Modern Wisdom - #683 - Shaan Puri - 7 Semi-Controversial Rules For Success

Episode Date: September 21, 2023

Shaan Puri is an entrepreneur, former CEO, podcaster and an angel investor. Shaan is kind of an anti-guru. He's a self-identified lazy person but also managed to exit multiple companies for millions of dollars. So today, we’re delving into 7 of his most semi-controversial insights and discuss why much of the advice from business gurus might just be useless. Expect to learn why hard work is massively overrated, what the two most understated skills in the word are, how to get out of your head and stop overthinking, why many people learn the wrong lessons from failure, how falling behind might not be the great teacher many think it is, why being a billionaire is a stupid goal, why you shouldn’t follow what most people do and much more... Sponsors: Get $150/£150 discount on the Eight Sleep Pod Cover at https://eightsleep.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Get a Free Sample Pack of all LMNT Flavours with your first box at https://www.drinklmnt.com/modernwisdom (automatically applied at checkout) Get 5 Free Travel Packs, Free Liquid Vitamin D and more from AG1 at https://drinkag1.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied)  Extra Stuff: Get my free Reading List of 100 books to read before you die → https://chriswillx.com/books/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom - Get in touch. Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/modernwisdompodcast Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello friends, welcome back to the show. My guest today is Sean Puri. He's an entrepreneur, former CEO, podcaster, and an angel investor. Sean is kind of an anti-guru. He's a self-identified lazy person, but also managed to exit multiple companies for millions of dollars.

So today we're delving into seven of his most semi-controversial insights and discussing why much of the advice from actual business gurus might just be useless. Expect to learn why hard work is massively overrated, what the most undervalued skills in the world are, how to get out of your head and stop overthinking why many people learn the wrong lessons from failure,

how falling behind might not be the great teacher many think it is, why being a billionaire is a stupid goal, why you shouldn't follow what most people do, and much more. This Monday, another modern wisdom cinema episode goes live this time with Rich Roll, massive time podcaster, endurance athlete and all-round, interesting human. I really enjoyed this conversation. It was a much more personal one where we both opened up about challenges that we faced in our past and in our current lives. And I really love Rich's influence. Got a very sort of peaceful, calming demeanor.

Very interesting. Really, really enjoyed that conversation. And after this Monday, we get onto the episodes I recorded in the UK with some very well-known names. And those will be going live starting soon, hopefully within the next couple of weeks. I'm also back in Austin, by the way, I'm back in the USA for at least a little while. And my live shows begin next week. So, if you're in Austin and you have got tickets to my live shows, I'll see you on Monday. This episode is brought to you by 8Sleep. I am currently dying in Austin because it's too hot all the time and I'm being kept alive by my 8Sleep pod cover.

It actively cools and heats each different side of the bed. So if you sleep hot or if you sleep cold, this fixes the problem. It is an absolute game changer. If you find yourself waking up in the middle of the night or feeling extra groggy in the morning, temperature is almost always to blame. Also, it tracks your sleep, tells you how long you've been asleep, it gives you advice about how to get to sleep better. It'll even adjust the temperature of your bed as your sleep stages change throughout the night. On top of all of that, there is a 90-day money-back guarantee, so you can buy it and sleep on it for 89 days, and if you do not like it,

they will give you your money back. Head to 8sleep.com-modernwisdom to save $150 or 150 pounds on the pod cover. That's the best offer that you will find, but you must go to eightsleep.com-modernwister. This episode is brought to you by Element. I have started my morning every single day for the last three years, the same way, which is with element in water. It tastes fantastic. It reduces muscle cramps and fatigue. It optimizes your brain health.

It regulates appetite and it helps to curb cravings. It's got a science-backed electrolyte ratio of sodium, potassium and magnesium. Super simple, there is nothing fancy going on here, but it really does work. Also, they have a no BS, no questions ask refund policy, so you can buy it 100% risk-free. And if you do not like it, they will give you your money back and you don't even need to return the box. That's how confident they are, that you love it. They are the exclusive hydration partner to Team USA Weightlifting and relied on by tons of Olympic athletes and high performers in the NFL, NBA, NHL and FBI sniper teams, plus

tech leaders and everyday athletes around the world. Head to drinklmnt.com slash modern wisdom to get a free sample pack of all eight flavors with any purchase that's drinklmnt.com slash modern wisdom to get a free sample pack of all eight flavors with any purchase that's drinklmnt.com slash modern wisdom. This episode is brought to you by AG1. You are not eating and a fruit and vegetables in your diet and you know it and this is going to help. If you are looking to make an upgrade to your nutrition, AG1 is a fantastic place to start.

It is a daily foundational nutrition supplement that supports whole body health. It's got a science-driven formulation of vitamins, probiotics and whole food source nutrients. It delivers comprehensive support for your brain, gut and immune system. This is why Dr. Andrew Huberman and David Sinclair and Joe Rogan and Lex Friedman and myself are all massive fans because it is the best daily foundational nutrition supplement on the planet. Also, there is a 90-day money back guarantee so you can buy it and try it for 89 days and if you do not like it, they will give you your money back.

Head to drinkag1.com slash modern wisdom to get a year's free supply vitamin D, 5 free travel packs plus that 90-day money-back guarantee that's drink AG1.com slash modern wisdom. But now, ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Sean Puri. We already did this once. It went well, it went amazingly well and I was very sad that we couldn't put it out because we had technical difficulties. This time we're both in our home setup, no technical difficulties and we're going to run it back from what we got through last time plus more.

Well, last time I was also very sick the night after we recorded a podcast. I did the podcast with you, so two podcasts in a row, and I went home and basically just was in bed with a fever for the rest of the night. So if you thought that was good, great, because I thought it was terrible, and I was feeling terrible at the time. I got to do better than that. Okay, maybe that's just what all guests feel like once they've finished up recording with me. That's what I like.

The post-coytile depression that occurs after you've podcasted with me. I'm not too sure, I'll have to ask them previous guests. All right, so I wanna go through some of your most controversial, semi-controversial opinions, which you've kind of become famous for, I think, first of all, one of my favorites, hard work is massively overrated.

Why? Well, I'll take a step back. The reason I like these controversial opinions is Ayo is cool if you have some controversial opinions. But B, I've learned how much of what we believe is just simply stories that were told. This goes from everything, religion, to school, to being taught what you should be doing

for your career and all this stuff. And so I've actively tried to just deprogram myself and ask and question the assumption. So I actually started with looking at what are the things that almost nobody disagrees with? And are those really true? And one of those that I found that I in practice disagree with was growing up, I was told, hard work is what's most important. Hard work is the key to success.

Hard work is, and you just hear hard work preach. And it's almost like you'd have to be insane to be anti hard work is, and you just hear hard work preach, and it's almost like you'd have to be insane to be anti-hard work, right? Like, some people do it just for the, just for the effect, but I don't, I don't really mean it like that. I just mean it's overrated. It's not that it's a bad thing, but that it is overrated, because what I found in my life is that what you do is far more important than how, how hard you work on that thing. So for example, you know, I thought about the hard work thing and I used to work in restaurants and nobody works harder than people in restaurants. Restaurants are open, you know, from breakfast till

late night every single day, seven days a week, it is, you know, a thankless job, you were working in a hot kitchen and you are, you know, cooks work hard, cooks in the back line of a kitchen work hard. Janitors work hard, you know, the cleaning lady works hard, but, you know, you sort of think about it, you're like, why isn't the janitor driving a Bentley? Right? Like if hard work was the key to success, then why aren't the people who I think works work the hardest in most of these situations doing better?

And it's because, you know, hard work will let you win the game that you're playing, but it doesn't help you if you chose the wrong game. And so the most critical decision is actually project selection, what you decide to work on, what you decide to do with your talent and your time and your work ethic is far more important. And I don't really hear that.

In fact, I actually, growing up, heard the opposite. You get to college and they're like, what's your major? I don't know, that. In fact, I actually, growing up, heard the opposite. You know, you get to college and they're like, what's your major? I don't know, I'm 17, 18. I'm like, how am I supposed to, you know, I just came from high school, right? Like, I don't know what the thing is yet. Is there a list I can look at of like the jobs

and what they're like? Do I get to go see one? And instead, it's just like, just pick. If you don't pick, if you don't declare, if you don't declare your major, this is in the US at least, I don't know how it's for you, if you don't declare your major, you're behind. Like already, it's like, if you've chosen to wait and see or think or go test, you've fallen behind, right? So it just became this thing where picking what you do was like this quick

one second thing you were supposed to just get right right away with no preparation and then spend the rest of your life working hard and I just found that the opposite actually turned out to be true for me, which was picking the right projects made a huge difference and working hard enough was good enough. I consider myself to be frankly somewhat lazy but very happy and successful. So, you know, I don't know if I'm the outlier or what, but like at least disproved it is not it is not the main thing in terms of success. I believe it's overrated. Yeah, to clarify here, I don't think that you're saying hard work doesn't matter. Hard work isn't a competitive advantage. You're saying that for the people who believe that hard work is absolutely everything, it is the end all be all that there are other higher points of leverage that

you can do that open up levels and players to the hard work so that it can be maximized. Yeah, exactly. Hard work is maybe the fourth or fifth most important factor or ingredient. So you might say, what's more important? So number one to me is what you work on. Number two would be who you're around, who you work with, because those people will influence you in a far greater direction and provide more opportunities in the future. So what you work on, who you work with far more important than how hard you work. I sort of think it's something like fourth or fifth most important on the list. And that really there's just a threshold you need to reach. So if you simply don't take action, you don't do the work. It doesn't matter how good an idea you had or how good a partner jet.

Obviously not going to work. But it is a threshold and that going far beyond that threshold, going from 40 hours a week to 70 hours a week to 90 hours a week, like some people will popularize, has much less of an effect than I think people think. It just sounds good, sounds cool, and it sounds like you earned it. Yeah, why is it, if you're true, if what you're saying is correct and hard work is as overrated as you say it is, why is it such a pervasive myth? Because it's virtue signaling. Most people, you know, the reality is, if you looked at

like a contribution, a chart that showed the contributions to success, well, I was born with like all my healthy functions, right? Yeah, 10 fingers, 10 toes, everything works great. I was born in the United States. So already, that was far more influential in my future success and endeavors than somebody who had the genetic lottery played out differently for them. They were born in a different place with a different set of physical resources. And then you just keep going down the list of like how what you what what actually contributes to success, a lot of those things are out of your control.

I can't take credit for where I was born. I can't take credit for the genetics that I was given or the gifts, the talents that I had as a baseline. So what people try to do is they try to shove those away, pretend those don't matter, because you didn't earn them, and people will say you're privileged if you bring them up. And so instead, they go to the thing that sounds like they made a choice to do it, and that is the sole reason why they had the success that they had. I chose to work hard, I put in the time, I earned it, and it's sort of like, you know, the same thing happens in any endeavor. When I win, it's because I'm great. When I lose, it was bad luck.

So, why is that? Why do we think that when we win, it's because of what we did, and when we lose, it's because of what everybody else did, right? What the economy did, what the weather did, what the government did, like, you know, people are very quick on the downside to offload accountability and on the upside to load in accountability. So I just noticed these things, notice human nature's tendencies and realize it does seem like that would be the convenient thing to do to assign credit to your actions and to make it sound like you. If you, if you have a lot, if you earned a lot, if you got a lot of success, the reason why is because you put in a lot.

