Modern Wisdom - #738 - Alex Hormozi - 21 Brutally Honest Lessons About Life

Episode Date: January 29, 2024

Alex Hormozi is a founder, investor and an author. Alex’s Twitter continually has been one of my favourite sources of great insights over the last few years. Today we get to go through some of my favourite lessons from him about life, human behaviour, psychology, business and resilience. Yet again this is so, so good. Expect to learn why being called a control freak isn’t an insult, how to stop making the same mistakes over and over again, why being at the top will always require you becoming uncomfortable, Alex’s guide to surviving cancellation, how to get more comfortable telling the truth, why it's good to remember that all your critics are going to die and much more... Sponsors:  Get a Free Sample Pack of all LMNT Flavours with your first box at https://www.drinklmnt.com/modernwisdom (automatically applied at checkout) Get 10% discount on Marek Health’s comprehensive blood panels at https://marekhealth.com/modernwisdom (use code: MODERNWISDOM) Get 20% discount on Nomatic’s amazing luggage at https://nomatic.com/modernwisdom (use code MODERNWISDOM) Sign up for a one-dollar-per-month trial period from Shopify at https://www.shopify.com/modernwisdom (automatically applied at checkout) Extra Stuff: Get my free reading list of 100 books to read before you die: https://chriswillx.com/books Try my productivity energy drink Neutonic: https://neutonic.com/modernwisdom Episodes You Might Enjoy: #577 - David Goggins - This Is How To Master Your Life: http://tinyurl.com/43hv6y59 #712 - Dr Jordan Peterson - How To Destroy Your Negative Beliefs: http://tinyurl.com/2rtz7avf #700 - Dr Andrew Huberman - The Secret Tools To Hack Your Brain: http://tinyurl.com/3ccn5vkp - 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 everybody, welcome back to the show. My guest today is Alex Hormozzi. He's a founder, investor and an author. Alex's Twitter continually seems to be one of my favorite sources of great insights over the last few years and today we get to go through some of my favorite lessons from him about life, human behavior, psychology, business and resilience. Expect to learn why being called a control freak isn't an insult. How to stop making the same mistakes over and over again.

Why being at the top will always require you becoming uncomfortable. Alex's guide to surviving cancellation. How to get more comfortable telling the truth. Why it's good to remember that all of your critics are going to die. And much more. I love these episodes, these listical style episodes where we move quickly through a bunch of different insights and aphorisms and riff on them and stuff. I really value them.

They're super, super dense. If you are new here or a long time listener, don't forget that you might be listening but not subscribed. The next few months has some of the most insane guests that I've ever had on the podcast. Some huge returning guests and some massive long time requested ones. So if you don't want to miss episodes when they go live and if you want to make me very happy and if you want to support the show, just press subscribe on Apple podcasts or Spotify or wherever else you are listening. Thank you.

But now, ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Alex Hormozzi. What did you call this? The podcasting booty call? We come together for a very intense three hours. Don't see each other for six months until I text you again and say what you're doing. It's exactly that. All right, so we're going to go through some of the best lessons I've learned from you

over the last couple of months. First one. Control freak is a word people with low standards use to describe people with high standards. You're not a control freak. You just want it done right the first time. You're not anxious. You care. Do not expect mediocre people to support world-class goals. I think most people feel really lonely when you want something that doesn't currently exist.

And so some people call that dreams and people call that goals, whatever it is, you're trying to pull something from doesn't currently exist. And so some people call that dreams, some people call that goals, whatever it is, you're trying to pull something from your mind into reality. And you want it done a certain way. And if it's not done that way, it's not what you imagined. And so people on the outside will throw stones and call you names that they think will change your behavior and get you to stop.

And the more I have been the person trying to pull things into reality, the more I've tried to weather and build kind of defenses against those things. So that when those stones get hurled at you by being called a control freak, or by saying you micromanage things, or that you have incredibly high standards, the answer is yes, because I want it done right

the first time. Because either way, we're going to, if you have enough will, it's going to get done The answer is yes, because I want it done right the first time. Because either way, we're going to, if you have enough will, it's going to get done the way that I want it to get done regardless. And it'll be less painful if we just do it right the first time, because we will still have to do it. And you may have to do it three or four more times, but eventually you will just succumb to the fact that we're going to do it this way. And I think all of the great things that have happened for humanity have been from one man or woman who had an idea and just wouldn't let people shake it from them. The standard of right isn't actually that insane when you think about it.

It's just right. It's just done without error. And I guess that the margin that some people consider to be right and other people consider to be right just changes. I'm trying to think of a really good example for this, but like the level of detail, I mean, it's the difference between a book that gets 10 or 100 five-star reviews and a book that gets 100,000 five-star reviews. And everyone wants a

silver bullet, but most of the things that make great products is 100 golden BBs. And so that's one of the things we have is there's no silver bullets, only hundreds of golden BBs. There's just hundreds of tiny little improvements. It's like, how can we look at the can? How can we improve the way it ships? What about the weight? What about the color scheme? How does it sit in the shelves? How are people going to look at it in this market versus this market? Or like, how does this name appear on hats and on shirts and on sites? And what's the RGB, you know, whatever the color scheme is here versus there? And it's just a thousand details that someone who does not care will not put the work to look into because they're trying to check a box rather than to make something that people will love or

I heard this from shoot, I can't remember where it was from but basically that the best art is art where the artist makes it for themselves and where you see commercial work is where a bunch of people are trying to make something for an audience. And so they're trying to like rinse and recycle stuff that actually solves no one's problems because no one is actually the audience. Whereas when you make it for yourself, there's thousands of people just like you who will have the same depth of understanding of it, but it feels selfish in the moment to make something for yourself.

But when you make it for yourself, you actually make it for everyone. But you can be reliably informed that there's some non-insignificant minority of people who also think like you. Yes. Who also have the same problems as you, who also have the same fears as you. So I'm going through two projects at the moment, one being a book and the other being eutonic that is nascent and it's new. And that means that there's lots more of these small things that are actually quite

big things. But I was telling you before we started about the fact there's a hyphen and there's a hyphen missing between one piece of copy and another piece of copy, but it's printed on a million cans. Right. I don't know what to say. But being concerned about being seen as someone who has two high standards is something that for quite a while I felt ashamed about. Because you feel like a bother. You feel like you're being unnecessarily, it's not even detail oriented, it's picky. Cumber some, yeah. Yes, yes, yes, yes, laborious.

And I realized, probably last year, it took me until last year to realize that not succumbing to stopping doing that is probably one of the only reasons why I've had any success. I mean, I think if, so for anyone who's listening, if you have that, I would consider it a gift. It makes sense for the majority of people to be opposed to that because you do make more work for everyone else. But the product of that work is so much better. And so if you want the work that you have to last and to be meaningful and make an impact, it comes from 100 Golden Beebees, of 100 particularities, of 100 peculiarities that you are picky about, because the whole thing needs to work. And what happens is if you have a big project, lots of people have to get involved,

but there still needs to be one vision. And otherwise it looks like a Frankenstein where everyone just checks a box of something they did in the past, they just copy and paste it over. And then it doesn't resonate with anyone because again, they just did it for everyone rather than for the artist. And so using that as a frame has given me permission

to be me in an unreasonable world. And so like, I told this last time I was on, but when I did the book launch, I had, I practiced that presentation three times a day, every day for 30 days. So I did a hundred run-throughs, full-length run-throughs. First, where I did it out loud and recorded it.

