone with the airplane so i can't pull it up but it was like if you are something about authenticity i have it right here the greatest thing you can the greatest thing you can do in a relationship, in business, etc., is just listen. There's a beauty in truly hearing where someone is.

There's a beauty in listening to listen instead of listening to think about what should be said. Yeah, yeah. That was another theme, just to bring up an example. When I think about business and when you're making content for social media or just like the internet, the best thing you can do is get feedback and listen to what your followers want. So then you can create more micro contextual content and then better like long form content, which then breaks down into more content later on. But then like that, in listening in business, or even like listening to your clients or customers of what they want, how to improve your service or your product, the same thing applies to relationships. Like, if I'm going through an extremely tough situation, the best thing someone can do is listen. And I think the fact that something with business is the same as

something with relationships is so intriguing. Because if you can learn those like themes and meta themes, it'll improve every facet of your life. And it'll actually like help expedite some learning because you realize that one thing in this arena of life can be applied to another in this arena of life. It even applies to like flow states you were talking about earlier. You tied it back to skydiving, right? Like an right like an experience you talked about the concept of falling right what's the difference between flow states skydiving and love um nothing exactly only the place it happens i guess you would say exactly but the the the concepts are the same so you talk about meta themes that's it's everywhere that's that's a big one i are like in you know i had a

two-hour drive here i was thinking about you know things i would love to talk about with you and it was like literally everything and the fact that we can just talk about anything is so beautiful. But I've been thinking a lot about, you know, exactly that, like relationships, storytelling, love. And my friend asked me just the other week, he said, what do you cherish most in life? And it's no simple answer. It's deep and one that caused you to think. And I thought about it for a while. I was like, what do I cherish most in life? And it was simply the conversations I have over a fire late at night or over a meal or across the table with Julian Dury on Trendifier, like conversations are the things I cherish most. And it's like, that theme applies with what I do in business too, or what I'll do in like storytelling. It's like getting to know the person, really seeing where they're coming from. It's just like, whether you call it a theme or whether you call it like a trait I like in life

or like a thing about life that I love. It's that, and I know it comes out of the blue, but it's just like so important to me. Cause if you had everything stripped away from you, then you realize the most important things in life. It's like, once you learn how to die, you know how to live. It's the Tuesdays with Maury book by Mitch album that I love so much. And what, uh, the quote i just said is what is talked about uh in the book by mori he said once you know how to die you know how to live do you think you know

how to die the fact that i hesitated means i don't yeah but i still have some work to do i was how do you know how to die? You experience things so drastic in life that they cause you to know what death may feel like or losing everything may feel like. So it simplifies down to what matters most in this life. It's like someone who like were to be in a car accident and be seeing like that that light before them but then come back to earth and come to reality it's like once you know how to die like that like literally physically

then you'll know how to live but i don't know when it comes to yeah not a lot and every day it's extremely hard not a lot of people get to say like yeah i had that happen or like i saw the light for a minute yeah i was legally dead so for the people that aren't you know because like in the mori for context in the book tuesdays with mori mori had a he had a life sentence right so he he had a progressive disease i think it was als or something so he he he was facing death it was it was there was there was an end date in sight right so he was in the process of dying so he he got to learn how to do it right so there's that perspective but for you and me just going about life young guys i don't i don't i don't i'm not afraid of death at all it's it kind of, I don't think about it a hell of a lot,

but when I do, I don't get stressed about it. It's just like kind of a thing that happens. But if I sat here and tried to tell you that I knew how to die, it would be just a total lie. I'll phrase it better, and I think this would resonate a lot just in general, is you practice dying every single day in a way. Because if you're trying to lift your utmost or experience like a lot just in general is you practice dying every single day in a way because if you're trying to lift your utmost or experience like a lot of discomfort or like push yourself to your

mental and physical bounds you experience pain which then causes you to be present because i think when you die you're extremely present and or when you're close to death you're extremely present right because it causes everything to narrow down great appreciation yeah great appreciation so um i've been i've just been thinking a lot about that and i have this piece of paper right above my bed so i sleep on this like futon and you sleep on a futon yeah i sleep on a futon savage savage um it sleep on a futon. Savage. Savage. My back, I used to have enjoyed it once I was in college. But I sleep with my, obviously, back down. And above on my, right above me on my ceiling is Tim Urban's sheet that breaks down life in a week-by-week basis.

I thought you were going to say you had a fat-headed Tim Irvin. I was real concerned. No, no. So Tim Irvin's the creator of Wait But Why. And he has this one graphic he put up in his, I think the Tailend article or some article, and it talks about death in terms of dots on a piece of paper, in terms of days, weeks, months. And I have one that's broken down into weeks for a 90-year life.

And the fact that I wake up every day and see that, it's like, all right, you got to get after it. You got to get after it. Because every second that passes, how many times am I going to be able to sit down with you and talk like this? It'll happen once. Maybe that'd be amazing if it happened more than once. It'll happen more than once. Yeah, happen more than once.

But it's not happening every day. It's not happening much. So like when you're here, let's try to, no, let's not try to be, let's be as present as possible. And it's that thing of when you know that your life is limited and you know your days are short, then it'll cause you to live life to the utmost. So that's my way of picturing it. Maybe I don't, I strive to experience it every day, but I think just like the way of thinking about it

and seeing it on my wall right when I wake up, I mean, that'll never get old, knowing that I'm going to die. You can't forget that yeah you're talking about time you're talking about time and time is one of the certainties in life and people have all different things to say about it i had grant wiley on here a couple weeks ago, who's just an amazing, amazing human. And he talked about, he was looking at it like, time does not exist, right? And we actually didn't dig into that. So next time he's here, I really want to go at that. But it's a great topic. You know, everyone looks at it differently. And then I shouldn't say everyone because a lot of people don't consider it. And I remember I had one of my clients in my previous job when my last career, RIP,

one of my clients was partnered up with someone else, Chaz, actually, to do some potential content work. And one of the things, and I think it was something that never went public but they were bringing in some of the prominent people that you know jazz managed or worked with to get some thoughts on like approach and regular high-level life shit and so tony saragusa was one of them and tony saragusa is like what you you see on TV, that's him. He is just like, you immediately love him when you meet him. Just, you want to talk about authentic? Oh my God. Just an absolute angel of a guy.

Hilarious, out of his mind, like in a great way, like over the top. But just somebody who wants to bring everyone together and have a great time and You don't think of Tony Saragusa in What we see in public and therefore also what I just told you it's like in private You don't think of a guy like that as someone who's like gonna think of the deep shit or whatever But people who are like that we take for granted because they do they have such a perspective on life Because that allows them to be like that. And one of the things he said on one of the sit-downs he did was he collects hourglasses. He collects hourglasses, which I've never heard of. If you would have taken a straw poll on things that I think Tony Saragusa does, Collecting hourglasses would have been nowhere in sight.

But he collects hourglasses, and he explained it like the hourglass shows the passing of time. And so when I look at these things, they all have a different amount of sand, or number of grains of sand, however you say it. They all have a different size. They all have a different time that it takes for the one full side to get to the other full side. But I look at it and it reminds me of the fact that it's fleeting and that this does not

last forever. And that whatever I do here, whether it be with the people I'm close to, the things I do in life, the things I do to go after to make money and have success, the things I do to make other people's lives better, I better get them in. And if I'm thinking about doing them, I better go after it and do it now because that finite time, whatever it is, whether I live 80 years, 90 years, 100 years, at some point, it ends. And at some point, you also begin to lose things, right? Because you get older, you age. What was that point you made when you were like, I would rather do this than cry in my Ferrari and I thought that was that was like your most oh you're bringing that well yeah and and it's actually you know what it's

interesting you bring that up because it's it's pretty related to this point I'm making but my point there was you're referring to when I was talking about my last career and when I had a decision to take a lot of money to continue to do it and in a lot of ways sell myself out to be able to buy things and get to where I had been working blindly to get towards or you know go off and and go after do the harder thing and go after the things that I'm passionate about and that I feel like I'm good at and that would mean living without a lot of money for a long time most likely and you know that's that's what i chose and i talked about it like i looked at my boss who i was extremely close with m extremely close with to this day who

wasn't saying no because of him i'll put it that way um but saying no to him was so hard yeah because i love him and yet what my line to him when i was going over how i came to the decision of like i can't keep doing this was i said larry if i this is why it's good you i love that you brought that up because it ties right into the time point that the goose was making i said larry if two years from now i'm still here i'm gonna be crying in a tesla i don't have a tesla right now but i'm gonna have a fucking tesla then probably i probably wouldn't i don't like buying a lot of shit but let's use the example right in two years i'm gonna be crying in my my Tesla two years more down with the same problems, problems that money couldn't solve, and I will be blaming everyone else but me for something that was

entirely my fault because I am sitting here right now with the opportunity to say no and go after the things I'm supposed to go after. And if I say yes, then I'm a bitch and I don't deserve to go after those things because i'm clearly giving in to what's not right or to to what i know isn't right for me just to be able to do what i think i want that's going to make me happier in life like it's going to solve problems and it's not so you know to relate it to the goose point he was saying like go after whatever those things are if you're thinking of doing that thing do it and it doesn't mean like be impulsive and just fucking jump from thing to thing but like find your lanes finds that find the things that not just make you happy but make the

people around you happy or give you a chance to meet more people that you can make happy and and enjoy and vibe off of and do them because the longer you sit there and say, yeah, you know, eventually, tomorrow, next week, never happens when people do that. It never happens. It's the stay tuned culture. No one ever tunes in. I love that. That's powerful. And your level of self-awareness to distinguish that you needed to leave that in order to move on to go on the path that was calling you is tremendous and oftentimes i'm you know i'm going to transition to but in a way i'm going to still be i'm 100 still on path with what i want to do it's just dream big and co is taking a hold because i'm going to go to austin texas to work on a food tech startup with truck bucks but i bring that up and we'll get into that in a second after we dive into some deep topics.