In reality, we know that sometimes it's asymmetric. Sometimes you just make a few critical decisions, simple decisions. I might have taken you a very short amount of time to do, but totally differentiated between success and failure. Yeah, I think there's a few things going on. One being, if you achieve success and it wasn't painful, people who are working hard and suffering and haven't achieved success,

to you, to them, you just look like a wanky, sort of bourgeois aristocrat of some kind, like a randomness aristocrat that was blessed by this sort of chance. Some Harris has got this idea that I didn't get chance to bring up with him on our episode, the myth of the self-made man. And he takes this one step further

because he folds in determinism and alakafry will. So he's basically like none of the things, none of the achievements that you have are yours to bear because you didn't choose the circumstances, you didn't choose the laws of thermodynamics, you didn't choose your genetics, you didn't choose the randomness, he didn't choose anything. And he sort of aims this at the right and says, this does an awful lot of heavy lifting

for people right of center and uses it to kind of lambast this myth of the self-made man. The problem that I have with that is it's a very disempowering story to tell yourself. I don't see it as an adaptive or useful story. Like I want to feel pride in my successes, because otherwise I know that I'm not going, I'm going to leave more on the table, because what's a fucking point? Like I get satisfaction from doing things well. So it's almost like a, it might be a literal truth, but a figurative falsehood in that it's not adaptive to believe, even if it's true. And I think that, I don't know, maybe there are times when self-deception

can be justified and that might be one of them. 100% agreed on both of the points you made. So I think the first is that, if you were honest about what actually works and what doesn't, it might annoy people because if things are going poorly or it's hard, they wanna, nobody likes to hear how easy it was for somebody else or how simple it could have been

if they had made different decisions. So it's sort of like keeps the barbarians at the gates type of thing to be like, no, no, no, the reason, the only difference was I put in more time in this direction and you put your time in this other direction. And it's the most equitable way to describe this. That pisses off the least number of people. However, for me, pissing off people

is not really a priority or a concern. I'm not trying to do it nor am I trying to avoid it. I'm just simply trying to be and let the chips fall where they may. Some people will love it, some people will hate it, and that's okay. I don't really care too much either way. The second point you made, which is there is no complete myth of the self-made band, it is disempowering. And so I have this whole

category of things that I always say are maybe true, but not that useful. So for example, if it's true, but not useful, there's plenty of things like we'll be in a meeting at work and somebody will say something. I say, that's true. I don't argue with what you're saying, but it's simply unimportant. It's not useful to what we're trying to decide or what we're trying to do here. Similarly, if it is true that we sort of have no free will and that it's all determined anyways and that doesn't really matter what would you do. Well, that's not that useful because it doesn't actually serve me.

That's not a story that serves me. And once you realize that it's all just stories anyways, pick the ones that serve you. Pick the ones that make you feel the way you want to feel that get you to the outcomes you want to have and not the ones that make you feel like crap. A related point, another opinion of yours. What are the most underrated skills in the world right now in your opinion? So I have two. The first one people don't even think is a skill, which is how underrated it actually is, is enthusiasm. Sort of a lame, maybe a little bit of

letdown from the way I framed that, but I don't think it should be a letdown. I think it should be exciting that enthusiasm is underrated. I'll give you a little story. So I had a realization one day day so I was 24 years old and I took a job and so I moved to Silicon Valley to take this job I joined the company and I think at the time I was probably the youngest employee in the company about 20 people there I was the youngest of 20 and And I looked around and there was engineers and there's designers people with all kinds of talents that I did not have couldn't code couldn't design You know can't dance can't do a lot of things So it's not like, don't feel like I have a bunch of hard skills. And I was like, what am I good at? You sort of have that sort of like

imposter syndrome self-doubt moment where you're like, why do they have me here? Why do they put me in charge of this project? Is it because I literally am like, you know, and I realized that like one of the things that I had that turns out to be quite important for most people who go on to do interest in things is I had a lot of enthusiasm. Meaning I was very excited about what we were doing. I would paint a picture that was compelling to me and then I would sprint at it. And the ability to paint a picture that excites you, the ability to paint a picture that excites you, the ability to bring excitement to a situation

sounds cheap, sounds fun, sounds totally frivolous, until you're around a group of people that don't have it. And then when the first person comes in that has a bunch of enthusiasm, that has hope about the future, that brings energy to the table, it's contagious, it changes the way everybody feels. And if you're going to do something that's important, generally, it's hard, right? I come from the world of entrepreneurship, entrepreneurship, people sort of realize, like, yeah, it usually starts off like, you're starting from scratch, you have nothing trying to make

it happen. There's a lot of force of will that goes into that. And discipline is one force of will. I'm going to show up at the right time and do the right things. The other is enthusiasm, which is, I'm gonna believe before it's here, and I'm gonna believe that it's gonna happen. I'm gonna take that, I'm gonna borrow on that future excitement today. I'm gonna take out a loan against the future, and I'm gonna borrow my happiness and excitement

about the future, and I'm gonna deploy it today to invest that enthusiasm today. That's how I think about enthusiasm, borrowing from the future. And I think it's a skill, I think it is massively underrated. I think having enthusiasm, when things are going good, it's quite easy. Having enthusiasm, when things are neutral to bad, is where you get the value of it. And most things are hard, and most things have pretty deep dips. So having enthusiasm is I think completely underrated because people

don't even see it as a skill. They don't see it as something you can develop. And they see and they don't place the importance on it. They don't realize how important that source of fuel is, how contagious that is, how it brings everybody's level up when you have it. So I think that's underrated altogether. The second one is storytelling. I want to go I want to jump I want to jump in on enthusiasm. Two things. By the way, three are disagree. I have noticed since I've been in America, I've realized the value of people

around me being excitable. British are genealogically, like we are genetically predisposed to be kind of dour, sort of personalities very similar to the weather, it's sort of gray and everything's a bit shit. We're very great with the satire and the sarcasm and the cutting the cutting remarks and stuff, but My disposition doesn't need any more of that. And what I realized one of the reasons that I've flourished since I've been in America Is I've been around people who believe that things are going to be better than They are right now. They continually presume progress is baked in. It's factored in all the time that things are going to get better. Of course,

stuff's going to grow. I'll do this going to be fine. This catastrophe, you're going to get over it and everything. That may be America overall. I'm not sure. That may just be my particular cohort of particular people in this particular city that I'm living in. But what it's done is it's raised my ambient mood and awful lot. We do not know the things that are going to happen in the future, right? We are not clairvoyant. We don't even really truly know ourselves, we're self-disceptive, other people to see us. We don't have a crystal ball that shows us what is going on either outside the world or inside of our own minds and our own bodies. Given the fact that we have to have

some form of delusion, why not pick a delusion that's going to be beneficial to you? You have the choice to do this. Why are on the side of, and the only real reason, I've been railing against cynicism for quite a while now, and it was Michael Malice's book, The White Pill, that really got me onto it. Synicism is the opposite of enthusiasm in some regards. And what I realized is the people who were being cynical were doing it because it was like sour grapes at an existential level. I called it the cynicism safety blanket that if you presume that things are going to be terrible you can never be disappointed by the world. Exactly.

And it just seems like it's like a coward's way to live. And I understand, I understand people have had bad things have happened to them. They've gone through traumas, they've had discrimination, they've had all of this stuff. Like, don't, I get it, right? I understand. And that would set you up to believe this may very well happen in the future. But like, what does it do for you? What corn does it grow? Show me the corn that you're growing from this.

The corn you're growing is fucking shitty. So yeah, I think less than this is more enthusiasm. The skill, two questions you can respond, but two questions as well. How do you develop it as a skill and how do you fuel it effectively? Let me give you a couple different angles at this. Okay.

So I come from Silicon Valley and Silicon Valley, the cynics get to be right and the optimists get to be rich. So the cynics get to be right. That eight out of the ten things are going to fail. Of course. Yeah, you're right. You get to be right eight out of ten times. And the two out of ten that actually work, you sat on the sideline thinking it was just another thing

that's not going to work. So Silicon Valley retranjure brain. So one way to train your brain to default optimism, rather than default pessimism, is to play it a game where optimism gets rewarded. And so come to Silicon Valley, you get to play again, the optical disorder. Here's another, here's another angle where it comes from.

This is a great conor McGregor quote. I love it. It used to be my desktop background. I told the story before, I came to Silicon Valley and every engineer has multiple monitors. It was like a status symbol. They don't have Louis Vuitton or any of that. The status symbol is like, how many monitors do you have?

How elaborate is your desk set up? So I'm sitting here with just my laptop and I'm like, shit, I'm like, I'm wearing the thrift store version of this luxury stand. I'm an idiot kid at the party. Exactly. I didn't even know what I would do with another screen, but hey, I need another screen here. I see a guy, come on, let's go. I get another screen and I don't know what the hell to do with it. So I just put up one quote because I was like, I don't have any

functional, like there's any functional utility here, aside from, again, honing this skill of enthusiasm, I'm controlling my mood. And the quote that I had on there was a Conor McGregor quote where he said, they're like, Conor, you always have this personality. Even when you lose, you seem to be having this like, I feel like we never get to see you down in the dumps. And this is usually a sport of highs and lows. And he goes, at the end of the day, it is, quote, is this,

at the end of the day, you got to feel some type of way. So why not feel unbeatable? Why not feel untouchable? Why not feel like the best to ever do it? And I just love that quote, which is, I'm in any moment, I am going to feel something. I'm going to be feeling a certain type of way. And I think what a lot of smart people do is they try to make that neutral.

Because it's just like almost logically, mathematically, rationally make sense. It's like, well, I'll make my default emotional home to be neutral, feeling nothing. And as good things happen, I'll feel better. And as bad things happen, I'll feel worse. And this is like a unspoken thing that I see a lot of smart people do. A lot of intellectuals do this. It is like a neatness and starting at zero. And then I'll go up if it good and bad if it goes down. Whereas people with the self-delusion, and which are usually,

if you get to sit down with like kind of people, remarkable people every week, you'll notice that their emotional home is not zero. Their emotional home is closer to 10. They default, feel untouchable, unstoppable, unshakable. They just enjoy that feeling and they just start there. And yes, sometimes the world will beat them down a little bit and they'll dip. But everybody always returns to your emotional home. And so you have to like program it, set that like a temperature, like a thermostat in your room. What is my default temperature going to be?

And I just took time to do that. So that's the first thing. The second thing is here's enthusiasm in a non-business context. Anybody who's ever dated somebody knows that like there is the quote unquote honeymoon period, like the start of every relationship that you get into is typically where it's like, you know, the highs.

Both people, I always say, a first date's like two people sitting down and deciding to lie to each other. It's like, you present your best self. You're going to basically play everything up. You're gonna play your gentlemen, how gentlemanly are you? You're gonna play it up. Let me get that door for you.

Let me dress up. Let me do X Y Z And nobody forts on a first date and so What happens is later in a relationship? people will retreat back to their emotional home their their personality home And all of a sudden they'll start to behave differently somebody you know at the beginning Let me take out that trash at the you know at the end Why I was have to take out the trash. Why don't you do it for once in a while?