Second time, where I would watch the recording and then edit in real time and then do it again. And I did that every single day. And so then when I came live and had half a million people or whatever, it came out, I think, flawlessly. But people were like, man, you're such a natural at this. It's like, well, I did it a hundred times. And so sometimes people even hear a hundred and it's just a big number.

But when you do a hundred repetitions of something, the first five times you're like, wow, I'm so much better. But then like the difference between five and the next 95 times is what goes from being great to being a masterpiece. And like it's that next 95 that I think is what makes people world-class and that's where everyone falls off And that's why most people aren't There is this poll I think from people who don't have high standards to people who do have high standards to drag them back

It's this like Moving back toward the mean yeah is Killing the only competitive advantage that you had Couldn't agree more. I mean, it's conforming, right? It's like, people want you to do what they find comfortable and most things that are, like, most companies deteriorate when the founder leaves

because it happens slowly because it's, you go from 100 golden babies to 99 golden babies and it doesn't look that different. And then there's 98 golden babies and they're like, I don't know. And then two years later, three years later, you're like, I don't know, it doesn't have the same like magic as what it was. And that's because the art behind it isn't there because it's not unified anymore. It's not congruent anymore. It's 100 departments making decisions with people copying, pasting things for an audience that doesn't exist rather than one person who's trying to be satisfied for an ideal that they are trying with all their might to live up to.

I suppose this is one of the important reasons to have a singular figure that is the herb and all of the spokes come off it because they're the only person that gets to see absolutely everything. And typically that would be the founder in a podcast, that would be a host in any other, in a solo music band, that would be the lead singer or the songwriter or whatever. They get to see everything. For instance, we've done some episodes before where it's been the night before and I've been not happy with the color grade because the way that something displays on mobile is slightly different to the way that it displays in Premiere Pro and it's slightly different to the way that it displays in a 6k photographer videographers curved screen. I've gone guys, it's like it's not up to scratch. Well, we're not going to be able to get it in time for the export

We're not going to be able to get it in time to get it uploaded and then there's checks that go through on YouTube like well It needs to happen. I could just have could just find a way to make this happen. And yeah, that impulse of just actually seeing it as something that you should lean into. Okay, well, it's not. And if you set the standard, and if everybody else gets up to that standard, what it shows is the people who continually push up against that and don't meet that standard, they're just not built for this particular company.

They're built for someone else that makes a mediocre product, but they're not built for you, who's making a world-class product. And I really want to jam down someone's throat right now. The whole, don't be a perfectionist, it's just another word for procrastination. I actually think that's complete bullshit. I think that- That's my quote. Is it? Perfection is a procrastination masquer actually think that's complete bullshit. I think that- That's my quote. Being, is it? Perfectionism is procrastination masquerading

as quality control. Okay, yes, okay. So then I'm gonna put a sub, a footnote on it that I think will add context, which is that most people who claim to be perfectionists are not perfectionists. They're actually procrastinating because they're not doing anything.

And so it just is a socially acceptable label because the real perfectionists feel this sickness where they like wanna itch their skin off until the thing's done, but they are trying to get it done whereas the perfectionist or the procrastinator uses that to say like, I'm not sure. I'm just getting it right. But like the person who's an actual perfectionist, one wants to finish and is working every

hour of every day on the thing and seeing progress towards it. Because if you don't know how your thing is getting better, you're not a perfectionist. You're just ignorant. They're also moving toward the goal every single step of the way as opposed to just sitting back at this huge list of things that are not doing the thing, planning to do the thing isn't doing the thing, thinking about the thing isn't doing the thing, getting angry at people on the internet

that have already done the thing isn't doing the thing. And there's also a, people who are perfectionists within the thing that matters most are prepared to see things that are ancillary to that. For instance, you're not absolutely a perfectionist, I'm going to guess, with the short form content that goes out on your Instagram. It's like, this is sawdust, as you call it.

This is just, it's extra, right? It's freebie stuff. Look, if we have one in a hundred videos that have got a typo or the hyphen's missing or something like that, all right. But if we're talking about the school announcement release, if there's a fucking typo in that, or if in the video one of the links is broken, or even if one of the links is slightly pixelated, that's something that I can have a problem with.

So picking your battles as a perfectionist, I think actually, or someone with high standards, is super important, because you can't have that degree of high standards at absolutely everything. Because if you don't pick your battles, you're not going to make sufficient movement at the velocity you need to actually make progress. So find the areas that are the highest contribution. Yeah.

And don't compromise on those. And it's funny you say that because I, the way that I immediately reframed that was that the perfectionism was around volume. It's like, that is what we will, that is what we are optimizing towards. And then we can, because if we look at, if we knew how people responded ahead of time to content, then we would make things differently than we do. But I probably like you, am often surprised, pleasantly and sometimes unpleasantly, by the stuff that just grabs hold

and then just goes viral as hell in content. And so I think part of that is making up for our own ignorance by increasing volume. And so that would be like, my reframe on the perfectionism there is like, we know that if we make 10 pieces of content, it is more likely that we will have more people see it than if we try really hard at one. And so we make 10 because the net benefit of the 10 is greater.

And so that's the ideal that we commit to. Tiago Forte has a fantastic take on this where he talks about perfectionism allows people to sit back and not produce work at a rate required to work out what actually works. Have you heard the story of the pottery class? Oh, I feel like the... All right, well, this feels like total modern. Is this where someone comes in behind and then holds the thing in front? So there's two, two, uh, there's a teacher and he's got two classes that he teaches. And one class, he says, the only assignment for this whole semester is that you come back with a perfect clay pot.

That's it. That's the assignment. The other class he says, your objective is to make the most total quantity of clay pots and you'll be measured by how many pots you make. And at the end of the quarter, the pots that came from the team that had to just make sheer volume, not only did they make more pots, but the quality of all of their pots was better compared to the teams that only had to make one. And it just underlines the biggest lesson that I've learned in my life,

which is that volume negates luck, is that you can try to be lucky and pick the one perfect thing and try and make it. But if you don't want to try and be lucky, you can just do so much fucking work that you will brute force your way to figuring it out. If you do a thousand podcasts, you'll be pretty fucking good at podcasts, right? But if you try to say, okay, you're brand new, and all you have to do is make one perfect podcast, the problem is that you don't have the perspective from which to make a judgment to say what is good, because you have zero data to base anything off of. You're basing your idea of a perfect podcast on something that you don't have the perspective from which to make a judgment to say what is good because you have zero data to base anything off of.

And so you're basing your idea of a perfect podcast on something that you've literally never done before. And so doing the volume gives you the perspective to then have the best podcast at number 1000 or 1001. Anyways, I just thought you'd love the clay pot. I know that story, but I thought it was photography. So anyway, but again, I don't disagree. And it's finding the thing that is to try

and make this tactical, what is the thing that you don't need to focus on volume today? The goal is not to try and fit 10 podcasts into one set. It's to make this one as good as possible. But if it's shorts or reels or tweets or something, it's lower leverage, it's lower input, just get it out there. All right, next one.