Let's get right into it. We'll get into a second, but letting go is often the greatest form of progress. You had to hit me with the deep thing, Anthony. All right, go ahead. Go ahead. But I've been thinking about this thing of like roses lately. And I'm going to bring this up and I'm going to get into the major, major pivot that's happening because I call it a pivot.

It's not a transition. It's a pivot because I'm on a pivot leg. I can go back and forth, so on and so forth. But I've been thinking about roses because if you were to see a rose for the first time, it's probably so beautiful, right? It's so awesome. It's so great. But it's kind of like the law of diminishing returns where the more you see it, the more it passes by, the more you walk by it, like a rose bush near your house, the more you get used to it.

So you become, as we were talking about life and death before, you take for granted the beauty of that rose. So it's not that the rose loses its beauty, it's the perception of the beauty you're seeing in the rose that is being lost itself. So it's your perspective, it's your framing of it. So I've been thinking about that a lot, and I just bring that up because we were talking about presence, we were talking about vulnerability, we were talking about life and death. And I want to make sure at all times I'm not being ungrateful for the gifts I have right now and everything I am striving to build for myself and the fact that i'm 22 years old and i can take immense risk risk to do what i want you're 22 years old yeah

oh you didn't know that till now get the yeah i'm 22. you're 22 years old yeah wait let me check yeah i'm 22. you're 22 years old yeah wait let me check yeah i'm 22. continue uh i bring that up because i'm so young i can take as much risk as possible in that to be honest that that like risk really narrows me in to be present, to appreciate what I'm doing. And with Dream Big & Co., I appreciated every second I was able to build that. And I really want to get into my background and this and that and what I'm doing. But I'm going to take a pivot to join a food tech startup, Truck Bucks, in Austin, Texas. They relocated just like six months to eight months ago.

Their founder, Nick Nanikos is down there. But Naval Ravikant says, there's three things that you should really, really, really make calculated decisions or like deep thought on. And it's where you live, what you do and who you're with. And I've just been thinking about that so much. Like, one of the things I value most in life is family. And I've been living home post-dropping out of college for about a year and a half now. And the fact that I have to let go of family for this time being and not be present with them living in New Jersey is something that was hard for me. I cried multiple times, but going to Austin, Texas will allow me to see more places, grow my understanding of what residencies I want to be in with maybe California, Austin, check out a place in Seattle, Florida, whatever. See what's best for me. Because once I know the place I enjoy, I'll be in an environment where I can thrive even more. And then I can continue

doing what I love. I'm going to be doing head of content for them, continue doing content, and I'll be around people I enjoy. The biggest thing for me joining them was actually the team, the culture, Nick as a leader. It's just like a, as a mini-documentary we just put together, which is hopefully coming out soon, where people can see it live come publishing of this conversation. All done by you? On, done by me, by Dream Big & Co. And in that, Nick talks about how they have a mastermind group. And it's basically that. Like their team, their culture is a mastermind group. And I've been striving to find my tribe in which I can grow. And this is calling me because I need to elevate myself

to learn from people either better than me or along the same lines as me, literally in the same location, but also striving in the same mission as I am. Because with Dream Big & Co, it's hard to do a lot of things on my own. And I learned a lot by doing. I learned about accounting.

I learned about sales. I had to really mold myself into being a salesman. Never did it before in my life. But all of this taking action, I created like my own degree and my own education because I'm a more hands-on guy. So with this, I'm joining a lot in large part because the team is just so amazing to learn from

and be a part of and strive for something that we really want to make ubiquitous everywhere. And that being food trucks having this platform and users having this access to food trucks, getting food delivered to them. But then also there's some coming moves that'll be announced soon that'll get into a bigger food space but i'm just trying to get more experience just when i thought i was out you pulled me back in i thought we were gonna get right

to that right now now i'm gonna pivot back away from truck bucks and actually talking about it because you just unlocked way too much right there first of all i can't fucking believe you're 22 years old jesus christ um okay great what did you how old did you think i was 25 26 i did and the baby face didn't take it away no no i i just figured you were born with that probably minimal beard probably are but hey shit man i could still i got pubes on the side of my face here. I can't grow one, so I heard that. But that trade-off that you're getting at with your family versus your environment, to be clear, your family's not dead and you're not abandoning them, right? So I want to give this stipulation. I like how you look at it like, oh, does this mean I'm not going to have presence with them? To an extent, yes, it does.

That's reality. Yeah, it's like we were talking about before, you have limited time. Yes. So, how many times am I going to be able to see my parents? I can like calculate that and be like x amount of times, but if I'm leaving, it's going to be less, right? So, it's like I cherish that because you got to think about values and environment. It's like family you know god family friends is my main values relationships and the fact that my new environment will cause me to just slightly not be in the same physical location as a main value i have is hard so i have to assess like the sacrifice in a way with that with my values

because life is a constant matching of values and environment but it's not and to be clear it's not an end it's not an end no not at all but it's something i very much enjoy being really close to my family but i always have them on a call and it's also not a trade-off though it's not like you're like i am no it's not a trade-off it's not a trade-off it's like well right now right yeah you're still a priority that's never going to change in my family i love you i care about you but i also have to have to make room and prioritize this personal growth yeah exactly and i have a limited window to be able to be at this point in my life where i can go after this stuff and dude you bringing that up with with the rose gave me chills and and maybe other people

would give less chills maybe i'm biased but i mean you're sitting in a studio with with pock right there next to you to your right right so man talked about it before favorite of all time right looking right at you oh tupac shakur was just easily the most underappreciated artist of all time and he was the biggest rapper in the world but people just don't they don't get it with him they really they miss the boat and there's i could go off and you and i could talk about tupac for a long time from like a creative standpoint we love that and i don't want to do that i want to stay on the point you made you talk about that rose and how if you see it a bunch of times over you take it for granted which by the by the way, people do with money all the time. Like suddenly they get a lot of money and

then, you know, they might've lived in a hut growing up, but now they're worth hundreds of millions of dollars. Yeah, they become entitled. Right. They forget about like where they came from on that. Even if it's still inherently in the back of their mind, because they know what it's like to have nothing, they don't remember how they looked at the world and the things they appreciate it so they take stuff for granted but his most famous non-rap song was a poem and it was called the rose that grew from concrete are you familiar with that no but i'm it's brilliant please send me that oh of course there was you know what there was also a commercial that got done in 2013 or 14 with Powerade that is maybe my favorite commercial of all time. It was during the NCAA tournament. It premiered and it was, you would love it because

it's, it was a true like short one minute movie. And it showed a kid growing up, you know, on the, on the drearier streets of Chicago to paint that picture of like, not from much, just playing basketball, bike into the court to, you know, dream about what he could be. And he's just biking. Well, he's really biking through the city.

