Modern Wisdom - 33 Brutal Truths To Stop Wasting Your Potential - Alex Hormozi - #1117

Starting point is 00:00:00 Welcome back, man. Another speed running podcasting booty call. That's the hope. Do more hard things every day is a great mantra, but it should be less about ice baths and more about making that decision you've been putting off for three months. Yeah. I think that there's been a big misconception around hard stuff, which is just that like running a marathon necessarily means that you can have a hard conversation with your wife by saying, like, I do hard things, but those hard things don't necessarily generalize. And so I think domain specificity is much more narrow unless you decide to generalize to an identity label of, like,

Starting point is 00:00:42 I am the type of person who can do hard things because I ran this marathon or because I do these ice baths. And then as a result, I can then generalize that label to other behaviors. But if you can make that label and identify with it, then you don't need to run the marathon in order to do the hard thing. You just need the label. What are the hard things that people should be focusing, on more? What are the step change function, hard thing capacity skills that people should focus on more? I think it's being cognizant of what other, what outside forces are influencing your behavior in a way that is aversive or against your goals. And so if you're like, I want to start a business,

Starting point is 00:01:24 but I am afraid of what other people will say, then it means that we are allowing those other people to control your behavior. And I think when you say it in really plain terms like they, you're like, I didn't know, was giving them that much power of my life. It's like, I am not doing this because of them, which means they control me. And to me, like, the hard thing is, in some ways, just not allowing that control to persist or to keep going. It is interesting how many people can do hard things physically, but can't do hard things decisively. I have, so I have, you know, our security team and whatnot, and this is a discussion that I've had with probably each of them at different times because they've seen combat and death and all that kind of stuff. And what's funny is that, like,

Starting point is 00:02:04 the amount of risk that they are willing to put their physical bodies in, like, literally their lives at stake, but then how that doesn't necessarily translate to being able to have a, like, call it vulnerable conversation with a wife, spouse, lover, etc. It's just interesting. And this is again, back to like, these things don't generalize. They look good, but they do not mean the same thing. It's weird that we publicly admire the obvious hard thing, even if that isn't the one that actually makes the biggest difference to people's life direction.

Starting point is 00:02:37 It's not predictive of being a good friend. It's not predictive of being the best partner. It's not predictive of being a successful business owner. But because it's more obvious, because it's more publicly laudable, you can flex it online and you can tell people I ran a marathon. As opposed to when my partner asked me a difficult question, I didn't shy away from it. I told them the truth. And to be clear, I think that those things are laudable in and of the moment. themselves. Like, you go fight a war, you go, like, you go run a marathon. I think all of those

Starting point is 00:03:06 things are praiseworthy. It's just the generalizable component of that hard being, oh, I can all hard things is really the misconception. But I do think that if you, if for whatever reason you tell yourself a narrative that you, because you did this hard thing, you can do all hard things, then that's amazing. And by all means, if someone's like, I started doing jujitsu and it completely changed my life, it's like, that's awesome. But it probably isn't because you learn how to do guard better. It's probably because, like, what guard what Learning to Do Guard meant for you changed these other series of behaviors on the line.

Starting point is 00:03:37 How correlative do you think it is people that do hard things physically versus people who develop the capacity to do hard things that matter? Can you say that again? Let's say that doing hard things electively versus doing hard things decisively. The big difference between the two to me

Starting point is 00:03:53 seems to be decisions that require emotion and decisions that require effort. That seems to be one of the big delineations here. So it's like the called hard conversation versus hard physical tasks. Yeah. And how many people who develop the skill to do hard physical tasks as a transformation? How many of those do you think carry over into being able to do the hard thing emotionally? Probably the same in the opposite direction.

Starting point is 00:04:17 The guys who are like can have quote hard conversations, the attorney who can get through all these complex ideas and have whatever then sucks on at Jiu-Jitsu or sucks at in the weight room or doesn't try hard. I think, I just think that skills are more. specific unless you generalize them. How do you generalize? I think it's it's creating labels and identity with personality. And so if we if we if we identify personality by the aggregate of how you behave in all conditions, right? So all these conditions, how you act is your personality. The label we ascribe to that personality would then be the identity. And so if we decide to change that label, then that label, this is getting a little technical, but basically becomes a global reinforcer for behavior. Like, I am this, I am honest. And so we make this label. And then honest has a lot of

Starting point is 00:05:07 sub-behaviors underneath of it that we then act because we believe that honest is good. And so we want to act in accordance with this global reinforcer for ourselves. And so when we enter a new situation, we think, okay, what is in alignment, what behavior is most aligned with this label? And then we do that. And then when we don't do, when we don't act that way, then we feel guilty because we broke our own rules of behavior. So the big lesson here is, Just because you're doing hard things in one domain does not mean that it crosses over into all domains unless you purposefully try to make your identity wrapped up around it. A thousand percent. I was when I went to college, I wanted to pledge a fraternity.

Starting point is 00:05:47 And it was in the SEC and they're known for hazing and whatnot. And so I called my dad and was like, hey, this might be like bad. I might have to go through some stuff that's hard. I don't know. And, you know, my dad's giving me a lot of. lasting gifts, but one of them he said, think about every hard thing that you've gone through up until this point. He's like, there is nothing that they can do to you that is worth than that. And that actually was incredibly empowering. And I remember when there were more hardships

Starting point is 00:06:14 that were going on, I just immediately went to the worst things that I had gone through. And I was like, oh my God, this is nothing. So I was able to like go through this relatively hard thing where there were people who were like cracking and crying and all this stuff. Like, I don't want to say grown men, but I would say adult boys next to me. And I was a little bit. And I was able to stand tall because it was just like there's nothing that these other 21 year old guys can do to me that I have not suffered through it's a good justification for doing hard things that Rogan's got this line the worst thing that's ever happened to you is the worst thing that's ever happened to you yeah and if the worst thing that's ever happened to you is somebody misspelling

Starting point is 00:06:46 your name on a Starbucks cup that's a big deal yeah but if the worst thing that's ever happened to you is a thousand times worse than that I think one problem we have is recency bias that if you haven't been through a tough time right now, your memory of being able to deal with hard things, you kind of get Velvet Prison Syndrome. And sometimes you can forget, like, I guess chicks would say, like, I'm still that bitch. I'm, you know, I've still got that capacity. Sometimes we forget. Yeah, I think one of the strongest frames that has got me through those harder times is that this is the story I will one day tell. And so it just, like, almost the more bad things that happen, And it's like the more epic the story becomes.

Starting point is 00:07:27 And so, I mean, in the main beneficiary of the stories that we tell is ourselves, because we're the, we're the, the giver and the receiver of most of the stories. By percentage of stories told, we are the biggest receiver of the stories. And so I think that's actually been, I think just such a powerful frame for, like, of course this terrible thing will happen. And like, doesn't that make the story so much better? Yeah. What's cool is, I think, when you say we're talking in narrative, story, personification,

Starting point is 00:07:51 arc, heroes journey, it all sounds kind of wishful. in a way, mythological, irrational, or symbolic, but that's the way that humans' brains work. We work in story, and even if it's not strictly the way that the neuroscience behind how the medial prefrontal lateral cortex works

Starting point is 00:08:18 in order to make us a tougher person, if you are the kind of person that tells yourself the story, that you're the kind of person that can get through this, That is functionally exactly what you're chasing. Like, what you're after is the story. And by putting that on the front end and going, okay, I'm just going to keep on building stories

Starting point is 00:08:36 that I'm going to refer back to in future, I think you're actually being more direct than if you were trying to take a more rational view of exactly how behavior is put together. Like, the story is the rational view of how your behavior and your identity are put together. There's a lot there. I think, like, with the neuroscience

Starting point is 00:08:56 and the brain labeling and all that stuff, I have no idea. So that's, that's above my pay grade. But yeah, I just think about all of our, all of our behavior is just in aggregate. We do what we've been rewarded for doing. And it doesn't mean we get a cookie. It could also mean the bad thing goes away. There's a lot of different types of reward. And so if we remember a story, so like let's say you have that story of you went through this hard thing and then you survived, then it basically serves as a reminder of the reinforcer of the behaviors you did to get through it. And so it's almost like with a kid who's smaller, if you're like, hey, remember last time you did this, you got ice cream. If you remind them of that reward, then they're

Starting point is 00:09:36 more likely to repeat the behavior. And so I think we basically use that narrative as a reminder to, in the short term, increase the relative value of a reinforcer. And so if we think about what is motivation in general, that's functionally what you're doing if you motivate someone. Like if you sell someone something, for the short term, you increase the relative value of a specific reinforcer. You didn't wake up wanting to buy Cologne, but you see an ad, and for the short period of time that the ad goes on, it increases the relative value of smelling good. And so as a result, it changes your behavior, and then you buy. And so I think stories function in that same way, where we use them to motivate ourselves in the short term to do the desired behavior that might be less comfortable

Starting point is 00:10:16 in the short term, but we're reminded about the larger reinforcing event that we had in the past. How many people do you think are doing hard things publicly in order to not need to feel? face the lack of capacity they have to do hard things privately? I don't know them, so I don't know, to be honest with you. That's my honest answer. I don't know. I think some people really do hard things, and what they capture online is a fraction and what they really do. And I think there are people who 100% of the hard things they do are online, and they're

Starting point is 00:10:44 not even that hard. Yeah, and they're not even that hard because they've got a squad of people behind them. Like, I think there was a meme around this for a moment. I was like, but you had a camera there. It's like, the girl collapses because of crazy news or something like that. It's like, but you had a camera there. And so there's just this, you know, this element of, you know. Mistrust, performative nature.

Starting point is 00:11:07 Yeah. Yeah. The three-step process of how to win. Number one, realize no one is coming to save you. Number two, take responsibility for your current position. Number three, be willing to sacrifice who you are for who you want to be. I think that those three is really all about power. in the realization, so the, probably in sequence, probably the first one should come first,

Starting point is 00:11:35 which is you own everything. It's like, okay, if I own everything, then you could still hope that someone saves you, but it still relies on someone else to change your condition. And so it's like, okay, I own all these outcomes. I'm not going to rely on someone else to change my condition, but you're still there, which means you have to take the third step, which is that I have to sacrifice, they have to give up something in order to get something else. And I think where people actually stay stuck the longest in their careers from an entrepreneurship perspective or just from a personal development perspective is the trades that we are unwilling to make is basically the desire to have everything at the same time. And the easiest analogy I have is like it is totally

Starting point is 00:12:16 reasonable to want to have a mountain view and to be on the beach and be walking distance from a whole foods. But you probably will not find a place that has all three of those. because they are all apparent contradictions or, you know, apparent odds. And so they're, but so, so what happens is we just stay in this paralysis of indecision because we feel like all paths are settling. And I think there's this movement or narrative around like never settle and things like that. But people mistake never settle for never make trades. And so we have this obsession with optionality or optionality maxing. But options are only valuable when taken.

Starting point is 00:12:58 And so when we never take the option, which means we don't cash in the option that we have available, like some options need to be taken. And when they are taken, other options disappear. Because just having maximum potential does not mean maximum reality. Because you need to commit. You have to commit, which is the elimination of alternatives. And so, like, there, I mean, show me anything that was worth doing that did not require commitment, which is an elimination of alternatives, a tradeoff.

Starting point is 00:13:24 And so in the beginning of our lives, when we're younger, we are praised for maximizing our potential, right? How can we have as many colleges accept us? How can we have all the best grades? How can we have all the paths in front of us? But I think many people know people who are really successful earlier on by for maximizing potential, but not realizing potential. And I think the gap between the maximization of potential and the realization of potential

Starting point is 00:13:51 is the commitments that we're willing to make, which is the trades, the elimination of the alternatives, when we have to start cashing those options in and realizing that some of them are never going to come for fruition because we could only have one life and some of those trades are permanent. You can only not have a kid until you have a kid. And then at that point, you have a kid. Right. There's no going back, right? You know, some decisions in life don't have refunds. And I think that is what I would say maybe in the earlier part of my career, especially single guys, because I think a lot of that's like really prevalent in social media right now. It's just options maxing. but we just even even in the attempt to options max you still close off other options which is that

Starting point is 00:14:33 like you will not have the benefits of let's say a committed marriage early on because you've kept your options over right and like you will not have the benefits of like a very large business if you try to pursue five or don't pursue any because you want to not make commitments and so I think that commitment is actually a really strong signal for maturation and growing up lots of mistakes were made by standing still. People think that inaction isn't a decision, but it is. Totally. I mean, your conditions change through an action still.

Starting point is 00:15:05 Like, doors close. There are moments where you have opportunities where you have to act or they will go away. And so I think it's like being able to seize those opportunities, and that means that you have to actively say no to something that you might want or might want a lot. And I think those are the traits that we, I think being willing to make those tradeoffs clearly, and trade them for the things that you want more, is how people can progress through life and get more of what they want.

Starting point is 00:15:31 The pain of having to accept trade-offs holds a lot of people back. 100%, and then they end up getting nothing. And I honestly think that is at the crux of why so many people are not realizing any potential at all, is because they are unwilling to make any trade and then make the biggest trade at all. How do you think about overcoming that decision paralysis,

Starting point is 00:15:51 lots of good options in front of you, spent a lot of time trying to maximize surface area of available options. And it's insane to say, but it's functionally true for humans that more options make you more miserable, not happier. Super true. And also, we probably know someone, I mean, I can think of people off the top my head that didn't have many options, but the option that they had was very clear. Like, this guy is a super nerd and just loves coding, and it was very clear straight on. And so there was a lot of things that weren't available to him physically, probably wasn't going to be the sports star, maybe even in super great shape.

Starting point is 00:16:29 But it was almost like that path was predetermined. But then when you fast forward, it's not like they're less successful. It's that because they just already knew what they were going to do, they got to start pulling the future forward down the one path and start walking. And so there's, again, this fetishization of having options and seeing that as a proxy for status when the reality is that they're all blank checks. you haven't cashed any of the men. And so I think the original question is to like, people get stuck because they don't know what they want.

Starting point is 00:17:01 And I define what you want by what you're willing to sacrifice to get something. Take responsibility for your current position. What's that mean? It's identifying yourself as source. And to be clear, it doesn't mean that like your position in reality is 100% because of you.

Starting point is 00:17:19 But from a, so this is a validity. this is a invalid but useful, more useful way of going through life, which is that it absolutely might not be your fault, but it is still your problem. Since you are the only one who you can influence directly, then you are the one who is source. And because, like, you could still be correct in saying that, like, because I insert grievance, insert, you know,

Starting point is 00:17:40 trauma, insert genetic predisposition, insert zip code I was born in, or language or poverty level or whatever it is, all of those things could be true. and yet you still have to take action as the only source that can change it. No one's coming to save you. Yeah, which goes back to the first one.

Starting point is 00:17:58 The interesting thing about no one is coming to save you also means no one is coming to stop you. I think some people might. I think actually as soon as you start, I think the lobster or crab analogy in the bucket is so true. I actually think that the hardest, I mean, I think for me again, like the hardest part of entrepreneurship

Starting point is 00:18:20 was the first set of friends that you have to relinquish. Because once you do it the first time, you realize that you will still survive, you'll still make it through, you'll find new friends. But like in the first time, it's sacrificing everything you've known and loved for something that you've never experienced and hope will happen and have no idea if it actually will. So the cost is known. The payoff isn't. And that is why I think it is the riskiest and why so many people struggle to make the job.

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Starting point is 00:19:36 and using the code modern wisdom, a checkout. The world will reward you in proportion to your courage, not your intellect. The most dangerous person in the world is the one who continues to show up every day even when the rewards are not guaranteed. Your potential is determined by the amount of uncertainty you're able to tolerate and how long you can tolerate it for. You can beat 99% of people if you can master the shame of rejection,

Starting point is 00:20:00 the burden of repetition, and the pain of feedback. I was asked, if you could transfer only one trait to your son, what would it be? And I really thought a lot about it, and I was like, all the traits, what I would transfer? And I think it's courage. because if you don't have courage, nothing else matters.

Starting point is 00:20:25 Like you can't take any action, you can't do anything worth doing, you can't stand for anything because you have no courage. And so I think that's why it's so much more preferable to be a failure than a coward. And I think that I would hope that I could transfer just that lesson and try and reinforce as many times as I can in his upbringing that like,

Starting point is 00:20:49 you have to, you have to take jumps and you have to lose and you have to be willing to lose and then realize that losing doesn't actually make you a loser because losing is the, is the first signal on the path to winning, but like not playing is the actual signal for a forever loss. What is courage to you? Good question. I needed to find it better. being willing to take action where there's a large short-term cost with an uncertain delayed benefit.

Starting point is 00:21:42 So if you want to start a business and you think that you're going to get made fun of or snide remarks or like, oh yeah, you're doing your podcast thing again. Oh yeah, don't miss out, right? You know, don't miss Friday night because you're big podcast. You know you're going to suffer that short term. That's a known cost. And then the payoff is delayed and uncertain. Like, not only will it come later, if it were guaranteed, if you knew you were going to make a million dollars doing a podcast, then you'd be like, whatever, fuck it. Like, it takes significantly less courage.

Starting point is 00:22:18 But I think it's the fact that it is unknown and delayed. So you basically have to be willing to get kicked in the nuts. and multiple times and sometimes for extended durations before the hope that you will get something. But I think the only way to get through that kind of kicked in the nuts period for however long it's going to be is realizing that you have two paths, one that is guaranteed, which is that the breath you're currently on will not get you where you want to go.

Starting point is 00:22:48 And the other path, it is not guaranteed to get you where you want to go, but it's the only one where you have a shot where you do. And that's where your potential is determined by the amount of uncertainty you're able to tolerate and how long you can tolerate it for. And I think that also goes to the bigger the games we play, right? The longer the game you play, the bigger the game you play. And so if you want to create rockets that go to the moon, you have to be able to deal with uncertainty for just an absolutely absurd amount of time compared to most humans on any endeavor. There's a line at the end, pain of feedback. I'm interested in that.

Starting point is 00:23:20 I mean, rejection hurts, failing hurts. And I think when you give it your all and then the market, society of the universe, whatever, determines that you are still not enough. That is very painful. I think that in time you learn that feedback is fuel rather than failure. And once that new association gets paired, I mean, you've had plenty of very. incredibly successful people in this podcast. And I would say many of them have the same kind of, I would call it lesson as like it's not, it's not failure, it's feedback or it's not failure. But it just means that like fundamentally they have a different pairing for losing. And so everyone has to go through this because like losing is good and feeling bad about losing is good because it forces you to change. And that change means that over time as long as you're changing in the correct direction, you get better. Or else you would continue to do the strategy that caused you to lose last time and you would just run it back again.

Starting point is 00:24:27 And this is why I have this like, I thought on the way over here, I was thinking about this. And like, I think one of the big losses or failures of society right now is that we are trying to castrate the teeth from the pain of loss. We're trying to not allow kids, people, the feeling to feel bad. It's like we have discerned that feeling bad is bad But feeling bad is not bad Feeling bad is a signal So that we need to change

Starting point is 00:24:59 Because if no one feels bad ever Then it means that everyone is doing what they want to do All the time And that is not how a functioning society works Sometimes people do stupid shit And need to know and feel bad for it Eventually reality is going to come into contact With your decisions

Starting point is 00:25:13 Yes And the more that's put off The less likely you are to come up with a way To avoid that reality coming into reality And so the way that, you know, right now what's going, and this is probably the more frightening part about like some of the media that's out there is like trying to just redefine reality and create a fantasy where you losing and you feeling bad isn't true. But it doesn't change reality. It just changes someone's perception of it for the short term. And then they have to pay reality back with interest in time.

Starting point is 00:25:42 And like the check always comes due. It's just like the interest is much bigger. And so in light of, you know, my son, my child that I have in the future, like, I want him to experience the pain of loss so that he can learn. Because like, how else can you learn? You have to. Otherwise, it's just, it's everything's quote, you know, going by feeling.

Starting point is 00:26:05 And then also somehow thinking that feeling bad is bad. And also that feeling good is good. And there's tons of things that you can probably do that feel good that are not good. And there's tons of things that you can do that feel bad that are not bad. Well, what a gift to give somebody to say you can feel bad and not feel bad about it. Yeah. And that's okay. Like, you lost.

Starting point is 00:26:29 What will we learn? What will we do next time? Great. Do it again. That feels like resilience. Yeah. As opposed to any time that you feel this emotion, which is negative, that is worthy of rushing in and panic and control and distance. That's almost like a formula for fragility.

Starting point is 00:26:47 So laddered onto this, I know we haven't talked about also, this is fun, is the idea that we need, like, that because you feel bad, it means that the path that you're on, like, you need to change something. And so it's equal opposite, which is like, okay, if we know that we're on the path getting kicked in the nuts right now, and I know I'm on my 17th or 100th podcast and I'm still not like a millionaire yet, I have not achieved what I want yet. It does not mean that I have to change. course. But earlier on, he said that bad feelings, feeling bad, are important to update the way that you're approaching this situation. So how do you distinguish between the two? No, and that's, and I'd say what you, what you hit on is, is the crux of it, which is judgment, which is like, and this is one of the hardest ones is like, how do you help someone recognize patterns of when you need to, basically, it's the eternal question of when do I push and when do I pivot, right? When do I push through the hardship versus when do I adjust? Am I giving up on

Starting point is 00:27:49 this set in the gym because I'm being a pussy or am I giving up because I'm about to injure myself. Yeah. And so I've got pivot. I like that. Yeah. And I've and I've worked with this a lot because it's a pretty classic entrepreneurship issue of like, do I have product market fit or like do I need just keep pushing? You know, like, you know, like, you know, where am I just trying to push up the hell? Is that if one of the fundamental assumptions that you begin your quest with has been proven untrue based on the feedback, then that is where pivoting makes sense. So if you said like, I think that I'm going to create a doggy skiing. because I think that a lot of dog owners will want to buy skateboards for their dog.

Starting point is 00:28:24 We'd be like, and I believe that the percentage, like, and I wouldn't make a, you know, a billion dollars doing this. That would mean that there's this size of the market. This percentage needs to be the take rate in order for me to get that market share. It's like, okay, if I talk to a hundred dog owners and none of them want to buy my doggy skateboard, I would not say that is a push situation. I would say that is a pivot situation because our fundamental assumption that we started this quest with is for false. And so we need to take that feedback and then pivot. If as we're going through, they're saying, uh, maybe, but like, I don't know what you have in your hands. What the hell is that?

Starting point is 00:29:00 So it's like the assumption is not proven, but it's more of an execution issue. And so it's like, okay, I just need to get better. I need to push through. But it's like, it is definitely one of the harder, um, lines to, to know, like, where, when should I push, when should I pivot? Uh, what lesson do I learned from losing. Because losing teaches you shit, and we just need to make sure that we learn the right thing. Like teaching will occur. Yes. Whether you take it away or not is up to you.

Starting point is 00:29:30 It's the, I hired my first employee and he was a fuckass. Therefore, all employees suck. Right. So like losing will teach you something. It's just want to make sure that we learn the right lesson. I feel like this is a justification for making early decisions as right as possible. 100% to try and avoid that PTSD of it's far easier to learn something than it is to unlearn something, probably 100 times easier to learn something than it is to unlearn something.

Starting point is 00:29:57 If you've drilled a particular habit, a particular bad habit, if you have come up with a mode of interacting with your employees or the world, because all of your employees, the first three employees, you get all of them fucked you over, and then finally get to the fourth. You have to unlearn all of the compensatory mechanisms that you built on the first three. now that you've got someone who's worthy of that and you're restricting their progress, you're slowing everything down,

Starting point is 00:30:18 you're being hypervigilant, it doesn't feel like a good place to work, try and make your early decisions right. Yeah, changing a behavior with a long history of reinforcement is harder than changing one with no history. It's such a hardcore behaviorist. Yeah, well, I mean, it's the only thing

Starting point is 00:30:33 that's made sense to me in the world. Like, it's, I mean, it's the skin upheld. I mean, it's just, I don't even, it's just, my reality, so I'll say differently, like many people do not get what they want. They look up with their lives and they're like, this is not what I want. And so if you don't have what you want, it means that the model that you view the world through is incorrect, or you have the correct model and the incorrect variables or insufficient variables.