So we kind of slip and we slip in these ways. And the worst way we slip is that the enthusiasm dips, we get comfortable and the enthusiasm dips and the kind of classic trope here is like when if you see somebody come home from work, you see like a dad come home from work. This person, a dad might have been left there for the house at six in the morning, seven in the morning, worked hard all day, drive back home, sit in traffic for 40 minutes, get back to the house, open up the door, they're hungry, they're thirsty, they're tired, they put down the briefcase, take off the suit jacket finally, and like they sort of slump through the door, and what all they want to do is get to the couch, get the cold beer, turn on the TV, and turn

off their brain. And this is how like, I think a lot of the world operates. And I heard this once, and I never let it go, which was that if you, if you, if you do what you did at the beginning, that would never be an end. And this works in relationships. If you act the way you acted at the beginning, there would never be an end of the relationship because both people would be on their absolute best behavior giving to each other all the time. And the version of this that I try to like make

as a practice or a habit is to have honey I'm home energy. So honey I'm home energy is like, if you ever see an I love Lucy back in the day. The guy opens the door, he's bursting with energy like nobody comes home from work like that. But this guy did it in the show because it's a show. He would come home, Honey I'm home. And you could just hear from the voice,

if somebody's in the house, oh, get ready, it's on. Like get ready for a great ball of energy coming your way that is going to be loving, that is going to be affectionate, that's going to be playful, and flirtation is a charming, all the things we kind of want to be, but we slip and we don't do it. And so one simple practice to develop the skill of enthusiasm is to have this honey I'm home energy, which is before you walk through a door, whether it's to a meeting, whether it's to your house, your apartment, whatever it is, just decide to walk in with that honey-hum-hum energy.

And you only need to do it for like 45 seconds. But if you just do that for 45 seconds, you like the way it feels, they will respond to you differently, and it'll just carry. Versus if you come in slumped over, you're gonna have that type of energy and that type of interaction,

and those types of experiences, which nobody actually wants to have. Yeah, the enthusiasm or excitability portion is it's almost kind of like a personality trait that I didn't know about. It's like finding out that there's a new type of weather. You just step out one day and you're like, what the fuck is this? Oh, I've never seen this before. It's like that, right?

And yeah, I very, very much, I'm completely pro, I've been calling it toxic positivity. I'm very pro toxic positivity. Like just seeing the good in situations being around people that do the same. There's definitely an undercurrent in the UK of excitability, almost being naive, it being kind of immature, it's being lame.

And then even as you move up through the IQ distribution, smart people like the idea of being cynical because it seems heterodox. And it seems like you've considered all of the options. Only somebody that's a smooth brained idiot would believe that things are going to go well. Obviously, that's what the normie midwits think. No, no, no, I've considered the options. But it fails to

recognize that ultimately your experience of your life is largely determined by the story that you tell yourself about it. In fact, you could maybe say that it almost, it's almost exclusively determined by that. There's a thing called the, so people talk about vicious cycles. And we've seen vicious cycles, how people slip into depression,

how companies fail, how vicious cycle, a vicious cycle, for example, would be, if you break it down into its core elements, there's just three, it's a triangle, three dots. Triangle, dot one is belief. If I believe that something is not gonna work, this relationship is not gonna work, this company's not gonna work, this meal is gonna suck, whatever it is.

If I believe that it's not gonna work, the relationship is not gonna work, this company's not gonna work, this meal is gonna suck, whatever it is. If I believe that it's not gonna work, the second dot is action. How much action am I gonna take towards making it happen, right? Like, I'm gonna take minimal action because I don't believe that it's gonna work. If you don't believe it's gonna work, you're just sort of tiptoe and you're not actually gonna go full force on it. So minimal belief leads to minimal action, which leads to a minimal result, which only reinforces your shitty original belief. And that's the vicious cycle.

So then the next time you just reinforce that. Oh, you know, I don't really believe I'm gonna stick to this diet. So therefore, I'm not actually gonna like throw away the junk food. I'll just put it away in the closet a little bit. And therefore, I'm gonna actually end up snacking away the junk food. I'll just put it away in the closet a little bit. And therefore, I'm going to actually end up snacking on the stuff because I know where it is.

It's in the closet. It's just I just have to open the door. And then I get a shitty result and I say, I knew it. I'd never follow through with these things, right? Like, these are the stories you tell yourself silently in your head, the voice in your head. And the opposite is true. There's also the winter cycle or the virtuous cycle. The virtuous cycle is the exact opposite.

Massive belief, oh my God, this is gonna work. What if you knew that like, if you knew that if you get to this, like you're going to the corner store and if you knew at that corner store, there is the winning lottery ticket. It is there. The next person who prints it wins. Would you, would you walk?

Or would you run, right? Like you're going to run. So your belief, if you really believe that, you would take massive action, you would sprint. And when you sprint, you would actually get there first, right? And like you would actually have a different result than, you know, lottery's not exactly right, because you're not gonna,

the belief is, is ill-founded in that case, but you would take massive action and generally massive action over a consistent period of time leads to results, which reinforces your belief that I'm the type of person that whenever I set my mind to something, I do it. And when I do it, I get results, right? Like that just becomes how a winner thinks.

And so enthusiasm is another word, it sort of, you know, roommates with belief. And if you say belief, beliefs are these kind of like heavy, long term, you only have a few beliefs. Enthusiasm is a general state that you operate in. Such that it takes your default level of belief in something up, which takes your action up, which takes your results up over time. And that is sort of like the, to me, the strategy that explains why this works. Not only does it feel good to have positive enthusiasm or positivity, but like there's an actual advantage.

I think there was a TED talk back in the day called the Happiness Advantage. And the guy was talking to his Harvard professor and he explained that like, happiness does not just feel good, it literally makes you perform better. They did many tests to see how you actually perform on the same test if you came in in a certain state

versus a different state. The happy state versus not. Yeah, George Mac has this really great idea that I'm going to write an article, a co-written article with him about public metrics and hidden metrics. And he talks about stuff like peace of mind being a hidden metric, but money being a public metric and time is very interesting times somewhere between the two. We kind of don't know time, but we kind of do as well. So for instance, people will happily sacrifice their peace of mind

in order to achieve money because there's no dashboard that tracks your peace of mind. And it's almost like enthusiasm, right? Inthusiasm is such a hidden metric as opposed to it being something that you fail to see the cost of. It's something that you fail to see the returns on because you fail to see the cost of, it's something that you fail to see the returns on, because the in a texture of your mind is not something that you're open to. So that's... People will learn another language, they'll tick a box. Oh, I'm going to learn Spanish versus work, if you said I'm going to work on upping my general level of enthusiasm, you'd be looked at like an insane person. What's going to actually serve you better in life? We need to do a lingo. Which one of us can go for enthusiasm? I actually, I prefer the opposite. I am happy to be the one

who is massively exploding this arbitrage. Capturing all of the games. Exactly. It lets a talentless guy like me thrive in a world like this. Okay. Second skill. What's the other one? Storytelling. That's right. Okay, second skill. What's the other one? Storytelling. So stories are the... Storytelling is... It's massively underrated because stories are the natural, like, transfer mechanism between

individuals. So, like, if you want something to stick and somebody else's head, you really have two choices. Music or story. And, you know, you look at, like, through all of time. What are the things that have lasted thousands of years? Religions, how are religions coded? Do you remember all of the rules of religion?

No, but people remember the stories. Same thing with, you know, anything that lasts a long time or sticks in people's heads. You know, I couldn't tell you what I learned in seventh grade, but I could tell you the plot of Lion King. You know, play by play plot of Lion King. Why? Because it's encoded as a story.

So stories are like an encoding mechanism for information or for knowledge. Music is another one. People will naturally, you know, remember catchy music. Most people don't have the ability to make music, but almost everybody could tell a good story. So if I could do the music thing I would, but instead I'll do the story thing.

And I think this is underrated because, and I think Steve Jobs had some quote like this. He's like, it's something like the storytellers, the most powerful person on earth, because they get everybody else to take action. So they're the ones who move one person to the next. And this is how politicians get people. This is how CEOs run companies

as stories. And so, but you're very rarely taught how to tell a story. Like, if I went and asked somebody, like, just explain to me, like, how, if I wanted to get better at storytelling, what would I do? Like, what, what, what are the skills? Like, give me like the two or three big concepts. And so they're very, uh, nobody really knows how to articulate it. You're not taught this in school. Because of that, again, there's a massive arbitrage. You have a thing that is very valuable. That most people don't know how to do very well. So, if you even try a little bit, you'll become the top 10% of storytellers very quickly. And from there, you get the results that a great communicator would get. What are the principles of storytelling as far as you're concerned?

So if you listen to Aaron Sorkin, so the guy, the writer and movie guy who did, you know, I think he did like whatever, West Wing and newsroom and a bunch of other stuff, like the Sholeswood Network movie, he's like, if you ask him, like I wanted to take his master class, I had set out a day, I was like, I'm gonna learn everything there is to know from this guy about storytelling, because this guy's a master storyteller

I cleared my calendar and like in the first 30 minutes He just repeats the same one principle over and over again. I'm like, oh, that seems to be it Which is stories are about intention and obstacle. He says I worship at the altar of intention and obstacle So basically if you watch any movie you watch any TV show within the first second you will you should know right like At any given time you should be able to pause and you'll know this usually within the first five minutes of every story There's a hero and the hero wants something they have an intention and they have an obstacle. What's in the way of it? Last night I was watching a show called hijack. You see this on it. Yeah, I finished it. Did you finish it? I finished it last night Yeah, everyone should go and watch It's on it. Yeah, I finished it. Did you finish it?

I finished it last night. Yeah, everyone should go and watch it. Idris Alba. Right away you see Idris Alba while I won't spoil it, but Idris Alba wants one thing, right? At the very beginning, he wants to be with his family. And he's got some obstacles. Life doesn't want to be with. All right, so like you get that.

If you go watch Die Hard, Die Hard. Oh, it's this movie about defusing a bomb and doing it, let's create this terrorist plot. What does he want? At very beginning, he gets a call. He wants to be home with his family. But then there's this terrorist plot. And really, at the end of die hard, all you try to do is just get to his family.

The whole movie is hero wants something and there's something in his way, but in this case a terrorist plot. And then throughout any story, that escalates. So like, let's take this show hijack, right? The name kind of gives it away, a plane gets hijacked. Okay, cool. So now, this person wants something different.

He doesn't want to bring his family back together. He immediately just wants not die from this terrorist, right? Or not die from this hijacking, land safely. Now, that's the intention. What are the obstacles? Well, there might be people working against that plan. And so, every story must have at its underpinning an intention and obstacle.

Okay, that's the first key principle of storytelling. And it doesn't matter if it's a romantic comedy. Oh, what does she want? Well, she's a high-powered lawyer, but all her friends are getting married and she's not dating anybody. What does she, she has an intention? She wants to have a loving relationship.

The obstacle, she's so successful and all the guys she meets her ass anybody. What is she, she has an intention. She wants to have a loving relationship. The obstacle, she's so successful and all the guys she meets her assholes. Okay, cool. She's busy in hat meat tassels. Okay, now what do you do to make a story more compelling? The next ingredient you need to add is steaks. So you sprinkle some steaks on there. What are steaks?

Steaks are elevating the what's at stake if they don't get it. So intention obstacle, if the intention is I'm hungry and the obstacle is you know lunches over there in the other room. It's not that exciting of a story. If the stakes are. This person has a need and then 30 days and they're you know if they don't eat. They're gonna die right now all of a sudden you have something more interesting. So stakes are high. Now stakes don't always have to be life or death the best story some of some of the best things, like I don't know if you've seen this show called The Bear. That's out recently. It's on Hulu. And it's kind of like critically acclaimed, like, cool people think it's cool type of show. And in that, there's not life or death steaks. There is

no terrorist plot. There is no life on the line. But they know that for everybody, in whatever your world is, there's something that's the highest stakes thing, the thing you want the most. And all you have to do is convince the audience that this character really cares about this, that the character really feels like it's a like a life or death, it's a life-changing swing if it happens or it doesn't happen. All you have to do is make it believable that that's the case. So when I tell stories, I actually take those pride in a story where on the surface, the stakes are small. Like I told the story once at a corporate retreat. It was like an executive retreat.