And then he comes up to the stadium and you see the statue of Jordan and everything. And then it comes up in on the stadium. And then when he walks in and the, the, all the stadium lights are out, but the court is just dimly lit. It's Derrick Rose. Cause Derrick Rose is just dimly lit it's Derrick Rose

I think I remember that Derrick Rose grew up in Chicago but the background is this very emotional music and the audio of Tupac reciting the rose that grew from concrete and his point

if I even mess up one word of that I'll never forgive myself so i'm not going to recite it but his concept was if there was a rose that grew from concrete even if it had damaged petals or it was a little bit discolored or it wasn't perfect you would see that and be like what the fuck wait a second that's unbelievable yeah a rose just grew in the middle of concrete you wouldn't question the damaged petals you wouldn't question what it looks like whereas if you just saw that rose among all the roses in a rose garden you'd say i'll pluck that fucker out right because it's not it's not like the other ones everything that we see and the

potential we see in things is all in the context of which we see them. That's why when I, in my previous career, and I did not see much of this, sadly, but I worked with, I had access to the richest people in the country, right? The top one of the one of the one of the one of the one of the one of the one percent. And so many people, and a lot of them I liked still, they invented problems with money. And yet i would then run into people who were really rich who we worked with who would just take joy in in the cup of coffee they got yes like oh my god that's a fucking cup of coffee and i'm like oh my god you're worth 700 million dollars who gives a fuck about the coffee they're so right man they're so yeah the the people who

are that wealthy because i say well it not rich, because wealth is a mindset. They're wealthy because they have that mindset. And some people are so poor that all they care about is money. And that's a thing my friend Adam brought up in conversation just this past week. And I thought that was phenomenal. Like money is a tool. It's a way in which you can get more resources or increase your bandwidth to do things. And you know this, you're in finance, you're working with these great people, but like

the ones who are the most happy are the ones who have the mindset with it. If they, if those certain people had the correct mindset in which they were truly present in life, even with all that wealth, they can lose it all and probably gain it back again because their mindset is just so intact and to be honest Elon exactly and that's what Tom Bilyeu with Impact Theory he created Quest Nutrition too

he talks about that with like I would rather be a championship level player than strive for the championship itself say that again I would rather be a championship level player for the championship itself. Say that again? I would rather be a championship level player, aka skill set mindset,

than strive for the championship itself. What's the context there? What is he getting at that supports your point? So he's getting at what supports my point with if someone were to be dropped on an island of the people that you work with that were extremely wealthy but still present and they were so good at it that they had the skill set and mindset to rebuild that wealth if they were to lose it and be dropped in the island once again the reason i bring up tom billiou with what he said is those individuals

that you work with they're championship level players. So they can play at that high level. They're not striving for the championship itself just to be rich. Rather, they have the tool set to be able to replicate anything because it's what they have. You know, money's can, it's like energy. It's just, it flows, it's gone. But like what you possess in terms of your mindset and skill set will never leave you.

Unless, obviously, like, Alzheimer's and stuff. But that's, like, down, down, down the line. Probably will never happen to most. I feel like Elon Musk comes up a lot. Elon Musk, he has that. On this podcast. But you've brought him up, too. You and I have talked about him before.

And he's a perfect example for a lot of things and i i think about you know to use your example specifically elon musk did not sit in his dorm room at penn and ask how he could make the most money he asked what are the five things i can do with my life to best foster the future of humanity right because we were all fucking asking ourselves that yeah but that's that's how he did it and that's how he became rich and also by the way worth saying and i'm not saying elon musk isn't filthy rich he is he is but elon musk sold all his houses because apparently as he said it's not cool for billionaires to own houses so i get rid of him he also has pretty much all his wealth tied up in tesla stock so it's it's not it's it's tied there is restricted stock and stuff that is technically not paper money and

from what i know as of a couple years ago he lives off of three lines of credit from three separate banks i think it's morgan stanley ubs and bank of america i want to say but it's three banks for a total of 500 million dollars as a line of credit it is not his cash because his wealth is tied up in that shit and i will even add to that and this is going to sound crazy to people, but remember, this guy runs like five different companies. He is all over the world all the time. He requires people around him just to basically like do one thing, and I'm not even talking security and all that, and also invest in all his businesses. $500 million is nothing for what he's doing. That is like $2 to you and me.

But let's pretend that he's just really, really rich, which he technically is. Let's just be honest. Let's call it what it is. He did not get that way and he does not view it as getting that way. Money is just a way of keeping score to like, I must be on to something here. Right? Once you get to a certain point, I guess you have enough, you know, those priorities have to be in what you're doing. So now when I understand that quote of being a championship level player over striving for the championship, it is you are taking on the mentality, you are getting in that mindset whether exactly the mamba mindset that

that kobe perfected or you know other minds goggins goggins beautiful example russell wilson who has like the positivity lock-in mindset right like that guy you could kick him in the nuts and be like hey what's up man how are you it almost pisses you off right but it's it's incredible and it's it's how he stays in his zone and invests in himself spiritually. And then it attracts to everything he does, physically, everything. So, you know, I just love that so much because that's how the magic happens. And with Elon, have you ever seen that 60 minutes where he's asked a lot? Yeah, he starts crying.

Yeah. Do you remember why he started crying in that yeah because his peers were looking down upon him and then he was talking about how much he struggled to get to where or not struggled how much he sacrificed to get to where he got to and then he just started crying because it's so much he cried over yeah you're right he cried over two things so the sacrifice and we can all we can go back to that yeah the thing that he was the first thing he was crying over was not his peers oh that might have been level up no no no you're dead on i know exactly what you're referring to it's even quote unquote worse than that it was his heroes i forget exactly who it was but like some maybe

with neil armstrong like some famous astronauts and shit were saying at the time like i think spacex is stupid or whatever and the guy i forget the which 60 minutes guy what his name is but brilliant the way he went at it and it's touchy but he was like you know he read him the quotes and he said it's not a hero of yours nilan sitting there not he goes what's it like to have your hero say these things about you and he starts crying and he says it it's it's tough he couldn't even get the words out because if the point being if that doesn't show you how in this guy is how in it he is for the reasons to be in it not the reasons of what comes with it i don't know what will because he there is nobody whose time on planet earth is more valuable he is a constant

machine going after these goals to foster the future of humanity so much so that he pisses off some of the people he looked up to because he is doing things so outside the box and so differently to try to accomplish those goals and yet he like forget the sacrifice which i shouldn't say forget the sacrifice sacrifice aside or on top of the sacrifice better way to put it he also has to then deal with facing the fact that he doesn't get the approval of people who he would most want the approval from and he still keeps going you don't do that if you are about money if you are are about getting, I'm going to use that forever, that fucking championship thing. If you were just about fucking winning the championship.

I knew you would like that. Yeah. Yeah. And to guys like him, and I was going to bring this up with you and people I really know well in life. There's certain individuals, aka you guys, where you don't go to the world. The world comes to you because you're so focused on, all right, how can I improve where I'm at, what I'm doing to better myself and people around me and the world at large that the world will naturally come to me because I'm attracting that because I'm putting that out into the world. And I just think that's a beautiful thing because a lot of people do it the other way around. Do you believe in the law of attraction? Yeah, 100%.

What you say? Like, what things you say? Yeah, law of attraction, law of action too. I mean, think about it, visualize it, but how are you going to get there? Action, action, action, and then everything will come. What about the low moments? Low moments are the ones that really test your character. One more quote. I forget the guy's name, but he said the best photographs, or just all photographs, are developed in darkness. So those low moments really show your true character.

And it shows your development of where you're actually at, at this point in time in life. So those low moments, that's what it reveals about you. But you have to tap into something deep to keep going. That's why someone like Elon Musk, I mean, that was probably a low moment when his hero said, this isn't going to work. But he had to tap into whatever his meaning for what he was doing was.

Because it was bigger than himself, really. And usually it is. And that's what caused him to continue striving. But those are the most important moments though because those are the ones i personally actually enjoy most and not enjoying this like mass statistic way of like i enjoy pain and like but like those deep moments put your principles and values under a trial of fire to see if you're like actually about it like put your nuts on the table type thing you don't want them to happen but you

appreciate the fact especially afterwards that they did because of what they you're trying yeah you're trying and especially for individuals below 30 like to not be so hard on yourself and be willing to do that thing because you're kind of still trying and even if you're not you're still extremely young but overall too like it's better to try than to just think about it so you got to admire those who actually put their best foot forward with what they have do you think it, I don't know if the word is normal, understandable that a part of dealing with those low moments is also maybe not being positive with yourself? Meaning, you know, I use the Russell Wilson example,

and maybe he legitimately, when the doors are shut and no one else is home and he's having a low moment, maybe he does like have those moments where he's like, fuck you, dude, you're an idiot or whatever. Or maybe he's such a, I don't want to call him a bot. That's very unfair because I really admire how he is. But maybe he's so in control of his shit that he's like, no, I'm going to be good and just constantly tells himself that. And my question would be there, does he even get a low moment when that happens? Do you even realize it's happening because you don't have those negative thoughts go in? Because like, you know, speaking from my own experience, and I definitely do a lot wrong. Definitely.