Here's how to get older without getting better. Keep relearning the same lesson. If you keep making the same mistake over and over, the mistake isn't the problem, you are. So I define learning by same condition, new behavior. And so when you go to a video game and you battle through the level and you battle the boss, if you keep doing the same thing to the boss and you keep losing, then you have not learned because you have the same condition and the same behavior.

And so I often say that like for anyone who's listening to this podcast, if the goal is to get better and you're like, man, I really want to learn something from this podcast. If you listen to this podcast and then you're in the same exact conditions as you were before, and then you do not change your behavior, you learned nothing. And so using that definition has at least allowed me to change my behavior faster, which then goes into rate of learning, which I define as intelligence. And so a lot of people are like, man, he's so smart, but he just doesn't, it's like, well, then if he doesn't change his behavior

and he's in the same conditions, he's a dummy. He's not that smart. And so if you are trying to battle the same boss over and over again, and you don't change what you're doing, and the boss keeps beating you, then it's not the game's problem. It's your problem. You are the problem. And I think that's, like,

if you continue, I talked about, obviously, I talked to a lot of entrepreneurs, but I usually do this when I have a crowd, it's like, hey, raise your hand if you work all the hours of the day. And a lot, you know, most of the crowd raised their hand. I say, okay, who here has been stuck at the same revenue level for six months or more? And then I say, keep the hands up. And like, honestly, most of the time, the same hands are raised. I say, you're doing the wrong shit. Like if you put all your inputs and the outputs haven't changed, then you have the same condition and the same behavior. And so you have learned nothing. And so that has always just been my reframe.

And so over time, if, if you're moving up in entrepreneurship, you're moving up in career, your behavior should change because it means you've learned exposure to information isn't learning. Great deal. They are. It's true. Yeah. It's true.

And it's the same with memory. It's literally the way that memory works. The best way to work out how the human memory system works is repeated recall, not repeated exposure. Right. You have to drag it out of memory and use it, not just see it a million times. And this is kind of the same thing with the lesson. It's you can listen to any of the podcasts that exist on the internet, or the ones that we've done, or the ones that you love, or whatever. And if you don't apply anything, it's a waste of time. And this is the best solution for this is Tim Ferriss's The Good Shit Sticks. Look, what's the thing from the podcast or the book or the audio book or the whatever the red or listen to. That you can't stop thinking about that you go to bed and you think about it that you took a screenshot or a screen recording and send it in the group chat that you like texted your mom about it three in the morning. This really explains the way that I felt in school or the way that I felt when such and such broke up with me or whatever. That's the thing that's the thing to focus on. But a lot of the time, the problem

with mental masturbation is that the amount of information you can intake versus the amount of change that you can deploy is asymmetric. Yeah. When I was getting started in my entrepreneurial journey, I would say this was like pre, this was when I was a entrepreneur, right? Like I hadn't quit my job yet. I started reading all these self-help books. And I remember reading like, it was probably like my 10th book in a row. And I realized that the words in that book contradicted like the these self-help books. And I remember reading like, it was probably like my 10th book in a row. And I realized that the words in that book contradicted like the second self-help book that I, you know,

one was like, it's all about goals. The other one's like, it's all about taking, you know, steps or whatever it was, right? And I, and I, all of a sudden I was like, you know, my life is the same. I've read all these books, but my, I still literally live in the exact same condo in Baltimore doing the same job.

Like nothing has changed. And so I just made the commitment that whatever the next book that I was going to read, I would just not read another book until I'd done everything in that book. And that's when I quit my job and I did a whole bunch of other things. And I've actually more or less stuck with that in terms of like, when I read books or even listen to podcasts, I usually do it with an intention to get something out of it. And I usually have notes up. And so that's... So my intake on information, because I get asked a lot, I'm sure you do. Like I actually don't read that much.

I definitely don't read nonfiction. I read like fantasy. Red Rising Baby! But it's because usually I get overwhelmed with the amount of things I would have to do. And so I'm like, I don't need more information. I'm like, I'm like, I could read a chapter and be like, all right, that's it. I like, it'll take me two weeks to do this. And so then like the rest of the time is doing that.

And so how do you ensure that the things that you're reading are giving you good advice? Because if you didn't move on before you took two weeks to go and do the thing, but the thing was dog shit, you've spent two weeks going backward. So I would probably, I would make the argument that I wouldn't have gone backwards because I would have gained the experience. And so I would have more context to know what the second thing was going to be. And that's just kind of like the trial by fire, learning through iteration. And I think I tend to do more of that.

Um, sort of a win or learn philosophy. Yeah. And I would say that like there, there are entrepreneurs who are definitely like super, super duper planners and they're entrepreneurs who are more like, let's just move and break shit and we'll figure it out. I tend to be really this on the micro in terms of like move shit and break, you know, like we'll figure it out as we go.

And I just tend to be a planner only in the big, like very grand, like, what do I really want to do in 10 years? But the majority of the time it's like, let's see. And we'll learn, I've learned so much, like so much of the content that I have comes from just fucking up in business. And people are like, this is such original content. I was like, this is just because that's what my life was.

I just like, I made this mistake and it didn't work. But I said this one thing one time and then all these people bought and I was like, ooh, how do I do that again? And so like it was always through iteration. And I've read all these books, but there's something knowing how, or sorry, knowing that and knowing how, like knowing that maybe this works maybe, but once you do it, it's a different type of learning where at least for me, it's about been that way.

If you could read, you could read 100 books on sales, but when you take your first cold call, all of that goes out the window because you actually have to, you actually have to sell. We'll get back to talking to Alex in one minute, but first I need to tell you about element. Element is a tasty electrolyte drink mix with everything that you need and nothing that you don't. Stop having coffee first thing in the morning. Your adenosine system that caffeine acts on isn't even active for the first 90 minutes

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slash modernwisdom. This is related to something I wrote last week. Don't be so worried about people who imitate your work. They only know the what but not the why. If you stopped being creative, so would they. A photocopier isn't an artist even if it can recreate the Mona Lisa. I love that because they think that like you, you are source in that situation. And so everyone is there for like a subset of you and they require you to live. You don't require them. And the equal opposite is I think we should be more fearful of when everyone stops copying you. Like the day that no one copies you is far, far more frightening than the day everyone's

copying you. Yeah. Jimmy Kyle refers to China as a cover band You know It's like they're the cover band of the Beatles and he says, you know, they're good and in many ways They're able to produce things at more scale and so on and so forth, but they're not driving the innovation forward in that same way Yeah, the idea of getting upset about people copying is just ridiculous like in that same way. Yeah, the idea of getting upset about people copying is just ridiculous. Like, yeah, that's all I got on that.

But you understand why it's painful, right? If someone's gone through, okay, let's test and test and test and test and test and then finally find a particular formula that works. And then 10 people downstream get the benefit of this hard, laborious, effortful late night grind and iteration. And they just got to be like, oh, that thing.

Yeah. So I think that like they'll be able to copy what they can see, but they won't be able to copy what they can't see, which is understanding why each of those pieces are in place. And when something changes in the future, they won't be able to iterate from there because they don't know why it was there in the first place.