Starting point is 00:31:01 It's basically all it is. And so for me, the more I have looked purely at inputs and outputs, the more I've gotten my predictions correct. And so I have been super reinforced for using this style of thinking. And so I do it more. And so it's just, and like, I read some of my old stuff and I'm like, oh man, like I could have said this

Starting point is 00:31:24 in half as much words if I, now, because it's understanding why. Like at the most basic level, it's just understanding why. I'll give an example. And I think this is why the vast majority of the world walks around confused, which is, I don't have what I want.

Starting point is 00:31:38 That didn't go the way I expected. She took that worse than I thought. So you're constantly surprised by reality. And so in a simple sentence, like Johnny stole because he's dishonest, right? Most people would nod their heads and be like, yeah, Johnny stole because he's dishonest. But we say, what does dishonest mean? Dishonest means it's a label, right, that we ascribe to somebody who does a series of different behaviors, one of which is stealing.

Starting point is 00:32:02 And so if we were to restate that sentence with a broken down definition, it would then be Johnny stole because he's the type of person who steals. which is circular and makes no sense. Because the real reason that Johnny Stoll is because he's been reinforced for stealing in the past or he saw someone who got reinforced for stealing and then modeled their behavior. That is why Johnny Stoll.

Starting point is 00:32:22 And so because of that basic misunderstanding, most people have these words that they use to explain the reality that they don't actually understand and as a result, reality fools them more often than it should. He was rewarded for it or he was punished for doing the opposite of it. Exactly. And so that basic, that like,

Starting point is 00:32:37 And that, what I just explained is the difference between description and explanation, which is relatively heady and I think difficult sometimes to grasp, but is at the most basic level like my worldview. This is what happened. This is why it happened. Why? Yeah. And so from that one kind of basic understanding, everything else can kind of pretty much get laddered up. And so said differently, if I wanted to tell a child, get good. at basketball, right? I would not tell him get better at basketball because a five-year-old would be like,

Starting point is 00:33:19 I don't know how to do that. What does that mean? So I'd be like, okay, well, let's break it down. We've got dribbling, passing, shooting. Okay. Do that a little bit closer, but they still probably don't know how to. If I say, go get better at dribbling, passing, and shooting. Still can't do anything with that. Until eventually, I'd be like, okay, passing. So I want you to take a step with your left foot towards the person and I want you to extend your elbows and finish with your thumbs down. And if the ball goes towards them in the direction that they're running and they catch it, you've passed successfully. And then I would repeat that chain of events until eventually they would understand that that chain of behaviors equals passing. If they do it a lot and they hit the target

Starting point is 00:33:52 many times, they would be good at passing. We'd repeat that all the way down until they're good of passing, dribbling, shooting, et cetera. And then eventually we'd describe them as a good basketball player. But that basic unbundling and re-bundling of terms is why I think the vast majority people are wildly confused by what's going on around them. Is that someone says, why don't you love me? And he's like, what are you talking about? He's like, I pay the bills, I take out the trash. Like, you know, like, what do you want for me? And she says, like, you don't tell me I'm pretty. You don't hug me. Like, you don't listen to me when I, when I, you don't ever ask me how my days going. And it's because for her, she defines love in these behaviors and he defines love

Starting point is 00:34:33 in these behaviors. And so then they fight forever rather than just saying like, what does that mean? What does that mean? We had two employees that were arguing about something at acquisition. And one was like, hey, can you? I would be fine if you were just like kind and polite to me. And I was like, okay, what does that mean? And there was obviously a moment of like hesitation there because it's like, okay, so you want the other person to guess what you think in your mind means good behavior, but you've never articulated it, and so you want them to guess and somehow get it right.

Starting point is 00:35:03 And so finally, it just was like, can you ask more questions rather than making more statements? And the other person was like, yeah, sure. It's like, great, but that basic thing now, and they're fine now and everything's great. And so, but like this is why I view the world and behavior because I have wanted things, but I didn't know how to get them,

Starting point is 00:35:22 which happens in reality. And so as long as I live in reality, I prefer to define things through reality. And then reality tends to behave far more as I predicted it would. Before we continue, most people in their 30s are still training hard. Their protein is dialed in. They sleep better than they did in their 20s. Discipline is not the issue. But recovery feels somewhat different.

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Starting point is 00:36:43 and using the code modern wisdom at checkout. That's timeline.com slash modern wisdom at checkout. On the, I want you to do this, but I didn't tell you, it's that Neil Strauss line, unspoken expectations, a premeditated resentment. Right. Why didn't you do this thing that I didn't tell you to do? Yeah, probably not deliberately, because I think a lot of people do it not on purpose. Of course, but it's an unconscious premeditated resentment. The investment that you are making will be a resentment in future that you aren't aware is about to come about. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:37:17 Another thing on the people's map of reality is inaccurate. I think one of the most obvious realizations that you can have when you hear somebody who complains a lot is that their framework of reality is incorrect. Oh, by a mile. A complaint is you saying, why is reality not delivering that to me which I anticipated? And reality doesn't care. Reality is just going to continue to deliver to you that which it is giving. why is there all of this traffic on the way to work? There shouldn't be all of this traffic.

Starting point is 00:37:49 I didn't anticipate all of this traffic. I assumed there wouldn't be traffic. Reality disagreed with me. Reality is not wrong. It's undefeated. Reality is undefeated. It's a million and O. A million TKOs.

Starting point is 00:38:06 So this is really, I mean, I can talk about this as long as you want, you know this. So what this becomes really interesting is how often this misconception of reality causes people to get fooled and keep the wrong people in their lives and keep sometimes the right people out of their lives. And so I call this malicious benefit or well-intentioned harm. And so on one hand, if there are a number of people who make, let's say, negative videos about you. They intend to harm you. But when you look at your

Starting point is 00:38:52 media and the way that you are compensated through the impressions that you earn and the amount of relevance that you have, you make more money. And so though they intended to hurt you, they have taken their time and effort, which you normally have to pay people for, and then for free, promote you. What a gift. It just means that they are incompetent at doing harm, which is wonderful. You want all your enemies to be incompetent in their harm doing. On the other hand, you have somebody who loves, I'll use this in quotes, right, loves you, means you well, but is also incompetent. And as a result, whenever they enter your life, your life gets worse. They cause negative consequences to occur. And so a lot of people care a huge

Starting point is 00:39:39 amount about intention. And this was one of the larger shifts that I think happened in my alcohol career, but just my life, was completely stripping people of their intentions and only looking at their outputs. And that made navigating relationships significantly easier for me because it allowed me to remove the noise from the signal of the person. And so there are some people, like I mean honestly the reason that one of the this is like probably the very beginning of this kind of thought change was with Layla like I had an advisor if you want to call that at the time and I was like I'm not sure if I want to marry this girl I don't you know help me you know make this decision and he said well just look at your stats he's like are you better shape and I was like well yeah you know she eats healthy

Starting point is 00:40:28 and she goes to the gym so you know I go with her and he's like okay um so you're you're exercising more you're eating better okay are you drinking as much as like no she actually really doesn't drink I like drinking. I'm probably a bad influence. He's like, okay, so she decreases this kind of negative thing. Okay, got it. And he's like, what about what about business? So I was like, oh, I'm making more than ever made. And she's helping me do that. And he was like, okay. And so he just went down the list of all these different kind of components in my life that I could measure. And he's like, it seems like your life significantly better with this person in it. And when I contrast that to some of the call it relationships I had in the past, it was almost the opposite. Like, I would get into the relationship and all of a sudden,

Starting point is 00:41:04 I like, I wouldn't work out as much. And I wouldn't eat as healthy. And I would go out more. and my business would suffer. And so, like, all the things that I cared about would go down. And so even though I don't think that person had any malicious intent, I think they had good intent, but they had well-intentioned harm. And so that lens has helped me make so many decisions in a way that removes a lot of the emotional weight behind them, which is like, oh, I absolutely believe that you are a well-intentioned person.

Starting point is 00:41:30 I was like, I just think you're very incompetent at doing good for me. Like, you do not have the skill to help me. I'm not prepared to be the collateral damage of your good intentioned errors. Yes. As you spin around trying to give me a hug but by accident punch me in the face. Yes. You're driving down the street and because you didn't mean to but weren't paying attention, you ran somebody over. Functionally, the difference between that person being dead because you didn't mean to because you were texting on your phone or because you're a bad driver and you swerving off the street to hit them, the outcome is the same.

Starting point is 00:42:05 And this is something that our society actively disagrees with. Because if we look at how our laws are written, we try to tease out intention and we change punishment and consequences based on intention. Is that not important to a degree? It can be. But I'm just more saying, I'm not saying should or shouldn't, but I'm saying in terms of how you navigate getting what you want out of life, if you were the one who got hit, you're dead either way.

Starting point is 00:42:30 And so when n equals one, I would look at the signal, what happens rather than the intention a hundred times out of 100. Is there any space? It sounds like for as long as this person in my life benefits me, it's good to keep them in the moment that they stop benefiting me, then I get rid of them to some people that would come across as a very transactional view of relationships. I think it assumes a binary of benefit, not benefit. And most people have many things that they do.

Starting point is 00:43:03 Like let's say somebody, let's say you're like, I'm married to something. somebody. What happens when that person stopped serving me? Well, it's very unlikely that tomorrow someone goes from, I help you in these hundred ways, do I either hurt you or help you in zero? It's more common, more likely that you had 100 ways, and now 10 years later, they help you 70 ways, and maybe 10 years later, they help you 40 ways. But if you're at least cognizant of the hundred ways that that person helps you, then it allows you to articulate, hey, when you do these things, it helps me a lot. It would really mean a lot to me. Reimforcement again. Yeah. I mean, and, and,

Starting point is 00:43:35 And I appreciate that. Yes. But like in different terms, I was going to put my Chris hat on. It's just good communication, right? Like, how do I know what you want until he's telling me? And I think that people say what you just said, which is people would see this as transactional. And then I would say, and, yes, and, why is this wrong? Why have you decided that having an exchange is incorrect?

Starting point is 00:44:03 It's how society works. All of capitalism, which is the best societies have been built on exchange. volunteer exchange. I think some people would feel icky about applying that exchange capitalism dynamic inside of friendships and intimate relationships. I think that exchange happens either way. They just don't want to say it.

Starting point is 00:44:19 If you have a friend and you are like, oh, we're right or die, it means you have a long history reinforcement, which means you have a long extinction curve. It just means that you've been reinforced many times for this friendship, which means that you're willing to deal with blips. But the amount of blips that you're willing to do with is proportional to the history of reinforcement.

Starting point is 00:44:36 If someone new comes into your life, and has almost done nothing good and then does a blip. You don't have as much ballast in the system. Exactly. You have no reason to. So the whole, the basically extinction curve is functionally just how long you're willing to hope that the good thing comes back. You probably should have a degree of recency bias though. Oh yeah, because if the person's behavior is changed.

Starting point is 00:44:54 Yeah, for sure. Yeah. It's going to be, it's always discounted. Someone that was 50% a good guy and 50% an asshole. Yeah. The 50% that is closest to you is more salient than the 50% that started 10 years ago. Oh yeah. If it was front half, back half,

Starting point is 00:45:07 100%. And honestly, and this is like, I think this is super relevant for a lot of people. Like, people do change. And that's okay. And you can be friends with the person they once were and no longer friends with the person they are. And that's okay. Mark Manson dropped this unreal line that reminded me of you. Do hard shit. Not because it's fun, but because the win actually means something. You bled for it. You broke for it. You earned it. Easy wins are forgettable. Hard ones change you. That's the point. And it's your line. Everything is hard and no one cares.

Starting point is 00:45:47 I'm sorry accomplishing your dreams wasn't fast, easy, and risk-free. Like, they wouldn't be dreams if they were. And you wouldn't call them wins if they were easy. Because they would just be you tying your shoes. And what it was once a win when you were five is no longer a win when you're competent. and with increased competence comes increased stakes. You have to be willing to bet more, put more on the line to win bigger, which means like if you're a billionaire playing $10 hands of poker is a complete waste of time.

Starting point is 00:46:18 Gabe from I prevail, the drummer from I prevail. You will always think you suck. That's okay. It's okay to suck compared to your standards as you grow. So will your standards. That doesn't mean you actually suck. They could just be the actuality of sucking versus the perception of sucking. Correct.

Starting point is 00:46:40 It's that as you increase in capacity, you increase in standards. And given that your standards will always outstrip your capacity, there will always be this felt sense lack between where I am and where I want to be. But yeah, that Mark Manson line, I think, is really important in sort of an era of AI because you can speed run or shortcut getting the outcome without putting in the requisite inputs. Now, because everybody's obsessed with leverage and trying to get as many outputs, from as few inputs as possible, that does make sense. But when you begin to fully detach it from it

Starting point is 00:47:14 and you don't focus on the journey that got you there in the same way and you're not scrutinizing the outputs with the same level of finitude and resolution. Because it was lower cost. Yes, yes. And it's not just the outputs that matter. It's not just the output. And this is where the sort of leverage crowd doesn't fully come into reality.

Starting point is 00:47:37 It doesn't come into contact with the way that humans are. telling themselves the story of their life, if you could come up with some sort of super quick code that would write 100 million dollars leads for you, the entire project would feel different, your process of getting that. It could be word for word the exact same. Take every word that I've written

Starting point is 00:47:59 and create this book based on this brief. Dink. I would prove that AI knew a lot about leads, but not me. And I think that, I mean, I think this, This sits at the discrepancy between saying the output of your life is who you become and the aggregate set of behavior that you've learned over your life, or if the output of your life is the stuff that exists as a result of you being here.

Starting point is 00:48:27 And that is more of a philosophical question than I think it is a right or wrong. I think you can make arguments for either side of like the purpose of your life is what changes as a result of you being here. What you did or who you became. Yeah. or the purpose of your life is all of the outside only existed to change the inside.

Starting point is 00:48:44 And I think there's arguments for both. I would say I have strong affinity towards both definitions because I would say that when I go through harder times, I lean more towards like, this is happening for me. And when I'm going through easier times,

Starting point is 00:48:58 it's like, I am happening to it. Yeah, yeah. I'm happening to reality. But the binary of that. Yeah. Seeing it is only one or the other, will create a kind of fragility. If all that you're focused on is outcomes,

Starting point is 00:49:13 then you're never going to think about becoming the person who can generate those outcomes because you're going to find shortcuts that don't necessarily work. And if you're only ever focused on inputs, you're never going to actually work out if all of this suffering amounted to anything. Show me some... George in the house last night was reading one of these books,

Starting point is 00:49:29 and he wasn't happy with the way that the author had put together the sentence. And he says, show me something I can drop on my foot. That was his line. I can't drop anything on my fucking foot with this. Show me something I can drop on my foot. There's wishy-washy, vague language.

Starting point is 00:49:46 Do you remember the park bench scene in Goodwill Hunting? No. I haven't seen it long enough ago, yeah. Sat on a park bench, Robin Williams talking to Matt Damon about love. And he has this line. He says, love is an active commitment, Will. It's a choice to value someone else's well-being as much as your own. If you watch the film, you'll know that he doesn't say that.

Starting point is 00:50:07 He says this instead. You wouldn't know about sleeping sitting up in the hospital room for two months because the doctors could see in your eyes that the term visiting hours do not apply to you. It's the same thing, same idea, right? Idea, picture, words, and that is the order. Not idea, words, pictures. Show me something I can drop on my fucking foot. That I can drop on my foot.

Starting point is 00:50:41 It's clear language. Both of them. Both of the examples. I think it's interesting because with the drop on your foot, it's like I think the the picture is obviously like more motive and because of that can be more motivating, more persuasive, et cetera, where I think the drop on my foot part where I, like where I have struggled as a human being is taking that idea and saying, I want to do that. I want that type of love. And then saying, well, the person I love is not in the hospital and I don't have the opportunity

Starting point is 00:51:21 right now to sleep standing up and have a doctor know that visiting hours don't apply to me. What do I do? And so then it does go back to what I'm willing to give up in order to maintain something. It's interesting when there isn't that level of pressure. You know, when you brush up against the grain of life, when you're swimming into the stream, it's very easy to see effort because the whole world is bearing down and you said there's an enemy to go up against. I think when things are easy, it's like, okay, well, What does love look like when things are easy?

Starting point is 00:51:55 We talk in relational love? Yeah. I think it's really, well, I'll just say more how I measure it. But I think it's just what you're willing to give up in order to maintain something. And so if I have a relationship and I have somebody that I love a lot, that I'm willing to give up everything, including my life, in order to maintain that relationship. And so, or for that person or for that idea, for freedom for the country.

Starting point is 00:52:22 If you love something a lot, you're willing to give up everything for it. And so when that person asks you to do something or doesn't ask you to do something and you think that they would still like it, then you are willing to inconvenience yourself to a large degree in order to do that. And I think that like the reason this stuff is so valuable for me is that like it allows me to both give the things

Starting point is 00:52:46 that I think the other person wants or that they've told me they want, but also how to differentiate who is using words in order to try and manipulate me. When someone like, dude, you know, I love. you know if it was bromance obviously but then you could say what have you given up in order to maintain this in what way have you inconvenienced yourself in order to maintain this relationship because all of the actions you've taken you've taken out of convenience and this relationship has

Starting point is 00:53:16 been only beneficial for you which is fine there's nothing wrong with that but there will come a time where our needs are at odds and in that situation, I would like to know how reinforcing was all the other stuff so that it is worth. Basically, it's saying, like, how much good was the good for you so that you're willing to deal with some bad? Can that lead to a situation where you almost purposefully try to seek out difficulty in an attempt to stress test relationships? I wouldn't.

Starting point is 00:53:48 Not all relationships should have. The glorious friendship would be seamless between you and another guy, and there's never anything you have to navigate and it's all just beneficial and positive in both directions. I have a friend like that. We've been friends since sixth grade and I don't think we've ever had conflict, which is great and rare. And that's why we're so friends. But no, I think that it's okay for conflict to occur. It's okay for seasons of friendship to end. But you can measure how good of friends you are by how. And I don't know how much inconvenience you might be willing to deal with with me, but we just, it just so happens that we really haven't had any need for conflict or

Starting point is 00:54:29 competition. He's an FBI agent. And so his measures is, like he has zero. There's no jealousy. There's no envy. There's no anything. It's just like, how many bad guys you catch the that? He's like, bro, you got to hear this one. And so we can just, and he's like, you know, then he'll just ask ridiculous questions about money stuff because he just thinks it's funny. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, and that has worked out well. But, yeah. Most people have no idea where their testosterone levels sit. But what if I told you there was a solution? Something that identifies low T faster than a high school bully and it won't cost you all your lunch money. That's where function comes in. Gives you access to over 160 lab tests, including a deep dive

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Starting point is 00:55:50 functionhealth.com slash modern wisdom using the code modern wisdom a checkout you're behind. You're behind because you're in a rush and you're in a rush because you feel behind and you feel behind because you're in a different season than the people you're comparing yourself to. You're not behind. You're just early. Yeah, it's measuring the output difference with without comparing the input difference. I think it's basically it's like, why is it my podcast like Rogans? It's like, okay, well, he's got 10 more year. You would know the answer to that, right? 10 more years and however many more podcasts, more.

Starting point is 00:56:30 And so it's, okay, well, if I were to match that and have done it back in time, would I have the same? Would I be bigger? With the same scale. Yeah, all of that. And so it's comparing outputs without comparing inputs. And I really just think it comes down to that at the most basic level. Now, most of the time you are early, because most people who make that, I would call it error in judgment, are earlier in their current.

Starting point is 00:56:51 careers. And I also don't think there's anything necessarily wrong. Like, a lot of people are like comparisons to the thief of joy. Um, I don't agree with that. I think comparison is how you measure things. Like this, this, this is the discrepancy. Labeling the discrepancy as bad as the thief of joy. Yeah. Comparison in general is how you can know what the discrepancy looks like between what you want and what you have so that you can fix it. So we should compare. Absolutely. You should compare yourself to Rogan. I'm just using you. But like, you know, I should compare myself to Elon. But course I should. so I could look at the massive discrepancy between me and Elon. And that just gives me clarity on what things I need to do to try and decrease that.

Starting point is 00:57:34 How do you think about getting rid of the label of bad? I think that the first action you take when you have not been reinforced for an action, you do through modeling. So, and this is why we do these types of podcasts, I assume, I mean, is that if you haven't done the hard thing or the hard thing that you want to do or taking the bed or taking the risk, we look for other people who have been the penguins who jumped off the edge first. And was there an alligator? Well, no alligators for penguins, but polar bear at the bottom to eat them? Or did they swim and get to the next iceberg and then they found whatever?

Starting point is 00:58:14 So we look at other people. And so modeling is a very real way. It's how you learn everything when you're a child. As you look at what other people do, good things happen to them. Okay, I'm going to do that. And so in the short term, we model the long-term play is that once you take that first step, ideally, you don't get eaten by a polar bear. And instead, you also get a fish, and then you go up and then you get reinforced for that.

Starting point is 00:58:34 And then basically every moment after that is your own experience becomes the loop. But the first jump comes from looking at whatever everyone else does and then takes the jump. Now, where that's so difficult to do is that you're looking what everyone else is doing, or at least the people that you want to emulate, which is, you know, really important. Like, don't listen to people closest to you, listen to people closest to your goals. which is not necessarily same people, often not. I want to listen to them. I want to model their behavior.

Starting point is 00:58:58 But then also still ignoring all of other people. So it's like I'm listening to these people. I'm ignoring these people, but behavior is tough because you're still valuing other people a lot. And so I think this is why so many, I would say, again, I come from the entrepreneur side, but like successful entrepreneurs have a very first principles approach of thinking because at some point,

Starting point is 00:59:18 no one has gone to the moon. And you just have to say, Does physics prevent me from doing this? And then when you reason everything from the ground up, you're able to find discrepancies between what people believe in what's true. And that's obviously where opportunity exists. You're David Deutschpilled with that. Does physics prevent me from being able to achieve this?

Starting point is 00:59:38 If not, then I just need... It's possible. Yeah, it is possible. Yeah, I think one of the reasons that these episodes resonate is that a lot of people who want to do things aren't around people who know, how to do them. And the harder the thing is that you're trying to achieve, the rarer it is to find people who are able to support you in the doing of it and not even just support you, but give you legitimate advice about how to get that. I 100% agree, and this is something that I've, I've struggled a lot with because what gives you the credibility to gain media and attention

Starting point is 01:00:18 is being exceptional in some domain most of the time. And being exceptional on a domain makes to unrelatable. And so it's kind of this very difficult catch-22 where- Credibility and relatability or inverse. Right. And I, but like, to your point, poor people are surrounded by other poor people and then assume that that is everyone. Because it's everyone they know, not everyone that exists, but it's their everyone as far as they're concerned. And I think that's what makes it so difficult in the beginning to get out of that first bubble is because you have to look outside and look at some people who might even appear unrelatable and try and grasp at the straws of their character, their origin story, where, again, people could hear me

Starting point is 01:00:58 say that I slept on the floor, that I didn't have enough money, whatever. But like, they only see me not then. No one's interviewing the gym owner who's sleeping on the floor who's going to someday become something because they don't know yet. That's your one regret, one of the regrets that I have that's the same as yours, which is I didn't track the early journey enough. If anyone is listening to this, I'm not a big advocate of regrets in general, but, But like a behavior that I would have changed that I don't think would have changed the outcome is like document. And you don't have to share it publicly. Just take pictures, take voice notes, email yourself, whatever, whatever catalog you want.