Like, I don't even know where to start. Yeah, likewise. definitely like i don't know where to start but yeah likewise you know i feel like i don't know masochistic's the word but i i like to when i'm alone beat myself up on some things is it because you have a high standard for yourself oh yeah that's part of it but it's also like motivation a little bit when i feel like something doesn't happen especially if it was something that i thought was gonna i just tell myself i mean and it's not everything it's it's some stuff i'll be like reverse psychology with it and i'll talk to myself like all right what's up bitch you know like that

kind of like your alter ego yeah that kind of that angry attitude like you suck like fuck you like i will talk to myself like that and it's negative energy that's why i'm asking because i feel like some of it i need to get rid of other parts of it though i don't want to because it keeps me honest with myself it makes me assume i'm nothing all the time i would rather be conservative i would rather default to conservative on always chasing something to be better than assuming i've i've i've caught something to be great you know and that then straddles the lines i'm sorry this is getting a little bit complicated but no i love that no i was doing that because that's deep i like that that straddles the line of well also positive and positivity and negativity you know because there's like a level to be that and i'm not saying

to be gary i think when gary v says shit like i fucking love failing i love it like no you don't no you don't you love what it taught you after because what and i think that's part you know some things i think he's careless with and injects these wrong opinions into people but a lot of people take that to be like i am i i want to fail and yeah because for him he's saying that because he he wants to be the best of the best when it comes to entrepreneurs and he wants to have people start to think in that frame of mind. What do you mean frame of mind? He wants to have people start acknowledging failure or their fears or remain patient, but he's saying it in such a kind of purple cow way, as Seth Godin says,

just so they can start thinking about it. Because if you said it modestly, it might not penetrate. And that's the problem. It gets misinterpreted. And so I liken it a lot when people say it. Like, oh, I love failing because they think that's what they're supposed to say. I liken it to when people say, hey, I don't regret anything because everything that happened has made me the person I am today. And then they just keep on living life. Like, I'll just let everything happen. You know, it's a slippery slope of, well, what do you accept? And where do you actually have a standard for yourself? So like, I don't- That's a great point. I don't ever want to be there, but I also struggle with,

well, am I being too hard on myself sometimes? And like, you know, I question everything. Like when you do that, do you say like, am I better than yesterday? Right? Or like when you have those moments in which- Rarely. So when you're having that discourse with your inner self it's rare that you're ever better than you were yesterday in that moment no it's rare that i asked myself that question oh i see because i think all that matters is are you better than yesterday in terms of have you learned

something that you never learned before because you can't really ever lose if you have that learner's mindset and it's not to dismiss or say like all right if i just fail over and over and over again until i die uh if i have a learner's mindset i'm good like yeah it's important but like happiness comes from progression. So, yeah, you can screw up plenty of times, but eventually you want to have those line you up for a great success. That's, that, you just said that way better than I was explaining it. That's exactly what I mean. You want, you know, like, you know that unless an act of God happens on any path to do something great, and even when an act of God happens on any path to really do something great over the long term, you're going to fuck up. There's going to be quote unquote failures. It's guaranteed.

What you don't want to then use that for is like, oh, let's hope for it, right? Because then your mindset gets wrong and you start to lose sight of, you're hoping for the failure such that when you get there, you feel accomplishment and don't look back on the failure to learn from it because that's why it happened in the first place and not just because you needed to get there like fucking checking off a box on the page. Yeah, yeah, it's Ray Dalio way of going, his formula is pain plus reflection equals progress.

So if you were to have some deep pain, how am I reflecting through this? And if you're not even able to reflect through it and not even acknowledge it or embrace it or accept it, then you're not going to progress forward. So like, yeah, no one wants to really fail, but as you said, it's the reaction to it that matters most. It's the thing that it can teach you so that you can move forward. And to be honest, like failure is all subjective to the path in which one lays out for themselves. So like a failure to you might not be the same failure to me.

So it's all about how we... Your perspective. Yeah, your perspective, your metric. And that's why at my, one of my cores is like, I love communication. I love connecting with people. I love creating. But like, those are my three things,

communication, creating, connecting. But I just love storytelling because it's a narrative. Like a narrative is everything because it's perspective you're like my my pivot with from dream big and co to now truck bucks one part of me can be like you're complete failure You didn't set up the organization the right way to scale properly or to delegate correctly. You're not the entrepreneur you should, so on and so forth. But the other side of me can be like- Can you tell people your new role, by the way? Yeah. Tell them so that I can correct you later on that and you can finish it. The head of content for Truckbox. Yeah. Okay. And I'll continue.

One side of me that could say that, and this is for the example of framing a perspective. The other side of me can say, okay, I'm putting Dream Big on the shelf because it needs some time off. The baby was being nurtured, but it was being too pressured. But I need to learn more in order to help a greater mission, in order to join this rocket ship to do great things, to be with great people in a great place. And then I can come back and do whatever I want, so on and so forth. But I'm young. I got to build a skill set and mindset. So there's two ways of looking at it. It's your choice. Okay, it's my choice in this example of how I choose to look at it. That's why narrative is so important. We're all creating our own stories every single day. You're 22 years old. You built a company as a college dropout prioritize what you wanted in your life pivoted within the company itself to be able to make money and finance the things you were building you then created amazing content for a an extremely fast-growing startup that's been around now it's long in the tooth like and i mean that in a good way in truck bucks that has a lot of money coming in in venture so much so that in making that relationship and creating that content the ceo fucked with you so much that

he gave you one of the five most important jobs at the company at age 22 so forget like how i look at myself when i brought this up and like my own struggles with whatever let me turn it back around on you and say if you don't look at that as this is what dream big and co became and allowed me to do you're i'm telling you as a friend you're out of your fucking mind because that's and and it would have been amazing if you were 25 or 26 but you're 22 and i want to punch you in the face because it's like, holy shit, dude. Like, do you realize what that did? You put yourself in that position to get that and be that.

And you make, you create such amazing shit that this guy was like, how the fuck is this kid available? Oh my God, you're in. What do you want? Right? And I went back. I told you about this earlier. I went back on like your old tiktok account because you use your main one like anthony or whatever but you had like a dream big and co

one for a while and you had early content because you were on the platform early that must the only thing i conclude is that it was a little bit ahead of its time on tiktok with the demographics that were on there in 2019 and the content was so fucking good some of it because it captured that narrative and that storytelling that you talked about and and you had the ones with with nick talking which i watched like three times especially one of them one of them was just like where he talked about all the vcs that had said yeah that's a good clip it's fucking amazing made me want to run through a wall and i'm just like that guy saw that i mean he said it right but then he saw it projected into the world and how you captured it and what it showed and if i were him i mean we both probably

well i won't speak for him but like you cringe when you watch yourself on camera i kind of yeah it's like watching yourself in sports on camera it's like why do i walk that way right right like i can't i'm so used to it now i i don't i don't have time to at this point but like most people who aren't doing that all day every day you might cringe at it but it's incredible right and he knows like in the in the deep part of his head when he sees that he's like this kid got that moment out of me and then he sees like the way you captured it and everything and how you bottled it up into content and he's looking at that and i'll i say this without knowing he's looking at going oh my god i need everything in my company to be like this so it doesn't matter that i think 10 people watch that video in 2019 10 or 20 some right

yeah it doesn't matter that's not what he's looking at he's like oh fucking we'll figure that part out don't worry about that i want that who who did this who did this oh that guy you're hired so like you put yourself in that position to to have a guy like that see that and feel that thing and then see it with everything else you did too outside of just you know he was one of many clients i i i mean i appreciate every word of that and it was such right timing too that at the time they had their like uh head of marketing marketing director like leaving so as we finished a final project with them recently with the mini documentary it was like a mutual decision came up like this would fit like this is a great mold there's an opening here is a void you guys really need to step into this as a company let me come in and elevate that

part of it and i'm more than ever appreciative to nick to taking opportunity on me for coming in but there's a lot a lot of risk you can say that goes into it me going down right before the right before the round comes on for their seed and they're in a pivotal point in which they have to really increase order volume they have a web app coming out uh april mid-april can we let's let's go right into it now let's use this as a platform to do it because i know we've been hinting at this over and over again and then you were just saying too much. But can you go through exactly what TruckBucks is and what the –

you touched on it earlier, but just what the core business is for people. Yeah, so it's more than just an app because right now they have just an app it's a platform for food truck vendors to have their entire operations their digital presence and their distribution of their food all their like delivery their orders come in through this TruckBucks platform. So they can increase their bandwidth as a TruckBucks or as a truck and as a vendor in general and automate a lot of processes and just delegate it all to TruckBucks. So at first they were an app for food trucks where people can order ahead and pick up their food and not have to wait in line. And then they partnered with DoorDash, Postmates, et cetera, to do delivery.

And they put like an API into their app to where they can see, you can see where the delivery is going, just like you would Uber Eats and such. And all those platforms are DoorDash and Grubhub. But the amazing thing is, is like Nick's, and Nick would talk about it so much better than me, but his grandfather came from Greece with $8 in his pocket. And then his parents set up restaurants and so on and so forth. And then Nick was in that industry, saw it, observed all the time. He said one time to me that he would go in the parking lot and count the amount of cars that were out there to see what the traffic was for that certain night.

So he knows the ins and outs so well. And then he started at Drexel creating this idea, this concept, and one by one signed up trucks all by himself in the beginning. And it's the way of the entrepreneurial and archetypal path. At the beginning, it was specifically just delivery for the food trucks. It was trucks no delivery yet they just last year so what did they do partnered they just had an app to where people can order their food from food trucks and pick it up instead of waiting online so that was the big thing and then their business model was taking a percentage of uh the transaction fee or the percentage of the transaction as a fee for themselves. And then eventually it went to like an Uber Eats delivery from food trucks. So food

trucks could prepare food that someone ordered and a courier sent by truck bucks comes and picks it up and takes it to them. And now what else is it? And now it's becoming more than just B2C. It's becoming B2B way of helping out food trucks, but also at the same time helping these consumers, AKA their users get food quicker and more efficient. Wow. So that's from, and it's amazing too, because from signing up trucks one by one in a,

such a niche way, it's such like the archetypal entrepreneurial path. I keep saying it, but like he literally lived that life and he did what every great founder does is like niche one by one, sign up, get feedback. How can I make it better?