That's the what and why. Right, and so like, I mean, I've obviously dealt this with in a business context where like real dollars are at stake. And so like in the gym world, you know, gym launch for those who don't know, I had a big licensing company, we had 5,000 locations and anyways.

So we had basically business processes that we would iterate and figure out why this worked. And so then I had, I used to keep a list of names and then it got too long and tiresome to keep the names of all the people who tried to take the stuff and then sell it as their own. I say their names every night before I go to bed. You think I don't remember you, I remember all of you. And so none of them 10 years later are still around and none of them even came to to a tenth of the size of Jamalge. And it was because it wasn't theirs.

The person that I would be far more afraid of, somebody who comes out with a significantly better system than what we had to help gyms make more money and help their clients more. But to this day, there still isn't one, and Jamalge is still the category king in that industry. And that's because we put, and we were talking about this earlier, everything is an R&D for us. And so we actually like, we're the only licensing company that had an R&D department

and we would test, we call them plays, but we test plays every 14 days. And so we'd spend 50 or 100 grand on just a test. We'd be like, all right, let's test this new marketing campaign or we'd say, hey, let's test this new high ticket sales processor. Hey, what if we did, what if we tried to sell memberships via chat? Let's just give it a shot, see what

happens. And, and honestly, 70% of the time, it would, it was worse than the control. Like it didn't work as well. And what we would do is we'd presented to the licensees and say, Hey, guys, guess what we just spent 50 grand on that you don't have to spend money on. Look at the results of this sell membership total dog shit. Yeah, the thing is, is that most people are actually really happy to know that it don't have to spend money on. Look at the results of this sale membership via chat. Yeah, yeah. The thing is, is that most people are actually really happy

to know that it didn't work. Cause it felt like they were scratching and itch, they're like, oh great, I don't have to do that one. Like someone did that test for me. So anyways, all that to say, unless you have that, that trail of bodies behind you that led you to figure out this one thing, when there is a kink

in the system, because some external condition changes, which it always will, they then don't know, which means you're always still going to be ahead. Yeah, that's very interesting. Yeah, because if you understand the physics of the system, if you understand the dynamics of why you're doing the things that you're doing and something changes, you can respond. But it goes back to people with high standards. You have to presume that you win in the weeds. You have to presume that you win in the weeds. And if you do, and if you're continuing

to be this close to it, as soon as things change, you go, hmm, that's interesting. Why has that happened? And that then allows you to continue to iterate. And you see it because you're in the weeds, right? Somebody who's all the way zoomed out just like, yeah, copy paste that. They're like, they're one, they're late because they have to see that it's working, see that it's working consistently. So they're three, six months behind. Then they start trying to figure out how to implement it. And then they start implementing it.

And then what they don't see is the things that made the conditions that made it work to begin with. And so like, if you just assume that you're always in the lead, then it and then what they don't see is the things that made the conditions that made it work to begin with and so like if you just Assume that you're always in the lead then it means then sure second through tenth place will always copy number one But to the victory go the spoils and so you will like no one gives a shit who is fourth place at the Olympics Reminder that if you want to be exceptional you're going to be different from everyone else Reminder that if you want to be exceptional, you're going to be different from everyone else. That's what makes you exceptional. You can't fit in and also be exceptional. Both have discomfort. When you fit in, you have internal conflict because you're not being 100% you.

When you're exceptional, you have external conflict because everyone sees you as different. Pick one. When your friends start to say, you've changed, remember, it's because they don't know how to say, you've grown. I define words a lot because it helps me kind of like made sense of the world. And like, Exceptionals is like an obvious one, right? We use the word exceptional like you are not like everyone else. But even saying it like that, like you are not like everyone else.

And so if someone says, you're not like everyone else, then you can just reframe that as like, I am exceptional. And that's not a bad thing. And I actually think that most people have, like, this might be counter to most people's beliefs, but I think most people have the potential to be exceptional because most people are peculiar in their own way. They just stifle that because they want to be accepted by most people, but in so doing, never accomplish what they want to do because they conform. And so, like, there's probably a lot of things

about the world or even your world around you that you're like, this never made sense to me, but then you do it anyways. And I think that a lot of innovation and a lot of what makes people exceptional is feeling, you know, thinking that thought or seeing that thing and then being like, huh, I don't think I'm gonna follow that rule anymore.

Like why do I need to shower twice a day? Huh, like I don't know, like why do I need to wear different clothing? Huh, like there's just a lot of these social norms that people, you know, usually pass down to us or they're, you know, bred into us in high school and college and things like that. But it's like, you see a guy who, you know, wears a cowboy hat and dresses a certain way. And he basically wants to say, I am this, I am this archetype of person. But if cowboy boots

are not as comfortable for you as new balances are, and you know that and you still wear cowboy boots, I would call you a fraud. Because like that is like, it's like a micro rebellion against yourself. It's like there is, and like I look at old people a lot because usually they don't give a shit anymore. They've just like given up and there was a survey that they did where the number one reason that old people like don't have as much drama and they're happier is they say they decided they literally don't have time for it. Like literally they don't have time for it. And I found that so interesting. And it's like,

well, if I'm going to eventually be that way, when I'm 80, I might as well just start being that way now. And so they usually wear like really comfortable footwear. And like they, they keep their surroundings like whatever weird peculiarities they have, they just accept them. And so I think a lot of like, if life is a long journey of self-acceptance, I think that earlier you can accept your own peculiarities as just part of you rather than trying to justify them or mold to what you, to the archetype that you think is acceptable within your social circle, at least for me. Like there's this period of discomfort when you change anything because everyone around you wants you to fit within the label that

they are comfortable with. But they also have the anchor of what you were before. Yeah, exactly. And so they try and like, people don't like that. And so they're like, no, no, I like you in this box. So just say, I know you're having a little thing right now. Don't worry, just, just, and they just want to shove you back into it.

And there's a lot of uncomfortable conversations that you have to have where it becomes really socially awkward. And so like I said one the other day about like going home for the holidays and the reason I don't like doing it is because often I have to confront a lot of people that I haven't seen in a long time and they'll speak to me in a way that I don't like.

And before that I would roll it off like whatever, no big deal, but I don't accept that. Didn't you tell Pido a family holiday a couple of years ago? Many. Many. Yeah, I think. But that's the, when your friends start to say, you've changed, it's because they don't know how to say,

you've grown. And because they see so few people who have, so it makes sense that they don't have that. So I see that as a lack of skill, not malice. Like it's not that they're bad people, they just don't even know it because so few people do change. So few people do grow.

Have you seen this image? It's a person whose heart and head are flowers. It's kind of a 2D drawing. It's a bit of a sketch. And they say this person with the kind of smaller flower, head and heart says, you've changed. And the person on the other side with this huge blooming thing says, I should hope so. Yeah. I haven't seen it, but I see it in my head.