Starting point is 01:01:37 I remember one of the most important personal moments that I had was when I lost everything for the first time. I screenshot on my bank account. So I went from having, you know, six successful gyms to losing all of it and having $1,000 to my name. And I remember looking at my bank account and I was like, wow, that's what the bottom of the barrel looks like. That is, and I hadn't, you know, I seen a number that low in a very, very, very long time. Even in high school I had more than that,

Starting point is 01:02:01 just because I had jobs and I didn't have expenses. And so I screenshot it and it was this very cathartic moment for me because I was like, never again. Like I will not let this happen. And I will have this be part of the story I tell. And I still have that screenshot. I've seen it. Because like, so basically, you want to document it

Starting point is 01:02:21 because you believe that you will be the hero that will overcome. And I think that if you can, if you can really just grasp it, like, just beginning the documentation story, like, even the fact that Kanye had some of those early videos, it's like he believed that he would make it and he believed he would use it. And so I think one of the greatest things you can do is, and it was almost like at that point, like, I, I believed when I took that screenshot that I was going to win. And I did believe I was going to get it back. And so the earlier you can have that realization that, like, I have to document this monster. Otherwise, I won't be able to tell the story. And the story, the receiver of that story,

Starting point is 01:02:53 biggest beneficiary of that story is you. I wish that I'd done the same. I wish that I'd done the same. You know, all the way back in my previous life, there was a period in my placement year. I would have been 20. I was living in Scotland, and one of the problems that you have

Starting point is 01:03:15 with running businesses in events, especially long, single outcome events, is that it's all costs until you finally get to cash in the revenue. And there was a dwindling pot of money that we had because we were putting all of this time in and driving from Edinburgh to Glasgow to Stirling to Dundee to come back to hand out flyers to manage the guest lists to restock the bars with the t-shirts to sell the thing and the event wasn't going to happen for another month and that just

Starting point is 01:03:42 meant it was all output I needed to pay for my gym membership and I needed to eat food and I needed to drive to these different places dwindle dwindle dwindle dwindle dwindle and we're not going to get to withdraw this money until it happens and I had a friend who came to help me hand out flyers because my business partner needed to look after Freshers Week in Newcastle. And I was going to look after Freshers Week across all of Scotland. I had my friend who came up a bit of a rough dude, but nice guy. And he'd grown up in serious poverty in the northeast of the UK. And this was the first time that I was out of money, zero, zero money.

Starting point is 01:04:13 And I could have wrung my parents. And I'm sure that they would have sent me some cash, but I had too much pride. And I felt too ashamed to do it. And there was this moment where we were in this flat and socky hole. street in Edinburgh on the far side of Edinburgh, sorry, Dean Park Road, Dean Park Road on the other side of Edinburgh. And I was saying, hey man, like, we're out of food in the house and I don't know where we're going to get it from. He's like, oh, don't worry, man, I was just go and steal some. And his background, his background from his upbringing was that when you run out of money,

Starting point is 01:04:45 you go and steal food. And I remember thinking, yeah, it's wild. I've got myself to the point in life where stealing food is a realistic decision. And do I want to video my friend Dean, stealing sandwiches from the Tesco around the corner? Probably not. But the fact that that story only exists for me in my mind and then the only way that I can communicate the lessons that I took from it

Starting point is 01:05:13 and the way that it made me feel is by having to go through this retelling. Yeah. Capture shit, especially in the beginning. The worst case scenario is, delete it. Like that's the, I'm just saying for like, what's the downside of doing it? The downside of doing it is that you quote, don't use it and that you delete it. But the, like the upside of having it as an artifact of kind of the stepping stones of who you wanted to become, I think,

Starting point is 01:05:38 is invaluable. Everything looks like luck to the unskilled. Ignore them. Yeah. You have to have skill in order to perceive and recognize skill. You have to have a base. level of skill. Now, you don't have to have the same level of skill as somebody else, but the greater skill you have in any domain, the more you appreciate the skill of somebody who's exceptional. So, for example, if you don't understand the rules of basketball, it's just guys passing a ball around and you don't know who scores or how it works or why they're wearing different shirts. Like, you have no understanding of what's going on. Brazilian jiu-jitsu is a great example of this. No idea. Is that good? Is he, is the guy-

Starting point is 01:06:26 Is he winning? Yeah, who's winning? Right. And then, and then, and the, and the, then the greater your skill, the greater your appreciation for how good someone is at that thing. Like resolution, more dexterity. 100%. And so like for that reason, if people who are around you as you begin to walk up the ascension of beginning to get successful, you have your first signs of life, like, oh my God, this might actually start working. And you get angry, only speaking from experience here, when people attribute the success to luck

Starting point is 01:06:57 rather than effort, the reality is, one, there was probably. some luck. Two, they don't have the skill to recognize your skill. It's a question of competence, not malicious intent. And I think just defining it that way has made it significantly, or made it significantly easier for me to realize. It's like, oh, they, they don't have the ability to recognize what I didn't. Because if they did have the ability to fully comprehend the skill that it took, they would be able to do it too. Mark Manson, James Cleaver, have got an idea that's similar to that, you only envy the lives of people whose sacrifices you cannot see. It doesn't make sense to continue wanting something if you're not willing to do what it takes

Starting point is 01:07:39 to get it. If you don't want to live the lifestyle, then release yourself from the desire. To crave the results, but not the process, is to guarantee disappointment. You only envy the lives of people whose sacrifices you cannot see. Yeah, I love Jimmy Cars. People want what you have, but not what you did to get it. It's just so good. You know, I mean, I, I, I, I think the first time I heard that I was like, fuck, I wish I'd written that. I was on this pod. Yeah. So good. I wish I'd written that. Um, but yeah, and I think, I think part of it is just like, it goes back to what we started with around trades. It's like,

Starting point is 01:08:13 they're just price tags. And you can totally say that something costs too much. Like, that is good. Like, those shoes are nice. They're not worth a billion dollars or whatever that relative. Yeah, to me. And so I think that being able to say, like, I think it is okay to say, something is both good and not worth it. And people have a hard time with that. So they say it must be bad because I'm not willing to pay the price for it. But it's like they might be great shoes. They might not be worth it for you.

Starting point is 01:08:40 But they're still good shoes. I think what particularly hurts is when you as a person who's put a lot of effort in see the price that you paid to acquire a skill and it appears to be dismissed by somebody that doesn't understand it. Or when you buy the shoes and then someone says, I can't believe you bought those shoes. There's no way I would ever do that. And you're like, I know you would never do that. That's why you don't have them.

Starting point is 01:09:01 And it's okay that you don't have them either. I'm not saying that as a judgment on you. It's like, you don't have the shoes. I do. I thought they were worth it. You didn't. And guess what? We both are different people who live different lives.

Starting point is 01:09:12 And so we have stated the obvious. In other news, Shopify powers 10% of all e-commerce companies in the US. They are the driving force behind Jimshark and Skims and Allo and Newtonic, which is why I partnered with them because when it comes to converting browser, into buyers, they are best in class. Their checkout is 36% better on average compared to other leading commerce platforms and with shop pay can boost conversions up to 50%. Basically, you didn't get into business to learn how to code or build a website or deal with the inventory stuff bullshit on the back end. You just want to get down to creating and promoting an awesome product. And Shopify takes all of

Starting point is 01:09:53 the mess off your hands and allows you to focus on the job. You actually came here to do, designing and selling the thing that you love. So upgrade your business and get the same checkout that we use with Newtonic with Shopify. Right now, you can sign up for a $1 per month trial period by going to the link in the description below or heading to Shopify.com slash modern wisdom, all lowercase. That's Shopify.com slash modern wisdom. Avoiding people who make it hard of you to achieve your goals is the highest form of self-care. The fastest way to change your life is to get around people whose minimum standards are your life goals. I violently agree with both of these statements that I wrote. I agree with me.

Starting point is 01:10:33 It'd be great if you didn't agree with you. I was like, whoever wrote that is a fucking idiot. This is at the heart of the, and I was, I wrote that right in the thick of my thinking around malicious goodwill, our malicious benefit and well-intentioned harm. was just I think I had some people around me at that time that had had done me harm and had said but I didn't mean to you know I had good intentions and if you were telling that as the person who was texting and driving to the wife of the person whose husband you killed I don't think I think they are justified and not caring and I think that if that person who continues to drive while texting afterwards because they lack the skill to not drive without texting and continues to run over your spouse or whatever you are justified in removing them from your life despite their good intention and I just think intention as desired result which is like if I my intention was this this is what I wanted to have happen and it's literally

Starting point is 01:11:45 just a lack of competence and competence is incredibly rare so it makes sense to remove many people who are not competent at helping you and either intentions but incompetent yeah and so I think that's why being really clear about like, hey, if you do this, this would help me. This decreases my risk of failure. That would be helpful for me. Makes serving, and I say that like serving you as a friend or as a spouse or as a whatever, you give people the tools to help you. And I think that you should totally do that. If you give some of the tools and then they choose not to help you, then I think you were also justified or it would be rational for you if you value your goals more than you value the relationship to sacrifice their relationship for the goal. And again, we would say which one you love

Starting point is 01:12:31 more by the one that you're willing to give up. The harshest truth every young man must eventually learn is that everyone was always rooting for you. Your parents want you to be a great son. Your wife wants you to be a great husband. Your boss wants you to be a slam dunk higher. Every first date you've ever been on, they've been rooting for you to get laid. Every time you started to tell a joke, people hoped it would have a hilarious punchline. Your proximity to anyone is a reflection of themselves, meaning the deck is never stacked against you and your failures are completely your own. Denzel Rust. I was supposed to say I was like, who wrote that one?

Starting point is 01:13:09 It's all your fault. No one's coming to save you. Sacrifice who you are. But people aren't against you, especially the people that are in proximity to you. People's proximity to you is a reflection of themselves. We hang around with people who we want to be like and who we want to win so that we can be in the collective glory. of it. So this is where the worldview, I think, is super important for me, at least, which is like, we hang around people who've rewarded us for being around them. So either they've

Starting point is 01:13:45 removed stuff that we ate or they give us stuff that we like. And I think where it becomes difficult is where you have competing priorities, where you have multiple things that you like and you want to shift. It's where you begin to change. Basically, your motivating factors start to change, but your environment hasn't. And so what was once reinforcing for you or was once rewarding, no longer is as much. And so this is where people fill this tension between desired of like, this is the life I want to live versus the life that I have. Tradeoffs.

Starting point is 01:14:12 Yeah. I mean, I've given a tremendous amount of thought to tradeoffs, and I really think it comes down to that is that people are just unwilling to make trades. Why? Experientially. Why? Because we want everything. And when we get everything we wanted, we no longer want it because we have it.

Starting point is 01:14:41 And I think there's this amazing comedian. I think his name's Kanan. I'm going to mess it up. But he says, he has this awesome bit on this. It's like more philosophy than comedy. And he says, all the joys in the getting.

Starting point is 01:14:53 He's like, but once you get it, you just have it. He's like, and getting so much better than having. Having is like, but the only thing the worst than having is losing. And then you lose it.

Starting point is 01:15:03 And all you want is to have it again. It's like a two minute bit. And he's like, you know, you don't get kids. You have kids. and he's like, you are have, and that is why you will never be satisfied. But yeah, you only either live in the desire or in the have, and the have is unsatisfactory,

Starting point is 01:15:23 and the desire is always compelling and out of reach. Leila has been talking to me about this more recently, where she's like, you know, the things that make you, us, et cetera, like very good at business is always seeing where things could be better, where things could be improved. And it's this incredible, you said earlier, these habits that have been reinforced, these grooves of behavior that lots of water has run through, right? And being able to live life with two modes, I find incredibly difficult, which is like,

Starting point is 01:15:57 all I am in one part of my life is dissatisfied and seeing the imperfections in what we do. And then the key to satisfaction of life is saying, everything is great, or rather, I accept everything as it is and I do not wish to change it. And I think that conflict is, I would just say just one that I, I, not conquered, just one that I walk through. Is that line about a problem to be managed, not paradox to be solved?

Starting point is 01:16:22 Yeah. Yeah, exactly. It's a, it's a problem to be managed, not a dichotomy to be solved. Yeah. Yeah, I don't, and I think many of these things, like there is no, oh, number 42, that's the answer. Like, that is the answer to this. I think they, we just, we do the best we can.

Starting point is 01:16:37 And I think, again, to the question that the start of the with, which is why do people have such a hard time with tradeoffs, which is that the trades, we don't want to make the trade. We want to be able to date everyone and have the benefits of a committed relationship. And when you begin to walk down one of those paths and see the other ones start fading into the distance, people have an emotional reaction and then they change coercion, then they flip, flat back and forth that tune of these two things, but then they never actually get to realize any of them. Because loss is more painful than gain. If you lose five pounds, it is more painful than finding five pounds.

Starting point is 01:17:15 And that means that you're always going to try and avoid loss as opposed to expedite gain, even if you would be happier by doing that because the pain of the loss is always going to be felt more. And probably short term, long term, as well. Yeah. Bill Perkins has got this line. He says, people will endure years of misery to avoid a couple of minutes of pain. Oh, my God. Yes, incredibly true.

Starting point is 01:17:43 And again, when we think about motivation, it's just that that short-term pain is always immediate, and so it always motivates you not to do it. So you have many motivating operations that are working on us at any given moment. And so even though something is short-term, like, it's funny because many people, obviously there's some people who just love going to the gym.

Starting point is 01:18:05 There are significantly more people who don't love going to the gym the moment they get to the gym. Then you warm up, then all of a sudden you feel good again, right? But there's this period where you're like, I don't necessarily want to go right now. And so you have a motivating operation at all times that is working against your best wishes,

Starting point is 01:18:20 or your best desires. And our goal of motivating ourselves is to tell ourselves those stories so that in the short term, we can overcome the short-term discomfort so that we can get the long-term benefit that we ultimately want, that we know we want, but we're reminded. And the first time you work out,

Starting point is 01:18:36 it only looks like pain. And then we model, we look at somebody else who's already, done it for a long time and so well I want that and so we model that and we borrow that credibility that outcome of the penguin that jumps off the cliff and so like I want the fish so I guess I'll try and do that and then after that the the loop takes over it's like hyperbolic accounting rather than hyperbolic discounting mm-hmm and it happens both ways so like for example if I'm if I want to set an alarm right if I set an alarm at five o'clock for the night before for

Starting point is 01:19:05 four o'clock in the morning I'm going to wake up super early and I'm going to do all this shit right we get the benefit of the idea of our productivity when we set the alarm. But the cost is discounted because it's in the future. But when we have to pay the cost, it's immediate. And so the benefit of hitting the snooze button is immediate. And the cost of getting up is also immediate. And so we hit the snooze button. And so it's like that, I feel like that is the microcosm of humanity of setting an alarm 12 hours before or eight hours before you're supposed to wake up and being like super jacked about it because you only get the benefit and there's no price attached to it. But then in the moment that you have to make the trade, all of a sudden, your priorities

Starting point is 01:19:43 change because the motive operations have changed. Yeah. And the long term benefit of what will happen to your life if you become the sort of person who gets up early is also in future. Mm-hmm. And if you do it a few times in a row, then you tell yourself, I am the type of person does this. And then that becomes a second operation, which can help you overcome the short term.

Starting point is 01:19:59 Like, I'm a big believer in IM statements as motivating operations, meaning, like, I am this type of person. I tend to be really hesitant to say I am statements because I believe they're very powerful in terms of changing behavior. But it's also something that I feel like I listen to a lot when I'm talking to other people. Like, I mean, this happens a lot, especially in dating. The thing about first dates, second dates, you're like, well, I'm a, like, in the first meeting, they'll give you like 20 I am.

Starting point is 01:20:25 It's like, I'm an eat freak. I'm a blah, blah, blah, like they just give you, okay, here's my lattice work of my beliefs about myself. When in reality, all of these things are just shorthand for a number. number of behaviors underneath of it. They're saying, I'm a great at basketball, and I'm also great at swimming, and you're like, whoa, there's so much here. But where it gets difficult is when you need to stop dribbling and start passing. But you said, I'm great at basketball, but I'm supposed to do both, but I actually need to change only one of them. And that's where people get into these

Starting point is 01:20:49 really hard times, which is why I think defining everything at the granular and moving it back up, but being able to go clouds to dirt on these definitions of behavior, allow you to change who you are much more fluidly. Because you understand that the label is actually just that. It's just shorthand. It's not reality. It's just a bucket to make communication easier. If I can't be bothered to describe all of the things that this particular term means. And it would be unreasonable. If I had to say he's a good basketball player, but instead of saying then, I'm like, oh my God, he's really good at taking his right foot and putting it in front, like it would be ridiculous. But you have to understand at that level in order to communicate

Starting point is 01:21:25 really clearly, in my opinion. This tension between excellence and satisfaction is an interesting one. I had this line this year, which was what you are praised for in public, you will pay for in private. A lot of the time, the things that make you fantastic operator when it comes to business and your career often can be totally unadaptive, maladaptive when it comes to the kitchen table. Competing priorities. And like this is, this is such a, this is one that I think, I think a lot about this. Because there is a priority. There is one that you want more. And I think people have all of trouble with that. This is why people who are monomaniacal often get so much further than people that don't. Because even just the thinking cost of managing, navigating the trade ops,

Starting point is 01:22:15 that's why someone asked me basically how monomaniacly should I go after my career? And I said, well, it depends on what phase you're in. But I think it is almost impossible to make a big swing, make big progress in your life without going complete sicko mode for an extended period of time. Yeah, it's about 10 years. I mean, I've just, I think it's like about 10 years. I've just going, um, I'm not going to compromise. Yeah. It's no compromises. It's no, there's this, um, episode in Breaking Bad and the title was, I think, no half measures. And I think it was about whether you punish someone or kill them, but that was the, but I remember watching that episode and the line stuck with me a lot, like no half measures, either do or don't. And I think that

Starting point is 01:23:11 half measures yield null outcomes. Yeah, it's not that you get half results. Yeah. And so what many people are plagued by is they are doing half measures in four domains and have yielded in none. and they feel like they are trying all the time. They're working every hour that they're awake to pursue or serve four different masters. And it's the realization that compromise on one means getting neither. And I think that people have a hard time with that because they're unwilling to say, I want one thing more than another. And I think you just have to be able to say, like, I'm willing to sacrifice this thing,

Starting point is 01:23:57 not forever but for now. Obligation, because of anchoring bias, because of the momentum of where you are now, because of the fear of regretting it. This is where the inaction thing comes back in. People think that inaction has no cost, but it does have a cost. Usually it's higher.

Starting point is 01:24:26 It's like money loves speed, wealth loves time, poverty loves indecision. And if you think about in action, as an action, we are always doing something. Even if you were watching television, you are taking an action. It's just not making, it's not making any progress. Well, maybe you're making progress in a show. Maybe you're making progress in your relaxation.

Starting point is 01:24:57 Maybe you're resting heart rate drops. Like, things are always occurring. And I think it's just whether we are voting with our behavior about, the outcome that we truly want. And most of the outcomes that we truly want happen at a delay, which is what makes them worth wanting, but also makes them equally hard to get. Don't listen to other people's opinions. Friendly reminder that most people are fat, poor pansies, and don't listen to them when they try to deter you from whatever it takes to succeed. The average person will always try to keep you average. It makes sense that if you want to be extraordinary, you will do things that

Starting point is 01:25:36 an ordinary person would see as extra. This is the really hard part that I had to come to terms with. It's that a lot of people want to see you fail because it justifies the risk that they chose not to take. We always have to think about listening to the people who are closest to our goals, not closest to us. We yearn for the approval of many people who don't have lives that we want. And so if they have a specific life, then it means that that is what they think is valuable. And if we don't want what they have, then why would we value their weight on our decisions?

Starting point is 01:26:31 And so it's like you have this, they're like, we have this mold that is my life. Your life no longer fits my mold. And you're like, right, I don't like the pot that that mold made. And so somehow when people state the obvious, which is that you are living your life against my preferences, we somehow feel like that needs to change because when we're younger and growing up, we can't leave. Yeah, you can't leave and you do need to live your life according to your parents' preferences, your teacher's preferences, your classmates' preferences, your principal's preferences. But when you get older, you do have to break the mold and decide what mold you want.

Starting point is 01:27:07 And in so doing, you will be against their preference. And if the vast majority of people have a life that you don't want, then you're going to do things that the vast majority of people don't agree with. I think the average American adult is obese, likely to be divorced and has less than 1K in the bank. And doing what everybody else does sounds like a great idea, but it's actually a reliable route to a life that you're probably not looking for. This is, I feel very passionately about this particular topic because it means that the path to exceptionalism is, is lonely. And loneliness is something that we decry as a society, that there's something wrong with it, there's something bad, there's something wrong with you if many people disagree with you. But success and pursuit of large endeavors is one of those few domains where everyone disagreeing

Starting point is 01:28:13 with you is a signal that you are actually doing something different. Now, sometimes you doing something different is the wrong move. I think Larry Ellison said this. He said, if everyone thinks your idea is stupid, either they're right or you're right. And if you're right, then you're likely to make a lot of funny. I'm loosely paraphrasing. But basically, it's like we have to be willing to do exceptional things in isolation and deal with the pain of rejection. And some of rejection isn't people saying, no, I don't want to buy from you. Some of rejection is people just rejecting your behavior, rejecting who you're becoming, rejecting the choices that you're making. And I think that rejection oftentimes is harder because it often surfaces as

Starting point is 01:29:03 snide remarks, jokes that are demeaning, that have a little bit too much edge to them, like a little bit too much truth. Or even just being excluded, a more silent version of that, not commission, but omission. We won't invite them out. Yeah. You turned up to squash practice. I didn't know it was on. I just thought that, I don't know, do you guys not tell me? Oh, yeah, well, All right, come on, join. Yeah, those moments. And I think those moments are very painful. But you trade those moments for the many moments when you're at home alone,

Starting point is 01:29:38 looking at your life around you and saying, this is not what I want. I don't want to be here. I don't want to be here. I don't want to be who I am. And I don't want to be there with them either. Right. And so it's no man's land. And I think that that is like the beginning of,

Starting point is 01:29:52 of the metamorphosis, the beginning of the transformation? It's the single most powerful idea that me and you have come up with, the lonely chapter, by far, by far. And I think the reason that it speaks to people is that the amount of doubt that you have to endure when doing this for the first time, when nobody around you understands what you're trying to do, when you're actively being discouraged from making changes and you have no promise of glory or success on the other side of it, is one of the most perfect cocktails of pain and discomfort that you can go through.

Starting point is 01:30:22 And this happens on every mountain. So it happens on your first mountain and it happens on your second mountain. Like if you are, you've achieved some level of success that everyone around you deems as successful enough by their standards, not yours. When you pursue the next summit, they then, all of it begins again. The machine begins again. I actually think that for a lot of people, the first big, lonely chapter that they will feel will be after their first success.

Starting point is 01:30:48 Because for a lot of people, the first success is done with. the frame that they're already inside of, they get to the top of it and realize it wasn't what they wanted, and then some people decide to go back down. Maybe some people don't need to go up the first mountain to realize there's somewhere they don't want to be, but for a lot of people, especially people that are driven and pushed toward excellence, I think they actually have to get there within, this was my story, right? Getting one of the biggest events companies in the UK running an organization that is cool and fun. And I, got to define and I was the boss and everybody knew me and there's some wealth and some status and

Starting point is 01:31:25 some freedom and there's goals everybody's telling me that this is something that I should be happy about and satisfied with and for some reason it didn't feel right and the only way to try and find something new is to let go of something that everybody else is telling you as something that you should want local maximums and it's like the further step they can see up the mountain and then when you get to that new local maximum, you have a different perception than they do, and you can see the next peak and they can't. Some people don't need to go up the peak, but I think a lot of people do. Yeah. I wonder if those are different types of lonely chapter. I wonder if there's a different type of a lonely chapter of letting go. I've kind of been, hold that thought. I just, I really wanted to talk to you about the difference

Starting point is 01:32:12 between having fallen off and having never made it. And having fallen off a lot of the time is somebody going from one local maxima to another local maxima that's higher or to a global maxima. Like, sure, some falloffs occur not through choice, but that evolution might be somebody going, my priorities have changed. And you are judging me on the scorecard of the game that I used to play. I'm not bothered about that anymore. Oh, that guy fell off. And I have two completely different thoughts about this.