And they went around the circle and everybody's supposed to say, what's going on? And everybody was trying to one up each other with a bigger problem, a more urgent fire that they had to put out. And I went the other way I said, so I just moved out of my house into my own apartment. This is back in the day. I've just moved out of my house in my own apartment, living on my own for the first time and my mom is coming over.

Now my mom's coming over. And I had told her that I'm living on my own, I'm a man now, I'm a big boy now, I can do it. But the reality is I'm still, you know, like, closer all over the floor, houses a mess,

I don't have groceries, nothing. But I had told her I'm cooking dinner for her tonight. And I'll be damned if I didn't look like an adult for at least two hours while my mom is there. And so I've established the intention, I've established the obstacle, right? I'm trying to look like an adult obstacle. I'm not actually an adult, stakes.

My mom's opinion of me matters to me. I can convince you that it matters and I can convince you that like, drop everything. I will not fail at this. It will be so bad for me if this happens. And I talk about it in the story. I'm like, you know, I, and this is a true story. I mean, Brussels sprouts, because that was the most adult thing I could think of. I'm trying to figure out how to make Brussels sprouts taste good. I've never even eaten Brussels sprouts. And like, I tell the story. People loved it. They loved

it because I took a low stakes thing and I told a story well. I love that. That's really, really great. And yeah, I say this a lot, but aspiring, fledgling podcasters that ask me about sort of what I wish I'd known when I started the show. And there's all the technical stuff and all of the strategic stuff that's good for growth hacking. But when it comes to the show, when I first started doing it, I thought that the job of a podcaster was to basically be blinckist for your guest, that you were supposed to ruthlessly index whatever's in their head, and that you, any moment that was meandering away from it, any sentence that wasn't directly driving some sort of return that people could action in their life, I basically wanted to be Andrew Huberman's

website dictated, right, to people but for everybody on the planet. And over time, increasingly, I've realized that the best podcast is just five architects. They architect a vibe. And all that they're doing is they're just allowing you to marinate in that vibe. You know, today's vibe is here are some contrarian thoughts that you may take offense to, but you're probably going to find interesting. And we're gonna whimsy our way through a bunch of side stories before I decide that it's time to move on to the next one.

That's the story, right? That's the vibe for today. So people know what they're gonna expect. And I love these listicle-style articles in particular because it keeps everything quite snappy and it keeps it moving and it stops everything getting to. But it's not about being like, right, Chan, I need to know the five step process on storytelling

and then I need to understand exactly how to do the whatever. It's good because it focuses you to make sure that you get something out of a conversation, but allowing someone to meander. And let's not forget, I've sat down opposite Rogan. A lot of my friends have multiple, multiple times. That man is a, like he's like a cook for meandering. Like, he is in love with meandering

and it works amazingly on his show because it just feels so naturalistic because that's how you talk with your boys or that's how you talk with your girls, right? When you sat at the dinner table or out having a beer or you've just finished playing pickle ball or whatever. Someone sees a particular type of bird. Guess what? The next 15 minutes are about birds. Like and then the next five minutes after that are about how birds are actually a sire from the government and I saw this conspiracy theory online.

And oh, what about Australia? Remember you see that thing that Australia doesn't exist and that's a sire. Yeah, I actually my aunt went to Australia. I've got a friend who's doing rattlesnake conversion therapy because rattlesnake's attorney gave due to easel's and the water. How do you think that Alex Jones trials going and isn't he the most sued person? And you're like, it just fractures and branches off. It's like freestyle wrapping, but really slowly. And I think that that protracted just allowance of, I'm going to follow the curiosity. It keeps people who have got very

interest interested because it doesn't pigeonhole you too much. It's a natural representation of how people have normal conversations. And even if you sit down to try and have a normal conversation with someone and then you began to constrain it, everyone would feel the constrain. Like, I've got a friend, really famous comedian who sat down with dinner with Jordan Peterson. This is a long time ago now. It's the first time he met him and he's become friends. The first time he met him, he had notes. He tried to have a conversation with Jordan and apparently halfway through, it was like, I need to stop fucking about with these notes.

Like, I'm not here to interview you. I'm not the New York Times, right? Like Washington Post. He had just had a conversation with the guy. And guess what? Like, if he had a bad flight that morning, you're talking about flights for 20 minutes. And that's fine. And yeah, I vibe architecting, storytelling, whimsy, really leaning into it, like, you know, unnecessary detail, like cold blustery November night.

All this shit, like, yeah, get in there. I love that, I love that. Yeah, I think it's a podcasting is a medium that allows for that, that's the beauty of it. Not other mediums, you can't do that. You can't me under in a TikTok in the same way, but you could do other things in a TikTok, which are very interesting.

Like you can say nothing in a TikTok and it works as long as you had the vibe right there too. Have you seen this girl who did this, what the fuck did DJs actually do? Video that went viral? You haven't seen this? No, what is it? Oh my God, we need Jamie here to pull this up for you.

Okay. So this is TikTok, because this girl, I think she's a model. She's just looking at her phone, like she's like very close to her phone. It's not even like a staged, whatever. It's like she's just looking at her phone and she's like crying. It's like a tear going down her cheek, which is inexplicable because all she's like very close to her phone. It's not even like a staged, whatever. It's like she's just looking at her phone. And she's crying.

It's like a tear going down her cheek, which is inexplicable because all she's saying is, she's like almost like broken down. She's like, what the fuck did DJs actually do? Like, what are the buttons are they pushing? What did the buttons do? Is it connected to anything? And she did that and it was so funny.

It was not trying to be funny, but it was so funny. She was saying nothing, but the whole vibe was there because immediately she was like, somebody who was so shook by this unknown and this realization that I don't even understand this thing. And I think it might have been not even real, are we sure that this was real?

And they went viral now and then a bunch of DJs started duet. It turned her saying that into a sample and turned it into a song, which they're turning it into a song. And then she came back on also, like the very next post, where she was like, so many DJs are answering me about what DJs actually do. And now I just got me thinking,

what is footballers actually do? I mean, are you guys just running around? Like almost flirting? Like, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Maybe you guys should slide into my DMs now and tell me what you do, because that other one works so well. Yeah. But she gets TikTok in a way that nobody does.

I think, like, she's gonna be a superstar. I watch a bunch of her content. It's because she is a vibe architect there. She knows how to be at her house doing nothing while still entertaining you and making you feel like you know her, like she's done this kind of girl next door hot thing, right? So she's hot enough that TikTok is interesting, but she's makes it feel like she's not trying.

She's relatable enough. She makes you feel relatable. Yep, yep. And she's talking about nothing, but she's entertaining when she, the way she says it. So it's this amazing amazing like mashup. Now Rogan does the equivalent of that for podcasting where he's like, he gets a good guess,

but not like celebrities really. Like it worked when it was like his friends were good hangs. It's like then we're gonna talk about stuff, well, kind of go wherever. And we could talk about nothing, but you still are entertained and you still kind of learn something because we talked about a nothing subject that you knew zero about. And so you know, he gets you that way.

So I find this stuff very, very entertaining, very interesting how it all plays out. It's not how you would have thought. And I'm sure many people told him like, dude, three hours, way too long for a podcast. Cut it down, trim it out, edit it, make it 40 minutes. That's the length of a commute. And he was like, I'm just going to do what I want. How about that? I remember when I first started doing podcasting and I looked, you know, run everything by the data. Okay, so what is the optimal length for a podcast? Well, if you want

to maximize completion and balance that with value, you're looking at it between 30 and 40 minutes, I think, because that's the length of a commute and you want people to be able to commit to it during a commute. Doesn't account for those psychopaths out there like me and probably you that listen to stuff at like 1.5 or 2 or 2.5 times speed. It's like that's like double commute, so whatever. But yeah, and ultimately it comes down to, are you having fun? Because if enthusiasm with storytelling, enthusiasm plus storytelling or enthusiasm about your story is a vicious combo.

Me and my house might always talk about this. These rally cr-not rally cross. What's the, is it motor cross or rally cross, rally driving, like off road rally driving thing like Colin McRae what he used to do. There are these guys that wear anorax and it's the Scottish Highlands and it is the middle of October and it's pitch black and freezing cold and they've been camping there and they stand there by the side of this dirt track to see 0.25 seconds of a cargo past That's it and then they turn to all of their boys and they're like

And they can't believe it and watching anybody get fired up that much about anything fires you up as well. This is why enthusiasm is contagious. And this is why toxic positivity and going against cynicism is good because it has a trickle-down effect, right? Like a contamination zone from a nuclear spill, you've got this fallout that just continues to go. And it can happen on the internet. And it's this goal. This goal was genuinely so intrigued and found it so funny to observe this thing.

Like what do DJs do? And I've employed them for 15 years and it's still a question that I can't give her a definitive answer to. She's on the sun. What the fuck do they do? So yeah, I think very, very good. Okay, next one.

If you're in your head, you're dead. What's that mean? I guess there's kind of a theme with these, which is smart people do really dumb things. And I think an example of that is people who are in their head a lot. So if you're in your head you're dead. I heard that once and I just resonated with me partly because it rhymes. I'm a simple 10, but also partly because there was something that was very true about it. And I didn't even fully understand it yet, but I was like, yes, what though? Yes, and what? That was my reaction to it, which is a very good signal for something you want

to know more about, which is an immediate visceral yes without the intellectual understanding yet. And what I learned from this was a very simple thing. I want to be happy, like many people do, but I did something that most people don't do, which is try to figure out how the hell do you actually be happy? One of the things about actually being happy is that you need to get out of your head.

So most people who are, again, the type people who listen to podcasts, I'll call out with a lot of people who listen to podcasts, they are in their head. So, most people who are, again, the type of people who listen to podcasts, I'll call out with a lot of people who listen to podcasts, they are in their head. They try to think their way through life. They think their way into, they think their way through problems and that serves them. But then they think they can think their way through feeling. They want happiness so they try to think their way there. No, no, no, hold on.