Yeah, it's brilliant. One of my friends, George Mack told me this five years ago, I think, I'm astounded by how many people want to be spectacular in life, but also want to be normal. By being normal you are, by definition, aiming for average. Normal people get normal results, exceptional people get exceptional results. You literally can't do what everyone else does and expect to not get what everyone else has got. By doing what everyone else does, you guarantee average results. Okay, so this comes down to everything that like business, I mean, obviously I come from the business and investing role. If everyone is jumping onto crypto, by the time you have all the information to make

a perfect decision, it's too late. And by the time you have consensus where everyone's like, that's a good investment, it probably isn't because it's already been mispriced because it's already like it's already inflated and it's above what its intrinsic value is. And so like good investors fundamentally can think for themselves and it's such an easy thing to say and such a hard thing to do. And so it's being able to say, if I shut myself in a room and I had to come up with a value for something and just use my own mind to come up with what I think this is worth. It's that that answer that you get in a room, in isolation with no internet connection, that

you believe in that number more than every single other person's and most people can't do that. But like that ability and then what happens though is if you really have to believe in that rather than everyone else's, you double check your fucking math because if it is different than everyone else's, you have the op fucking math. Because if it is different than everyone else's, you have the op, like that is what opportunity looks like. It's called advantage. Right.

It's like, and you have the potential to make a shitload of money or lose a ton of money because you didn't check your math. And so the more I've been reinforced for thinking independently and in the beginning it's on small things and then you just continue to reinforce that cycle of, huh, I came to this conclusion on my own, it seems different than everyone else's, but I think, I think my thing makes sense. So I'm going to do that. How would you advise someone to overcome that regression to the mean that pull to not make waves, to not be heterodox or non-typical when it comes to that decision making. Because it's hard.

You're talking about this internal conflict versus external conflict. How do you make the internal conflict more important than the external conflict? For me, I was more miserable trying to make everyone else happy than I am now with everyone else unhappy with me. And so I think like from the social group I had before I quit my job, if we're going all the way like ground zero to today, I talked to no one from that time in my life compared to today. And I was absolutely miserable and unhappy and unfulfilled.

And I would say that the majority of those people probably don't like me today because I changed. I didn't do what I was supposed to do. He thinks he's so fancy now, etc., etc. And I think I'm just okay with that. And so I think coming to terms with the idea that I could be absolutely rejected by everyone I know, but like me, I was more okay with that because the alternative was I didn't want to live anymore. And so obviously there's degrees and there's continuums and there's stages of where people are at with

that. But as that being the taken to its logical extreme, what I rather live for them than live for me, I would rather be hated by everyone than like myself. There's a degree of honesty is the right word, but it's also too simple. Like being completely 100% truthful with yourself. If that's the way, this is why, I told you about the motocross, the rallycross thing that me and my housemate love.

Okay, so you know, like Colin McCray, these guys that drive four wheel, there's the dude in the co-pilot seat and it's five left bends, da da da da da, all that shit. These guys that go to go and watch this co-pilot seat and it's five left bends, all that shit. These guys that go to go and watch this are in the middle of some fucking wood in Ayrshire, right, in Scotland. And it's pissing wet and it's November and they've got a poncho on and they get to drive

for however long to get to this plate. You can even see thinking about it, the hairs on my arms are standing up. This is how fucking dope it is. So these guys are there and they see some dude in overcast rain, freezing cold, soaking wet, go, and then they turn to all of their boys and they're like, ah! Watching someone who loves anything with that much purity

fires me up. It fires me up. Like we love watching, we don't watch it for what the cars are doing. We watch it for what it does to the spectators. And that degree of like just unencumbered passion. Not being apologetic. Like they've probably, they're probably wearing comfy shit.

They're not wearing cowboy boots. You know what I mean? They look like a large condom in this poncho. Do they care? They don't care. And that's purity. That's truthfulness and honesty. And really, like what, what are you hoping to be able to look back on your life or for people to say after you're gone, if you don't do that. He was such a good guy and he never rocked the boat. He was such a good guy and he always conformed to our expectations.

He was such a good guy and he was so predictable. People think, and I did throughout a lot of my 20s, I thought that what people wanted from me was someone that they could easily predict. But I realized when I thought about the people that I loved in my life, I didn't love them because of how predictable they were. I loved them because of how unapologetically themselves they were. I have a friend who nearly ended a relationship that he's still with, who he,

the love of his life, who's probably going to end up marrying because he refused to not sleep on the floor for six months as part of a Alex Becker's doing it at the moment. Like he's like, sleeping on the floor seems to be like a pretty dialed idea. And she's like, I'm not sleeping on the floor. Well, I am. So they didn't sleep together for like, you know, for like a long time. Like that's, those are the people that you love. And those are the people that you can, because they pay such a high price to do that. You can be very reliable at presuming that they mean what they're saying.

Because if they didn't really mean what they're saying, they would conform, they would take an easier path. I love all of that. My, I was trying to kind of consolidate it for myself and the listeners. For me, it just, it comes down to truly valuing your opinion of yourself more than other people's opinion of you.

And it's just, it's an easy thing to say. And it's incredibly hard to do because that means that if you disagree with everyone else in the room, there's this meme that I love. I don't know if you've seen it. There's this little cartoon of this one little guy and then there's like an ocean of people that way. And it just says, yes, you're all wrong. And I just like, I feel like that meme, my, my, uh, Jerocash, my, my, uh,

brother and editor in the books in the battle against nihilism and, and, and towards truth. Um, we send that meme back and forth to one another when we're like, yes, everyone is wrong about this word. Like we are right. And I think it's just another when we're like, yes, everyone is wrong about this word. Like, we are right. And I think it's just being willing to, like, but the only way you can believe in a thing or an idea or even yourself is because you have the evidence behind you that supports that your belief isn't full of shit. So that when you're in that room and you come up with that one number and you say, I think everyone's wrong. I think this is actually what it's worth. You're not just making it up to say you believe something different.

You actually have proof and evidence that you're not full of shit. And I think that's the work is like, I did a, I looked into a lot of the stuff on the floor sleeping. I think it checks out. I'm going to do it. Like it's- I think everyone else is wrong. I think everyone else is wrong. And everyone's like, you're an idiot. And you're like, I think you're wrong. Like it's- I think everyone else is wrong. I think everyone else is wrong. And everyone's like, you're an idiot. And you're like, I think you're wrong.

And that's okay. You don't, and it's just, most people can't do that. Just the idea of being weird is too much. Like just like- Did you ever, this is quite old now. It's at least a decade old. I think it's called 50 days of rejection or 100 days of rejection.

I love it already. So it's a series of experiments that you do every day for 100 days of rejection. I love it already. So it's a series of experiments that you do every day for 100 days. And there's a different one each day. And one of them is ask for a free coffee when you go to Starbucks. Oh, I love it. Just say, hey, can I have this for free?

Yeah. And it's, I don't know whether it escalates over time, but there's like weird stuff, things that you do to people in public, things that blah, blah, blah. And it's trying to overcome that. Like it's sort of, it's in your stuff, things that you do to people in public, things that blah, blah, blah. And it's trying to overcome that. Like, it sort of, it's in your throat, you know, when you feel that and your cheeks get flush and everything kind of gets hot around here. Yeah, it's that embarrassment, it's that shame,

it's that, well, what if they think, what? Yeah. What if they think what? Yeah. So, yeah, I, someone should redo that. It's like a decade old now, but someone should redo. I think it's called 100 Days of Rejection. YouTube idea. That would be a great YouTube idea to do 100 Days of Rejection or whatever it is. All right, next one.