Starting point is 01:32:47 One is short and then I'll make the longer one. I realized when I was running something a while ago, that when you have no evidence or no proof that you're going to be successful, everyone will ask why you're working so hard. And then once you win, everyone asks why you're working so hard. You know, that was the Mark Manson one that he said, we'll tell you how lucky you are. Oh, is it? And you liked the idea of, no, they just ask you again why you're working so hard. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And it was a funny remix.

Starting point is 01:33:21 Yeah. And it was just a realization that people were literally always going to ask me why I was working so hard or why you were working so hard and why are you pursuing your goals because they're saying that your goals are not the goals that I would pursue and to which you would respond. Yes. The second thing was I was talking to an entrepreneur, at least successful, and they were saying, hey, I really want to dominate my market.

Starting point is 01:33:44 I want to put everyone else out of business, blah, blah, blah, blah. And as somebody who has put people out of business, I will say that it doesn't come with parades and it doesn't come with balloons. And it's not Goliath versus Goliath because by the time you actually beat them into true submission, it's really like a giant beating a child. Because it's almost never a true fair fight. And there are no rules and there is no referee and no one determines you the winner. And so what ends up happening is you get bigger and bigger and bigger. and then they shrink into a relevance, and then you see a Facebook post that says

Starting point is 01:34:19 that they've changed their goals and that they actually discerned that this isn't as important to them as it once was. And I think that, one, that's okay. Two, it's not satisfying at all. Three, when you see the jobs and the employees that actually worked at the company that were just, you know, living their lives

Starting point is 01:34:38 and have kids and all of a sudden, like this idea of this conquest that you're going to beat someone feels significantly less rewarding. That's glorious. 100%. And I used to joke that when losers lose, they change their goals rather than say they lost. And I think it's more that they might have at some point while they began to lose,

Starting point is 01:35:08 maybe it's the first quarter or the second quarter of the game, but down by a few points. They might have some awareness of what it would take in order to win, but they determined at that point that the trade was no longer worth it. And I think that that's okay. And I would say that that has, that is a shift that I've had personally, is that if someone no longer determines that the price is worth it, then amazing, they've made a, they've made a conscious decision. What I would say I advocate against is having that decision made for you because you weren't conscious of the decision being made to begin with and then just basically accepting it. Can vengeance be deranging in that way then? Say again? Convengents be deranging.

Starting point is 01:35:46 For whom? The desire to get one over on this person, it compels you to act in a way which is being puppeted by them in a very odd way. Yeah, they control you. Yeah. The person that you're trying to beat has cajoled you and tempted you into doing something that isn't necessarily in your interests. And then when you do reach the finish line, then never going to say, well, played, man, fair fight.

Starting point is 01:36:16 Yeah, exactly. No one else knows. It's largely just this silent war between you and your projection of them. And to be clear, like, I think that vengeance and revenge can be incredibly motivating. And if the only view that you have is that to get what you want, then use what you have. But I think that the outcome of it of beating a specific person is not nearly as fulfilling as you think it will be. but if along the way you can create good from it, then I think that there's some reconciliation of pros and cons that happens,

Starting point is 01:36:57 of like good stuff happened, bad stuff happened, and is there more good than bad, that we sum up at the end of our lives. But I find it interesting when I think about, when I look at like the oldest, you know, the old wise men that I pay attention to or that I read their dead books or they're dead, the books are alive, it is interesting how much they talk about like the folly of youth and how how how much we value

Starting point is 01:37:20 things that never really mattered to begin with um and how and i try to think like what is that guy going to say about what i'm currently doing and will he approve of it um and i mean to be clear i'm like i always have the answer but i think it it takes the edge off both sides uh on the downside if you do you know have your losses it's like well this this is okay um and on the upside when you do have your winds, you're like, I'm not that important. A lot of this feels to be about the expansion of time, being able to see things on a broader time horizon. Is that fair? Time and space, I think there's the two things that can shrink or expand anything. Right. So like if you zoom in the atoms of this table versus zooming all the way out to the cosmos, all of a sudden, you know, whether two monkeys

Starting point is 01:38:08 are having a podcast that they're recording matters significantly less. And also when we think about the billions of podcasts that get recorded over the next however many years, it shrinks it. It shrinks it. But in this exact moment, this becomes the most important thing that I'm focused on right now. And so I think playing with time and space as ways to cope with hardship is one of the most viable tools that you can have in terms of getting through hard times. To zoom into enjoyment, zoom out of difficulty. That's pain, yeah. Hmm.

Starting point is 01:38:36 Hmm. You can get competent at nearly anything in 20 hours. The problem is, most people spend a decade delaying the first 20 hours. More potential is wasted through an action than in. competence. I saw a TED talk years ago where a guy talked about how he learned how to play the guitar in 20 hours. And that TED talk changed my life, not because I learned to play the guitar, but all of a sudden, complex tasks or seemingly complex tasks felt much, much more attainable. I was like, okay, I might not be the best website developer in the world, but in 20 hours,

Starting point is 01:39:12 I can have a website. And that 20-hour mantra for me has just been like two days at Two full days, two 10-hour days, fully focused. You can pretty much go from zero to not hero, but zero to competent. And when you string hundreds of those 20-hour days together, I think you become incredibly dangerous. We were talking earlier about range, the book. I think being cross-departmental, being cross... Multidisciplinary.

Starting point is 01:39:41 Thank you, disciplinary. Multidisciplinary is hard to calculate how valuable it is, because of the first 20 hours of almost every discipline is probably the biggest most meaningful concepts from that discipline. From not being able to ride a bike to being able to ride a bike. Yes, being able to not read to read, even if you can't read Shakespeare,

Starting point is 01:40:03 but you can read all of a sudden, like, 80%- The world of Shakespeare is now opened up to you. It's just a matter of time before you get that. Yeah. And even if you could never read Shakespeare, the 80% of the books that you can read as a result of a sixth grade reading level is basically more books than you have time to read. and you will get the largest returns from those first 20 hours.

Starting point is 01:40:22 And so there's a very strong argument for trying to collapse the time between wanting something and beginning those first 20 hours. And because the 80-20 of the skills you gain that have utility, like that your usefulness across a huge amount of domains is multiplicative, not additive. So I've said this example before, but like, you know, Jay-Z in the very beginning, it's like he might have had some rhythm or something. And then all of a sudden, he learned how to wrap. And then he learned how to sell.

Starting point is 01:40:52 Now, some people say maybe was sold earlier than that, but I'll just leave it there. He learned how to sell. And then all of a sudden, he learned on a market. And with each of these additional skills, his income didn't go up by like, oh, one plus one equals two. It went, you know, one, well, one's a bad number. So two to the tenth power all of a sudden become significantly greater than what you can do. And so when unsure about what, like, when,

Starting point is 01:41:16 you're not sure what to do, build potential. Because when the opportunity does come, you want to be ready. And so it does make sense in the beginning of your career to maximize optionality. It's just that you have to be willing to trade it in. And so when you're not sure what to do, the logical thing to do is, I don't know what I'm going to do tomorrow, but I'm a good night's sleep. I don't know what I'm going to meet a mate, but I'm going to start getting in shape now. I don't know what I'm going to sell, but I'm going to start building an audience and making content. There's always an argument for, like, If you don't know what to do, there's still plenty of things to do. But the goal is not necessarily to do those things forever. It's to do those things to then use them as the launch pad to get the

Starting point is 01:41:58 thing you really want. The trap is opening up so much optionality without the concordant decisiveness that you end up being trapped. You end up being stuck. Because you think, I've got all of these directions that I could go in. I've spent all of this time building up panoply of roots that I could take my life down, and I do not have any ability to decide on which of those to take. Panoply. Panoply. You like that? Myriad, cornucopia, a plethora. Two people that are obsessed with language. I have a war with each other. But one is British, so he wins. You only need to get rich once, so you might as well work as hard as you can

Starting point is 01:42:42 to get it done as fast as you can. The fastest way to attract what you want in life is to deserve it by doing so much work it becomes unreasonable not to achieve it. Do so much work, it would be unreasonable that you fail. The seat at the table is yours if you want it. Do the hard work, build the skills no one can ignore, adjust your mindset to match where you want to go, then pull up a chair and sit down. You want to work with such relentless obsession that when people see you, they're grateful they don't have to compete against you. The fastest shortcut is to stop looking for shortcuts. Do the work. Are those all mine? All one.

Starting point is 01:43:22 Violence is the answer. There's two, there's two quotes on the, on the, in the first few pages of our sales handbook internally at acquisition.com. One is volume negates luck. And violence is the answer.

Starting point is 01:43:37 And I would say that those are like credos that the team lives by. And I think, violent team. Mm-hmm. They are. Um, and violently successful.

Starting point is 01:43:46 Um, I think, I think there's a lot of power in, in knowing that you're doing every single thing you possibly can to win because if you are, if you can look at yourself in the mirror and say,

Starting point is 01:44:06 I have controlled the controllable. I think there's some level entirely. The controllable, not the uncontrollable. Those things can happen. I could do my book launch and there can be a lighten strike and there can be no power in Vegas. That can happen. But in the event that that happens,

Starting point is 01:44:20 if you leave it all in the field, if you have nothing left in the tank, I don't think there's a feeling that's more satisfying as a man than knowing that you've given everything that you had to give to an endeavor that you deemed meaningful. And so Layla and I have this thing that we say a lot,

Starting point is 01:44:40 but a man must have a quest. And I just really, really like that. It's like you need to do something. You need to go towards something. And your quest could be the best, being the best father. it could be it could be being the best musician or the best podcast or the best businessman or the best tire replacer or the best sweeper whatever it is but like i think i think being questless being aimless and never being able to use the violence that you are capable of in the pursuit

Starting point is 01:45:10 of endeavor that you find meaningful is where people find themselves lost and without hope because hopelessness comes from a perceived lack of options. We don't know what to do. Anxiety comes from many options, but no priorities. And so there's many things to do, but we don't sure which one. And so a quest remedies both of those, because you have one path that you're clear on, and you know the only thing that you have left to do

Starting point is 01:45:48 is destroy everything in your path to getting to where you. you want to go. And I'm using strong language on purpose rather than saying that you literally need to destroy everyone. But more so, the ideas, the thoughts, the doubts, the perceived risks that aren't even really risks. Those are the things that we have to march triumphfully towards. And I think having someone in your corner who believes in that better version of you is one of the rarest gifts that you can have in life. And there's a line from 300 that I love. The queen says to Leonidas, she says,

Starting point is 01:46:28 come back with your shield or on it. And I think that we all want a spouse or a partner who can reward us for the good fight. Because what that queen is saying in that moment is not like, I want you to win. She's like, I want you to die trying. So, and I think that that's like all we, I mean, to be fair, that's literally all we will do is die trying. All of us will die trying.

Starting point is 01:46:55 And I think, well, rather, all of us will die, some of us will die trying. And I think that's, that's about as good of a life as I think anyone can really ask for. One of my least favorite groups of people are those without a quest mocking those who have one. Wastes of space. It causes doubt. This is another reason why the lonely chapter thing resonates so much that people who are in it have their certainty about wanting to get out of it diminished by people who can't see the fact that they're in it. And you go, fuck, all of my friends are saying, well, why are you staying in? Because you want to go to the gym in the morning. What does it matter if you miss? What does it matter

Starting point is 01:47:38 if you miss your workout? It doesn't matter if you miss your workout tomorrow, dude. Go, no, I really, really want this thing. And my wanting of this hard thing and the efforts and sacrifices and trade-offs I'm having to make in order to get there, the doubt that already exists inside of me is being multiplied by people who are outside of it. And if I could give everybody a gift, it would be the ability to turn down the volume on people who don't understand the goals

Starting point is 01:48:08 that you're trying to achieve. It shouldn't be your job to explain yourself to people who don't understand what you're trying to do. And the confusion of this person gets it and understands it, and this person doesn't, you shouldn't be listening to them at equal measure. I have a lot of live translation that I think

Starting point is 01:48:32 I've wired into being able to handle some things that were difficult, which is like I pretty much translate all hate into you live your life against my preferences. And so whenever they're saying all of these things of like, no, you don't have to go to the gym, we're doing this other thing, it's just saying, you're living your life in a way

Starting point is 01:48:48 that's against my preferences. You're valuing things that I don't value. And you're like, you're right. And so it doesn't mean, like, we don't need to have the same values. at least in the short term. And I think just accepting that that is okay and that you can still be friends,

Starting point is 01:49:02 at least in the short term, is fine. And what they're really trying to do is get you to comply with their way of living because maybe, not always, when you live in accordance with your new values and new preferences, it brings into sharp contrast how they are not living in accordance to theirs.

Starting point is 01:49:25 Yeah. Yeah. This was 10 years ago when as a club promoter I decided that I was going to take six months off from drinking, which now sounds like commonplace. Now is almost a caricature of something lame that people do too much. And drinking has come back around. But 10 years ago, I was on the fucking frontier. And I remember when I stopped drinking, so many of the people that would hang out with went from being surprised to ribbing mockery to almost offended. And I think a lot of that was people realizing, oh, shit, the fact that Chris has stopped drinking throws the fact that I need to drink in order to feel social into harsh contrast.

Starting point is 01:50:07 My bad habits are being highlighted by the fact that someone near me has broken them. And what's really interesting about that is that you made money from other people drinking. And so you clearly had no problem with anyone drinking. You just chose not to drink for you so that you could grow the business, get more in shape, whatever. It makes it feel even more elective, which makes it feel like even more of an insult. Right, which makes it also more, more ridiculous how violent they were about opposing this choice because you were like, I'm not projecting anything on you. I would prefer it if you drank.

Starting point is 01:50:43 Please. Please spend as much money as you can at the club. Continue. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right. But even that, like, it's a perfect example because there wasn't a shade of judgment behind it because you are incentivized to have them. I was opening the doors myself.

Starting point is 01:50:58 And cracking the bottom. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, pretty much. And so, like, I actually think it is the perfect example because it shows that, like, it is not about you. That is the point. Because there was no judgment. You were literally incentivized them for them to continue that behavior. And yet they still felt bad and angry that you were doing, not doing something they were doing,

Starting point is 01:51:18 which then made them feel that they felt like they shouldn't be doing it either. And then they just projected it on to you. And it's like when you have this violent opposition, one of the things that I've actually been more recently thinking about is like, no one hates you. They hate the projection that they have of you that's 99% made up because no one can know 100% of you. Like the only person whose hate you should really pay attention to is your own.

Starting point is 01:51:43 Because there's no other person on earth who has full context to who you are. And so the person that someone's making fun of or they hate or that they're disagreeing with is the person and within the context of, of here, obviously, that's consumed six 30-second clips of you over the 37 years you've been alive and has filled in the blanks for every other minute of your existence with the exception of those three minutes that they have consumed. And so how much weight, I should probably proportionally wait the opinions of people based on the shared experience that they have of my life with me. And so if someone has spent one day with me out of the 37 years that I've been alive,

Starting point is 01:52:27 I have 37 times 365 more context on the individual than they do. And so I should probably wait it appropriately to that. There's a idea from Gwinda Bogle, which is about this. It's called tilting at windmills. An online stranger doesn't know you. All they have are a few vague impressions of you, too meager to form anything but a phantasm. So when they attack you, they're really just attacking their own imagination. there is no need to take it personally,

Starting point is 01:52:53 which is related to this principle of humanity. Every single person is exactly what you would be if you would them. This includes your political opponents. So instead of dismissing them as evil or stupid, maybe seek to understand the circumstances that led them to their conclusions. You know I love that.

Starting point is 01:53:13 It also teases out something that I might have to put my hat on for it. Throw it up. Switch it out. Which is that, If everyone, if you were going to be the same, if you were the exact same person as they are, if you were them,

Starting point is 01:53:36 then it removes the concept of free will. Mm-hmm, mm-hmm, mm-hmm, mm-hmm, yeah. If you're poor, try the buy-nothing challenge. The buy-nothing challenge, for 30 days, Buy nothing except food, rent, gas and insurance. Don't bring your wallet with you when you leave home, pack lunch. See how much you save. Repeat until you have as much as you want.

Starting point is 01:54:05 Brackets, pairs well with working 12 hours a day. Being good with money literally just means spend less than you make and put the extra in things that go up, not down. Financial education in two tweets. The hardest part about most things isn't knowing what to do. it's doing it. And the hard part about doing it is that you're often more rewarded for every action except for the one that you need to take. And so there's a hundred things you can spend money on. There's only one nothing. And so every, it's so exhausting to not spend money when you don't have

Starting point is 01:54:53 any because every single thing that you want are many things that you want have price tags associated with them. And you have to at all moments in the day say no, a hundred. times in order to quote, spend nothing. And so it's this muscle that we have to build. But I strongly encourage the Buy Nothing challenge because, one, you realize how little you can really live on. And when you realize how little you can really live on, you realize how much more risk you can actually take. Because the apparent downside of what if I lost everything becomes incredibly tangible, which is like, while I lived on $200, $500, $500. Not even that bad. Yeah. It's actually And when you realize that, and this is, I think, Morgan Strusal, what I was saying is

Starting point is 01:55:36 his name, right? When we look back in time at some of our happiest moments, we think we were happy when we were poor. But I'll just say on an anecdotal level, well, see, one of my own words, we often say that we'll be happy. Like, we already have the things that we said we want that would make us happy. And yet here we are. Yeah, there's a nostalgia discount for sure that.

Starting point is 01:56:03 nobody ever believes that we're living through a golden era golden eras only ever occur in history the good old days yeah it's always the good old days i asked a question actually recently which was there's certain periods that people look back on nationally as times that were particularly wonderful i did ask the question do you think anyone will look back at 2026 and think that it was the good old days at some point uh every generation believes that they're living through a moment moment, which is markedly different than the generations before. This one does feel particularly unremarkable in that way. To a degree, yeah, I think when I, I'm trying to project forward stuff that currently we think about with loving nostalgia from the past. And I'm not sure, but then probably during the 90s, right, did people think that WWF and F-16 fighter rockets, fighter jets and and limp biscuit were going to be what people in three decades time would look back on with loving tenderness so i'm going to say two things that i think are um so one a behaviors can explain the the nostalgia paradox which is that across species negative consequences fade

Starting point is 01:57:26 fading affect bias yeah and but positive doesn't And so that's why you have your ex that you always want to go back to because you forget how crazy she is and then you see her and then you're like, oh my God, I forgot how crazy you were. And why you drink in the next morning, you say, I'm never going to drink again and then seven days later you're drinking again. Take it to my life. Right. And so, but like even being cognizant of the fact that punishment fades and reward sticks is help for making decisions in the future. So that's thing one. The second is that like when I really think about at least the errors of my life, so I'll just talk personally. when I think about when I was, you know, sleeping on the gym floor, um, in a lot of ways that was like the good old days. Like I was, I was fighting really hard for something I really cared about. And then, you know, there was the moment where it started to work.

Starting point is 01:58:16 And I started, you know, launching gym to gym to gym with Layla, which was like, wasn't necessarily the good old days, but like, it was she and I and we were figuring it out. And I think I have a lot of respect and admiration for that kid who was just working his ass off, even though I didn't know what I was doing. I just tried. And then obviously when things started working out with, Jim launched and it was really scaling, it's like, I remember that period.

Starting point is 01:58:39 And like, I think you can, you can ascribe a good old days, especially on a personal level to like almost every season of life when you look in retrospect, be just because the negative has faded. Of course. And so it's one of these things that's like, it's like a great way to feel bad about how you feel today

Starting point is 01:58:57 because you know you should feel better because you know you will feel better about today. in the future because the future will have today without the negative consequences and the stressors of today that in the future seem irrelevant. And so it's like whenever you think about this stuff, like, what is my operation for gratitude is imagine something good, imagine losing it, and then realize that you haven't lost it.

Starting point is 01:59:22 That is how you feel gratitude at the most basic level. And so whenever you repeat that operation, either in your mind or in reality, like you feel gratitude. And so I think nostalgia is a flavor of that as we go back in time. Now, we can't get it back, but I guess we can see it through a new lens. That's the memory dividend thing from Bill Perkins. Phenomenal book. Everyone, really good. Zero. Gone by Diwee Zero. Really, really good book. Really great. Three hours to read. Fantastic. Yeah, I think some of the areas that people rely on with me,

Starting point is 02:00:01 more nostalgia from a personal standpoint, times with more simplicity and fewer tradeoffs, I think, tend to be looked back on with, huh. I was really singularly focused in that way. Life was simpler then. Correct. And there is an accumulation of complexity. So I wonder if simplification would be a way to remove some of the restrictions between now and front-running some of that gratitude for now in the moment. I think that's really interesting because I think that the complexity of our lives in the moment that we were living them was just as maxed out as it is as it is now because we're human, not because life was more complex, but because we always find the maximum amount of problems that our brains can perceive. And so at any given moment, whether you're, you know, 20 or 40,

Starting point is 02:00:49 like you might have absolutely more problems when you're 40, but you also have higher ability to deal with those problems and the problems that you perceive when you were 20. The worst thing's ever happened to you is the worst thing ever happened to you. You will, still have the same number of problems. And so the idea of simplifying our lives is really just an attempt to mirror only the incomplete memory that we have of that moment. Yes, yes, yes, yes. I'm going to try and get rid of the trade-offs that I did have to do in the past in the moment to make the moment more like the past. Yeah. There's a Adam Lane Smith taught me this a couple of years ago. I think it's really, really true. Your life does not need to be easier. It needs to be simpler. Your system is designed to

Starting point is 02:01:28 handle stress and challenge, but not complication. You probably handle hard things pretty well, but feel overwhelmed when they become messy. Do not attribute to difficulty that which can be explained by complexity. Really cool. Really cool. And I think that's where a lot of stress is felt. And this is the line from whatever, fucking four episodes ago, where there's no such thing as being overworked, only underrested, that overworked, is the,

Starting point is 02:02:01 asterisk, overworked at a small bucket of things, but there is such a thing as being spread too thin and overworked across a larger bucket of things. If all that you have to do for the next six months or two years is write a book, it's going to be stressful, but it's going to be enjoyable. If you have to write a book and raise a kid and manage finances and go to work and try and get in shape and connect with your partner and your mom's ill. It only takes two or three of those and people fall apart. Your system is designed to handle intensity but not complexity. I think most people would be astonished to how much they can accomplish if they remove things. Because I don't think focus is also not additive but multiplicative in that the best things that I've ever made,

Starting point is 02:03:01 books, things like that, the best works that I've created have been. in things that had many coats of paint. And so I can look at the same project over a long period of time when I'm on good days, on bad days, it rains, it's sunshine, Layla and I are good, Layla and I are bad. Through all these different seasons, and so I look at the work through as many lenses as I can,

Starting point is 02:03:24 and then it creates the texture to the work that gives it that depth. And I like the many coats of paint, because you have to let it dry. It's very rare that something on the first shot is very good. It just takes a lot of attempts, but you can't get that surface area of thinking if you can only think about it a handful of times. And so there's only so much thinking time that you have, which means that if you give it to five projects rather than one, getting one inch deep on five projects is rarely a novel concept.

Starting point is 02:03:55 Like you rarely will come up with something that is inherently unique because many people can give one inch deep thought towards any idea. Well, also, somebody who is one-fifth as good as you are doing that thing, are giving 100% of themselves. So you're basically curtailing your capacity by spreading it across multiple things. And again, I relate things back to business, but in some ways, you believing that you can pursue multiple masters is actually arrogant because it assumes that the people that you compete against can't beat you when they're fully focused on one thing and that you can somehow, compete with three or four or five people at the same time and still win. And maybe you can, but I think the vast majority of people just lose. Stop whining. Every position has an advantage. Younger means cutting edge. Older means more experience.

Starting point is 02:04:46 Smaller company means more personalized. Bigger company means longer track record. Rich means resources to use. Broke means nothing to lose. You aren't limited by your resources, only your resourcefulness. There's always a way to win. just not always a enough desire to win. The position of simplicity as well, I think, so much of today is about trade-offs. It's cool.