You can't, you know, like that's like saying, I'm gonna talk my way through cooking. No, no, no, there's two different things. Like I can maybe think my way, like in logic my way through logical problems, but I can't think my way through emotion. That's not how emotion works. Trying to think your way out of overthinking

is like trying to sniff your way out of a cocaine addiction. George Mack. Dude, George, two bangers in the semis. I love it. He's great. I just added, by the way, I just added George to my work slack, even though me and George don't work together because I was like, I just think we're George in my life. So we just have a channel on Slack, we're like, I'll just dump random shit like this and

he'll do the same. It's amazing. I highly recommend. So the realization here was I always had a mindset. I thought the formula work like this. I thought if you think a certain thing, you will feel a certain way, which will lead you to do a certain thing. And that is true. If I think that this person is, this person just cut me off while I was driving. I will feel pissed, I'll feel angry, and I will then do something in retaliation. I'll road rage, I'll

drive, I'll cut them off, I'll flick them off, whatever it is. Think leads to feel, leads to do. I thought it's a one-way street. I realized most like math equations are reversible, like if A plus B equals C, then C equals A a plus b So the other way also works and it actually works better in this case So if you do a thing you will feel differently which will cause you to think differently and so Anybody who exercises knows this intuitively whether they've wrapped words around this or not which is If you if you focus on if you think so if you think you're feeling tired or shitty, and therefore you, if you think I don't have enough time or I didn't sleep enough last night, whatever,

you'll feel tired and shitty, therefore you won't do exercise. But if you just happen to overcome that, if you quickly just short circuit that and say, no, not listening to that thought, and you instead just go do the thing, you go and you do 50 pushups right now on the ground. You go into cold plunge. You do something physical. You will immediately

feel different, which will lead you to have a different thought. And so once I realized the equation works better the other way, the street, the traffic is less crowded going driving the other way on that road. I was like, this is the hack. And so now I realize that the thoughts are not the sort of master controller of the universe. They're just an equal party to this. They have one seat at the table, feelings have another and actions have another. And actually they all influence each other. So if you want to feel differently, you can either think something different or do something

different. And doing is just way easier. Because if you try to think yourself out of it, you just tie yourself up and nots usually. And so once I realized this, I realized I had lived a lot of my life in my own head trying to think my way through everything. And a much faster version of this was to just do something. This plays itself out in a bunch of different ways. So one time I saw on Twitter, somebody say something like, I've having panic attacks, or so, anybody found a way to get myself to not have these panic attacks, and they were like therapy, or you could try

just really talking yourself through it, so you're not feeling that you don't think that thought there, or you don't have that feeling there, or you don't have the panic attack. And then Emmett Sheer, who's the CEO of Twitch, the guy who had acquired my previous company, replied to it. And I never really thought a CEO would chime in on like, hey, here's the CEO of Twitch, the guy who had acquired my previous company, replied to it. And I never really thought a CEO would chime in on like, hey, here's how I deal with panic attacks, but he did. And he goes, fastest hack for panic attacks,

immediately dip your face, submerge your face into ice cold water. You will stop having the panic attack immediately because it activates the mammalian dive reflex. Yep. And I had never heard of this before. I just completely needed me, but it was exactly in the same line of thinking,

which is often the fastest way to change how you feel is a rapid change in your physiology, which then will lead you to think a different thought, which then will lead you to feel it in a way and have a different action. It's just a hack. It's just a complete life hack that most smart people don't utilize. They're just brains sitting in a way and have a different action. It's just a hack. It's just a complete life hack that most smart people don't utilize.

They're just brains sitting in a dead vessel. And you see this, go watch how people operate. They just sit in their car, sit on their couch and sit at their desk. Or like you want to have a meeting where you're going to make a key decision that might change the trajectory of your entire company. And everybody sits there, hunched over,

tired after a long day, eating shitty food. Full of muffins, yeah. Yeah, trying to get a coffee, just to stimulate themselves, just to kind of get through that thing. It's insane, we make decisions when we're in that physical state. It is, it is a,

an absolute leak or weakness in both people's game. One of the interesting things I learned from Kelly Starritz, Suple Lapid Guy was, if you've ever had to take a really mentally challenging phone call, what you will sometimes find yourself doing is like a puppeteer has got a hold of you, you'll stand up from your seat and you'll start locomoting around the room. You'll just do laps. You've got a 30 square foot room that you're in

and you've somehow managed to create some totally arbitrary route that you're working in a figure of eight or an infinity symbol or whatever around this room. We're just built to move. Humans are built to move. We're built to be on the ground. We're built to be out in nature. We're built to be connected to the ground to see sun,

et cetera, et cetera. You don't need to go full like all-brain markers, psychedelic, like biohack, Ben Greenfield, biohack stuff here. Like, it's just, notice within yourself what your physiology feels compelled to do when things happen to you. Like, you do something, you reach for something because the cookies or the cinnamon rolls or the coffee or whatever is in front of you and you've conditioned yourself to think that that's the thing that's going to change you. Heuberman's got the best quote on this, which is you cannot change the mind of the mind, you have to change it with the body. I don't know if that's strict as with most aphorisms,

there's exceptions. Meditation is purposefully changing the mind with the mind, right? Like it's actually isolating the mind to cycle on itself. But I think the broad rule is very true. And I've always said this that if you gave me the choice between having a good night's sleep or going to the gym, I will go to the gym every time. And my mood will be reset more from pre to post training than from pre to post bed. I can wake up. And yesterday's bad mood or whatever can bleed through the night. I'll have a dream about being kidnapped by people

from Liverpool and being forced to do the marketing. Oh, I had that literally happened a couple of weeks ago. I also had another one where I'd committed a war crime and my old cricket team from 20 years ago knew that I'd done it and they were mercenaries hunting me and Sam Harris was a newscaster trying to track me.. Speaking of Sam, the episode that I did with him here, this really lovely bit worries, he's talking about kind of this like cerebral pornography

that a lot of us have where we sort of prey at the altar of cognitive horsepower and and presume that because we've got such good concepts that we can sort all of this and when he tries to explain to his smart friends that meditation and maybe letting go of that and finding a little bit more ease, releasing the tiller a little bit more, might be a good idea. They say, well, that sounds roughly equivalent

to being hit over the head with a hammer. I look at all of my great concepts, you would have a much better life if you had some, you should have more concepts like mine. Like imagine how great you'd be if you had my concept. Right. And it's a permanent battle, I think.

And you're right as well to point the finger into the ears of the people that are listening to podcasts like mine and yours. Because you're so good at this. You just told a funny vulnerability. The story about being adapted forced to do their marketing is so funnier. By the way, that is like an amazing and then you like connected the dots to some like Sam Harris. Like you have this like bank of quotes and frameworks and

nuggets from the smartest people on earth. That's so amazing that you have that. So first of all, you're good at what you do. I appreciate that. Thank you. The second is I had a realization while you were talking that I think is a new philosophy that I have, I just realized, let me try to work this out live. Mental minimalism.

So basically, I think it's becoming vogue to have a sort of minimalist lifestyle, maybe fashion style, like minimalism is in in a bunch of different areas. One area where it's not in is mentally. So the sort of knowledge porn, worshiping at the altar of cognition, collecting mental models and frameworks, like their stamps, I think a lot of this is complete wasted energy and actually counterproductive. You know, it's, what's that Bruce Lee thing?

It's like, you know, I don't fear the man who knows a thousand cakes. I fear the man who's practiced one cake a thousand times. Same, same, same zz, you know? Like, that's how I feel about like, I really just want to understand a few principles. And that's it. And how do you know you know how to know which are the right principles. I think there's the I think they're the ones that resonate and they'll still change over time. So like at any given season of your life, you need different. There's different principles that will speak to you.

Almost in a like when the student is ready, the teacher appears type of thing. Right now in my life, I think that there are certain ones that stand out more than others. But this mental minimalism thing, I think, works because it ties into my favorite meme, the midwit meme, the yours, mine and George Max. George is asking about if he's going to do it, the Midwits guide to life. So I've heard this. He's thinking about doing a coffee table book, which is every page is a different Midwit meme. And it's just just all of them. I mean, first customer, yeah, whatever you start, I'll put me into whatever it is. That meme, I told my business partner at the beginning of the year, I said, this is the

meme of the year. I said, this meme explains everything I've done wrong in life and everything I've done right in life. When I did it right, I did it right according to this meme, I did it wrong. So if people don't know the meme, it's basically, I'll, actually, I think you might explain it better than I do. Can you, particularly, what is the midwit meme? And then let's play with that a little bit.

Of course, yeah. So it's an IQ distribution, which is a bell curve, right? So you have a graph and from left to right, you have stupid on the left and you have super, super smart on the right, you have this bell curve that runs showing that there's more people in the middle than the rar on the edges. On the left, you have this guy that kind of looks a little bit like in the underthroll with this sort of furrowed brow and sort of these sort of recessed eyes, it looks kind of thick. And then in the middle, you sort of have this woke, sort of SJW screaming, very tense, kind of like glasses, stressed out guy. And then on the right, you have the sage who almost looks like a Jedi master or whatever. And usually you have both people, the stupid and the smart person

end up coming to the same realization and the person in the middle has some over complicated ideas. So one of the obvious examples would be lift weight-eat protein, stupid guy. Guy in the middle, I must ensure that my pre-digested grass-fed coffee butter is perfectly served 30 minutes before to ensure that my protein window, weight T protein, right? George is, George's favorite one of these is, the guy in the left says, I'm the guy in the left. The guy in the middle says, I'm the guy in the right. And the guy in the right says, I'm the guy in the left. That is good. There's levels to the midwhip meme now learning. I think that meme explains so much of life. I think that most people should strive

to be, you know, the funny thing you could strive to be either the Neanderthrow or the Jedi, it doesn't matter. They come to the same conclusion. And this idea of mentalism, minimalism, can you distill down why you're doing something to one reason. People love pros and cons lists and they tie themselves in knots trying to weigh this out the scale of one pro, one con, two pros, one and a half cons and they can't make any decisions. Or this happens to me a lot in the business world. I talked to a founder today.

They're starting a new company and I said, your last company was so interesting. You raised $20 million, you did all the stuff, you did some good things, but obviously they didn't work out. That's why we're here, versus on your yacht. So, what did you get wrong? You proceeded to talk for 20 minutes, telling me about everything you did right. And I was like, what happened? I asked you a question, I said, where did it go wrong?

You gave me 20 minutes, which already is an incorrect answer, because the answer should be simple. And then the 20 minutes were weaving through things you did right and things that other people did wrong and things that other companies tried, what are you talking about? People don't even learn the right lesson from what they did. And so like, you know, I would simplify a lot of the things in life, right? They'd like the diet part of my life, eat real food, not too much exercise, right? Like that's it, right? Eat real food, mostly veggies and exercise. This is diet advice at the simplest level. All I need to do now is intensely do that thing, right? The difference between knowledge and wisdom, knowledge is knowing what you should do, and wisdom is doing what you should do. Like to me, that is my definition of wisdom. It's knowledge applied. It's doing

what you should do. You do need enough knowledge to at least know roughly what you should do. But what most people do is they then overindex on knowledge and go try to learn all the possible things that there are to know about the subject and under index on wisdom, which is actually doing and applying the base knowledge that they have. Yes. So trying to take the mental minimalism thing, making it a little bit more applied, I think that it makes me think a little bit about the Explore Exploite framework, which is that you need to be able to expose yourself to enough ideas that you can work out which

one's a good, which one's a bad. Tim Ferris has a phenomenal idea, which is his system for memorization and it's called the good shit sticks. And what he suggests is, if you're Tiago Forte and you're Ali Abdahl and you're built from that cohort of people, you'll have a perfectly organized, ever-no external brain that's got everything's root-folded and decision-tried back to whatever whatever if you listen to something and it stands out to you and you can't not send a screenshot of it to someone from a book or screen record it and send it to your friends or put it in a group chat or write it down in a note yeah, that's good. That's good. The good shit sticks and that for me is the easiest way to remember stuff, because you don't ever have to remember things

that you're not excited about remembering. It's easy to remember stuff. Like the one that I've got from you earlier on today, the scenics get to be right and optimists get to be rich. Money, beyond money, right? I can't forget it. I can't, I'm gonna remember that now for five years, right? I'm gonna be quoting that in half a decade's time.