Grew, grew the team. They went from four to 23 in the past year and just kept building and building and building. And now they're at the point where they were so niche. Now they're able to expand into the tech team, building a web app. They can be this whole entire, uh, you can say like software platform

because they are a data company. They're a software company, like to have these vendors use their, um, software. And then they'll be getting into more spaces soon. But the more niche they were, the better they can scale things out and expand later on. Slowly at first, then all of a sudden. Yeah, because when it rains, it pours. It drizzles and then it rains, it pours. I love that, though, because the heart of the story,

it's like the butterfly effect in life. Grandfather puts eight whatever the fuck the money over there was in his pocket at the time. Takes some boat across the Atlantic or whatever. Maybe he took a plane by that time. I don't know. But took something across the Atlantic. Came here with nothing. Figured out something to be able to have a roof over his head.

Parents go in, build out. Greeks build in restaurants. I would have never guessed it. Shout out to my boy Nico but I I grew up with my best friend for my whole life is uh that their family he's Greek uh Carol is yeah and oh yeah yeah because you talked to Nico but their their family owns a lot more in restaurants and they're all in the business so we always joke like oh the Greeks run the restaurants but the Greeks run banging ass restaurants yeah they're so good so parents come in now and first generation they come in they build out these great restaurants and the sons in there work and learning the work ethic and

everything but then also looking around saying what can i make better yeah just like our friend giovanni too who grew up in in that business as well not to mention uh i forgot to mention his grandfather nick's grandfather created when he had eight dollars in his pocket and came here it was a food truck he created come on yeah come on how crazy is that it's full circle it's insane and like right now you're saying he watched the traffic at the red like yeah there was one story yeah he watched the traffic in the park he watched everything he everything. He observed everything. I love bringing it up because the way Gary

kind of observed everything in the wine shop at Wine Library with his dad, Sasha, and I'm going to talk to Gary Vee one day. I know his story so well, my gosh, but the way he did it that way, Nick did the same thing in not equating or saying their tantamount

in any way, but that path of being did the same thing. And not equating or saying they're tantamount in any way. But like that path of like being within the industry so early on, gives the greatest advantage to when he's going to build and build and build and become a good entrepreneur. He's an amazing entrepreneur, amazing leader. And to be honest, I think the ones that are truly, truly great, are the ones that were exposed to it early on, we talked about exposure in terms of diversity and seeing different perspectives uh by seeing different ethnicities and cultures and nationalities but like nick was a part of it like literally

in his teens so the more time you and runway you have the better things can play out yeah he just he exudes i'm just pulling something up back there and because it's kind of coming up i just want to have it if we need it yeah that's a good one he and i don't know him at all which i think is really cool because i i know you very well and then i know austin as well who works with him who's just an awesome guy full stack and so like you know you kind of get a feel for like what kind of people are in that kind of culture and then you can connect the dots it's all an embodiment of him right every entrepreneur's company is an embodiment of them right so i try to before i meet people sometimes

when i'm connected to them in a lot of ways i try to figure out what what is what makes this person tick like how how did they get in this position and to hear the full-blown generational story there and to go back to the over cliche you know in vc solving problems and all that i mean that's that's how he did it he's like okay i'm doing something i'm working hard i'm learning a work ethic i'm in this restaurant that my parents built like god bless them this is amazing what are all the hard things about this or what is happening to drive sales here that i can make better to get more of it to provide more value for more people and get more customers and more people who are fed

okay start there and then oh what's a big trend going on oh food trucks right food trucks okay what can i do with that and how can i apply all this shit that i noticed that was wrong in the regular restaurant business and now think about where that can go. Food truck vendors are already putting so much on the line themselves. They're like the most entrepreneurial and most entrepreneur-like that anyone can be. So to help them out is like the most tremendous act one can do. And as I said early on, Nick was going food truck to food truck, signing these trucks up to be on the app

and to be a part of the Truck Bucks ecosystem. But he like, and he always says it, our interview, he'll say it to this day, and especially the mini documentary, he talks about it. He has every single contact. He has every single vendor as a contact in his phone. Like he's about building relationships, especially early on, because he's able. Obviously when he's, when we grow and he has more of a higher level thinking, like Archimedes

point of view with everything. And he's like the captain of the ship at a much higher level with a bigger company. He won't be able to do that. But the fact that you do that early on, it's not only shows a lot, but it allows you to build something that people actually want and use and care about. A lot of these companies have the same type of early days story. And one of the great tragedies, not to go negative for a second, but I just want to at least mention this. One of the great tragedies is when some of these companies grow so big they cross the chasm and forget. They forget that they were in the garage or in the dorm room. Well, it's what you said before with being entitled to.

Sure. Yeah, exactly. Themes, man, themes. Dead ass on. Exactly. Exactly. And so then they lose those types of things. And I would hope, you know, someone like Nick,

as they continue to explode here, never loses that type of thing. Yeah. I look at a, the reason bring it up is is with his story one of the first ones to come to mind and there are many is airbnb airbnb was told to go fuck themselves six ways to sunday by every vc john and i john ronnie and i who you have done work with for years and known for years, it was awesome. John is so like that too. When we were on, I talked about it and I said

straight up, you know, him with Stu Knighted, he has a ton of Airbnb vibes. Because Stu Knighted is starting to explode now with downloads and the concept's amazing. If you're on a college campus right now and you want to figure out how to do work that, maybe you're a writer and you're in an astronomy class and you have no fucking idea what you're doing and you don't care.

Go on Stenited. You won't regret it. Anyway, side plug of that. He – for years there, he struggled building it out because the concept was there, but how do we package it? How do we get people to buy into it? And so he got to a point where he had to fund it right and and was at a critical mass where covet hit and he got really on something because he'd been fun he'd been trying to go about it the wrong way he had the right product with the wrong address right sent it to the wrong mailbox

and so he landed on tick tock and and you know he and his dad became TikTok influencers, allowed him to fund Stu Knighted and now Stu Knighted's exploding, right? With Airbnb, they sold the cereal boxes of Obama and McCain. It was like Captain McCain's and Obama O's in 2008. Also using it to spread awareness for Airbnb after they weren't funded because none of the VCs would give them money. So it got them through. But I bring them up because on top of that, another thing they did, small scale to just fucking figure it out, but not forget that this comes down to solving the problems and building a relationship with every customer down to the simplest level, eye to eye.

This tech company, right, all about bits and having people all apart and connected via the internet the way that they got people to buy into airbnb and do it and get them comfortable was they realized pictures mattered they had to have beautiful looking pictures online for people to want to buy the product and what they realized on top of that is that the people who were taking the pictures who were the early adopters who were renting out their homes or apartments or whatever often were terrible fucking photographers and did nothing to like spruce it up and make it look like an ad so they went and took the fucking pictures they appreciated people buying in and offering up their place i mean it was amazing it's the

early adopters so they want to help them out and they want to help themselves too and so they went in there they would go to people's apartments, come over, shake their hands, build a relationship, see why they joined the app and in the meantime, take the advertisements themselves and put it up there. I remember hearing that from Reid Hoffman. So when you say, dude, when he's going door to door here, I'm pointing at him because he's on the screen back there, we'll get to that, but when he's going door to door here, not door to door, truck to truck and building those relationships that it sends a chill up my spine because that's exactly what

some of these great companies have done we're so like i swear because like i think about profiling people features on people all the time because i've studied all those musts or jobs type people and all these entrepreneurs, all these athletes. And like, from studying the history of them. And like, by the way, when I was in college, my favorite classes were not business, were not economics. It was history. It was the history of Philadelphia.

Architecture, because architecture went into history. If you study the past like that, you know what worked, you know the blueprint, and then you can apply it to what's happening now and say like all right did things check off so with with that example with Airbnb I always like used to think to myself John just like kind of looks or like has that vibe to Brian Chesky uh and Nick as well it's just like that I kept saying entrepreneurial archetypal path because that is what the best have done in the past and if he's doing it now i mean it has to say something so to your point one billion percent well those stories too they point to the rough early days trying to make it and whatever it takes yeah whatever it is.