Starting point is 02:05:30 Looking across all of these, I can't see any of them that would be improved by complexity. Young, old, small, big, rich, broke. It's a universal rule that cuts through all of them, which I think is really interesting. But yeah, everybody is able to find a reason why the situation that they're in is either great, but more typically, not great. Because finding all of the ways that the thing that you have or don't have either limits you or restrict you in a way that it wouldn't, if you were somebody else or in a different situation, allows you to front run why you might fail in future. this is the reason why inversion is one of the most powerful ways to get what you want because we are

Starting point is 02:06:21 hardwired to survive and part of survival is threat identification what are all the problems that exist around me in my environment in my life that threaten me and so when you try to think about what's good with your life you have to sit there and be like okay I have to do my five-minute journal in the morning and think what three and you're like sitting there like okay What three things am I grateful for, right? And you have to try to do that, especially if you do different things every day, right? But what's interesting,

Starting point is 02:06:50 and this is why I think Munger was so brilliant with this, is if you frame, what are all the threats that I have to accomplishing what I want? What are all the things they're going to get in my way? If I had to guarantee failure, what would I do? It's much easier to come up with the list of all the things that will guarantee failure

Starting point is 02:07:09 because we're programmed to find those threats. And then all you have to do is just flip it as soon as you've figured out that monster list of the things that guarantee your failure. And then you just do that. You know, it's a cool version of this. If you were to design a day or a lifestyle for your worst enemy who's trying to beat you, what would it be? And the inversion of the inversion is imagine that you were going up against you, but with a mustache. It's you versus a mustache. and this version of you is doing everything that they can to beat you.

Starting point is 02:07:43 They know all of your failures. They know all of your shortcomings and your fears. What would that person do? Just do that. Do what that person would do that would beat you. Do what you with a mustache would do to beat you. And that's one of George's ideas. And I think it's really cool.

Starting point is 02:07:57 It's the same as basically what would you do if you had 10 times the agency? Because presumably that person would have way more agency. They wouldn't doubt themselves as much. They'd be more decisive. They would reduce complexity. they would be less distracted. So there's a frame in the investing world, which is if someone else were to come and buy

Starting point is 02:08:19 100% of your company today, what would they immediately do in the first 30 days? Holy shit, I can't believe that they're spending this much money on catering. I can't believe they still have that guy who was good two years ago and just shows up for work now. And I think it's because what that frame provides you is an emotionless view

Starting point is 02:08:42 of your current situation. You are your best, the person that you would, your worst enemy would have no emotion with a mustache. Yeah, with a mustache, would have no emotion around making the hard call because he's not you, he's someone else. And the person he's firing is not your best friend Todd. It's just this inadequate person

Starting point is 02:09:01 who's no longer upskilled. And so when we make these, when we talk through, you know, we have these podcasts around feelings and emotions and whatnot, like, there is the there's the feelings that we there's the experience of life of the things that we feel while we go through it

Starting point is 02:09:19 and then there's the decisions that must occur in reality and I think trying to serve both masters is where people get I don't say in trouble but at least they understand that they're making a trade I keep Todd on because I feel guilty okay we just at least understand

Starting point is 02:09:38 that Todd is hurting your business and you would rather hurt the business than have the conversation with Todd. Show me your priorities. Yeah, and we know the priorities. It's just are the priorities the priorities you want. What are you willing to sacrifice? Well, you either care more about Todd

Starting point is 02:09:53 or more about not feeling guilty than you do about your business. Yeah. Show me your priorities. And we know them. We know the priorities. And so, oh, behaviorist, you man. Yeah, and I think that like your life

Starting point is 02:10:09 as a consequence of your priorities. And the question is just whether or not, like many people want to want, they don't actually want. Yeah. They want to be willing to give up things in order to get stuff, but they don't actually give up things

Starting point is 02:10:23 in order to get stuff. Above your intelligence, above your work ethic, you will be compensated in proportion to your risk. Pro tip, if you're afraid to take the risk, write down in excruciating detail what you're actually afraid of happening, step by step,

Starting point is 02:10:38 what happens next when you fail? You'll often find it's not so bad when you spell it out. Fear exists in the vague, not the specific. So risk comes in a handful of flavors. One is what we know we will give up, that we hope we will get something back from that's bigger. There's also the we want something bigger, but we will pay a cost.

Starting point is 02:11:11 So different ways of saying the same thing. Like it's going to be, lose something good, get something bad are the things that risk presents for us. A different view on risk that I've been thinking a lot about is proportionality of risk. And at the most basic level, this is a lot of what investing really is, which is there is always risk, but is the risk priced appropriately? And Peter Thiel had this commentary around Elon where if he had just had one of his three companies succeed, it would have already been a crazy win. But somehow he got all three of them to become, I guess now, you know, multi-billion trillion-dollar-plus

Starting point is 02:11:52 companies. And he said he must know something about risk that all of us don't understand. And I think there's something incredibly powerful about studying the person who's accumulated the most wealth in history, or at least in present day. And that man's understanding of risk is different. And it's probably a more accurate view of true risk rather than perceived risk. And he often talks about, like, well, the downside of trying as hard as you can is basically nothing. If you're in the developed world, the likely that you starve to death is almost nothing.

Starting point is 02:12:23 And there is free shelter if literally no one in your social construct would allow you to crash on a couch. And that assumes that during the day you are incapable of working in any way that generates money, which there are many ways to generate money that do not require tremendous skill, at least today. And so

Starting point is 02:12:38 the downside is nothing. And so that is why the risk of going after whatever it is that you want is mispriced by the vast majority of people because they have this fear of the big thing that's good that's going to go away or a big bad thing that's going to come as a result. But the big bad thing is nothing. But the big thing that's good that they miss out on is everything. And so the risk is almost always mispriced because our brains are wired to misprice it because if you mess up once, you don't pass on your jeans and you die. But it is in no way wired.

Starting point is 02:13:14 to maximize your potential and what you're capable of. This mismatch between ancient programming and the modern world is kind of hilarious. We've got a nervous system that was built to fight bears, and now it's worried by group techs. It's true. It's true. And how do you think about... Let me have one more piece on that risk piece.

Starting point is 02:13:38 I was talking to an entrepreneur a week or two ago, and she had grown her great grandmother's business from $4 million to $44 million. million in three years. It was like awesome. Super cool story. And it became obvious to her that her brand and needing to create more content was kind of the constraint of her going from, call it, 45 million to 200 million and beyond. And she said, okay, so do you think I should like hire an editor? And it was interesting, she's like, well, how much is that going to cost? And so the business is doing a million month of profit now. And what was interesting to me is that oftentimes we don't also recalibrate our appetite for risk as our exposure to opportunity expands. And so you right now

Starting point is 02:14:23 are still operating from the $4 million business owner risk angle where you were making a million a year and one or two editors was 10 or 20% of your net income. When you're making $12 million in profit, we should be thinking about how do we make a $2, $3, $4 million bet that we think is going to result in an extra $200 million or $100 million on top of that. which is a phenomenal return. And so, I mean, I open up the offers book with one of my top two quotes from Jeff Bezos. He talks about how if you have a 10% chance of 100x payoff, you should take that bet every time, knowing that you will be wrong nine times out of 10.

Starting point is 02:15:01 The difficulty with that example contrasted with reality is that if you were at a casino know, and you had a 10% chance of 100x payoff, of course you should take that bet, but then just assume that the minimum bet is 10 years, and you only have three hands to play. And that's the reality of life. That said, when we look at what that loss of that 10%, when the 90% of the time that it fails isn't actually a loss, though. You've accumulated a lot along the way. Yeah, and you've gained experience, you've gained lessons, you've gained skills, you've gained network, you've gained relationships, perspective. And so you only move forward by taking these shots on goal. And I think that if every risk was only seen as zero downside, only upside, and either I win or I learn, which we're not the first people to say that, but whatever version of that narrative you need in order to realize that life is given you an endless amount of scratch-off tickets and you just have to cash them in.

Starting point is 02:16:09 I think that more people would take bets and more people would win. It's way better to be high conviction and wrong than low conviction and wrong. You know? Like, I'm just going to go for it. Because at least if you're high conviction and wrong, you move sufficiently quickly to be able to update your system based on the results that you've got. It's why indecisiveness, again, in that inaction thing, inaction has a cost, do not make the assumption that inaction has no price.

Starting point is 02:16:33 So it does have a price. Yeah. And it's, and it's a, this is one of those labels that we're saying at the very beginning about shorthand. It's like inaction isn't even in action. We are always taking action. It's action against your priorities versus action towards your priorities, which of them will help you accomplish what you want? And when you think that presumably nobody wants to be less decisive, there's very few, I mean, there's being rash, which I don't think is the same as being decisive, when I've met the threshold that is satisfactory or should be satisfactory in order for me to make this decision I make it,

Starting point is 02:17:05 is not the same as I make a decision before I have sufficient information in order to be able to make it. It's an information question, not a time question. Yeah. But when you think, don't practice what you don't want to become. And if you are practicing being indecisive couched in the wrapper of keeping optionality open, you're just practicing being indecisive over and over again. And if you think of your indecision as an investment in your future decisions, are you making them harder, that actually makes indecision a really, a really, really, really horrible pitfall to go down. I remember one of the things that allowed me to take the bet to quit my job was, and I,

Starting point is 02:17:48 people see me now, but like, I'm still very risk-averse, believe it or not. And so, I mean, remember I was a, you know, I didn't have the, like, school failed me. What do I do? I had the opposite cursive options I had done really well, all that kind of stuff. And the thing that got me was, if not now, then when. Because I figured a future version of me that I was delaying this decision for would either have a wife to support or wife and kids to support. Right. And I was like, so if it's this hard for me now, how can I make the assumption that it's going to somehow be easier at some point in the future? And if I really say that I want this thing, then how can I not do it now when the chips are most stacked in my favor? her. And you said one other thing earlier that I, oh, about, we have a desire for perfect information in order to make a perfect decision from a world that will give us neither. And so we have to be willing. So like what separates a rash decision from a well-informed decision? Well, taking to the natural extreme, a perfectly informed decision, the decision has often been made for you,

Starting point is 02:19:05 because the outcomes have already occurred, which means that if you have perfect information, the opportunity has already gone away. And so we have to be willing to make some assumptions. We have to make some bets, which is why having a worldview or a good model of prediction makes you better at getting what you want because you can say, listen, I know this,

Starting point is 02:19:25 I believe this based on my pattern of how I think the world works. And because of this film, I think this is a good or decent bet. And a lot of that calculus is the, what's my upside, what's my downside if I'm wrong. And if we know that the downside of being wrong is zero, then go for it. What's that?

Starting point is 02:19:42 All loss is just psychological until death. Dude, that's Jocko. Of course, I saw that and I was like, fuck. Jock shout out. I love that quote. Yeah. It angers me how good it is. So good.

Starting point is 02:19:55 I was thinking about, it's been almost exactly a year since me and he sat down. And a lot of the, this is seventh time you've been on, Maybe something like that. Is it really? Maybe six or seventh, plus we did the one with me and me and Leila. And I think there's always an interesting progression.

Starting point is 02:20:14 So one of the things that I've noticed looking at the time capsule of the last year of your writing and what I've been thinking about too is risk uncertainty and decisiveness seem to be themes that are in there a lot. And I came across this Nabil Qureshi quote that is maybe a little self-serving, but I think it's really true about why drilling 20, 30 hours, 40 hours, however long me and you have spoken, why I think it's important and why I don't get bored of it. He says, a cursed fact of the world is that the most important life lessons you learn are the hardest to communicate to others because they always sound like cliches. And there's a bit of me in the back of my mind that hears, it's not that deep, bro, you're overcom, complicating it. You don't need to look at life with this level of resolution. This seems to be unnecessarily dissecting. This is majoring in the miners. This is taking too seriously things which

Starting point is 02:21:17 don't matter in that sort of a way, paying too much attention. It's a kind of fragility of optimization, etc., etc. And the fact that lots of things that are important sound like stuff that you've heard before doesn't discount the fact that you need to hear it. Because if you know it that well, why the fuck you're still in the same place? If you're bored of hearing about how important cold, dark quiet is in order to prepare your bedroom for sleep, why does you sleep still suck? Why does your sleep still suck? If you're bored of hearing how it's important to integrate emotions, but there are times when you need to put them to one side, that they're information, not a master,

Starting point is 02:22:06 why is it you still don't have a good relationship with your emotions? If you know this stuff, if it's so obvious, if this is the sort of thing that you should have been taught by your father, or you should have learned in school, or you shouldn't have had to wait until you're in your 40s to understand, why is it you haven't mastered it? And the most important life lessons that you learn are the hardest to communicate to others

Starting point is 02:22:26 because they always sound like cliches. we need to be reminded more than we need to be taught. And so that means that the gap between what we have and what we want is typically not a lack of information, but a lack of execution. And so if it's a lack of execution, then it ladders up to what are the motivating operations that are either preventing me from doing it or that are insufficient to compel me? And so this is why I think Chris and I go into this very, very maneuvered, detail about, okay, you would just sleep on your friend's couch and how bad is that?

Starting point is 02:23:08 And trying to actually spell out that the downs, like, how do you put the picture, like we were saying earlier with the waiting room or the hospital bed? It's trying to take three steps forward into the reality of what living through your downside would look like so that you can realize that the downside is 10 times worse in your mind than it is in reality. And if it's 10 times worse in your mind than it is in reality, then it means that you can take actions in reality because the downside doesn't really exist. And the excruciating detail is needed in order to be able to bring this imagination into reality. I can feel that. I imagine what it

Starting point is 02:23:42 would be like to be on my friend's couch. I know it would be brown. It would be on the left-hand side of the room. I would have a little thing on the floor. That would be a mobile desk that I might work at. And sometimes it takes actually reaching out to a friend before you take a big jump and say, hey, if all this, I'm about to do something wild, if this went to shit, would I be able to crash at your place for like an extended period? I would be willing to do X, Y, and Z. I don't think it's going to happen, but would you be willing to do it? Because you saying that you're willing to take me in is going to allow me to do that.

Starting point is 02:24:12 I would say that if you actually have real friends, 10 out of 10 of them be like, yeah, dude, go for it. Like, I got you. And I think, like, I had, there was a handful of people that I probably called every single night during the six months leading into me quitting my job where I basically rehashed the exact same decision a hundred times with them and re-derived it. I think people would be surprised to hear that. I think people would be surprised to hear that Mr. Decisive seemingly would need to have that conversation. I also think it's cool to hear that story because it legitimates

Starting point is 02:24:48 somebody's bravery in the face of uncertainty and repetition. I think a lot of the time we feel like we're a burden to our friends for asking them for advice about the same problem that we've come to with before. I've done it with you. And like, hey man, I, yeah, no, no, it's not new. Yeah, no, it's the, yeah, it's the, it's the, it's the, it's the same thing again. I'm sorry. Yeah, I need to say, no, no new perspective. No, I need to say the, I need to say the, I need, yeah, it's going to be, it's the conversation from last week. But, but, but now again, is that cool. So the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the license. giving people the license to be boring in their learning and in their need for support from people.

Starting point is 02:25:40 Like, I'm sick of moping about this situation and I have a friend that's prepared to sit in it with me. That feels really good. To give more color to that period, because one of the things that Lailo and I were talking about was she has a desire to make successful people more. relatable so that people who don't have successful people around them can feel like it is attainable. So I'm going to add a handful of colors to that little chapter and hopefully people will be okay with it. So in that in that time period, many people know this, but I got fired and so like who would fire Hermosie, the hardworking maniac? Well, I just wasn't that good of an employee.

Starting point is 02:26:27 and so I basically just read books all day instead of working and I read most of the self-help books that you've heard of 100 million dollars offers 100 million dollars leads those are the books out of kidding I wasn't reading no but I was reading you know and and to be fair I don't think any one of them I'd say like I can I can say a handful of them phrases and entire books stuck with me One phrase I heard in about camera, I remember which one it was, was entrepreneur. And the phrase disgusted me so much because it was like, oh, yeah, all those people who just want to be entrepreneurs. And it just said it flippantly. It wasn't even decrying the term. It just said like, oh, yeah, this is how we define these people who are like not there but like business interested. Yeah. Well, the nonchalance is even more insulting.

Starting point is 02:27:17 Exactly. And that's why I was like, I'm that. I am this disgusting thing. I don't want to be this. But that still wasn't enough to motivate it. It was a negative operating, you know, It was negative, but it still wasn't enough. I listened to Arnold's ladder of success speech that he gave. This is obviously 15 to 16 years ago. It was this speech. I found it on YouTube, and I listened to it like every morning before I go to work. You cannot climb the ladder of success with your hands in your pockets.

Starting point is 02:27:49 And I listened to that every morning. I read Relentless by Tim Grover, and it was basically the first. book that I think gave me permission to use called the dark side to get things done. And I'd be like, I would say now I don't necessarily operate 100% from that same perspective, but it was what I needed at the time. And I called it a friend of mine, his name was Victor, he was considering quitting his job too. And so every night we basically just like planned and schemed of how we're going to, our exit plan, of how we were going to, we just mentally masturbated the idea of like what freedom

Starting point is 02:28:21 would be like if we actually left. And I would have this, I had to have an early Bluetooth thing, which is a piece of ship now. And I remember I had this cowhide carpet in my apartment that I got from IKEA, that the path that I would walk on while he and I would talk started getting treaded. So there's this line in the middle of where I would pace. And so the things that, and I would have the lunch with my dad, the like, hey, I'm going to quit my job and do my own thing. I didn't have that lunch one time.

Starting point is 02:28:53 I had that lunch many times. and each time he would reasonably talk me off the cliff and say, listen, this is the boring chapter. You're just going to do your few years, and then you're going to go to business school, and like, this is the plan. And so it was very clear that I was following a path that was trod upon. And to be fair, my dad absolutely did what he believed was best,

Starting point is 02:29:12 and I think his intentions are perfect. And so all of these things were happening with me for me during that period of time. And I just remember having read as many self-help books, as I could, you know, get my hands on, and then I looked around my room and apartment and realized that my life hadn't changed it all. And that was when I Googled online and decided I was going to start a business. I narrowed it down to three. And then one guy got back to me who had a gym. And even then, when I had my first conversation with him, I was like, I really want to start a gym. He's like, so you don't have a gym. I was like, no. He's like, okay, well, basically, you're going

Starting point is 02:29:54 need to like do something before I can help you. And it's just you need to make a serious commitment, make a decision. So I thought about this for a while. And then a few weeks later, I texted him. I said like, I'm ready. And so I called him back up again. And he's like, well, okay, great. So you have a lease. What's the, you know, what's the, you know, it's just like, oh, oh, no, no, I don't have that. And he was, and he was disgusted. And he was like, lose my number, dude. Like, and he was disgusted by how little I had done in that meantime. And so all of these things happened. It wasn't one of them.

Starting point is 02:30:27 And so as much as I could say, like, I just read this one book in my life changed. Like, sometimes you have to hear it a hundred times before it either sinks in or there's enough negative or enough positive or both that it gets you over whatever perceived threshold of action that you have. And so it was only when all of those things happened. and I came to the realization and I also applied to business school because I was like, what do I do in the meantime? So I was doing four hours of GMAT problems every day because I was still violent then

Starting point is 02:30:56 so that I could ace the GMAT. And then I got above Harvard's mid-score and then I was doing all the applications because it's something else that you can do that you can procrastinate with. And so I did all the applications into business school and one of the questions that came up was how will a Harvard MBA or booth

Starting point is 02:31:12 NBA at Cameron Burr help your short and long-term goals? and I remember belaboring over this question for three days, and I answered all the other questions, and I was thinking about it, and I was like, I don't think it is going to help my long-term goals. Because I looked at the math of like, okay, this can cost me $120,000, this is at the time, and I won't be able to make money for two years.

Starting point is 02:31:31 So I'm going to stop making money, and it's going to cost me $120, and then the starting salary was $120, or like average starting salary post-business school. And so I thought to myself, could I take $2,000, $120,000, and within that period of time believe that I could get to the point where I could make $10,000 a month, but I would own a business rather than having a job to then maybe someday own a business. And I believed that that bet felt reasonable. And so even then you're like, okay, so that's when he quit and didn't.

Starting point is 02:31:58 No. And so it was all of those things. And then finally the realization that I, that it was never going to get easier. And so then the fear that I was never going to start the business that I said I wanted to someday start the fact that I actually had an exploding offer from life, which is that it was only going to get harder, and that I realized how hard it had been for me to that point to still not have made a decision.

Starting point is 02:32:24 And it was the fear that I was never going to make it, which compelled me to make it. And that's what got me to pack all my shit, drive my car halfway across the country, and then then and only then call everyone and tell them that I had left so they couldn't talk me out of it. And so if anyone is like, man, so decisive Hermosie or whatever, it took a Herculean effort and to suspend a shitload of doubt and risk aversion.

Starting point is 02:32:51 And also in terms of when I talk about this stuff with caring about what other people thought, I cared so much about other people thought that I knew that I cared so much about what other people thought, that I wasn't even willing to hear them because I knew if I did hear them, they would talk me out of it. That's how fragile your conviction was. Yes. That one sentence from the wrong person moving you back in that. past direction would have pulled you? I needed to physically create so much space that even if they had talked me out of it, it would still take me a day and a half to drive back. And so the reason,

Starting point is 02:33:25 I think you read one of the quotes earlier, like if you want to change your life, change your environment is so powerful is that your environment as it currently stands right now, the combination of where you live, where your friends are, the routines that you have, the places you go have created loops of behavior for you. And so the best way, to change what you're doing is change the entire environment. Like there's the the Vietnam War Vets. They did this research study. You probably heard of it. But all these guys did heroin when they were in Vietnam. It was like 25%. It was a gigantic percentage. And then weirdly when they came back, I think Clear talks about this in his book. When they came back, only 10% of the heroin users relapsed into heroin only. I mean, but still, it's small compared to the heroin. Yes. The success rate of or the failure rate of rehab institutions is like, 78%. So it had a 8x, you know, a difference in relapse rate, but there wasn't even rehab that happened. The only thing that happened was that every single environmental cue was changed. And so if you are having trouble getting out of your current condition, then get out of your

Starting point is 02:34:32 current condition. Move. Go to a different city. Even if you can't move to a different city, move across town, move 30 minutes away. Train at a different gym, go to a different coffee shop to work. Yeah, make different friends. For the short, period and realistically you probably won't make different friends but just stop hanging out with the friends you got for period and if you decide that once you've gone through that session that series that chapter you still want to be friends if they are really your friends they will welcome you back with open arms if they only were friends with that version of you then that's not the version of you that you want to be and that's not what you want to go back to anyways and so that was one of the

Starting point is 02:35:05 trades that you made to become who you wanted to be it's crazy that we think we can change our thinking environment whilst keeping our external environment the exact same And we're going to just continue to use, I don't know, what type of effort we think it is that we're applying to our own brain, whilst experiencing the same cues and stimulus, but hoping that our thinking is going to adapt. You have to change to change. And it sounds so odd. Does that sound like a tritruism or whatever? Like, cliche, yeah.

Starting point is 02:35:37 If nothing has changed, nothing will change. And so you have to be, like something has to be the catalyst. and you were the only like either you get in a car accident your girlfriend breaks up with you you can use the negative at least like if you are not happy with your life and then something bad happens to you be grateful for it in the moment because it means that you a change a chaos variable has entered the building and that means that you have the ability for a short period of time before equilibrium gets reestablished that you can change shit without the same consequences because all your loops got got muddled and so like those are the periods of time where you can go through tremendous change

Starting point is 02:36:11 because you're like, well, fuck it. Everything that I thought to be true isn't. So what else that I think was false but isn't? And then you can start moving towards it. Came across this line from Beauty of Sass. It is an unwritten rule of life that after every prolonged period of hardship and uncertainty, there is going to be a period where you achieve quantum leaps across multiple areas of your life. The only requirement is that you do not give up on yourself.

Starting point is 02:36:40 Failure and success are on the same road. It's just that failure is an earlier exit. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. What's that one about whatever you do, don't be the guy who gives up at the exact moment when you should be fighting with everything you have. You'll make it through either way, but there's only one way you'll look back and be proud of yourself. This is the meta frame of the story that we one day tell. We tell stories of what type of person we are all day long when we're confronted with different decisions.