Can't get rid of it. You don't matter. If the story about storytelling, if you switched off and you started thinking about what you've got to do later on today or what you're gonna make for lunch or whatever, like sweet, then you don't need to go back and try and remember that because it wasn't for you, right? And that's, you know, you just enjoyed the lovely warm

tones of what we're going through. So, explore, exploit, good shit sticks, good, good, that's, so we've got, um, how do I expose myself to it? How do I allow things to pop up? Like what's my selection criteria from the things that I've been exposed to? So that's a nice little framework to, to run ourselves through. And then I would maybe say, when it comes to like stopping yourself praying at the altar of cerebral horse power quite

so much, all of the people that I know that are the most effective in life have a very small number of operating principles and one orientation, usually, one single orientation. And this is a lesson orientation. What do you mean by that? They are moving toward a particular destination. I hesitate to say goal because I don't think it's quite the same as a goal. It's more an area that they're moving toward. So for instance, for George, his would be he wants to be able to have fun and write. So his entire life is built around him being able to have fun and write. It's to write for two hours every single morning. It doesn't matter

where on the planet he is. And he wants to have fun. And fun for him can be from hanging with friends. It can be doing cold cold turbid can be learning to play pickleball. It can be traveling. It can be doing whatever, right? Two stories. One from Jeff Bezos apparently while he was at Amazon, every single decision that was made was run through one single orienting principle. The orienting principle was, does this improve the customer experience? Does this improve the customer experience?

Every single decision. Don't know if it's true symbolically, it's useful. Second one, Elon Musk, does this get us closer to Mars? Does this get us close to Mars? And if you have a single orienting principle evidently, does me taking a poop now or taking a poop in 15 minutes time, which one gets as close to the Mars, like that's, you know, you're not going to ask yourself that question, but just having that orienting principle. And this is why Homozi, who has got an interesting approach to this, he

talks about periods of life, phases, phases about periods of life. Faces? Faces or periods of life. And he was talking about, for this next phase or for this next period, and I think he's breaks them up into seven year blocks. He was like, I know that I'm going to be in Vegas for the next seven. So I don't mind.

Like I can just lock in, I'm in Vegas. This is what we're going to do. We've got the apartment. I've got, I know where I'm going to buy an office and I'm going to do whatever and I'm going to build a gym. By having phases or periods of your life, it allows you to be more ruthless with your orientation principle because you don't, it doesn't need to scale for quite as long. If you accept it, you're time bound on what you're doing. I actually think seven years is fucking insane. Like, obviously, he's probably got it broken

in the 90 day sprints and one year blocks or whatever. But by having it at least time bound, what it permits you to do is be like, right, okay, all that I need to do within the next 90 days is build up a healthy eating habit. And my social life can go out of the window and my business might take a little bit of a hit, but I've decided in advance that this is the thing that I'm going to do.

And I like the orienting principle as like a way to simplify down. I've been exposed to all these ideas. So I'm good ones have stuck about the ones that I enjoyed, the ones that I've kept. Now, what am I really, really aiming towards? Okay, which ones spoke to me the most? How does it fit with my lifestyle and how can I time bound that for the next, however long? Yeah, the time thing is interesting because you can use it in a bunch of different ways. You can play with time in a bunch of ways. So when you think that something's going to be really hard,

you shrink the time to time box to be like, cool, what's the best I can do in the next 45 minutes? to time box to be like, cool, what's the best I can do in the next 45 minutes? And all of a sudden, the brain becomes, I call the brain an answering machine. You just have to figure out what the right questions, right prompts, like AI. What are the right prompts I need to give it in order for it to give me a different answer? Ask a better question, get a better answer. And so, you can time box on the short scale to be more productive, to be more creative. You can time box, like you said to be more productive to be more creative. You can time box like you said to Depresurize a decision so you can think in both directions

What I'll do sometimes is say what if I was long? Like how do I take a longer term Orientation towards this so for example I might say There's a meeting on the calendar. I don't really see the agenda. It doesn't tie into this thing I'm doing right now, but like over a long time horizon, I think Chris is awesome, and I want to do awesome things with awesome people in the long run.

Great, it's worth doing. Or, you know, this person, I could kind of win more in this deal now, but maybe if I give a little, it actually builds some good will with us, and it lubricates the next 10 deals we do together. I met a friend once. I really wanted to be an investor and I had no money.

And he was like, so first I just didn't do any deals because I didn't have the money. I just was limited by my imagination. Don't have money, don't do deals. And I missed three deals that became billion dollar companies. And at that point, I was like, okay, well,

I don't want to really see number four. So I'm gonna find a way, I still have no money, but I'm going to find a way. So I asked a different question to my brain. How can I invest even though I don't have money? Brain says, well, you got friends with money. Why don't you ask them? Why don't you why don't you do a deal with them? Take a little less economics, but at least you do the deal and immediately go to a friend who's maybe 10 years older than me or so 7 to 10 years older and He's got money and I said, I want to do this deal. He said, yeah, I said, okay, well, I don't really know what's the fair split here. Like, is there a standard? I'm googling. I can't find

it. I don't want to be a sucker, but I also don't want to be greedy. And I'm don't know the answer. And he, I thought, well, this, and this guy's a business shark. So I'm like, certainly he's going to shark me with this offer. I got to prepare myself for this shark attack. This guy's been so successful, made hundreds of millions of dollars. He is, I'm like, certainly he's gonna shark me with this offer. I gotta prepare myself for this shark attack. This guy's been so successful, made hundreds of millions of dollars. He is, I'm playing Chess against Magnus Carlson here, trying to negotiate this deal with this guy. And instead, he text me and just says, whatever you think is fair is fine with me in this deal.

I actually don't care about this deal. What I care about is doing deals with the deal for the next 20 years. And I was like, huh, never had a text message like that. Never even had an experience like that. Never met somebody who takes that long-term orientation. Bezos and others have, I think Bezos donates a lot to the long-now foundation, which is like this, in San Francisco, there's a clock that's like 10,000-year clock or some shit like that.

This tells you, like, think longer, think bigger. You will operate differently than somebody who's always short term minded. So you can go that direction or you could shrink the time horizon and say, you know what? I don't know the forever answer of my purpose in life and what I want to do with my career and all the stuff. But what I do know is like, this is fun right now. I think it'll be fun. And why don't I just set two years?

What are great decisions I can make though? I'm happy to commit to for a two year period, but not necessarily a 20 year period. So you can depressurize the situation and allow yourself to think more clearly. My buddy Sam has a version of this called worry time. And he's kind of like, I'm a pretty laid back guy. He's a lot more like high strung in general.

And I'm like, how do you live like that? And he's like, oh, I've found my mechanisms. He goes, I have something called worry time. He's like, I used to worry all the time about whatever it is, money, my car repair, whatever's going on. He's like, and I realized that really doesn't get me anywhere to have this low ambient worry at all times.

This low level, non-specific stress at all times. He's like, so I just started setting out time. He said, okay, I don't worry about money, except for Sundays from 11 a.m. to noon. And that's my time, I know it's there, and I'll started setting out time. I said, okay, I don't think about, I don't worry about money, except for Sundays from 11 a.m. to noon. And that's my time. I know it's there. And I'll think about money during that time.

And I'll say, do I have enough? And am I spending too much? And whatever, it'll make some adjustments. I say, I'm good. Till the next Sunday. And he's like, that's what I do. I literally just scheduled it in it. And just the fact that I scheduled it

of like, now's the time I'm gonna work on this or worry about this Totally changes my like allows me to then function freely and think clearly other than that I love that hack just in mayors as a similar one about choosing what to work on he's like a Common thing you see is people get to a certain point like middle of their career and then they get paralyzed They can't decide what to do. They're looking for the perfect project as the perfect conditions That's just gonna be like sufficiently ambitious and prestigious and noble and lucrative and all these things and they just don't know what to do.

They can feel totally lost and he goes, one of the big things that works is basically committing to something and being like, I'm gonna not question this decision every day. My trainer says this thing, he goes, you don't plant the seed and then dig it up the next day. Are you growing? No, you plant the seed and you just water it. You just water it. You know that that plant is going to take a little time to sprout. That's okay. You don't dig it

up every single time and question it. And so, this sort of scheduled worry time or scheduled commitment times, I think people are mostly victims to time. And then you meet some people that are sort of masters of time. They manipulate time in a different way. And I didn't even have language around this until I met them and I started to realize, oh, there's some games you can play with time that actually make it work for you versus just this thing you're running out of and don't have enough of. Next one. People think they learn from failure, but I don't find that to be true. Why? It's another one of those things that everybody says, and you sound crazy to disagree with it.

Everybody says, oh, I failed, I learned so much. Right? I didn't lose, I learned. And it's a great mindset to have. If it were true, it is simply not true in most situations because if you press on that, you ask about it. So what did you learn? Answer is not at the tip of the tongue. Okay, let me give you some time. Let's think about it. Okay, so what did you learn? I gave the example of the founder who I said, well, it failed. Why did it fail? And I had a different

story. Some people in success learn the wrong lesson. I had a guy work for me, 18 years old, and he was talented at what he was doing, but he had like many people do, I did at 182. I had a bit of a degenerate streak, like to gamble. And when I gamble, I played online poker. Kids nowadays, they play Robinhood, and they play crypto, and they play other things, right? So he was like, I'm talking to him on a call and he goes quite for a second.

I'm like, Hey, did you, are you, do you hear me? Like I said, let's do this. You're writing the notes. You stop writing. What happened? He goes, Oh, sorry. I said the Bitcoin crash to $4,000. And I wanted to buy.

And I go, and I'm like two things, A, we're in a meeting. Why are you looking at the Bitcoin price? B, why is Bitcoin at $4,000? I'm like, two things, A, we're in a meeting, why are you looking at the Bitcoin price? B, why is Bitcoin at $4,000? I want to buy two. And so I went, she bought on some crazy leverage. So he's buying like 25X or something like that. So he puts in like five grand, but buys 25X worth, but like he's gonna get liquidated

if the price drops anymore, but he played that, right? Makes money. And so he's 18 or 19 years old. I think he's got a couple hundred thousand dollars in the bank from like, combination of like, taking all the money I paid him for work and then gambling and trying to run it up. And I'm like, okay, that's good.

And I had always talked to him about this one company. So there's this company that he, he was really interested in, that was like, whatever, some gaming company listed on the Australian stock exchange. It kept talking to me about this. I'm like, whatever, some gaming company listed on the Australian stock exchange. It kept talking to me about this. I'm like, dude, do you think I care about some company in Australia?

They're like, well, why do you tell me about this? He's like, oh, I think it's gonna be big. So I'm like, if you think it's gonna be big, you should invest in it. But I forgot that he's not a normal person and he's going to invest everything in it. So he does. He invests all of his money into this one stock.

Of course, things don't go right. That company wasn't doing so well. They say they decide, you know what, shit's not going well for us. We're going to do what was in vogue at the time. We're going to pivot to crypto. So they go and they say, we are now a blockchain gaming company. Australian stock exchange doesn't like that. They boot them off the exchange. They say, we don't support crypto publicly straightaway companies, so they de-list them. So now my friend is 20 years old. He's holding $200,000 of a stock that is no longer listed on the market

and basically has no pathway to get back on there and just seems like a dead end. So he joins this Facebook group of people who also were like stockholders, like victims of a victims group. And people in that group are just like, what do we do? Like I own the stock, I can't even sell it anymore. And so it's not publicly traded anymore.