So thinking about it from Airbnb, who is told to go fuck themselves over and over again by all these VCs going, yeah, someone's going to rent out their home for people. Like, yeah, okay, in your dreams, pal. They did not – they had to have the presence of mind, and this is a complicated topic because it's a slippery slope. They had to have the presence of mind to sit back and honestly assess, and they had to ask themselves, are these people telling us it's stupid right? Or do we just know that we are on to something that the world hasn't seen yet? And even if they're not fully ready for it yet, enough people are that they're going to get everyone else ready for it. That's a very hard question because there's a lot of people who just think continuing to do the same thing and actually like go after the thing as long as they're consistent and do it forever, it means it'll be

great. That's not the reality. The product has to be great. I have a point on that. But you have to stick to the vision. You see what I'm saying? The product has to be great, but you have to stick to the vision. You see what I'm saying? The product has to be great, but you have to stick to the vision. And so if you have that assessment and you truly sit up late at night and you know, yeah, I know this. I know this product is important. I know it's not just me hoping

for a million fucking dollars tomorrow. And it's just like, this is going to change some shit and it's going to make something better. Then you also have to have the conviction to when people point at you and say, change your product because it doesn't work and here's how it's going to make something better, then you also have to have the conviction to when people point at you and say, change your product because it doesn't work and here's how it's going to work, to look back at them and say, fuck you. Yeah, you have to have laser focus. And that's

why I said focus was so important before, but it's also self-awareness to know where to go. And then when you know where you're going, it's to remain focused in one way. Because there's good feedback from users or customers to then implement into your product but then there's the ones the doubters where they're like this won't work this isn't what you should do and that's what you have to hedge off and i commend founders who just build great things because there's so much that goes into it behind the scenes to get above the clouds to get to the point where people actually see it on a grand scale but it's those early moments early on in the journey that matter most well shit like this behind you because you

just brought it up so let's let's roll with it shit like this behind you is documenting the moments before they became the moment well and it's unbelievable this content that's why that's why you know we i heard you talk about it before like interviewing all these people that come onto your podcast is getting them before they get big right and it's more than that it's like you care about them great conversations great relationship like i you have every person who comes on this podcast you have their number you know in your phone most likely so it's like it's more than that but i used to think the same way with dream big and co is i'm doing stories on people because i know right now they're kind of

underpriced in terms of their value. Like they're just nascent. They have so much potential. They're a prodigy because when they blow up, this is something they can look back on because I'm all about documenting the journey. I'm trying to sell these stories. I'm trying to have people buy into stuff. And I know we have the video and we have digital and social media now. So we have the ability to build in public, which adds even more pressure because it's like you have to make sure that this person will actually do it. But it's either you bend or break. And to get these moments on audio, video or written is so beautiful. It's so beautiful. Documentation is everything.

I'm going to play this because this is plain documentation. This was when is documentation this was when i say this was ahead of its time on tiktok people are gonna see why and if you're watching i'm gonna put it in the bottom corner look at his eyes so that you can see it yeah look at that but look at how brilliant the content you captured here is and then on top of that not just what it is but you see how it says 354 views right there if he continues trending the way he does that 354 on this video you won't have to move it people will go back and find it from fucking 2019 and share it that will have four zeros behind it i also want to say too before you play all you need

is one with content if you have someone on here who blows up tomorrow, dude, I mean, you got a laundry list of people that are. Every single one I believe will. We already have had people who are going to blow up. Yeah, every single person. You know better than anyone. We've had some people in here that are. Yes, yes. Yeah, so I'm the same thinking, but evergreen content.

You just need one. A lot of people, they keep going and judge themselves based off follower count or likes or they have right now but just keep going like believe in that person it'll pay off you just need one yeah you and i are very similar yes this is um this clip makes me want to run through a fucking wall years ago i talked to certain investors years ago i told them about it a lot of those people didn't believe that it could be done they didn't believe in the industry they didn't believe that the app would ever be launched they didn't believe we would have customers that it could work and then i speak to them years later after not seeing them now and give them a quick update and they look like they see a ghost

dude that is something and i know and i know there's a lot behind that too that was the great thing like i want more but that full thing they look like they've seen a ghost there and i i i fuck with that heavy because people i don't know I want to say this. I think there is a real motivation in that, fuck you, I'm going to show you energy. I don't think there's anything wrong with that. And I think about that. I don't need to hold grudges with people. I don't need to do that. But I also don't need to forget.

And looking at my... Great my and i'm not the only i'm not the only person like this i i saved some of those i saved i saved the emails where they stopped responding those are my favorites i told i told john to do the same thing with his he has everyone saved i hope he put it into an album but i told him those are the things that are important because those are the things that test you because those are the things that test you. We talked about before, like that's your character right there. Are you going to bend or break? And the documentation goes such a long way.

People don't know how much it takes. And people don't know, people don't know too, like how much video content I have saved of me just talking or moments of me crying of when something wasn't working or like I document everything just because it's so important yeah I haven't put it out in public one day I want to when it seems right but like I'm building in public in other ways but like that's the that's the stuff that goes in like the documentary one day of just like I think everyone should create a documentary and I really want to get in this point too, if you don't have anything to touch on before I go down this. Yeah, this is important. Every single person in 2021 and onwards is their own media

company. Oh yeah. So for you, I think you're more powerful than any vice could ever be right now. Obviously you have lower numbers and all of that, but like the positioning and leverage you have as a sole single individual, you're not competing with single podcast hosts. You're, you're, you're competing with media companies of that magnitude. So I think everyone's their own media company. And I think, and I can stand here, I can sit here, I can sit here and say this with full conviction in my heart too, something we can look back on in many years, storytelling and documentation and documentaries is going to become such a huge thing because people want to know the maker behind the making.

They want to know Mr. Beast and what he did behind the scenes to create what he did. And that's why I'm so big on storytelling. And that's why I set up dream big and co to always come back to use as a point of uh doing those moments of documentation on people because it's going to be a wave that'll be so powerful especially in the decade or two that's going to be utilized so well even it's what truly matters even things recently we you wish you had it you know people talk about they wish they could see the video michael jordan in his in his backyard shooting in the hoop the night after he got cut from the varsity basketball team they wish they could be there and see that and and see that that moment

of just oh you're done okay you're gonna see right but one i say recently because one i think about all the time a guy who i really fucking love who's just incredible and he's eccentric he's out there he's he probably i'd take away has plenty of insecurities and plenty of things where he doesn't view himself in the light that he should for who he is as as a person from everyone i've heard who's ever dealt with him. But Post Malone, who's on the wall right there. And there is a famous story that – you know what? I always forget to go look it up again because I'm always replaying it in my head.

But there was some sort of like short documentary where they were talking about his rise, and there's no video of it, of the rise itself. But his manager, Dre London, who, by the way, believed in him. Like, this wasn't some guy who came in like, oh, yeah, you're blown out, play guy got you. No, no, no. Dre London was there when he had nothing, which the fact that they're so close and Dre manages him, that – That's beautiful. I fucking love that. But Dre London is telling the story about post

come up and so when post was i i think he went to college for like a hot minute right after high school and realized like college not not his vibe right so leaves and a buddy of his from his town was a couple years younger had succeeded as a video game streamer he's making a lot of money i think he's on youtube or twitch or something and so he had a house out in la he said austin come out like you have a bedroom here for free you're in your window i want you to try to make it which is great he had a friend who believed in him like that and gave him a shot and so free rent in that way but he had one room and dre l Dre London talks about coming over to see Post. I forget how he had met him or how he knew he might be pretty good.

I don't remember that context studio where he had you know used things that aren't denoisers to denoise and fix the audio and had all the mics set up going into the macbook and everything and he was creating all his music soup to nuts himself he said the crazy thing about it though was what I saw in the back was what I saw in the back corner. What I saw in the back corner made me realize that I was in his bedroom. And he didn't use it as a fucking bedroom. Because in the back corner was a closet. And there was a literal cot on the ground. This motherfucker was sleeping in the closet with the one room he had.

And made the room his studio. And he said, I took one look at that and I said, oh, he wants it. He fucking wants it. And one of the great fears of mine, and I don't mind saying a fear, it's a fear you should have, is not putting your heart and soul into the things that you are great at and being honest that you're great at it and going after it because one of another one of mine but one of the saddest things i do witness in my life is when i see people who are great at things and i'm fortunate enough to know a lot of them and this this is the downside of it who most likely are are never gonna let the world know that they are

because for whatever reason maybe it's not that they don't want it but they let things get in their way and they don't want it that bad they don't they aren't willing to fucking put the chips in the middle and sacrifice everything to do it you have the expectation of others 100 but that dude didn't give a fuck he wanted it and he made white iverson in that goddamn room and the rest is history that's a story for the books yeah and that is the exact stuff i love talking about because i can and i would love a part two just talking about straight stories of people like that the baby being a hotel room tell that and i don't know the full thing the only thing i know is the baby being in a hotel room probably extremely extremely um ruggish and

not in good shape cheap bought it out for one night uh and just made what song was it he recorded a song with uh an okay mic in this hotel room ended up being one of like his might have been time okay it might have been shit but it could have been not dude he made it that's the other thing he made a lot of songs before he blew up yeah exactly songs i know i mean there's marcus charles is an individual i know now he's not big but he's one of those who's like he has such great potential such a great hip hop artist such a great audio engineer does everything himself independent artist but like has created three albums four even i think and so many singles and still hasn't gotten the traction he needs or he deserves i should say

to where he should be and he's one of those individuals um i've done constant stories with people with dream big and co who i think are just undervalued like when you think of i'll come back to other examples in a sec like the baby and post malone but when you think of like investing this is another theme we can connect investing a lot, a lot of people, like Warren Buffett's value investing model, looking for underpriced companies based on their stock price. And then you think about social media. People are trying to get underpriced attention all the time, especially with ads.