Starting point is 02:37:12 What type of person am I? And I would like to be known to myself as a fighter, is that I'm willing to fight for what I want and for what I believe in. And I think that not as why I think I would want to have courage to be the one thing that is transferred. And I think it's because I'm going to go back to that season because I think it's relevant. Like I was a really good student at Vanderbilt. I was vice president of the powerlifting team. I was president of the fraternity that I was in. I had a three eight, I think GPA.

Starting point is 02:37:53 And I graduated in three years. but I was so afraid of not getting a job that I took the first job that I was offered from the first person, which was an introduction my dad had from a patient of his. And to be clear, so we were like, oh, it was an epitism, it wasn't a great job. But I was so afraid that I would be jobless

Starting point is 02:38:13 that I just took that job. And I only say this to say that like, you can change your stars. Like I was not the type of person who does the types of things that I do now then. And I retell those stories. I don't talk about them as much because honestly I blocked most of them out because I was in so much pain during that period of my life. And the reason that I'm willing to keep making content and write books and all that stuff is because I know that there is another

Starting point is 02:38:57 person who is going through a similar chapter and worried if they are sane or if it is only them, and it is not. And so, like, you can't compare yourself to people who are different chapters. You just have to believe that you can change incrementally one behavior at a time over an extended period of time and that those changes will aggregate, that they will stack up.

Starting point is 02:39:26 Because, like, we don't know what the last chapter is going to look like. We only know what the next page does, and we get to write that today. And, like, I was so driven by fear. I was so afraid of everything during that chapter. And so it was like other people's opinions. What if I fail? What if this doesn't work out?

Starting point is 02:39:50 What if people make fun of me? Like I had all this fear around it. And like the emotionality that I have now towards it is because of the, the, a mix of pity and pride that I have for that young man, the young Alex that was going through. because I'm proud that I made it through that, but I also pity the amount of pain that I was going through

Starting point is 02:40:16 to make that jump. And so I don't know who's listening, but like, fear can be useful. If you know that you were driven by fear to some degree, and in some ways it's almost shameful to say it, because it was the reason that the word that I never want to have used described for me as cowardly is because I behaved like a coward. I was afraid of everything. I was afraid of failing. I was afraid of my dad's judgment. I was afraid of everything. And I, the flip that made it for me was just using that fear against something bigger was that I was more afraid

Starting point is 02:41:01 of not, of looking back on my life and never having tried. And I knew that that would be so empty and I would be so filled with regret and that I knew that I would beat myself up over it every single day as I got older, that that existence was more terrifying to me than the practical consequences of me taking a step where I would fail. And it sounds, it's very easy for me to say now to you or anyone who's listening, like, of course the downside's not that big, you'll just sleep on a friend's couch, whatever. but at the time for me, it was everything. And it was all of the status that I had spent all of my time trying to accumulate. I was present of this, president of this, president of that, I'd done all the good grades,

Starting point is 02:41:47 I had a good job on paper. And so whatever fuel you have, whether it's anger, whether it's shame, whether it's fear, even if you have all of them, like, if you know you have them, try and put them behind you to get you to run away from it. If it's right now, it's in front of you, and it's preventing you from taking the next step. And so it's like if you can just put it behind you so that you're running away from this future,

Starting point is 02:42:16 it's like run harder away from the future that your current path is taking you towards that you're afraid of, than the short-term path that running away from it is going to run you into. It's like you either have to be, you know, it's like in I'm taking some liberties here

Starting point is 02:42:35 it's like you can either fear the whip of the person behind you or the enemy in front of you and the direction you face is the one that you fear the least and so if you know that there's an enemy in front of you and a whip behind you it's like you just need to in the short term increase

Starting point is 02:42:53 the pain of the one that you want least have you seen succession uh the first season Okay, so... I don't watch it because it's too real for me. So it keeps me up. And like, basically, I get, I get too, like, amped when I watch it because I like it, but I'm like, I can't do this before bed.

Starting point is 02:43:10 So... I need, like, vampires and, like... In the final season, Tom is having a conversation with his wife, and he says, I wonder if the pain that I would feel without you would be less than... than the pain that I feel by being with you. And that seems to be what you're talking about here. It's 100% that. And I,

Starting point is 02:43:41 you talk in retrospect about that period, about what that guy went through. It doesn't sound like pity to me. It sounds like grief. It sounds much closer to grief. Like somebody nearly died or did die or suffered a lot and didn't deserve it. Oh, I think that person totally died.

Starting point is 02:43:57 Like the, I don't want to say the man I was, as a boy that I was totally died. And I think, I mean, the hardest, the hardest loss that I had. to take was the boy that I was in my father's eyes that was living up to his expectations, which is all that I wanted. And so sacrificing that. And it took years. And my dad and I are cool were great. But like for a season, that's what I had to sacrifice that person. And it was all I had wanted was to make him happy. And so, and again, no fault of his own. But that is all I wanted. And so

Starting point is 02:44:30 it's like I had achieved the dreams that I had as a younger man and in so doing it had become my nightmare. And that's why the third point that you read about, no one is coming to save you, everything is your fault, and you have to sacrifice who you are for who you want to become. I think it's so real for me is that you do. And like someone's dreams will die. It is yours or theirs. So you just want to make sure that the person who is dreaming for you has bigger dreams for a life than you do. And sometimes well-intentioned people because they want to be practical and they want to be realistic, have smaller dreams for you than you do. And if they have smaller dreams, then you should listen to you and not them. Obviously, your dad built a story about

Starting point is 02:45:20 what success looks like. Yeah. And you rejected it slowly but loudly. now that you're about to have a child, what story you're going to tell that kid? Of that period? Or no, this story about what success looks like? Like, how certain are you

Starting point is 02:45:40 that the story that you tell your son isn't just a new version of the same cage that you had to break out of? It's something that I think a lot about. How do I, you know, the child is going to be born into, by the time he has memories,

Starting point is 02:45:58 he will be the son of a billionaire. That's a lot. And in some ways I don't wish that on anyone, and yet I'm bringing someone into that, which has its own thought circles I won't get into. But I am going to focus him, to the degree that I can influence his behavior, on being courageous.

Starting point is 02:46:33 on leaving nothing on the field. I will care endlessly about his effort and very little about the outcomes, assuming he controlled the controllables. And I will hold an incredibly high standard, and it is because I respect him and believe in him and that he is the potential to achieve it. And what's been very difficult for me, because I haven't fully defined this, and maybe I will by the time he's born or by the time he's a little older, is I've had trouble trying to define what a successful parent looks like and what a successful child look like.

Starting point is 02:47:15 Because if we define a successful parent by the output of the child, there's a whole hell of a lot of people that have had pretty tough parents that have turned out really good. But then does that mean that the parents are good or bad? I don't know. And the successful child is the successful child that he is happy. I tend to reject that definition overall. Is it that he has purpose? I'd probably prefer that because I think happiness can be fleeting. Purpose tends to stick a little longer. But at the very end of the day, I think character,

Starting point is 02:47:49 which I still define as just huge sets of behaviors, I want him to be brave. And I want him to try his ass. off. And if he does that, well, no matter what, he will be good enough for me, but I will just more so make the commitment that given all the resources that I have, both mental and financial, I will do the best I can with what I have to give him the maximum possibility of achieving what he wants. Have you been thinking about life differently for yourself with the prospect of a kid on the way? Not really. That might surprise some people, but like, first off, I'm not pregnant. And so I

Starting point is 02:48:31 don't believe in the we are pregnant. I do not have a baby inside of my stomach. And so, no, I haven't, my behavior hasn't really changed because my consciousness haven't really changed. I suspect that when, you know, the child comes, I will, I will change accordingly. And I think that it's, this is one of those, I would say, like, internet strawmands of like, well, just wait till the kid comes. I'll be like, yeah, and then I'll change. There'll be a new condition. So I'll change to that. It's just like, what if you change your mind? Then I'll change what I'm doing. You know, it's just like, this is, worked for me so far and I'll probably take the things that will continue to work and I'll

Starting point is 02:49:05 probably adjust to others. I don't think that having children in any way is going to get in the way of the goals that I have. And my proof points are that the wealthiest, most successful business people in the world almost all have children. And so, like, I see that as pretty strong proof that it's not something that prevents you from achieving, you know, business success. And to be clear, business success for me is more so that I want to leave everything I have on the field. If that results in growth, then great. If I have... many seasons of hardship ahead of me, which I'm sure I do, and moments of plateaus and stagnation and things like that until I figure out whatever the next thing I have to do is or the next person I

Starting point is 02:49:39 need to become or sets of behavior that I have to do, then that's the game. That's what I sign up for that. I chose this. But I also know exactly what I chose this, what I traded this for, which was the young boy in that life. And I would happily make that trade 100 times over. And so I in no way say that my life is perfect or anything far from it. but it is the life I chose and I am okay with that. You talked about changing your environment, often changing your desired outcomes. It's going to be about as big of an environment changes you've had in a decade. Yeah.

Starting point is 02:50:17 More. Yeah. I'm sure it will change me. And I... What would be the most surprising outcome? I think the most surprising outcome is that I don't change at all. Right. I actually think that...

Starting point is 02:50:32 It's the second most surprising outcome. I'll say the outcome that might surprise other people the most is that I think there's a very real chance of a reality where I work significantly less than I do now because I prefer hanging out with the kid than I do working and if I do then that's what I will do. Is that a pathway of satisfaction that hasn't necessarily been front and center of your life for quite a while? basically being willing to enjoy a moment for the sake of the moment and nothing else um it's a less instrumental view yeah a lot of your life and mine as well is very instrumental yeah i will do it because i will do it because not i will do it yeah also because i enjoy it right but there's only one more stuff yeah um yes and i think it's just because it's in accordance with values that i have like i want to be a good father and so i deem that a label that i would like to live up to and so

Starting point is 02:51:28 I'm willing to make some trades. And I think that's, I will be making trades in the future and I'll try to make the trades the best I can. Interesting that after a decade and a couple of decades of contorting yourself into this very specific type of engine or a sort of monster that sucks in challenges and spits out completed tasks,

Starting point is 02:51:50 that to most people, holidays sound like leisure, but to a certain category of people, holidays feel like work because they need to let go of the routine and pathway that they've sort of constructed themselves into. That there might be a lot of work required in order to be able to co-sleep with your kid at three in the afternoon with it laying on your chest, reading fiction or not, just lying, staring at the ceiling thinking this is cool. Huh, that should be naturally, biologically, hormonally, energy expendituresally,

Starting point is 02:52:28 relatively seamless to do and yet there's potentially going to be a ton of areas for growth in you there? I'm sure. I'm sure that it will be a new challenge and I will dedicate my effort to succeeding at it the same way I do other challenges and I'm sure I will be uncomfortable as I have been with other challenges and I will try and meet that discomfort with action and let myself get used to a new reality. And I will do my best to enjoy it every second of it. Because, I mean, I do look a lot at older guys who have kids. And one of the really fun ones to look at is people who have second families.

Starting point is 02:53:16 So they kind of like do first run, first wife, kids, whatever, and then take 10. Exit into first business. How does he run the second one? Yeah, kind of. And so what's interesting is I've tried to observe what those guys do differently. and almost to a man, they'll say I should have spent more time with the kid. And it's one thing to say that you should have. It's something very different to see them do it the second time around.

Starting point is 02:53:41 Now, there's the obvious of, like, well, easy for them to say because they built the empire the first time. And so, like, they get a do-over. That was collateral damage in getting to the point where they're sufficiently satisfied. I, thankfully, knock on wood, whatever we want to do. I built what I needed to build to feel like I had a sufficient platform to provide for a child in all manners, both like my time flexibility. I work because I choose to, but like I have the flexibility and we can not work whatever and the kid can have whatever. The side effect of you working whether you chose to or not is a degree of material comfort and ticking off of the accomplishments

Starting point is 02:54:20 that closes the loops around them. I think that if I can live this season trying to steal as many chapters from people's second second go. I'll see that as a good idea and I'll basically use that off of

Starting point is 02:54:39 modeling. Like I'm just looking at what good things seems to happen for them. I'm going to try that and I'll adjust as we go but I'll probably use that as my base case baseline and then and I'll figure it, we'll figure it out together. Yeah. Well, I have a little have a little

Starting point is 02:54:54 Ah. Something. Wisdom pending. Loading. Loading competence. Yeah. It's very important that the baby's got good merch. It's all about the merch.

Starting point is 02:55:07 Yeah. That's right. Well, this spot on him is, we have a retail price for the ad space, so I'll let you know. Okay, that's cool. I imagine, I assumed it would just be Acquisition.com, but front end of the funnel, front side of the baby. Yeah, he'll be like a NASCAR driver with all the sponsors. Everything everywhere.

Starting point is 02:55:26 Yeah, yeah. If you're going to chase a dream, go all in. If you're going to love, love fiercely. If you're going to walk away, never look back. So many people never even give themselves a fighting chance because they never fully commit. If you're going to go, go all the way. No half measures. No half measures. I was about to say no half measures. I was like, no who wrote that. You think so many solutions are fully committed to. as a result, they don't actually work. And then we think, oh, this path was wrong. This business was a bad idea. I should have started making content when it never had a fighting chance because we didn't even do close to the amount of volume that would be sufficient for it to work and not for nearly the duration that would be required. And so it's like people to do enough for long enough to get anything to work.

Starting point is 02:56:17 And I think the biggest issue there is because we expect our dreams to be accomplished faster and easier and risk-free when it will be hard, take a long time. and we will sacrifice more things than we expect it. And I think one of the hardest parts about accomplishing big things is that the cost is unknown. So even though it is more than you, you know you're giving up some stuff, but you still don't even know everything that you're going to give up.

Starting point is 02:56:39 It's like running a race and not knowing how long it is. I don't know where the finish line is. Yeah. And what's fascinating about that is that like if you know where the finish line is, you can usually handle just about anything. That's why Uber works. Yeah. That's the main reason.

Starting point is 02:56:52 Yeah, you can order a cab from anywhere and you don't need to work out the local taxi number and stuff. The main reason why it works is you know how far away the car is. I know how long this wait is. Remember in the before times? Just ring a cab and it would just arrive at some point. Yeah. I think Roy Sutherland had the thing about the, I think the channel. This is your people's thing. But you could see people complained about how long it took and they could either build another channel which would cost billions of dollars or they could do what they did, which was just tell you how long you had to wait. And it like solved. all the concerns. It was Heathrow Airport, Terminal 5, if anyone's ever taken a connecting flight inside of Terminal 5. It's mad how many times I've done that and it's always the same fucking escalator. I don't know whether it's because I fly the same route or if that's just the one funnel to go up through internal security for the second time to briefly enter England before you then fly back out without actually being able to leave. And people were complaining about the fact

Starting point is 02:57:52 that it was taking too long to get through security. And classic engineer problem, they decided, we're going to get new detectors, and we're going to speed up the conveyor belt, and we're going to have an S-shaped queuing system, which will spread people out into more fingers so that the security checking people can get them through and more expeditious,

Starting point is 02:58:11 just millions, hundreds of millions of dollars in re-operating costs. And Rory and his team are like, there might be a cheaper solution, and they fixed it, by just putting wait time posters 15 minutes from here, 20 minutes from here, 25 minutes from here. And the wait time was always five minutes longer than the amount of time it took together. It's pretty moving.

Starting point is 02:58:34 Yeah. They said it was going to be 25. We got in 17. Yeah. We got a bit of a bonus. Get some good time. Yeah. Dude, that's why his book's called alchemy, right?

Starting point is 02:58:42 Behavioral science applied well is kind of like magic. Yeah. But yeah, the no half measures thing, dude. So much of the pain that people feel when it comes to decisions is in the indecision, even in making the decision. It's the uncertainty when they do it. And this is what common optionality focused advice is, well, if the decision's reversible, then it doesn't really matter so much.

Starting point is 02:59:15 But you should treat reversible decisions still as if they're irreversible. And this is David Epstein's new work, which is people are much happier with irreversible decisions than with reversible ones. For instance, if every jeans store that you went into did not allow returns or exchanges, you would be happier with your jeans. Even if you wanted to exchange them or return them, you would be happy. It's like the kid store. You can't return the kid. So most people are very happy with their kids. This is just like you can't.

Starting point is 02:59:49 Yeah, I mean, you can't. you can't really go back. And so it makes it's way less cognitive effort to justify and rationalize that it was a good idea. So I am an investor and a huge advocate of embryo selection through IVF and Heresite, which is the company in the world that's best for this, have just an endless list of philosophical justifications, medical justifications, biological justifications, humanitarian justifications, and I think that if you agree that trying to avoid disease is good, it scales all the way up to trying to increase

Starting point is 03:00:23 robustness, which is pretty much any trait that you care to care about. The thing that I'm still yet to hear a compelling case in argument against is buyers' remorse, because if you have chosen this particular embryo out of the list of 10, because this one had the particular diagnostic criteria and dashboard that you like to look up. Now, the thing that's weird is this is already happening by doctors because they look through the scope of the microscope and they go, that one looks healthy. Round. That one's, it's A, B, C, right? You don't want the C's, B's, and you probably not. You've got three A's, two A's in there. Let's try and implant this.

Starting point is 03:01:02 One doesn't take one, whatever. So this was already being done and eyeballed by the doctor. But even that wasn't your decision. So you could maybe be angry at the doctor, but it's like, hey look, we just took the advice of a professional here. We decided to do the thing. That is the one element that I wonder whether, when this becomes more widespread, whether we're going to see just a little tweak. I don't think so. Okay.

Starting point is 03:01:25 Just because I don't think the, like, I think it would be more akin to, you go to the jean store and they show you maybe like a thread on a thing and maybe a dye. and then but the genes that you get you still can't return and so it's so far from the final product if you had if you had six kids and you could only pick one and they were fully you and you could talk to them and then you're like but you can't go back I think people might have more buyers because you would have seen

Starting point is 03:01:53 what the other option would with the full yeah don't stop trying because it didn't work it never works the first time it takes everyone a different amount of time to realize everyone is just thinking about themselves no one's watching and you should have just done whatever the fuck you wanted to all along. Yeah, look at old people.

Starting point is 03:02:15 Like, old people have it figured out. I mean, my, I did, so my, my dad, my, my father's father died before I was, you know, able to function. But my dad has called a father figure who functioned as a grandfather on that side. And one of the things that I always admired about him was that he literally didn't have time for this. He's like, I've got like 10 years. I literally don't have time for this. And so his give a fuck level was so low that he just, he walked through life unscathed

Starting point is 03:02:54 by the worries that weigh down most people. Like, oh, I wonder if I said that too rudely to that part. He was already on to the next thing. He's like, I literally don't have time. That's the youth is wasted on the young thing. Yeah. but it's it's one of those like you i'm so funny about that up i don't know if youth is wasted on the young i think um you just have call it peak cognition and health state and you don't know anything besides

Starting point is 03:03:24 like nothing hurts and everything works and then you just have a a slow degradation of everything works and nothing hurts until and then at the very end you just nothing works and everything yeah yeah and everything hurts Yeah, and I think that's just it. There's definitely a unique value in the future is long and broad that has a quality all of its own, that is only available to people that are young, right? That is not nothing, and it does not just exist inside of your head. You're able to make a materially different type of plan when there is a long amount of time in front of you

Starting point is 03:04:11 than when there is a short amount of time in front of you. Assuming you don't die or something else happens. Of course. Or the probability distribution of you being able to fulfill these plans is different. And this is Bill Perkins thing about, it's not memory dividend, but you can only do certain things at certain periods of life. A really great concept. Yeah. That going downhill skiing at 80 is unlikely with your knees.

Starting point is 03:04:35 I think he told me he's 50s and he said he got offered the opportunity. opportunity to go wakeboarding. Wake surfs a lot. We got the opportunity to go wakeboarding a year ago, a couple of years ago. And he didn't want to go. He was tired or something. And then he realized, thought, this is probably one of the last times I'm ever going to be able to go wakeboarding. I don't think I'm ever going to be able to do this again. And he did. And that very well might be it. There are certain things that you can only do at certain times. And I think what what trying to do. And it's interesting about that cliche line, unteachable lessons. We choose to learn the hard lessons the hard way. And what we're all trying to do is get as many

Starting point is 03:05:25 cliches into our experience in order to be able to skip over the most well-known pitfalls of the ages ourselves. We know that it's coming. We know it's going to happen. for some reason we refuse to learn by the doing of others we have to choose we we decide to do ourselves we're trying to like pick up we're trying to imbibe the most commonly held wisdom that is least absorbed by everybody money won't make you happy fame won't fix yourself worth you don't love that hot girl she's just pretty and difficult to get you should see your parents more nothing is as important as you think it is when you're thinking about it, all the other worries were a waste of time. But, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, we're just trying to, the mountain of evidence and

Starting point is 03:06:15 exposure is greatest and our ability to, it's like a, it's a, some sort of macronutrient, which is unbelievably pervasive and unbelievably hard to absorb. If you can ingest tons and tons of it, but for some reason, and what we're trying to do is find the enzyme or the particular way to cook this thing, so that we are able to finally absorb it. But yeah, it takes everyone a different amount of time to realize everyone is just thinking about themselves, no one was watching, and you should have just done whatever the fuck you wanted to all along. Like that is every old person ever telling you that. And it's just a case of, okay, how quickly can I believe that the people, all of the old people are right?

Starting point is 03:06:54 Because it's one of two things, it's true. Either all old people have arrived at a similar sort of insight, which is that one, or they've all been inducted into some sort of sci-op cult to lie to younger people about the same coordinated false flag in order to get them to do

Starting point is 03:07:16 something. I don't know. I think so each of the isms that you just said to me is a clear behavior loop where there is a super strong short-term reinforcer and a very long, long-term one. And so almost all of those are

Starting point is 03:07:32 things that you would opt for in the short-term. And so until you have a strong thing that tells you that that is wrong, the other magnet is just too strong to resist for the vast majority of people. And I would also imagine that the older folks have a much closer proximity to death, which, I mean, when you see one or two people die, it can affect you. When you see, like, a lot of people die and the good ones and the bad ones and the in-betweens, all of a sudden you're like, wait, because I think, like, when you go through death or someone close to you dying, I think one of the most, jarring pieces of death is how quickly everyone else moves on and how everyone just keeps operating as though that person never existed. And of course, there's the like, I always remember, you know, XYZ person and of course, that's fine. But like, the world moves on. And I think when you see that happen at times, unless you are completely delusional, you assume that they will, that it will

Starting point is 03:08:24 move on from you. And then I think what it does is it creates this huge, this gigantic pill of humility that I think older people have. Not all older people. Of course, there's there's oddballs. Like, I think by and large, old people are significantly less competitive. There's less ego, I would say, as a class. They're more like, that's a young man's game. Like, I don't want to, basically, they just choose not to play at a lot of the status games and things like that because they've just seen people with the best status and the worst status, they all die the same.

Starting point is 03:08:54 And everyone moves on just the same. And so I think they shift more to more being present because also they could die soon too. I think that's one of the reasons why seeing somebody who is old playing a game that they should have transcended gives us a sort of a sense of like we wince a bit. It's like cringe almost. The businessman who is in his 60s still attending every high-powered conference who already has done the exit as many times as is needed trying to win the validation of the same group of people who have cycled through a bunch. He never he never exits. It's like being stuck on the level of a. video game whose boss you've defeated.

Starting point is 03:09:32 Yeah. And just going back and running it back again because maybe this time it would be different. Yeah, I think Arthur Brooks talks about this with like, uh, like from strength to strength in that book or like the second, like everyone has to make this leap from first level of fluid intelligence, high energy, high work ethic to at some point you make the second jump and some people don't and then it just becomes this curmudgence, these very miserable older people. And it's like you have to make this leap where you switch the way you work. But you're not, an old person is not going to beat a young person at being young.