So what do I do? And so some people are offering like, look, I'll buy it off you for like, you know, 10 cents of the dollar. Like I'll just, I'll give you 10 cents for every dollar you have of this. And people are happy to move on from their position. So my friend decides, you know what? The thing I'm gonna do, the lesson I've learned so far in this like extreme risk-taking thing

is that I didn't take enough risk. He immediately goes and doubles down on it. And he buys, he goes and borrows more money and starts buying more stock from all these people that are selling for pennies on the dollar. He becomes like one of the largest shareholders of this company. Somehow through like dumb luck, this company starts to like crypto, crypto hits a bull run, crypto starts to run up now and he crypto company is looking good.

NFTs become a thing, this company's perfectly positioned to do something. NFTs share price goes way up, but it's still de-listed, but it's now worth a lot. So a guy approaches him and says, I'll give you $2 million for it. Hold on, I gotta take my daughter to go pee. Once I go pee. That's the key.

All right. Potty training. Here I am. Fuck yeah. Dropping knowledge bombs, and then I have to go wipe a butt. And potty training. That's the duality of man, get you a man that can do both. Exactly, that was the commercial right there.

Where was I? Okay, guy comes up, offers him $2 million for his stock. I'm like, how the hell did this work out from? Of course, he says, no, he says this is gonna go bigger and he goes forward. And I'm telling the story and at the time I told the story, I was telling it, because I was like this guy who was my intern, had this crazy story,

like, isn't that amazing? And one gentleman at the table goes, huh. He goes, so do you think he learned the right lesson out of that? And never even heard somebody say this question, which is, did you, you learned, yes, but did you learn the right thing from this experience? And I don't think I had even learned the right lesson. And definitely my friend who was the, the kid who was doing this had not learned the right lesson, which was he was taking away this lesson of like,

I'm a genius and I'm right. As his like takeaway, when he actually probably should have been taking a slightly different lesson. And I just see this over and over again. And I think there's a practical part of this too. People don't write down what they were thinking at the time or later. Like they don't really have a system in place that will let them assess what they're doing. So you can kind of like, our memories are generally quite bad. Our memories of our own thoughts are worse our memories of our thoughts when we were wrong you're

kidding me like there's no chance we have an accurate view of that and so because you don't actually have this like accurate like I'm doing this for this reason I think this how it's going to play out fast forward here's how it actually played out, you don't have this before and after to learn from. I think generally people aren't very good at learning from this, and I think it's also interesting that they don't have a system to do it, and I think people should have a system to assess the decisions you make, because judgment and decision making is probably the most important skill you can hone over time, but we just kind of leave it up to like,

I hope it just comes with age, when actually you can probably increase the rate of learning on your decision making if you like establish a little system for yourself of being just writing things down, just write it out while you're doing what you're doing and why, and then assessing it later, regularly, regularly assessing it.

I always thought it would be really cool if there was such a machine as being able to take a photo of the texture of your mind and being able to revisit it, you know, for the people that are trying to become more positive or more enthusiastic or more balanced or equanimous or mindful or peaceful or aggressive or overcome their shyness, whatever. Go back to you five years ago, you ten years ago, and get a sense for what sorts of things captured your attention on a daily basis. What were the sorts of things that you were caught up ruminating about and worrying about whether they were going to happen or how they

could have happened or if what you would have done had you not wanted them to happen? If you were able to go back and experience that, literally feel it again, the texture of your mind, the contrast would be so unbelievable, but it's the drip, drip, drip, Japanese water torture of erosion that's so slow, like a tectonic plate moves over time that it nudges what we expect from our daily existence. To the point where you can't notice when did you become confident? When did you overcome your shyness? When did you, whatever? Like, there's no point at which it happened. It's like asking someone when they became old,

right? It's just a gradation that you went through. When did you become peaceful? When did you become angry? When did you become resentful? Like all of these things they just occur. And I think that self deception around things that we got wrong, as you said, is just it's fucking unbeaten. I went to the doctor the other day and I'm sitting there and I'm like, yeah, I think I might have sleep apnea. I don't really know. I did a test back in the day, they said, you know, I was very mild, but I feel like it's gotten worse. I don't really know. And he goes, he's like, have you gained any weight?

And I was like, yeah, I'm maybe a little, I don't know. Yeah, I think so, but like, not like something drastic. And he pulls up my chart. And the doctors often, I go to, it's like the charts in between you two. So it's not like, back in the day, the doctors used to have it, and they used to look at it, and then talk to you.

Here, we could both see the screen. And so I'm looking at the chart, and literally he's like, so 2017, you were 40 pounds lighter than you are now. I was like, 40 pounds, that sounds like a lot of weight to get. I guess it has been, I basically gained 10 pounds a year,

or eight pounds a year for five years. And it was like, yeah, I knew I'd been getting year, for eight pounds a year for five years. And it was like, yeah, I knew I'd been getting kind of out of shape, dead bod status, but like, when you hear it that way or you see it on a chart, you're just like, what, like, it was eye opening. And that's me, and I can see my body. Imagine my brain and my level of wisdom

and the things I focus on and my intellect and my decision-making like I have no chance of noticing Either the degradation or impure improvements to be honest. Yeah, of those over time. I do wish a such a machine What would exist George? So again, this is like that George is the third guest here It's just doesn't happen to be contributed. It's been very quiet today. He's got this thing that he's doing, which is pretty didic-pilled as it goes, where at the end of each day, he's trying to capture some key lessons about the day,

so that he can make the hidden observable, in terms of how he feels. And, you know, journaling is kind of a more qualitative solution, I suppose, for this. But you know, a dashboard like what Rob is trying to design or George has managed to cobble together on a free type form website and whatever it is that he's using. I do think is a good way to start visualizing the things that you care about. All right, next one.

I love this one. Being a billionaire is a stupid goal. Why? You're around billionaires. You're a man of many means and you have. You would be your amount of many means. And do you have friends with as many means and even more means? Why? Well, first of all, they just give the money away. Anyways, so clearly it couldn't be that valuable. Like they worked their whole life to get it and then they give it all away. So all ready that tells you that like a massive

accumulation and abundance of money beyond a certain point certainly doesn't matter otherwise they would not give it away. Like let's say I gave them extra health, I don't think they're donating that. Let's say I gave them extra time, 100 extra years of life. I don't think they're donating that. But you can give them a billion dollars

and they'll give away 99% of it. So that's the first thing. Just the first signal that maybe this is overrated. The second is I'm not against abundance. So some most people who hate millionaires just hate abundance. They hate when anybody wins at a large scale. I'm not that guy. I like people who win. I admire and respect and strive to be one of those people. But what I admire and appreciate the most is somebody who picks the right game to play. somebody who chooses a game or designs a game of their own liking. So the question then becomes, what are the other things that could become massively abundant

and a massive winner of? Okay, the money game is one. And there are certainly checkpoints along the way of money that matter when you don't have to have any more money, like you don't have to have a job because your investments make you enough money, right? That's financial freedom that was like the key checkpoint of life or it's not being in debt. Getting back to zero for somebody who's in debt is a big checkpoint.

But beyond that, the checkpoints run out or they spread out in a big way. And the prizes shrink. It's like, what's the difference between somebody's got $50 million and $500 million? It's like one, rents the jet, the other owns the jet. There's not that much of a difference, right? One has a library in their house, the other guy pays the library at the school.

It's like, ah, two cares. Do I really care about that anyways? Not worth dedicating my life to. So the question is, what things of abundance are worth dedicating your life to? And how do you think about those? So I think it's great to have an abundance of time, free time, but also youth. That's youthfulness. And also if you're just a young person, like when I was 21, I just wanted everything that the 40-year-olds around me had. They seemed to have the money, they seemed to have

the relationships, they seemed to have the cars and the status and the cool job and everything else. And now that I'm, you know, I'm 35, I'm going to be 40 soon. All I want is what the 21-year-olds have. Time and youth, energy, abundance, like freedom. Like, you know, and so, you know, youth is wasted on the young in that way. So I think having an abundance of time is amazing. Having an abundance of generosity would be amazing. Having an abundance of fun is amazing.

I've figured out what to do with my life just by simply asking the question, who is having the most fun in their career? And that was a much better guiding principle for me to figure out what I actually wanted to do with my life was look around and figure out who's having the most fun. I knew a lot of successful people, those people were not having a lot of fun. And the scary part, the most dangerous part of it all was, if you ask them, are you having fun?

They say, yeah. But if you observe them, it's like somebody whose volume knob is stuck on seven, they don't even know that there's eight, nine and 10. They can only go to seven. They think seven is sufficient and maximally fun. Once you see somebody on 10, you look at the seven, you're like, ah, there's a clear difference. Who was the people that were at 10? So there's some people that are like,

I would say first, it was sad how hard it was to think of this because I was like, I know a bunch of people who by traditional measures are successful. And it wasn't like I just could rattle off 20 names of people who are winning. Like if you said, who's winning the money game? I could name you 20 people. If you said who's winning the audience game?

I could name you 20 people. But if you said who's having the most fun? Who are the people that are dominating that have fun in life game? It was a lot harder for me to think of those names, which means kind of surrounded myself with the wrong people, the wrong inspiration. I think that Joe Rogan has a ton of fun.

And he's kind of like a popular person, so it's not that cool of an answer, but what I think he's done amazingly well is he has managed to make his life about his hobbies without turning his hobbies into jobs. So his hobbies, loves, you know, martial arts, fighting UFC, becomes the commentator for the UFC gets to call all the biggest fights sit ringside. No, gets to know the fighters, follow the sport, study it for, get paid to study this thing, get paid to watch this thing.

He would otherwise be paying to watch. Hmm, that's great. But he also avoided all the trappings of that job. He's not on the road 200 days a year, like Dana White is. He literally just said, I'm only gonna do the Vegas shows, which happened to be the best shows, which happened to be one hour from where he lived, was living in the US in LA.

And he's like, I'm not gonna travel to Abduabhi for once one fight, it's just not worth it. Right, he loved comedy, he finds it creatively challenging to do that and finds it amazing to like make people laugh for a living. He does that, and he has won in that game as well. But again, he doesn't have to tour 250 days a year like most comedians.

It doesn't have to censor himself like many comedians. Podcasting, he's like, oh, I'm just curious guy. I'd love to have these conversations. It became the number one podcaster, right? Didn't have to, but what you don't see him do is what a lot of content creators do. They get on a content treadmill that they don't enjoy. And they're constantly begging the, begging for audience, trying to figure out, what do I need to do to get more clicks more likes more whatever. And they almost ruin what's otherwise the best job in the world.

He's managed to become the podcast without doing that. And so he kind of hits the goals, but also what you call the anti goals, which are basically the traps you could fall into while achieving your goal. I'll never forget like a friend in college, her dad was a partner at a big consulting firm and he was making literally $1 million a year. And I thought that was mind blowing that somebody could make $1 million in a year, let alone like, I thought having a million dollars was like, what you accumulate over time.

That was the end point of money. And he was making a million dollars a year, but he also traveled Monday through Thursday night. And he would get back Thursday night and then be there Friday Saturday. And then Sunday he would leave again, basically travel for his job. And he did that her whole life.

And now she's in college, and he missed, like basically her whole life. And she resented him for it, and I was like, wow, you know, can you, you know, you want success, but you want your kids to like you. You want success, but your kids to know you. You want success, but you want your wife to still like you, and it'd be faithful to that relationship.