I just want to, like, I promise you, if you can actually go through 100 Days of Rejection, your life will change because you will realize that at the end of the 100 days, you're still alive and nothing changed. It's I'm going to die. That's the fear. The fear is I'm going to ask for the coffee and they're going to say no, and then everyone's going to laugh at me and then I'm going to be alone and then I'm going to be unsheltered and then I'll be dead.

Yeah. It's catastrophize to death. We all do it. I mean, obviously, I come from a sales background. Getting people to say no to me is something that I'm now... If you've asked drunken Newcastle girls where they're going tonight, darling, for a decade and a half on the street trying to give out wristbands for a free entry to a club night no one wants to go to, you get good at rejection as well. That's why I honestly think that

everyone is always going to campaign for the thing that they did, right? You're always going to say something along the lines of, I think people can learn a lot from sales. And I'm always going to say, I think people can learn a lot from being in Club Promo. But like, honestly, dude, the, the insight that you get into human nature from doing that, from seeing what do people object to, and why do they object in that way? And what happens if someone like gets physical with you because you've tried to do it and you go, Oh, well, I wasn't in the wrong. So de-escalating, this should actually be quite easy. And I can have faith that everyone's going to see me as the right guy, even if somebody else took objection with what I was doing. So yeah, long story

short, become a club promoter. All right, next up, next one. There's a big difference between becoming known and becoming respected. Don't let an algorithm convince you otherwise. I mean, I think this is probably super pertinent for people in our position. But I'll go from the internet perspective and we can circle back to IRL. But I mean, a lot of people will make content. Obviously, I make stuff for me too, a lot of people will make contents. Obviously, that makes stuff for me too.

Like talk about artists making things for themselves. Like I make most of my tweets are just like notes to self. But like if I ever feel like I have to sacrifice who I am or the values that I believe in in order to like get more views or something like that, I see it happen more times than not because the algorithm and the views and the likes become kind of a proxy for conforming in their own way.

Like everyone likes this type of thing, do more of that. And that makes me feel very like dance monkey dance. And I think there's few things that kill my soul more than that. And so I would rather, you know, I would rather the algorithm shut me off tomorrow and I continue to make stuff that I find interesting that 10 people find interesting

that is actually the same stuff as me, then just have these viral hits that I feel like I'm Ronald McDonald in and just feel like I've completely lost my soul. And I do think as a side note that if you do the first one where your intention is to maybe help find the 10 people who are really interested in your thing, you probably will create more of the viral hits. But when you solve for the other way, I think you accomplish neither. I have this theory that more creators fall out of favor because they become cringe than because they become irrelevant. I love that. Yeah, I love that.

I think it's true. I think if you think about the thing that you do, almost anything that anybody is creating is public facing because it wasn't public facing it would just be a hobby. Doing your painting because you love painting is a hobby doing your painting to try and sell it is something that you do as a business or as a public project. The flywheel is so vicious in the positive direction and even more vicious in the negative direction. If it becomes cancerous or uncool or untrendy or catastrophic or cringe to be seen to be watching or listening to or consuming the thing that you make, it is you're permanently going to be swimming upstream and it is only going to get worse. Which is why you look at Shane Gillis is a really great example of this at the moment. He's someone who is great at his craft, big platform, moved to Austin, got all of the

multipliers in place, but he isn't cringe. And because he's not cringe, if you've watched Beautiful Dogs, his Netflix special, it's not uncool. It's like this idea in publishing, because I've been doing my research ahead of the book, there's this idea in publishing called the Subway Test. Would someone be prepared to have the full dust jacket version of your book out on the subway? And if your book is like stop erectile dysfunction now. As soon as you see the erection problem. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, like, no more flatulence today or something. Like, if that's,

if that's your book, it's going to be very difficult. Or if it's written by somebody where it's like, oh, really don't want to do that. So, and this is the point where there are tons and tons and tons of people on the planet who have huge platforms that nobody respects. And I've seen, even within my seven year career of doing this, the arc of people trade integrity for exposure and not be able to buy it back. Yeah. Because there is no return policy on your integrity. On your reputation.

And those people would give anything to be back in the Cool Kids Club. I mean, this is a, like, I love this entire train. Um, I was thinking, like, what, what creates, like, what's, what's timelessly not cringe? Right? Like, so like, if cringe is the ultimate, like, what we don't want, then thinking like, what's timelessly not cringe? Right? So like if cringe is the ultimate like what we don't want, then like what is forever not cringe? And the only thing that I can like really think of

is just true authenticity, which is an overused word, but again, easy to say hard to do. I think what is forever cringe on the equal opposite side is pandering. Like whenever you're seen as someone who's only doing stuff for other people's opinion approval, likes whatever, especially double cringe, when it's for your own personal gain.

And so if the equal opposite of that is something that is to my personal detriment, that is truly something that I believe in, it honestly doesn't matter what it is, because there are some people that probably believe things that I don't believe, but I genuinely think, based on what I see, that they genuinely believe it, and they don't really stand to gain much for believing it.

There's no cringe there. It's just like that man fucking believes that. And I think that some of the characters in our current, politosphere and things like that, many people, you say the word Trump and you have half the people who hate you and the other half that love you. It's like, I think most people agree

that he believes what he says. Now, whether you believe the content of what he's saying is a different story, but I don't think many people have is a different story, but like, I don't think many people have called him as somebody who's like, I think he's, he doesn't really think that about himself. Like, no, I think he, I think he really does. And even I'm just going to push the edges because that's where you have to like explore

the fringe. Look at someone like Kanye, who's been borderline canceled for, I mean, multiple times, right? But like, why is Kanye quote uncancelable? Cause he hasn't been, right? Not really. Like if he came out tomorrow with a hit album, I'll bet you it would fucking sell. Because I think that at least for me, from what I see,

I think he does what he believes. And people might be like, he's mentally unstable. There's all these other things, but like no one thinks he's being fake. And I think that like, if that becomes the North Star of like, I just never want to become cringe, then it's just never be fake. In other news, this episode is brought to you by Maric Health. I wanted to get my bloodwork done last year.

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slash modern wisdom and modern wisdom at checkout. I think that avoiding cringe and aligning authenticity as best you can and it's a permanent battle because you are not inside of a vacuum and you see other people doing things and there is temptation and you need to respond to the audience's feedback in some regard or else you're just going to be making something that nobody fucking cares about but you also need to not compromise too much. One of your old ones related to this, people are attracted to authenticity but it's hard to define for me. Here's my best attempt.

True alignment of what you think, what you say and what you do. The hardest part is realizing that our thoughts are fucked and that we have to fix them instead of faking the next two. Hardly agree. You said it. Man. Yeah, that's dead on. Well, I've got a really cool idea.

Herestratic fame. Many people would rather be hated than unknown. In ancient Greece, Herestratus burned down the temple of Artemis purely so that he would be remembered. Nowadays, we have nuisance influences who stream themselves committing crimes and harassing people purely for clout.

Herestratic fame. Yeah, that's like the, you gain the world, but you lose your soul. Kind of. I mean, I'm also the last person to judge. And so like, if that's what you want, then by all means do it. I don't think it's what people want. I think that they think it's what they want. I've been playing with this idea or this name, one of the concepts that the book will be focused on intentionalism and essentialism by Greg McEwen is one of the concepts that the book will be focused on intentionalism. And essentialism by Greg McEwen is one of my favorite ever books.