Starting point is 03:10:00 Right. And that's where people, and that's where I think some of that cringness, and it happens on both sexes, men, you know, men and women. The six-year-old woman who's trying to pretend like she's 20, it's like it's... Yeah, yeah, there's something there too. If you're nervous, do more. It's hard to be nervous when you practice the same thing a thousand times in a row. When in doubt, stack reps. Anything you start, you will suck at. You will be embarrassing, but you will survive. Then you will realize that looking like a fool lasts a moment, being one that never started, lasts a lifetime. I think people wildly underestimate the value of accumulating significant enough volume that it's no longer something that you have a reaction to. So you desensitize yourself to it. And so like, for example, exposure therapy. And so if you, if you give a speech and you're nervous about the speech, if you do it enough times that you are bored of doing it, that you are sick of the presentation, you're probably ready. And so I, how many times did you do the book launch? over 100 easily easily over 100 um it was a lot but but by the time that it happened i was like

Starting point is 03:11:10 i know what the next slide like i had words on the slides but i knew what the slide was going to say because my my words started started them before the words appeared on the slide um and that is that has just become my limit test because i like i said earlier like i definitely cared a lot about what people thought. And so you can do the very hard work of not caring what people think, or you can do so much work that there's nothing left to control. Like if you've controlled the controllables, then I think, at least for me personally, my anxiety levels around performance and things like that go down to essentially zero because it's like, I have done this before. And before I did both launches, because I've had them, I've done two big ones now, the first one that I did, I did at a venue.

Starting point is 03:11:54 And the woman who like kind of ran the whole thing, she's like, she had people going on stages and all the time. And she said something right before I got on stage. She said, you were the most calm out of any person that I have seen. And I just remember looking at her in the moment. And I was like, I have done this before. And I said it a little bit violently, but I was just like, this is not my first time doing this. Like, I will do exactly what I did the last 20 fucking times I did this. And that is all. I will come. I will do my job. And I just, that's why I'm a big fan of the Patriots under Belichick like do your job like you cannot control everything do the things you can control and it just it takes so much of the anxiety and the second loops of thinking and third

Starting point is 03:12:36 order consequences that you're worried about out of your mind because that is it and so if you if there's a lot of stakes do so much volume that it would be unreasonable that you fail and then at that point if you do fail you will not blame yourself because you're like I did my part and that's okay and next time I'll try and control the things that are outside And the judgment of other people becomes less scary because your likelihood of failure becomes lower overall and less culpable to you in admission. People think after they fail, they think to themselves like, I should have done this differently. I should have done that differently. It's like, well, think about what you're going to say when you fail and then do that before you fail and you probably won't fail.

Starting point is 03:13:19 That's why I think people feel so aggrieved when something happens that was out of their control. when they'd done everything, because it is going to suck if there is a lightning strike in Vegas. And you go, for fuck sake, dude, I worked so hard. I worked so hard. Everything was done. Yes, it's not your fault, but it's not that frustration won't come and that you won't be agitated at it. It's a different flavor, and it's certainly better than blaming yourself. But it's like, I think about, you know, botched pediatric surgery, something like that.

Starting point is 03:13:57 You know, you've got the kid that had been in the traffic accident to the hospital on time, but that surgeon, that particular day just wasn't paying the right amount of attention or whatever happened. And then there's, you know, there's some bad outcome. Fuck, like, we did everything. We did everything. And we did everything is reassuring. But it, there is a type of lack of control that comes along with that that must be also very difficult to deal with. The same for business launches and everything else. So two fun things there.

Starting point is 03:14:32 So one, people don't know this, but the day before the launch, the last one, I had someone filed a TRO, which is temporary restraining order to try and prevent me from launching the book. Let's just say an adversary. And the hearing for the whether I could do the bulk launch was at 4 o'clock on Friday for a launch that I'd spent $10 million on. and almost two years of my life, plus the other books leading up to this, right?

Starting point is 03:15:01 And so at 4 o'clock, there was going to be a decision, obviously, it was dismissed. But, like, there was a world where I was not going to be able, there's a parallel universe where I wasn't going to be able to launch the book. What time did you launch the book? 9 a.m. Saturday. Right. Like, tight.

Starting point is 03:15:18 Did you have to attend the hearing? No. I have my counsel to do it. But what was interesting is that when they told me that, that it was dismissed and that we had won or whatever. My honest reaction was like, darn, it would have been a sicker story. Like, I swear to God,

Starting point is 03:15:35 because I already was like, this book is so good, people want to make it illegal. Like, the marketing would have written itself. But anyways, I say that, say, like, one is like, I'm a big believer from a marketer's perspective. You should never waste a crisis. And that means that there's always a story to tell,

Starting point is 03:15:50 and you're the best person to tell it to. The second one is that, especially with a kid coming, I call them like getting kicked in the nuts type problems, which is if toddler wakes up and then decides to, you know, if let's say I had something that was super valuable and very fragile, finds it and then destroys it. And it's, you know, a year and a half year and a half old or two years old. In that moment, there is nothing that I can, I can't, there's no screaming, there's no punishing. It doesn't comprehend what's going on. All I would do is condition it to hate me. If I were to punish me, if I were to punish me,

Starting point is 03:16:23 shit in that moment. And so I just have to suffer. Like there's there's nothing to do there. You just suffer. And you can try and avoid it and put it elevated. Of course, control the control. But let's assume that you did that and it still happened. And but I think there's a certain amount of peace knowing that like you did what you could and shit happens. Like there's just nothing you can do. There's just nothing you can do. And I think in some ways that's very free. Like shit happens to everybody. It's interesting how I think about this when I watch people perform, especially people that have become very familiar with their craft. So people leak out who they are in the breaths in between the things that they're doing. Somebody's character is not revealed with how they pick you up on the first date, but it's how they treat the waiter, whether or not they hold the door open for somebody else who goes in.

Starting point is 03:17:23 and I think about this when I see performers on stage, watching a band this year, and seeing the drummer who is playing and his stick breaks, and while he's playing the particular beat, he just seamlessly switches, this hand reaches behind him, picks up another one, twels it twice, and then gets back to it. That is something that you have done 10,000, 20,000, 30,000 times. It's got nothing to do with the actual role of playing the drums, not the skill or the talent of playing the drums, but it's the breath in between what he does.

Starting point is 03:17:57 And I think about the same here with, it's easy for anybody to look composed when things are going well, or even when things are going neutral, but it's very exposing when things go poorly about their character. It's the breath in between the big thing. It's you going, well, what I'm here to do is give the presentation for the book.

Starting point is 03:18:17 Okay, well, how do you deal with a T.R.O. the night before. Right. that's the reach behind can I keep going I see it as um I actually so to to to and this is not to pop the bubble of romanticism around because I do think that's really elegant um it's just how you behave on different conditions and so if we see personality is how you behave in the aggrative conditions it means that you can behave under perfect conditions and you can't behave under imperfect conditions which means that you need to practice behaving in imperfect conditions so that you can behave the same way and so again part of the reason I think of having so much practice uh being

Starting point is 03:18:50 being basically being a proxy for the preparation is that you will have been exposed to so many different conditions. That is what happens when the clicker stops working. Exactly. And I had that happen during one of them. One of my practitioners, I had two times I had the clicker stopped working. So I was like, oh, am I going to do that? Like it didn't happen when we were alive. One of the issues. Had it have happened, you've already run that.

Starting point is 03:19:07 Right. We figured that out. I had another run where I had the case of the book stuff and then it all fell over. I had one where like I put it, they were backwards. They were like upside down or whatever. So like on the camera. me about that? So there's there's there's there's there's all these different permutations that like it's like you can you can you can decrease likelihood of failure if you try and get all the failures out before you actually before it counts and I think that's like at least for me how

Starting point is 03:19:31 I approach performance is how do I get all the failures out of the way so that I have the highest likelihood of succeeding when when the time that matters counts. I wonder if Elon intended to do that with the cyber truck how many times have you tried to throw that steel ball at the window of a cyber truck presumably not non yeah presumably it's happened before You just get a little bit over-excited with too much adrenaline and launch it with too heavy of an arm. Yeah. You'd be surprised how far you can get by only knowing what you want and not accepting anything else until you get it. So we've talked about commitment and decisions a lot.

Starting point is 03:20:07 I find additionally like decisions, the root of that from Latin is Decadere, which is to cut off. And commitment is the elimination of alternatives. And so they're almost like, you know, cousin words in terms of their meaning. but by definition if you are the most focused person in the world then you would have nothing but the one thing that you focus on it for the most focused reader in the world you would only read you would not drink you would not sleep you'd not eat

Starting point is 03:20:32 you'd be the most focused reader in the world anything that is not reading is making you less focused and so if you know what you want which I think is for many people more difficult because it's not knowing what they want it's deciding all the things they're willing to give up in order to get what they want because what you want is what you're willing to sacrifice for And so if we want multiple things, which one of the things that we still want, are we willing to sacrifice for the one that we want more? And I think if you get clear on the thing that you're willing to sacrifice other things for, that you're willing to put all those things on the altar to sacrifice for the one thing, life gets to our point earlier about simplicity much easier because you have a singular lens to make all decisions through. Kobe was notorious for like, does this make me a better basketball player?

Starting point is 03:21:11 That was it. It just, every decision was filtered through that lens. And so it makes decision-making incredibly easy. And so the amount of mental bandwidth that you get back is all of it. But the hard part for more people is making the decision that this is what they want, not once you made the decision following through. Yeah, it's the elimination of alternatives, not the continued commitment to the thing, which is none of the alternatives.

Starting point is 03:21:39 There's tons of stuff on products for switching costs being horrendous. But I think that what is not talked about enough, is basically the cost of switching desires. Like you're switching wants. And the amount of time and effort that gets wasted in the loops of making the decision and then yearning for the cost of that decision that you already said was worth it. So one of the things that's been really helpful for me for big life decisions when I have, I would say, conflicting priorities, like multiple things that I want,

Starting point is 03:22:09 is when I make the call, I'll usually write out a document that explains all of the reasoning in its full in its in its totality so that i don't so one if i if i if i have this moment of doubt again i revisit it and then i read it again and then it basically closes the loop almost instantly and so rather than have these endless thought loops i'll have one or two i'll reread it and then it kind of goes away and this is especially on the relational side if you let's say you had a breakup or something like that and you're like or maybe you were the one who did the breakup and you know you could get them back but you don't know if it was the right decision blah blah blah like writing out every reason that you did it because you forget. And this is the whole point about punishment fades and reward

Starting point is 03:22:49 sticks is that in the moment of pain after she comes back and she's crazy, you have to remind yourself of all the shit of all the things that you know you will forget. So it's almost like you're writing a warning letter to your future self of like, don't forget about this. Remember the time she keyed your car. She did it again. Right. Like you have to put all those things down so that when you're in that moment of nostalgia looking back, you know what, those were the good old ties. You know, she wasn't so bad. But maybe I was being a little bit unreasonable. You can read again. You're like, oh, my God, I can't believe.

Starting point is 03:23:15 Thank God, I made that call. But that way you don't actually have to then waste the next six months re-learning the same mistake again because you already documented in an artifact. That's called borrowed authority exercises. Borrowed authority. But instead of borrowing it from someone else, you're borrowing it from a past version of you. Yeah. I like that.

Starting point is 03:23:32 Yeah, yeah. The fading affect bias thing is pretty fascinating. Adam Masriani says that tragedy plus time equals comedy is the closest thing that exists as a formula in human psychology. Tragedy plus time equals comedy. Some stuff that was kind of horrendous in the past over a long enough time horizon becomes neutral or hilarious. And some stuff sticks about as bad, but even the bad isn't as bad. But yeah, it's a tragedy plus time equals comedy is kind of true. And I think that's one of the reasons why Gallo's humor that soldiers use when they're away that was talking to this British SAS guy. And

Starting point is 03:24:11 he got one of his teammates got friendly fired in the ass by a misfire from someone's handgun and they're in the middle of a firefight surrounded by enemy combatants they're now going to have to get this guy out of there that guy's not going to be able to fight anymore they're going to have to sub someone in for the team maybe this means everybody everybody blah blah blah but everyone just started laughing it's like for fuck sake everyone laughed I mean like I do get the sense that trying to bring forward humor as a tour how do you think about that like you serious guy take up a suit with an existential level of drive?

Starting point is 03:24:50 How do you think about the role of humor? So it's funny that you even said serious guy because I would say I'm serious on this podcast because we talk about serious things. But like if you were to talk to my team, like the recording studio is a not PG zone. It is not like everyone knows there's two places HR is not allowed. One is where I record and the second is the gym.

Starting point is 03:25:10 and like there's just no HR allowed you've got to deal with whatever I'm going to say. But if you were to look at my newsfeed right now, it is entirely stand-up comedy. And so I'm probably closeted or not, like I'm a huge stand-up fan. It's almost all that I consume. And it's because I think that comedians are modern-day philosophers.

Starting point is 03:25:30 They point out these apparent truths that we don't want to look at. Some comedians. Some. And what's interesting about comedy specifically is that most of the time, they say statements that they would be punished for saying in any other condition than on stage. And so comedy gives this veil of protection, which I think we need to protect, for them to say things that, like, if you think about comedy at the most basic level for, like, a human, kids can laugh when they see someone do something they should get punished for, but not get punished. So you see Roadrunner get smashed with the hammer or whatever, and then they laugh, right? Or you see, you know, three stooges.

Starting point is 03:26:09 like, you know, whatever. And so it's slapstick because that's the level of humor that a child can understand, but it's basically punishment avoided. And so we laugh. And so when somebody goes up there and says something they should get punished for, they should get bonked on the head, but they don't, we laugh. And so I find that like endlessly, I mean, I laugh a lot. So I don't remember the question was, but yeah, I'm a big fan of comedy. Yeah, it was what's the role of comedy in manipulating but using humor as a tool, I guess, in that way. The ability to dispel this thing feeling serious by laughing at it is kind of magical. It's like the Bogart and Harry Potter.

Starting point is 03:26:52 Like how many of my big fears can I just laugh about how funny this will be soon? And if I can pull, if I think it's going to be funny eventually, I might as well think it's going to be funny today. That's a fucking great archive poll to think about the Boggart and Harry Potter. which is how you do it, just to make it look silly. This is the thing that you are most scared of, and the way that you get it to fuck off is to turn it into something hilarious.

Starting point is 03:27:16 I still remember the first time I learned about this. I was probably 11. My friend, we were on this road trip, and he... At 11? Yeah. Well, I was, there were parents who were driving. Yeah, but there's him and his brother, right? Yeah, we were just crushing it.

Starting point is 03:27:33 Crushing life. And right before the road trip, he, uh, they had just picked, um, like those, those yellow cherries, whatever those are. You know, the little, they're like cherries, but they're yellow and red, like golden cherry. They look like golden apples, but they're whatever. They're cherries. Some sort of cherry. And they just picked them from like the tree that had just gone ripe, whatever.

Starting point is 03:27:52 And there was a whole bowl of them. And he had all of them. Uh, and then we went in the car to go on this road trip. And about an hour into the trip, he's like, I, I need to go to the bathroom. And they were like, well, we're not. there yet like well you know we'll stop in the next bathroom he's like no no like i i really need to go to the bathroom and so they had to pull over to this like small town that had nothing and they literally knocked on doors to see if someone would let an 11 year old kid uh in and so there's an old lady who said

Starting point is 03:28:22 yes through a window i couldn't even make this up and we had to go through this spiral stale case up to her her flat or whatever her apartment and i was behind him because they were like well all of you kids are going to go use the bathroom if we're going to stop right and so it's his dad It's the old lady, his dad, him, me, and then his younger brother, and then the mom. Actually, the mom went in the car. But anyways, that was the, that was the lineup. I'm looking up. And as we're walking up, I just remember this horrendous smell.

Starting point is 03:28:50 And then I was like, oh my God, he's ripping ass. And then I see just a fucking deluge of shit just coming out and drip down his leg and it's on the steps. And he's walking through and we're all trying. And it was horrendous. And he's 11. And anyways, he goes, he has to wear his dad's boxers because he shits his pants, right? So his dad doesn't have boxers. He has his dad's boxers on.

Starting point is 03:29:15 And he was so humiliated. And he was like, don't fucking joke about it. And, and obviously, we're 11, right? And so his mother, when she saw it cracks up at this happening, even though he's like super serious about it. And she says, you are going to laugh about this in a. few years. Like, this will be a very funny story. And I just remember that she was already there. She, like, she was already there. She was already, this is hilarious. And she was like, it might take you

Starting point is 03:29:45 some time, but this is very funny. And I, that was like, that was the time where I learned that was, like, your tragedy plus time is comedy. Can, if it becomes that eventually, then you might as well have it now. Of course we have a T. R.A. Ha ha. Like, how ridiculous is this? Unreal. What a better story. it'll be because like I don't remember anything about that trip besides the fact that he shit his pants that'll definitely breach the threshold for emotional activation yeah like novelty and intensity are the two things that create emotion that would create memories that's definitely one of them that talking of the young people thing young people don't want to work hard anymore no young people don't want to work hard anymore for you you have to create a company worth working hard for yeah I mean I just

Starting point is 03:30:34 fundamentally reject that humans have somehow changed um I do think that there are going to be preferences that change between what do you call it not classes generations thank you generations um but they just work differently but there i mean i see some 15 year olds that are just as motivated as 15 and 20 year olds and i see some lazy 15 and 20 year olds that were just as lazy as 15 and 20 year olds that i know i think it's just convenient more than anything and typically it's easier for older people to say that we had it harder and you did so what and also most generations say I want to make it better for the next generation, and then when it is better for the next generation, we resent them for it being better and easier, but wasn't that the point? And so it's really just

Starting point is 03:31:15 like resenting them for receiving the gift that we gave them. What does creating a company worth working hard for mean? I think it's a combination of the microenvironment within the company, and then the global reinforcer that the company stands for. And so I see when Elon says, we're going to, you know, Mars or more realistically, we're saving humanity, which is, I think, what most people were bought in on his vision C. He's created the most noble cause of all kind that you should, a goal big enough that it's worth suffering for.

Starting point is 03:31:53 And so people are willing to suffer, as long as the price is worth it, we're willing to go through just about anything. And so making the company worth suffering for or worth working hard for is about, number one, making sure that where we're going is a place that people feel inspired to work towards. I think this is worth doing.

Starting point is 03:32:09 On the micro, it's okay, how can I make the work environment something that people want to come back to. And that a lot has to do with just training leaders and managers in order to make environments that ward off people who suck and encourage people who don't suck. Yeah, if you have a company that continues to get great talent, that you should. You can hire people who just weren't right or we're not going to work hard or weren't

Starting point is 03:32:33 going to be bought in. But after a while, especially if you've got enough staff that work for you, if they continue to be demotivated and to not want to work hard, it's a you problem. What's more likely that all of your exes are assholes who are argumentative or that you're the argumentative asshole? Because you are the common denominator between all of these different exes. Or them. Me and them, there's two. Them is the other. Right. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. No, but so to your point in seriousness, if we see that as culture, right, which is this big amorphous term, but obviously it's the business world. So I've defined it, which is the rules that govern reinforcement in organization. Right. So what are the if then statements that when someone does this, this happens? And so the, the culture of any group, not necessarily even a company, but of any team, any group of people, is going to be, what are all the things that are rewarded? What are all the things that are punished? And then kind of third categories, what are the things that are themselves reinforcing that we permit, but we shouldn't. Right. And so being really clear, and this is why I'm big

Starting point is 03:33:29 on defining things in observational terms. So instead of saying, hey, Susie was lazy, we're going to say, like, Susie doesn't respond to Slack quickly. And she showed up late to two meetings. Okay. So that's what she did. Is she lazy? That's a label that doesn't really help. anybody but if I can tell Susie hey people are beginning to describe you as lazy and it's because of these things I'm assuming you don't want to be described as lazy right okay if you just change do this instead next time and it just it just it cuts out so much of the noise of like this generate it's like many of the times they don't even know that's what good looked like no one ever defined success no one ever defined what the standard was and so I see that probably the most important job of the

Starting point is 03:34:11 leader is to hold the standard, is to define what good looks like an observable term so that everyone knows this is success. Therefore, failure is also obvious. Right. And then obviously all the downstream implications of that of how do you model behavior so that other people do it, etc. It's very hard to have a vision when you have bills to pay. I saw this old white guy giving financial advice on TikTok getting roasted in the comments, boomer, fake guru, etc. The guy was Ray Dalio. That's when I realized there was no amount of success that can legitimize you to the ignorant. If you actually met everyone, you'd realize some people aren't worth being loved by. It's a good thing to be hated by a bad person. Violent agreement. But that moment with Ray Daly

Starting point is 03:35:00 was like, it was actually, like, there are these moments that you have that change the way you behave. And that was one for me that I don't want to say it was the last nail in the coffin because I don't think anyone is impervious from outside influences, but it was a significant nail in the coffin of the public opinion for me in terms of content because I think to some degree maybe I'll just speak for myself

Starting point is 03:35:26 there's always a chase for more legitimacy like am I legit yet am I like do I need to be billionaire Yeah do I need to be a billionaire to be legit Do I need to be a deck of billionaire to be legit? Like when am I legit right Which which really means When will everyone love me and no one hate me?

Starting point is 03:35:44 but when I was writing that I was thinking to myself like oh everyone love me well I've met a lot of people that I think that if they loved me I don't think I would like me I would see that as a compliment yeah and so then it was like oh well this is just this is a fixed cost I just would prefer to be liked by the correct people and I should prefer to be disliked by the incorrect people

Starting point is 03:36:14 in which case, great. Some people didn't like me. That makes sense. I'm not for everyone. Adam Masaryani's got the two laws that govern the internet. The internet is a very big place and people have differing opinions. Just when you combine those two things together, it means that some huge portion of people are going to hate you.

Starting point is 03:36:33 And as you get exposed to more, given that the internet is a very big place. I had Joe Santagardo on the show. One of the biggest podcasts in the world, recently sold out MSG fucking huge sat there and the first thing

Starting point is 03:36:46 that I said to him I was like dude you they do the same plays as we do on Spotify the same play they got their award

Starting point is 03:36:52 their button award that's literally the same announcement I got mine non zero a number of fucking plays right worked very hard in it

Starting point is 03:37:00 so Joe what do you think is the big podcast just sold out MSG I do tours too a podcast it's like

Starting point is 03:37:08 how Venn diagram me how much and he's like I think it's like it's like the headlights of a fucking Jeep. It's like two big circles. He's 80% women at his live events. It's 90, 95% women for him and his co-host. Hilarious comedian. I've never heard of it. So yeah. He'd be on YouTube at the basement yard. Joe something like fucking awesome talent,

Starting point is 03:37:27 generational talent at what he does. All of the comments, all of the comments. I like this guy. Who the fuck is he? The internet is a really big place. It's a really, really, really big place. and sometimes you can have that, which is, wow, two van diagrams come together and they actually mix quite nicely. Other times, it's like oil and water. And given the fact that the internet's a big place and lots of people have different tastes, the problem I think is taking feedback from people who you think are your people but aren't. Because the difference between, huh, this person is unencumbered and has a type of unbiased, perspective of me that is novel and useful to take as opposed to people who have seen a lot of

Starting point is 03:38:15 mean can frame maybe I was a bit mean but they know I've got enough ballast in the system that they give me a pass suppose this person that saw me for the first time was that I think you're a bit rude to that person you're fuck actually do you know what maybe I was but the other side being this person just isn't my people determining those two from the internet with the disembodied egg profile thing or everybody everybody now especially with how the platforms work everybody can go viral because it's no longer about followers which i feel like unbelievably annoyed by that i was small when followers mattered and now i'm big when just content matters like i invested into the market when it was really really difficult and now that i'm at the

Starting point is 03:39:00 top of the market it means that it's easy for everybody at the start whatever but the same thing how do you really feel yeah It's true. It's true. It is. It is. Followers seem to matter an awful lot and meant that you just piss out huge plays because of your subscriber base. And now everybody, the fact that anybody can go viral, how fantastic. It's a egalitarian. It means that new creators can come through. And I've seen lots of them. And I coach lots of them and help them to try and get up. But at the same time, that means that people who aren't creators can go viral. Someone can just yap, because they wanted to. I was on this American Airlines flight and I can't believe that this thing happened. You wake up, but, but, you wake up the next day and you're a headline. You go, ah, I don't know if all of these people who don't know who I am are my people or are not, and the feedback is very difficult to dissent. Or if they see the 15 seconds, I think there was that lady who had that, she went off on the airline pilot. I don't know anything about it. I literally only know that. I thought you were going to say the one about that this is like 10 years old now, the chick that said, I'm heading to Africa, hope I don't get AIDS, lull, just joking, I'm white.