When you think about these talented individuals, what I truly enjoy is seeing them before, you know, the world sees them. Because that's a beautiful thing. I think that's so amazing. And not to just be there because they're going to blow up and I'm going to know them. I don't care. I just love seeing the stuff behind the curtains. Because that's what truly matters. That's the foundation. And you have people like Pele. I'll go back to current examples and actually go back on track. He obviously is the greatest soccer player of all time. He used a sock when he was young to practice.

And then when he had enough money from a job, used a mango. And I just think that's incredible uh you have back to your point of appreciation and small things appreciation small things you have countless people and that's like what i want to make the dream big platform into eventually is just this place where you can find stories like that because that's beautiful it's like the full full-end documentation of things and that's what i truly enjoyed like that because that's beautiful. It's like the full end documentation of things. And that's why I truly enjoy it from the jump. That's why I started Dream Big and Co. as a podcast just for fun early on because I love the journey. I love hearing every part of their upbringing up into the point of where they achieved an aspiration or are close

to it because it paints a picture so much. And I think story has that way of inspiring but also informing educating entertaining in which other ways and just quotes won't ever do it's like my friend jordan gross said great author just interviewed him for uh dream big daily for the podcast episode 80. obviously it's gonna things will be on hold for a while with that but um because i'm going to truck bucks but what he said was because he's big on narrative he's big on fable he loves storytelling but he said if a kid was told to go in his room he wouldn't just go in his room but if he was told to go in his room because there's a monster outside he'll go in so it's like that ability to to tell story, there's so much more to it than just saying it or just like having a picture

or like having a quote can ever do. That's why I love story so much. Storytellers rule the world. You can tell a story. That's why narrative communication. But I like the people who do it from a genuine place and do true stories. Yeah, I'm big on true stories.

Like growing up, I watched NFL films all the time, a football live, 30 for 30s. God, brilliant shit, man. I love fiction, but man. True stories is beautiful. I'm sorry, I should have said that better. I'm talking about people who can manipulate and just tell stories to act and win you over.

That's something. Yeah, well, if you're doing intentional manipulation to get your end of the deal or bargain in in a in a way you know is wrong or that will hurt people that's that's a totally different story it's terrible but to use it for good is a beautiful thing that's something i want to be truly stellar at one day through repetition, is just being able to tell stories well. Is it tough? Like, your music to my ears with some of the things you're saying,

because one of the things I have said about this podcast is I bring on people here who, let's just talk statistically, not all of them are going to end up being public superstars. It's a reality. I don't know which ones. I think they all have the potential to. But I bring on people who sometimes are already blown up a little bit or sometimes are I know right about to or sometimes aren't trying to but I think should. Like Jackson Hollowell, who I had on here, is a prime example.

Jackson Hollowell and his fiance do a movies and tv blog on instagram for fun it is they are the best that forget the fact that he's got the greatest voice you just want to listen to it and he's so passionate about it and like they're both they play off each other perfectly and they're so into it I mean he he should be the best critic in America because he's not a pure like old-school ratchet ebit critic he's just a guy he's a fan right and so i see that and i'm on him now all the time like jackson when you're starting that youtube channel when you're starting that youtube channel it will go it will go i mean his clips are the ones that go on my tick tock and i'm like do you see people want it it's more it's crazy that you believe in people more than they can see themselves sometimes and that's the thing that's the thing and jackson is not an example of this it could be though look

out jackson don't don't fuck up but i've you know jackson's someone i really started talking with about that like a month ago when i brought him in here because i had followed the blog and stuff he did a great job we never like talked about it and we've been in different parts of our life like i don't see him a hell of a lot and so after we recorded the podcast that's when i had the conversation and said have you thought about this like have people told you how fucking good at this you are and he was honestly like i mean you know it's whatever i'm like so no and and i'm like oh my god like why are people not telling him that but i look at it like to the point you're making that you do

and i said this a few minutes ago but you do come across those where you realize they're not going to do it they're not going to do it not because they don't have the ability not because they're not great at whatever it is like that thing but they're not going to do it in all likelihood and you hope you're wrong but it is one of the hardest things to watch because you believe in the person more than they believe in themselves. And then in the worst case, you want it more for them than they want it for themselves. It's a very hard place to be. But I think the thing I had started to try to say there and got off lost on the tangent was I say about this podcast I want the world to see the people that I bring on here through their eyes the way I see these people

through mine so when I bring on a Jackson Hollowell I don't see Jackson Hollowell the guy who has a great job and does you know with his fiance this technical side gig where they watch every fucking movie and tv show known to man and brilliantly talk about it and you know have 5,000 followers on Instagram. That's not who I see. I see Jackson Hollowell the guy who He and his fiance Alex should have a YouTube channel that has 5 million subscribers And he should be the preeminent guy in pop culture talking about movies and TV shows I would listen and apparently tick tock agreesok agrees you know or at least the early results are they agree you know so i see it that way and now i want the world to feel that when i see john

ronnie john ronnie's starting to happen he's already like also kind of he was always bound to happen it was not a it was not a if but a when i want people to see it fuck chesky no offense at chesky it's not shot at him i want people to see john ron d for like yo john ron d is changing when i bring on anthony fenn not the next him but anthony finu john ronnie the first yeah black when i bring on anthony fenu and when riley comes on here in a couple weeks i don't want the world to see like oh this guy is like working on i want the world to see like oh the guys who are like going to change our entire world in the next five minutes or so. You know, when I bring on Bill Fasciolo,

who still works in a corporate job, who in addition to be one of the smartest human beings I have ever met in my life, also one of the nicest human beings I've ever met in my life, is one of the most talented individuals across a wide spectrum. He's the guy who's going to win any chemistry competition or any engineering competition and will then go be

the lead act in the fucking school play not that we're in school anymore but like i see that and i go that needs a platform like not even a person bill you're a fucking thing and you are a talented fucking thing i want the world to see that you know and so i the only fear of that is that when people just don't see it in themselves and they won't get it and it's like i don't want to be having that conversation 30 years from now with them you know they're they're my friend like i'm always going to support them and be there for them being like why didn't you do it yeah and the greatest thing you can do is be transparent in letting the truth as you see it speak to them early on. Because if they don't act on it, it's up to them.

But you did all you could have in supporting them, even challenging them in certain ways to keep going or start up what they should start up. It's a hard thing to do. And that's the beauty of the decentralization of media right now. And also, I know you're big into Bitcoin and blockchain, decentralization of finance, because amazing you're in the world of finance, but all these barriers to entry that are being taken down due to just like widespread innovation is beautiful because you're empowering the individual you're giving them opportunity to make what is theirs and control it fully

and own it and be their own person create their own, make a legacy beyond what could ever have been created a century ago for their generational line, their family to come, so on and so forth. And people are capitalizing on it, but I say opportunity because it's an opportunity. It's not willingly given to you. It shouldn't be. But this is the greatest point in time in which people are, it's right there. If you really want to do anything, it's right there. you really want to do anything it's right there you can start a peanut business and change your family forever just by posting online you can start a podcast instead of taking a finance job it takes time it takes time effort and to be patient is something i want to cultivate because to your greatest strength is your greatest weakness. So with ambition for me, patience can lack sometimes, but it's going to make all the difference if you can do something for consistent, do something consistently for a long enough

period of time to where it benefits you and others at like a larger scale. But it does take time. period of time to where it benefits you and others at like a larger scale but it does take time and that in the journey in the step you take will add up and it's those steps that really matter to where you get to because I always say what you do when you're small amplifies when you're big so it's like you talk about to if you don't lose it we talked yeah yeah that's why like every detail matters I saw you posted about that like every detail matters because people will see it and you put in the damn detail yeah there there's a guy i'm i won't say i know him like people say people say

oh i know so-and-so i know so-and-so like to me i'm all about relationships you're all about relationships when you say you know someone someone you talk to right not some guy acquaintance you met once right not even acquaintance

oh you're saying yeah someone you know I see or another side you understand what I mean and I also hate name dropping so don't ask me who this is I'm not gonna say

but there's there's somebody I met through mutual friends two and a half years ago something like that and I was just an idiot innocent kid in the sense that i didn't think it through and thank god i didn't because i was dumb

enough to just kind of think like oh yeah i'm i'm doing business in new york all the time i'd love to meet with this guy and i just texted my friends like oh you're friends with him you want to hook it up and they were like okay i guess we could try. Like, is he nuts? Like, this guy wants to waste time on him? But to my surprise or through my innocence, I did get a meeting with this person. And he was starting to, I don't want to say blow up, but he was starting to be in niche circles, a known name at the time and the thing that really strived in addition to the fact he took 90 minutes on a monday with me on a hectic monday i might add and i had nothing i had zero to offer him which i think about like that and i think about you know what someone does because i was also really dumb for coming in there and yet he he was okay with that. He was like, nah, it's cool.