And I figured it would be a nice like hat nod. Doing what you mean to do and wanting what you want to want is so fucking hard to do and so rare because we're built to conform. I think one of my life goals, and I can summarize it in a question, but is to be fearless. And that's, I mean, equal opposite courage is another word. But I love this question,

which is what would you do if you weren't afraid? And I just, I love thinking about that when I'm thinking about big life decisions. Like, what would I do if I weren't afraid? And it's usually like the big one, the bigger thing that I really want to do, but I'm afraid to do it. It's like, that's what I should do. And to your point about,

you had the five things that you told your team. The one that we have is, originally it was something that we called one of one, which is make only things that we can make. Like you'll never see a Coca-Cola business breakdown from Alex from Ozy because anyone can do a Coca-Cola business breakdown. That's not one of one content.

But if I say, I doubled the sales of this company by implementing these four things, no one else can say that, no one else did it, right? And so it's one of one. And so as the book lunch and whatnot came, we took one of one and it became this big massive thing and it wasn't, it stopped being about like, what can only do things that only we can do. It was about doing things that we didn't even know we could do yet, which became one of

zero. And that's why that became the brand that I'm gonna continue to wear for the next few years and build that association. But I think that that kind of encapsulates my personal life goal, which is like, what would I do if I weren't afraid? And what would I do if I didn't, if I knew I couldn't fail?

And the idea that I will never wish for fewer epic stories at the end of my life. And I've never regretted failures. I've always regretted things that I didn't try. And so just along those lines of trying to create more bias internally towards action rather than inaction and normalizing consequences of failure as we said earlier, win or learn. And I think that little frame, believe it or not, for anyone who's like on the teetering edge of like, what should I do that thing?

When I was debating quitting my job, which is still the hardest decision I've made to this day, still of the many that I've made, was I figured that if I didn't make the entrepreneurship thing work, I would have a hell of a story for business school. And that was actually like the reasoned argument that I gave myself for being willing to quit was that I think that with my experience, I'll still be able to get a job and I'll have a really cool story of

entrepreneurship that I could use to apply to get into business school and then eventually get a job later. And so most times we catastrophize any failure to death, right? Which is like, I'm gonna fail, I'm gonna lose all my money, I'm gonna be homeless, no one's gonna talk to me, I'm gonna die, right? But like, if you play it out two natural steps, like, okay, I lose everything, what do I do? I would probably have a couch or floor

that someone would lend me. Because at least socially, I haven't been, I haven't fucked everyone I know. And so I have that. It's like, okay, so I would have some capacity to do that. Okay, is there anything that I could do in the meantime in order to make money? Well, sure, I could drive Uber and strip.

And I've already, you know, I've told this story before, but for me, that was genuinely my plan B because I knew that I could probably make 70, 80 grand a year driving Uber. I could probably make 150 stripping, maybe 200. Strip at the gay bars, the guys pay better. And then,. And then, boom, I've got 208,000 a year. I could live on the floor and then I could restart again. And so that's because I don't have a lot of shame with that kind of stuff. That doesn't matter to me. But I think

playing out the fear, Laila says this and I love it, but that fear is a mile wide and an inch deep. And so it looks like this ocean that you're going to step into and drown. But as soon as you step into it, you realize it was not that deep at all and you can keep walking through it. And I just love that visual because a lot of times when it's like, we have this anxiety around this big decision we have to make, if you actually take the step and realize that it's not death, you're not going to drown immediately. There's plenty of other steps you can take from there even if you get a little wet

They tell you my story about a friend who went through a cancellation and was worried it was a coward. Oh Like a like a public cancellation thing. Okay, so I Went for dinner quite a while ago now with this guy that I was pretty Interested in and he knew what I did and we went sort of bumped into each other and what are you doing? Let's go for dinner. And I knew about the situation that he'd been through, but he didn't know that I knew. So I was like, tell me, like, I'm, there's no pressure. And he was able to be unencumbered.

And basically he went through like a tough cancellation where kind of the whole world came down to bear on him. and he was telling me this story. I was in a very interesting time as like being very reflective. And he said my whole life I'd been worried that I was a coward. Terrified that I was a coward. But I'd never been through a situation where I'd had to bring absolutely everything to bear on my life. And I'm a hard man and I like to hang around with hard men and I like to shoot guns and do jujitsu and and and be around Navy SEALs and stuff like that. I always had this fear in the back of my mind that I might secretly be a coward.

And then he said the cancellation thing happened and it wasn't a very difficult one rep max. It wasn't a really hard crossfit workout. It was something outside of his control. He used this term I love and he said I could always hear my better self clearing his throat in the room next door. I always wondered what would happen if I had to really really wrangle everything if the whole world came crashing down on me. I wanted to work out whether I was a coward he said. Thankfully kick the door in and came through. But I just love that I could always hear my better self clearing his throat in the room next door but he never been fully tested done lots lots of hard things, a lot of acclaim, very successful, blah, blah, blah. But we all know that's your thing, right? Like, but I'll know about whether or not you've left something on the table. And yeah,

he, there was always just 5% still in the tank when he was doing things, but how he felt about how invested he was, he always had to get out of jail free card in one way or another. And, uh, yeah, I love that. I fucking, I could always hear my better self clearing his throat in the room next door. Two things on that. So I think if we're, if we're consolidating some of the points we were making earlier, the, but I'll know refrain.

I think that a lot of the personal excellence comes down to making the but I'll know more important than the but everyone, what will everyone else think? Because the, I think the true test of whether you're a quote perfectionist or not is if everyone else in the room says it's exceptional and then you say, but I'll know it's not because I don't think it's exceptional yet. If you still break what everyone else believes is beautiful so that you can make the thing that you make it the way you want it to make or make it the way you want it to be, I think that is probably like the truest test of whether or not you really do value your own opinion over those of other peoples.

And if you really want to be true to the quote, the art, whatever your art is, art, I'm using it as a generic term, it could be the career or the, even like the, the, the financial projections that you're supposed to do at your company. Like there is a way you could do it and do it absolutely fucking excellent. And there's a way you could do it that you could phone it in and probably not get in trouble, but the things that you'd know, and then you'd be the type of person who always phones it in. And that to me is disgusting.

And that would make me disgusted with me. And that is the thing that would make me want to peel my skin off because I would hate me. And I think that's why so many people do hate them because they do settle and they do make these things and they do know and still ignore it. And so they ignore the man in the other room who's clinging his throat and they shut the door and they lock it and they never let that guy in. And so they look the man in the other room who's clinging his throat, and they shut the door and they lock it

and they never let that guy in. And so they look like everyone else, they act like everyone else and they get what everyone else gets. America was built on the backs of men who smoked cigarettes, drove without seat belts and had bacon for breakfast. If you miss your biohacking routine this morning,

you're going to be okay. There's a time for leverage, but there's also a time for violence, which is just brute force. People get really obsessed with optimal, which is getting the most bang for your buck, but there's also maximizing, which is just getting the most bucks. You lose more life trying to optimize everything than just living it. The stress of trying to be perfect is killing you more quickly than your imperfections. I think that's an ode to being willing to take huge amounts

of imperfect action towards one goal and being willing to sacrifice other things for an extended period of time, despite the fact that other people say they're making a sacrifice. Like when we enter seasons, I call it, you know, the season of no, which is where you have extended duration where I say no to almost everything.