Starting point is 03:40:02 And she got, she tweeted it before she got on the plane, got off the plane and her whole life was in flames. Family guy did a bit about this Brian did it before he got on a plane so good and they saw and the world saw however many less than 180

Starting point is 03:40:17 whatever the characters is and took that and then just said this I know everything about this is who you are yeah this is everything that you are and I think that in a nutshell is like why we can't take too much weight for okay that they have consumed

Starting point is 03:40:30 280 characters of every character that you've ever said or thought in the history of you it's like one thing that I think brought to argue the complete opposite side of this. I think there's a very powerful question, which is what if they're right? And so what? So, for example, I get a ton of like, Jew said gear, steroids, whatever. I said, Jew said.

Starting point is 03:40:59 I don't get that one. But I get a lot of like steroid-related stuff, especially if I don't have, you know, my flannel on. And I used to be like really offended by it. And then Lila was like, you've taken steroids. And I was like, that is a fair point. What if that ride? Yeah. And it's just like, and I was like, oh, this makes sense.

Starting point is 03:41:22 And then like Lela, people, you know, get after her voice being low. And it's like, she's like, I took steroids. So yeah, that's how that happens. Anyways. Moving on. Yeah. Do you know Joe Hudson? Have you come across him yet?

Starting point is 03:41:38 No. He's been on my pod. He's a Sam Altman's coach, head of human culture, performance, something at Open AI. Like one of only maybe two or three people that deserve the title of master coach, Dr. Kay being one of them, probably Tony, I guess, too. And his handle on Twitter is FU Joe Hudson. And I was like, where's the FU from? It's like because people say, fuck you, Joe Hudson.

Starting point is 03:42:01 Because one of my friends a long time ago said, you know, what, Joe, you're an asshole. And I thought about it for a while and I realized, I am an asshole. So sometimes the things that people say to you just are true. They're just right. And in the fighting against it is where all of the pain is. That's all the pain. Exactly. And then as soon as that like that happened, either that comment stopped tapping as much or I stopped seeing it. I don't know which one actually happened, but either way, it stopped affecting me. And so like, I mean, I guess it is simply a frame of acceptance of like, what if they're right? Well, maybe they are right. And so what? What does that mean? Oh. But the answer, what works whether they're right or wrong? Which is why,

Starting point is 03:42:45 I mean, that's one of your old ones. Right. I'm thinking about one of my favorite lines of yours that I keep coming back to this year, the stress of being perfect will kill you more quickly than your imperfections. Stress of trying to be perfect will kill you more quickly than your imperfections. I think there's a burbling, but pretty rapidly growing anti-optimization cult at the moment. And I think that people are feeling overwhelmed with advice. I think they're uncertain about the future. There's loads of chaos going on. Is AI going to take my job?

Starting point is 03:43:17 Is the Iran war going to bleed over here? What's going to happen? Is Trump going to run for a third term? Is there going to be a civil war? There's too much information. I'm overwhelmed with screens. I haven't got good sleep. I'm taking two supplements.

Starting point is 03:43:28 And they just want someone to simplify life. You can simplify life by trying to wrangle it down into an aggressive routine. But what that looks like from the outside a lot of the time is sort of fragility. And this is your America was built on the backs of men who ate bacon for breakfast and smoked cigarettes. Like if you miss your morning routine today, you'll be fine. The line between this is important for me to improve my mental health in order to create the structure that I need to make progress. And this is a glorified rain dance that I'm doing because I'm superstitious about how things work. I even saw this with Jocco, the first ever episode I did with Jocco.

Starting point is 03:44:03 He was in a bit of a terse mood as a terse man that was like terse squad. And someone brought you up to him afterward a couple of months later on Twitter. And he said, I hadn't trained that morning. I was in a bit of a grump. He hadn't been to the gym. And I reflected about that a lot. And I brought it up to him. I spent a few days with him over Christmas.

Starting point is 03:44:27 And I was like, remember when that? Yeah. It's like, interesting because. training is obviously the structure that you have built a lot of things on and it makes you feel good and it facilitates your performance. But if the removal of the training doesn't allow you to do the thing, there is a kind of fragility that's baked into the system that you want to be able to perform regardless of whether you've got to train or not and the training builds on top. Does that make sense?

Starting point is 03:44:55 A thousand percent. If the routine that you do is additive, great. then you have baseline performance without it. If the routine creates dependence to do baseline performance, then it becomes a crutch and then you become fragile. And so, yeah, I'm, I would say on the spectrum of routine versus retard maxing, I'm on the retard maxing side of like, just work. Grab your, grab your stimmy's and get to it. And I think it's because my, I think one of my big fears in life is becoming

Starting point is 03:45:31 soft, is allowing, like nothing fails like success, is letting the laurels soften me to the game, which is like the reason that I still do like Q&As with, you know, smaller business owners that are, you know, doing a few million dollars year or whatever is that's going to come off weird. But is I have to stay connected to the earth. I have to stay like grounded here. Otherwise, I will lose the edge that is where all the details are one. And so, as a flag for self, if you cannot function without your routine, your routine owns you, you do not own it. Full stop.

Starting point is 03:46:15 If it's just additive, great. And that means that if you don't have it, you should still be able to win. Because one of my big beliefs is whenever someone has an excuse for losing, that's like, well, it wasn't a perfect day for me. It's like there's this scene in, I think it's Invictus. It's Matt Damon movie. He's like a rugby player. or whatever with Morgan Freeman. South Africa.

Starting point is 03:46:35 Yeah. And there's this scene where Morgan Freeman is Nelson Mandela and he's talking to Matt Damon. And I think Matt Damon says something to the degree of, you know, we're not playing at 100%.

Starting point is 03:46:48 And I think Morgan Freeman says no one ever is. And it was like, I don't even think it's a quoted part of the movie, but I remember seeing that and being like, fuck. Like no one's ever at 100%. It's like saying I can win the,

Starting point is 03:47:01 I can win with if I have perfect weather, perfect conditions, perfect whatever. And so I think that's why trying to get all the failures out so you can try to create or recreate the randomness that imperfect conditions can and still win. And I think that's why I'm such an advocate of just win. Like it does, like it just does, because the thing is this, after the game is played, no one remembers whether the ref gave you a bad call or the weather was bad or whether your starting lineup had two entries on it.

Starting point is 03:47:31 No one remembers. And so if they're not going to remember it in 20 years, then it shouldn't be a reason that we're going to try and lose today. There's a Floyd Mayweather quote where he says, you felt like you were on your A game today? And he says, I ain't got to use my A game, my B game, my C game, I can use my Z game. I don't even have to hit him hard. The result's going to be the same. The prospect of being able to beat somebody with your C game is really fucking cool. I love it.

Starting point is 03:47:57 It's violent. Most people think the hard part is getting started. The hard part is continuing to do the work when the excitement wears off and the grind feels hopeless. The visual that I always think about this is the marathons, marathon runners, is that people get excited

Starting point is 03:48:18 at the very beginning of the marathon where there's all these balloons and their friends and they're like training them on, there's music. And then at the end of the marathon is where everyone cheers you on at the end. But the marathon is won in the 26.1 miles between those two tenth of a mile.

Starting point is 03:48:32 And it is the boring, unending, relentless mundane middle and I think the game is mastering the middle. It's just the, it's just unending, unyielding, and everyone can get motivated for a moment. It's just like people feel motivated, but like motivation is is incredibly ephemeral, right? It vanishes. And that's why creating the conditions that make failure less likely is so important. Because if we can make successful actions, the most likely actions, success becomes the most likely outcome.

Starting point is 03:49:04 And I think that is like that is the piece that people miss because they actually stack their deck against themselves by never arranging the conditions to make successful actions the most likely action. So it's like I have to have, like I have to use perfect willpower to go out with my friends and not drink. I have and because of that, I'm going to stay out late, but I can, I'm going to have, I'm going to get home and immediately fall asleep. And if I, if I fall asleep perfectly, I'll get up by the time that I have this interview or by the time I need to give this. presentation, and they need everything to go perfect in order to have one win when it is much more, let's use anti-fragile, to set up the condition so that everything can go wrong and you can still win. So when we did the launch for the money models launch, one of the frames that we had is we wanted it to be inevitable. And so in order for it to be inevitable, we wanted to have three or four different

Starting point is 03:49:57 ways that we could break the record. Was it like, if we only do this, we break the record. If we only do this we break the record. If only this happens, we break the record. If only do this, we break the record. And we figured that if each of these had 80 or 90 percent likelihood of happening, that the likely that we'd break the record would be very high. And at the end of the day, we still didn't know, but I think stacking probabilities and in thinking about, I'm going to, I'm going to bridge this for a second. But I think the number of ways that people attack the problems in front of them is not nearly enough in terms of volume and not with nearly enough the intensity. like they're not going at it with full measure.

Starting point is 03:50:35 Like if you knew that your family is going to die or the thing that you care about most was going to disappear, how differently would you attack this problem? And how many different ways would you attack the problem? If you said, oh, man, I don't have a job right now. It's like, okay, well, what have you actually done? Right? And it's like, well, I applied to three places. It's like, okay, cool.

Starting point is 03:50:51 Well, how long did that take you? It took me 45 minutes. Okay, how many hours are there in a week? How many hours are there in a month? What are you doing that's not that? That is increasingly likely that you get it? Basically nothing. And so there's nothing that stops you from applying to 100 or 1,000 jobs in a month.

Starting point is 03:51:05 And the likelihood of you apply to 1,000 jobs and you have the requisite requirements that you don't get one is very low. And so it's just like, why are you not doing that? And I don't know the answer to that because I've just been a relatively violent person by nature. But I think once you have a very clear path to getting what you want, it's like, okay, how do I remove everything that prevents me from getting it? Not in a self-aggrandizing way. I am flawed to, but I'm just saying it helps. It is true that more dreams are destroyed by distraction than incompetence. And that's in the micro, but in the macro as well.

Starting point is 03:51:40 A billion percent. So if you had a white room that you were locked into and there was nothing in the white room except for one black dot, what is the most interesting thing in that room, the one black dot? And so people struggle to get motivated to do the work because there are other more interesting things to do than the work. And so you're not going to willpower your way through making work more interesting, but you can absolutely put yourself in a situation where work becomes the most interesting thing. And that is how you do a shitload of work. We talked a lot about risk. I said, you know, over the last sort of 12 months, looking at what you've talked about,

Starting point is 03:52:23 uncertainty, managing risk, but respect is something else you've been thinking about a good bit. What have you, another R word, the other R word, what have you been thinking about to do with respect? Well, I'm so excited you, I'm so excited as you asked. So I've been trying to think about the operation of respect because I thought, okay, what is something that I've wanted my whole life, right? I think many men want respect. Some people say status, but I'll define respect as this. So respect is letting someone else's word. change what you do even when they cannot make you. So if I respect someone, what they what they say

Starting point is 03:53:10 changes what I do even though they cannot force me to do it. And so there's two sides of respect. There's the earning of respect and there's the giving of respect. And so I was trying to encapsulate this into an acronym that I could remember because I know I'm going to talk about this a lot, especially with our leaders at the company because leaders won't respect. That makes sense. but how do you how do you how do you how do you gain respect and then also not past the line of being a tyrant right and so the acronym that I have is powers which is the behaviors that earn respect is number one is that you pay the cost which is that you sacrifice for the group where they can see it so if I i remember the first time um so when I was when I was a pledge back in my fraternity days

Starting point is 03:53:53 it's a group where everyone's even right no one's no one's special and there was a particular senior who was known for being a bad hazer and he called the goats and so the goats had to go to the house and you had to go in pairs right and so he called one guy and the guy was like it's goats it's just a derogative term derogatory term for a pledge okay yeah yeah worms goats whatever um well goats because they're gophers and they go do shit for you anyways they um and so he just looked at the group of you know 18 other guys and it's like who wants to come with me because we know he was going to get hazed so somebody just has to basically sacrifice themselves. And so I remember it was like, I'll go with you, dude. And it's a tiny act where that sacrifice gains respect from the whole group because that micro benefits everybody else for not having to go through it. And so when you are in a new organization, this is the operation for respect. You sacrifice yourself in a way that benefits the whole in a way that is visible. You don't have to do it visibly because then it looks cringe, but like they will see it eventually. Turning up early.

Starting point is 03:54:56 Yeah. Number two. two is outcomes, which is that things get better when you are involved for everyone. And so functionally, it's competence, which I would define as outcomes improve with your involvement that are traceable to you repeatedly. So it's the opposite of luck or free riding, right? Three is your word, right, the W, which is what you say will happen happens and what you say you'll do, you do. E is in force. And this is the sticking one I'll get to more in a second. but it's you don't let people cross you consistently. The R is restraint, which is that you hold back when you could punish more

Starting point is 03:55:34 and you give more credit than you need to. And then S is steady, is that you function in high-stake situations the same as normal situations. And so what ends up happening is that enforcement is basically your compliance floor, which is that if I enforce rules of like this is how I want to be treated, then people will at baseline just do that. But that is where you have a tyrant on their own because you need the other ones to have respect. You have to be competent.

Starting point is 03:56:07 Like if you have just enforcement of rules, but you have no competence, things is not better for anyone. You've never bared any cost. Everyone fucking hates that guy. And the moment their ability to make that person's life worse goes away, so does the behavior. And so the key that separates basically fear-driven or compliance versus respect is that they have to be able

Starting point is 03:56:26 to do it even when you have no ability to make them. Now on the flip side, if you have all of the competence things, but you have no enforcement, then you're the admired dormant. You do things for everyone, but like no one respects you. So then the next thing that comes up is like, okay, so enforcement, and this is probably the hairiest of the ones that is still required. And so there's three things that have to happen in order for you to be obligated to enforce a standard, which is that, number one, someone has to know the standard you have. We're like, please do not talk to me that way. Please do not address me in that manner.

Starting point is 03:56:59 Whatever that, whatever, do not turn in the dinner that's cold, whatever. They have to have a known standard. Number two is that they have to have the ability to adhere to that standard and then three, choose not to. Now, a lot of times people can feel disrespected. But if you've never articulated that this is a preference of yours, that you do things a certain way, and then you basically punish someone for treating you in a specific way without ever having told, them, then that is when you'll be seen as theoretical. Unspoken standards of premeditated disrespects.

Starting point is 03:57:29 Yeah. And so imagine the situation where you have a chef who's, you know, he takes a shithole, turns it around, is, you know, best in class chef. And he's got, and he's known for both being incredibly hard, but everyone who works for him loves him. So it's like, how do we manage this apparent contradiction? So new sous chef comes in, messes something up. the plate gets comes back in and then the head chef takes it dumps it and looks at the kit he says you just cost us that table we're going to comp the bill but don't worry you're still with us show up again at 6 a.m. tomorrow and do better so you have the moment we have to enforce it but it's about the behavior not the person and that's the big that's the big unlock what we're doing it about the person look like so it's basically you lazy piece of shit it's basically labeling them rather than the behavior and criticizing who they are rather than what they're

Starting point is 03:58:25 did. And so the three things is, number one, it has to be a known rule. Number two, they have to have the ability to follow it. And number three, choose not to. That is when a transgression occurs. Now, then it comes into, okay, what are the consequences that happen? Does that mean that you just let people transgress if you say, hey, don't do that and hey, don't worry. I still love you. Well, the consequence for crossing you needs to be consistent, which means that every time someone crosses you, there needs to be a consequence. If there isn't, then you teach people. to gamble with you because it's a variable reinforcer. You need to have consistent reinforcers which extinguishes the behavior. And so it has to be consistent. It has to be immediate and it has to be

Starting point is 03:59:05 escalating, which means if the first time I tell you, I say, don't worry, you're with us, be here tomorrow, do better. Fine. If you do it again, then it's like you're off for the night. If you do it again, you don't come back. And so there has to be it escalating consequence because what happens is at some moment it stops being about punishing the being. behavior, and it should be about punishing the pattern of behavior, which then means it is the person, which might be at that point. I don't want to train this person anymore. And so at that point, you have to respect the standard for everyone. And out of owing it to everyone, we have to let this person go, even if they're a perceived high performer. And so the flip side of it, so that's the how you earn

Starting point is 03:59:49 respect is you do powers. You sacrifice for the group. You have outcomes that you demonstrate competence for. your word is your bond, you do what you say you're going to do, you enforce the standards publicly, swiftly, consistently, and escalatingly. You show restraint. When you could yell, like, go fucking nuts on this kid for fucking something up, you choose not to even though you could. And then S is that you're steady, even when the biggest Michelin Star judge is there, you still act the exact same way as though they were just a normal dinner table. On the flip side, it's like, okay, how do I give respect? because this is equal opposite if you're like, well, this person needs to show me respect.

Starting point is 04:00:26 And I think this is important because if you're like, I felt disrespected, well, one, did we say what our preference was? And this has been super useful for me because I sometimes will be a disrespected by somebody who doesn't know. And so it helped me just to say, hey, you might not have known this. Don't do this again.

Starting point is 04:00:41 We're still cool. You didn't know. If you do it again, now we have a problem, right? So I just came up an acronym, hearted, which is all I could make from my memory. but basically honor, which is that you respect their preferences, you respect their lines, and you don't test the limits. E is esteem, so you praise them when they are not present.

Starting point is 04:01:01 Attend, which is that you listen to them without cutting in or interrupting. You are reliable in that your word is as good to them as theirs as to you. If you say, I've got the soup, you'll get the soup. You show them respect by saying what you said you were going to do to honor them. The next is truth, and this is where it gets a little bit more interesting. you tell them straight including what they will not like. And so that means that if you really respect someone, you don't coddle them. Just like a parent would respect to child.

Starting point is 04:01:28 I'm not going to dumb this down for you. And then E, this is another hard one, is expectations, is that you hold them to the same standard. And so you don't lower the bar for someone because otherwise that's just watering it down and diluting it. Don't talk down to me. Bringing the standard down to that level of count. Exactly. And so it's equal opposite. And then finally, D is defer.

Starting point is 04:01:48 is that in their area of expertise, you defer to their decisions. And so this has been really helpful for me to define this because respect is one word, but it has many behaviors underneath of it. And so by defining it that way, it's been incredibly helpful because when I'm talking to leaders, it's like, you need to earn respect. And you earn respect in this way. And that way I could say, you have not visibly sacrificed anything for this group or the outcomes that you've generated in no way have demonstrated competence. Or you said you would do this thing and then you haven't done it. Or you are allowing people to treat you in a way that is not the way that a leader would allow someone to treat them and you have not enforced anything. I would say that that happens on, the E happens

Starting point is 04:02:27 on both sides. I would say that I have some leaders in the company, for example, who are overly enforcing and people absolutely comply with what they tell them to do, but it's because it's all out of fear of just don't cross them, right? But you don't know what it is, which just means that they look like a loose cannon. On the other side, you've got the people who are really competent, but they're just like, ah, you know, it's okay. You know, Jopi go lucky, but like they don't get the respect because they never enforce anything. I can think of two different leaders in my company right now that are on both sides of this, both competent, but one that probably over enforces and another that basically under enforces. But until I had the words and these behaviors, I can't give them good feedback, which is why I'm so adamant about defining these terms in terms of behavior, because then I can actually help someone gain respect.

Starting point is 04:03:11 And so if you were like, man, I fucking no one respects me. It's like, well, there's the list. What things did you miss or what things have you not done? And that's just like, this is something that I've, it's obviously a huge passion of mine because defining the VIG or defining the amorphous in terms that people can be like, wow, I did that operation and I now have gotten respect. Yeah.

Starting point is 04:03:31 Like, that's very cool for me. I read a really great essay about how status is accumulated. And there's broadly two ways, especially ancestrally, dominance and prestige. and the interesting thing is that in times of war tribes tend to prefer dominant leaders problem being that a time of war hopefully if you don't lose will last it'll end

Starting point is 04:03:58 and then you're stuck with this tyrannical dominant guy who's surrounded himself with sycophants and that's when you want someone who's prestigious and to find someone who's prestigious the issue being that sometimes they're not as decisive or as cutthroat as you need in a time of crisis And this was the issue with Churchill, right? I mean, Churchill was like an amazing wartime leader and then didn't do as well after the

Starting point is 04:04:22 war. Yeah, I mean, he wasn't built as a peacetime leader. Yeah. He just, that wasn't what he needed. UK history. Yeah, of course. Dude, here's one about Churchill. I'm reading The Splendid and the Vile, which is the best book about Churchill.

Starting point is 04:04:34 You only go to the whole book, I think it's 500 pages. And it's 18 months is what it covers. And it's all of the journals and diary entries from all of the different people. best thing that I learned about Churchill so far is that he really hated whistling. He was allergic to whistling. And there was one day there was a boy that was walking down the street whistling. And he ended up in this huge back and forth with this 11 year old kid. You know, some street urchin. And Churchill, one of the biggest wars that before his campaign began was between him and this 11 year old child. Brilliant. Absolutely brilliant.

Starting point is 04:05:10 finishing this off just talking about like probably the word of the day risk you can't get rich if you never risk losing money you can't get loved if you never risk getting rejected

Starting point is 04:05:22 you can't get strong if you never risk getting injured you have to risk looking broke to get rich you have to risk looking weak to get strong you have to risk looking desperate to get loved egos hold back more dreams than failure and rejection ever will it's like risk not have not

Starting point is 04:05:50 it's like you have to put something in the altar at the most basic level it's like the first step is what you're willing to lose and it's it is trade of a known and inferior thing for a unknown and superior thing and it's the fact that it's unknown

Starting point is 04:06:08 that is the thing that bugs everyone and I think most of gains, most of the gains in life and the lack of gains come from being unwilling to sacrifice mediocrity.

Starting point is 04:06:34 It's interesting to think about sacrificing mediocrity. Right. But I think that is the, that is the appropriate term. People fear being less than extraordinary, and in so doing, sacrifice being extraordinary. It's like you sacrifice one either way. And so either you sacrifice being extraordinary to be ordinary, or you sacrifice ordinary for the chance at being extraordinary or less than ordinary. but if you really think about it many people who are ordinary have failed

Starting point is 04:07:09 and so you're really just still ordinary and so why would you not sacrifice ordinary for extraordinary? Fuck yeah man I appreciate you it's always good to sit down with you pleasure is mine as always all right

Starting point is 04:07:23 see you next time everyone dude yes yes so good we speak fuck we speak fuck there we go

Starting point is 04:07:37 sit back down you can present you were two versions of a very famous photo that's going to be behind you for most of the episodes a rembrandt yeah uh an original yeah this is an original i'm not sure if you've noticed um i'd like to thank my friends and family uh your hair is also really short hair too so you look like and this one you look like a child with the i do i look like some sort of freak child with bicep veins i think it's like ancient chippendales yes it is like like

Starting point is 04:08:09 But for some reason, for some reason you're in Hawaiian shorts. I didn't notice that. And then the one behind it is the, this is the original. All class. It's just, yeah, all class, no breaks. I love how they've kept me in a necklace, but this one's become so baroque. We're a tasteful group.

Starting point is 04:08:30 I think we're looking at truth. That's true. That's correct. That's correct. Disregard risk, look at truth. Yeah. Yeah. Fuck, yeah.

Starting point is 04:08:38 I appreciate you, man. When I first started doing personal growth, I really wanted to read the best books, the most impactful ones, the most entertaining ones, the ones that were the easiest to read and the most dense and interesting. But there wasn't a list of them. So I scoured and scoured and scoured and then gave up and just started reading on my own. And then I made a list of 100 of the best books that I've ever found. And you can get that for free right now. So if you want to spend more time around great books that aren't going to completely kill your memory and your attention, just trying to get through a single page, go to chriswillex.com slash books to get my list completely free of 100 books you should

Starting point is 04:09:17 read before you die. That's chriswillx.com slash books.

Modern Wisdom - 33 Brutal Truths To Stop Wasting Your Potential - Alex Hormozi - #1117

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