So like, you know, define the game a little differently. So I think big billionaire is a stupid goal because it defines the game on terms that for an abundance that doesn't actually matter. I love that. Are you familiar with, um, die with zero, bill, poking stuff? Good book. Yeah, I like that book. Yeah, I became really tight with him after. I brought him on the show. He, I mean, you know, for anybody that doesn't like that book, and I can understand why it rubbed certain people up the wrong way because it's a book that's written for people who have surplus income,

and not everybody does, which means that the people who don't have it get upset about it, he is a man that lives that philosophy. We finished that. It's a classic case, by the way, of pointing the blame the wrong way. You're bad at this guy who wrote this book for some people, because you don't have what those people have. That's misguided anger. I would agree. Yeah, we finished that podcast within 30 minutes, we are on his boat, being driven by the captain

of his boat, wake surfing for the next three and a half hours, with Phil, the unabomber, somebody, the poker player. And I'm like, this is brilliant. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And then over the next like three or four weeks, I spent a ton of time at his house and he just, he does the things. This is related tangentially to something that I think you've done recently, or at least I've seen someone write about you or maybe you write about yourself, which is the life-changing nature of having an assistant and integrating them correctly into your life What does that look like?

To let me say two things one there's only one thing I remember from the die with zero book I read it. I liked it But I only remember one thing and it's a story he tells about I want to tell it again because it was so impactful to me And I feel like everybody needs to hear this so I'm'm like, oh, let me just say his bit here. He talks about like he was, he had some job at a bank or investment firm or something like that, like, you know, the job you want. And his friend was like, I want to go on a trip to Europe for like five or six weeks. Like, let's go back packing through Europe. There were like just out of school, 22, 22, 22, 25 years old, something like that. And he's like, let's go back packing through Europe. There were like just out of school, 22, trying to through to 25 years old, some like that.

And he's like, let's go back back to Europe. And I was like, oh, yeah, that sounds great, but like, how are we gonna get six weeks off? He's like, we're not probably, we'll ask, but they probably won't say yes, and then we'll quit and we'll hope that there's a job for us when we come back. He's like, oh man, like, that's irresponsible. Like, I don't want to do that.

So his friend goes and he's, at the time, he's laughing at him like, stupid guy made stupid decision to quit his job and go backpacking, frolling through Europe. And I was like, you know, I'm here making wise decisions. That guy's making unwise decisions. Friend comes back, friend is like, dude, he's like, how was he? He's like, I mean, I can't even put into words. Like anybody who's done study abroad comes back with the same thing with like, it's like, how was he? He's like, I mean, I can't even put into words. Like anybody who's done study abroad

comes back with the same thing with like, it's hard to even explain. It was so amazing. I stated these hostels and I was, I remet this band and we just jumped on their van and we toured with them for two nights and then I met this girl. She was amazing.

We're still dating and I tried this food and whatever, slept on the beach three of the nights. It was amazing. He's like, wow, he's like, I knew immediately that I had made a mistake, should have had those experiences. And second thing, he says, finally, he's like 32, 33 years old.

He's like, has accumulated enough social capital of this company to be able to take time off and go do this. So he goes on the back packing trip at like 33 or 32 and he's like, you know, it's not that fun staying in a hostel when you're 33 and like, you know, it's different. There's actually, it's not just that it would have been better to do it then, it's like, there's a time,

a season of life where you should do certain things and there really, those things have maximal impact during those seasons. And what I thought he was doing was unwise. And actually, he was doing the life wise thing to do, which was to take advantage of our youth. And I could go have this experience at the time where that experience is amazing. And I just, oh, that stuck out with me.

I just, I feel like that is such a, such a important lesson, right? Like what do you say? I did to add an additional one in that he hasn't released yet. He has, this shows the levels of wealth. We're about to talk about your assistant. This guy's got an experienced architect who their only job is to find different things that they think he might want to do

and then put them to him. And then even if he says that he doesn't want to do them, convince them that he's going to go and do them. And one of them was training, which is like inter-railing in Japan. And there are these five star, very expensive trains that go the full length of Japan. And it's like being on a cruise, but being on a really, really expensive train. And they sent it across to him. And he said, each shit, that sounds fucking lame. I don't want to do

that. Why am I going on a train? I've got a hot wife. Like, what am I, I'm gonna go on this train on my own. It's gonna be full of old people. I'm gonna hate it. It's gonna be moving around and blah, blah. They convinced him to go, he gets on, falls in love with it. He's like, I wanna do this.

I wanna do this every month for the rest of my life. What he realizes is that he can do that when he's 70. He can't keep weightboarding when he's 70. So he is banking this anticipation for when he's going to get back onto inter-railing or training or whatever across Japan and God knows where else he's gonna go. But that's for the future.

So there are certain experiences that you can only do at particular periods of your life. They're better maximized during that time. It's kind of less lame to do them during that time. And it allows you to match the, a lot of it is to do with health, like health, well-than-time, the three factors that you play within is book. Your health is largely a determinant of what it is that you're able to do because your hips aren't going to take it skiing when you're 80, right? But you probably find to do training, like to sit on a train and be served like cake

by a nice Japanese person, right? Like that's gonna be fine. So yeah, periods, yes, you assistant, what have you done? How's it worked? Yeah, I mean, I don't even think it's that crazy, but I think that most people, I sort of rail on these controversial things, which is

like the common theme of all of my, all of my beliefs comes down to the following, which is don't follow what most people do, because most people don't have a result that you would want. So like in America, most average person is obese, literally, like by the definition, I think the average was obese What 50 something percent of marriages end in divorce so that's kind of like that's the average expected outcome there And most of them have you know more than a thousand dollars in the bank or ten thousand dollars for you know like an emergency Whatever the numbers aren't the specifics don't really matter directionally. They're all correct, which is that It is easy to feel safe doing what

most people do until you realize that most people are going to a destination you don't want to be at. Then it becomes very risky to do what most people do. Most people, when they get money, buy luxurious things like fancy cars, clothes, watches, maybe vacations, things like fancy cars, clothes, watches, maybe vacations, things like that. And so there's just, I would say one of the general wisdoms is, experiences are greater than things. And I always say, services are even better than experiences.

I was able to hire an assistant. It works full-time for me for the cost of a couple of purses. An assistant improves the quality of your life far more than a person that sits in your closet because you're afraid to take it out and get a scratcher. Same thing with a car. I hired a private chef for our family for less than what most people pay for a luxury car. Because I didn't care what it looked like like when I drove around, or like a quality car, a safe car, but I didn't care if it was an Instagram car.

But I did care that somebody would go get fresh ingredients, make healthy food for me and my family that tastes great and better than I can, that I don't have to worry about going, getting groceries, cooking, or cleaning up afterwards. So I got my time, I got my health, and I got my taste. I can't believe everybody doesn't do this, who can? So that's the first thing.

Assistant, same thing, higher assistant. Through Shepherd, she's in the Philippines, so I didn't even go with a full-on personal assistant here. So let me try, first, let me dabble with it this way. And it's great, she's the first line of defense on your email inbox and your time. And she makes me, she helps me be a better friend. I'm like, Hey, my friend had this thing. I think I want to get him this gift. Can you go find a, you know, I want to buy a McCandle that has this funny thing

about the sense I joke on the front and just send it to him and month and also wins their birthday. Let's make sure we remember that this year, because I'm kind of a shitty friend otherwise. And it just help you be a better person. They helped you be whatever the person you want to be, they can help you be. And I created a system to like, to do that. So I had to learn how do you even operate, you know, with this, with this new functionality to have to have somebody who can do this with you. Once I learned it, it's pretty big unlock. But I would say just in general, finding a way to buy luxuries that you actually want is great. I will also say, I think for people who are sitting there

listening, they're like, oh great. Oh wow, it was great to have a private chef and assistant, good for you, douche bag right? That's fair, take that on the chin. But I will say, I used to have a big reaction whenever I would experience, whenever I encountered people who had this type of stuff. It was basically bitterness, but it would be disguised as, oh, that's stupid, I wouldn't

want that, that's stuck. I would tell myself some story that would make myself feel better, and the story was either that having that thing would make me a bad person or that I don't want that anyways for whatever reasons. And I had this visceral, which I went to somebody's house in Las Vegas and they live in like basically a palace and then they drive the fanciest cars and they have, they literally there's a pool

that goes around their house like a circle, like a moat but it's just that's their swimming pool. Do it be cooler if it was a moat? Exactly, it's like a swimable moat. It's a moat you just want to stay in instead of cross. And I was talking to my buddy and I was like, yeah, they have all this stuff, but I wouldn't want that. Anyway, I was being defensive about it

and didn't even realize it. He goes, he goes, you know, just gonna let you know, one friend to another, you know, like one black belt to another, we're both trying to master our minds. You're talking very differently than you usually do, and it kind of makes me feel like maybe, you know, it's kind of bothering you that you don't have these things

and you're telling yourself all these things about why you don't want them anyways or why it's bad to have them or how this person is a douchebag for having them. Instead, what if you switched it? What if this was Costco and you got to walk around and you're sampling a bunch of things of a lifestyle to figure out which ones you want and which ones you don't. And so instead of the reaction being, I don't have this and therefore I feel bad, be like, oh, I'm so lucky I get to try this to figure out if I like this, how I like this, or if I don't care for this at all.

Fantastic. What a cheap way to learn that. And I just flip my mind to like, Oh, I actually seek being exposed to other ways of thinking or living in order to get a sample, a little taste, a little test to find out. Oh, that's awesome. Or they do it this way, but I would want it this remix way. Or just, Oh, I don't want that at all. I think I don't have to desire that because this is not something that appeals to me. And that really changed the way I interacted with people who I felt like, because I felt embarrassed

at the way I was reacting before. Having a friend who calls you out in a what sounds like reshuring, but from way like that about your bullshit is you need to keep those sorts of people close to you. Well, we made an agreement. It was like, hey, look, I want to be this way, you want to be this way. We're both nerds about this stuff. So let's make an agreement that in our quest to master this, to become a black belt, there are going to be times where you're going

to have to point out techniques I'm doing wrong, things I'm doing. And so I want you to just say I'm to me when you see them. And I promise you that I will receive it as a gift, the feedback as a gift, and I will receive it that way. So that's that's the agreement. We're both going to do that for each other. That's part of who we're both like mine in this way. So we know we can talk to each other about that. Whereas if we talk to the wrong person who's not seeking that type of input or opinion, they might take

it at the wrong way. But let's set an agreement in a foundation right now. We are men who want to live by a certain code. That's our code. And we both are down with this crowd sourcing your personal growth. I like it very much. Sean Pouri, ladies and gentlemen, dude, I'm so glad that we got to run this back. The first one was phenomenal. And I want to do this again. So please keep on coming out with controversial tactics for people to have a better life. Where should people go to keep up to date with all of the different things that you do? Yeah, you can go to just my email. This is where I put, I think, the best content. So just go to SeanPouri.com, S H A N P UA-N-P-U-R-I, dot com. You can put the link

in there or whatever. And just put your email in there. I send out stuff that I think is the most thoughtful stuff that's hopefully going to make you think is really all my only promise. I think I can spark thoughts in your head. And then the second thing is the podcast. So we have a podcast called My First Million. You know, if people listen to this podcast probably to become more wise, most people listen to this podcast are our podcast to become wealthy. And so, yeah, it's me and my buddy Sam. It's a good time. It's very entertaining. And it's kind of about business and opportunities that we see or stories that we hear that, you know, we get to share on the pod. So My First Million, go

subscribe to that. Hell yeah, Sean. I appreciate you. Thank you, man. Thank you.