And he's like, probably 10 years older than me. Nah, five, six years older than me. Because people like that probably don't lend their time out to someone like you. They don't. And so I respected that. But he, in very small ways after that, stayed in touch with me. And I also, after I met met with him started to comprehend how how big he had gotten by that point which i also didn't know before i went in there but then he got

big but it didn't happen two minutes after i met with him it was two and a half years ago it happened like this right and then starting like this and if you are listening and not watching, I'm moving in like a parabola, right? And he started to grow like crazy. And the way he started to grow like crazy and where he got his fame is in public content. Now, what he does behind the public content, he is the best at what he does. He is phenomenal at it. That is his it, right? I bring it up because public content is not his it it's not he is not a natural charismatic like speaker i mean i i shouldn't say not charismatic he's not like you don't doesn't come easy to him right yeah and he also is more rigid because if i mean i don't know where he finds the fucking time to do this because his regular job is nuts.

But he has built out a platform that also, by the way, makes a lot of money across media as a no-name because he just fucking built. And he got a little better every day, a little better every day. He would hear no's from people who didn't want to talk with him. No problem. I'll come back. Did. Comes back. little better every day he would hear no's from people who didn't want to talk with him no problem i'll come back did comes back doesn't burn bridges with most people unless it's on certain subject matters but with most people doesn't burn any bridges is publicly available to a lot of people takes the time to follow up with a jerk off like me who we talked to once right like even if it's just a few texts which that's all it is you know that

that's more than most people could say right and and i see this and when i do my own thing i look up at that and i go that's the bar that's the fucking bar it can be done because i frankly like if i'm going to be honest his it that's behind all the media work he does i could never do what he does he's incredible at it my it i believe and i've gotten myself to be comfortable with saying it is this i am naturally much better at this than for sure right but he did it and he didn't start with that right he didn't start with the like oh this is my it right it's possible yeah well early on i was going to say one thing but it can be twofold early on can be a lot of conviction for what you're doing and you go down it and you have some doubt along the way but you keep

trudging through courage or it can be like am i an imposter early on and then you get into it and it's like, all right, no, I'm good. I can prove it through effort. I'm going to get better. And step by step by step, you set the bar so low that anything above it is okay because you keep growing and you get higher and higher in your development of it. But to be honest, we're all imposters when we're starting off. Like, yeah, you're not good at what you do. Accept that reality.

Take ownership. Even if you're naturally good at it. You still have to suck. You still have to get your talent. Talent without anything is useless. I mean, you got to put in the work for things to compound into great progress and then growth and whatever else your aim is.

But it's not going to be conviction all the time that's why courage is crucial like Simon Sinek I don't know yeah you don't have yes I'm right on I'm glad you have him because he talks about something I absolutely love because I am in that boat where it's not always confidence or conviction but it's like the courage. That'll be the thing. Like all great founders, you know, they don't all have conviction for what they're doing. There's moments when they doubt or they're insecure, but a company that goes to great heights is because one pillar of that, of scale or of growth is the founder dealt with something internally that got them over the edge so it's the courage to keep moving that matters more than anything and the example that'll

make all the difference the examples are all there for us too and that's my endless examples i can look at that and we and that's just one right and that just happens to be someone i met with one time but there's a lot of other people who i kind of view the same way because I don't know them either, right? Who I look up to across different parts like probably over 50% of podcasts are less than 15 episodes. Oh, way more than that. Oh my gosh. There's one stat that's insane. There's only, the 1% are the ones that just over time did the thing. And the greatest measure of truth is time.

So time will tell all. If you keep going, you build a craft, you'll be way better than the others that stopped and quit. For their own reasons, maybe for giving up on themselves or because they found a different path and did that. But the ones that are great and better than you right now,

the only difference is they did it a thousand times and they got in there 10,000 hours,colm gladwell says yeah only difference i think time is a good spot to to leave it we could time time time back again time with hourglass and time and money it's something to think about the the dichotomy of that it brings this whole conversation full circle because there were just my god there are so many themes in this man there's a lot and i love this i'm i will i will definitely i'm better at listening to my own podcast now because i have to i force myself to but now i can listen and i like enjoy them just because i get to hear the conversations again this one i'm going to listen to a couple times. You have a large level of self-awareness,

but hearing yourself back, you're putting in double the effort to increase your amount of self-awareness because you're listening to what you're doing. Everything you did wrong. It's like developing subconsciously. Like, am I good at this? I was the same way early on.

It's such a hassle to edit, but it's also you enjoy it because you're like, I'm studying myself in my craft. I can't, you know, know when i edit there are some things i can see don't get me wrong like especially when i get into flow where because when i edit i'm not taking anything out in the conversations as i've told people a million times but i am editing because the way i look at it is the things i can can control the quality of my product i am not making these podcasts for this wednesday i am i want the people who are in now to fucking see a perfect quality product don't

be wrong yeah but i'm also making them for five years from now when someone's binging them because they found me i love that so i sit there and i get my camera angles right that's my edit so when i'm focused on the visual of it too when i'm actually editing i do inherently miss a lot of parts of the conversation so that's what i'm saying i force myself when it's done and it's out i force myself to listen to it while i'm doing like busy work or something so i can hear like oh well i that up i'm always looking for like the negatives that i can fix which i guess is fine but i end up enjoying like sometimes my guests even will have said something that in the moment i heard completely i was like whoa but then after the podcast was done all this going on i edited i forgot about and then i hear it again

or i hear something and i hear it differently the next time and i'm like holy so i know with this podcast where we went all over the place mostly like psychologically and mindset and yeah you and i obviously i knew this coming in but wow that we share a lot of the same views on people in the world i know when i listen to this again i'm gonna need to do it a couple times because there's just so much in here and i think that i think the ending on this whole point of it comes back to time is perfect because that's that was the overall i think maybe i'll find out something different later i think the overall point we're making everything we talked about tied back to time the time you invest in yourself the time that it takes to

build something the time that it takes to remain consistent the time we have here on earth the time that it takes to build something, the time that it takes to remain consistent, the time we have here on Earth, the time we have to prioritize things in the world. And I'm drawing a circle here on the table because that's what it is. It's the circle of life and everything comes back full circle and it's all coming back to the same thing we all have in common,

which is we're going to be on this Earth for a certain amount of time and at some point it will end so you better maximize it. Mic drop. If I could drop a mic right now yeah lower it you can figure out how to lower them dude you're awesome i i can't believe you're 22 i i appreciate you beyond word and measurement like you inspire the heck out of me and having

conversations like this lights me up like i said things i cherish most in life so to uh to the moon as they say to the moon baby well enjoy the process dude congratulations this that is a i you know it was amazing if you were 25 or 26 getting that job but you're 22 head of content of that company and i i don't know what i'm allowed to say about financials but they're looking good so great for you and they got a lot of employees now too yeah they grew from four to 20 28 soon so people can do some math in their heads and figure out that this kid's kind of early early guy to a tool yeah so one thing i would say too self-awareness the thing that got me over the edge was that would i rather be the first and the builder of something that will do pretty good but do i decipher and say should i be a

number 10 or a number 20 in this that'll go to even greater heights. Or like a number four, number five. And it's good to know where you're at and to accept that. I think life is about acceptance. And for me, I had to say, what am I best at? I use Dream Bigging Co. as a way to learn, as a way to tell stories, as a way to mold my craft. I'll come back to it eventually. Maybe I will, maybe I won't.

But it's the self-awareness that got me to the point of knowing what is what. And only you will know that. Everyone can say this decision's right or wrong. Everyone can say say you're doing you're dropping out is right or wrong you got to know yourself man it's between you and you but yes it helps other people but it's between you and you you made the name dream big and co when you were like 19 i guess something like that drawn drawn on the napkin when i was working at a fitness gym dream big and co the co is to sound official dream big at first with just the arrow as the high you had to prestige worldwide with it with the i love that the end co is great it's like it's it's like so that is such i that's such a name you make when you're 19 years old that it

works like you owned it you're all about there's already like a dream big podcast with like a four-year-old girl or something so i'm adding an endco i'm coming after you four-year-old girl it's dream big you were dreaming big and so if i told you when you were 19 that you were going to be c-level guy at a startup heading into eventually heading and i mean i guess you're not officially that right now but you're the head of an entire, basically like the marketing arm of a startup that's heading into a very big seed round right now. And you're age 22 doing that, going to one of the cultural hubs of America, Austin, Texas. You just said, that's a pretty good dream. That's not bad.

I appreciate you. That's a good start to my career. And it's not a start because you've been at it longer, but it's like you think 22. Oh, that's when I'm starting my career. Well, here you are, man. So I look up to that a lot. And cheers to it. Cheers. Yeah, man.

Thanks for coming in, brother. Appreciate you. Pleasure having you. We'll do it again. For sure. Everyone else. Thank you so much. Everyone else, give it a thought.

Get back to me. Peace.