And most people say that's unbalanced. And they hurl that as though it's a bad thing. They're like, that's so unbalanced. You're like, yes, that's the point. Because if I had a balanced outcome, then I won't have the outsized return on this one thing. And so, again, like there's so many these little insults that people will throw at you,

like you're unbalanced, you changed, that they intend as insults, but if you actually don't take your society program response and say, oh, they mean to insult me. But if you actually think about what they're saying, they're saying something that's true. And then we just need to be okay with that truth because that was the choice we made to begin with.

And so I think about that a lot, which is like, how many things do people tell me that they intend to insult me with that I can take as a compliment? Didn't someone bump into Layla walking down the street? Yeah. It happened so recently. So yeah, we're walking in the street. Someone bumps into her. I like, we don't always walk like side by side because there's lots of people.

So we like split up sometimes. Anyway, she, she comes back to me and she was like, guess what this guy just said. And I was like, what? And she was like, he called me a skinny bitch. And I was like, what? And she, but she seemed so happy. And I was like, and I was like, like, I just kind of shook my head, like, what? And she was like, he called me a skinny bitch. And I was like, what? But she seemed so happy. And I was like, I just kind of shook my head, like tell me more, like explain.

She was like, I mean, he said I was skinny. And I was like, this is the perfect example of him hurling an insult and her choosing not to be insulted. Thank you. Yeah, thanks. Really? Yeah. Do you. Yeah, thanks. Really? Yeah. Do you really mean it?

Yeah. Yeah. It like, I wonder how many times we've been insulted, even in like in my younger days where someone said something to me that like if I had my current brain, I could have been like, you really mean it? Thanks, man. And yeah, like so imbalanced. I remember I took that as such an insult for

such a long period of time. Now, part of that was because when I was being brought up, balance was like one of the big frames of my household was like, you have to be balanced, which really just meant you have to be awesome at everything. But balance was the word. So being unbalanced was a term that was used as an insult. And so for so many years I wanted to be balanced. But then I was like, well, nothing great was ever achieved by people who tried to be great at all things. And so I was like, okay, I'm just not gonna, I might not have a great relationship

for a long period of time. I mean, there was like a lot of people don't know this, but in the early days of our relationship, even when we were married, I told it, so the first three years, I said the business comes before our marriage. So a lot of people don't know that. And I was like, well, to me, it made sense.

It was like most people break up over money, the business makes money, so the business feeds us, and then we will be okay. And that was kind of my thinking around it. And we eventually flipped that, said like, if we're good, the business will be fine. But it took three years to get there. But all that to say, like, I think having periods of imbalance and maybe to be fair, if I hadn't had that priority at that

time, maybe Jim Walsh wouldn't have been what it became. And so I can't look back and say, like, I should have done it different because it's really easy to say that now. But like, I might not be here to say that if I had been that way. Oliver Bergman's got this great frame where he talks about choosing advance what you're going to suck at. Oh, yeah. It's in 4,000 weeks. And if you are a type A go getter person who has what I called the curse of competence, your options in life are restricted more by what you choose than what you can do

You will feel disquiet when Something that you used to be great at begins to slip because you focused your attention elsewhere You used to be in really great shape You said that one of your goals this year was to get a raise or to be able to buy your first house or to find a partner or to do whatever. Hey, guess what? If you're spending four or five nights a week going to places where you can maybe date or going out on dates or doing whatever, you're probably not going to have as much time to dedicate to the gym. If you want to get that raise or be able to save for your first house or whatever,

you're going to have to work later, which maybe means that your friends are going to drop off. If you pick whatever the thing is, there is a price that you begin to pay. And this cycle began for me so frequently, toward the back end of my 20s, where I would dedicate myself to a thing, then something else would begin to slip. So I would then go, oh, I'll just, I'll just give a little bit. I'll just give a little bit to that. And it's not an additive system. It's multiplicative. It's not two plus like three.

It's two times three. And that means that the more that you attend to the thing that you say that you're going to do, the more the gains accrue to you. And then you can still pivot back, but you need to periodize things. And this is a frame that I wish, now it's it's still something that I struggle with realizing that now isn't forever. The thing that you're doing right now doesn't need to be forever. Yeah.

If you are coming out the back of the searching for the partner thing and you let, hey, guess what, I gained 15 pounds. Yeah. So, all right, well dedicate yourself for the next six months to going to the gym. But this isn't the rest of your life. Right. And once that thing's done, oh, well, guess what? I'm back to, you know, 12% body fat. I feel great about myself. What's next? It's not forever. Yeah. It's just for now. Yes. We have a frame that we actually use a lot. I always think about these things from a business context, but they end up retroactively applying to life.

But when we're making big strategic decisions, we say, which problems would we prefer? And so rather than talking about the gains and what's the upside, if we have, let's say we're going to make a big investment in software for this company, or we're going to make a big huge, a new service line, or we're going to just decide to develop a physical product, right? I mean, I know you were literally on the just back half of a big decision like this yourself. It's like, okay, let's imagine what the problems

are gonna be if we decide to do this new service category. Well, some people are gonna complain that they're not getting results from this thing. We're gonna have a ton, like we might have some negative reviews in the short term that we're gonna have to deal with. Like let's look at what happens when one of our favorite customers tells us to fuck off. Like let's really sit in what each of these problems is.

And then when we spell out all of the problems and we don't even think about the upside, say which of these problems do we prefer and which are we more equipped to deal with? Sometimes we have really amazing innovation and in my opinion, like really solid decision making that comes afterwards that minimizes kind of the post decision regret because we also know

what negatives would have come with the path Unchosen because most most times like our regrets come come from the path and chosen because we imagine it only with the upside we only think about I think there's a there's a there's a book that where a girl lives many different versions of her life and There's a book that where a girl lives many different versions of her life. And- Midnight Library. Yes. And the thing is that there's these pieces of her life that she imagines are going to be amazing, but then she realizes her best friend's dead or all of a sudden she's pregnant.

And you're like, whoa, what happened? And so we don't take into account on the paths not taken the things that we would have lost along the way. And so I think really good decision making and also regret minimization is that when you make the decision, you think about the downsides too, and you remember what those downsides are. And for me, that has been one of my strongest frames for like, I didn't decide to do that.

Were all that, oh yeah, those were a lot, I'm glad, those were problems I'm very happy I don't have to deal with now. In other news, this episode is brought to you by Nomadic. You might have seen that I recently was on the road for a full 28 days using just hand luggage because hold luggage is a psyop meant to keep you poor and late. And almost everything is down to this backpack and the carry-on that I was using. This is their travel pack, their 20-litre travel pack, and honestly it is the best backpack that I've ever found.

It would take way longer than I've got to explain all of the different pieces of tech that are inside of this. But it basically allows you to pack so much more stuff with so much less fuss and it's outstanding. They're beautifully designed, not over-engineered and has a lifetime guarantee. So this is literally the final backpack that you will ever need to buy. Also, you can return or exchange your bag for any reason within 30 days. So you can buy it, try it, use it and carry stuff in it for a full month. And if you don't

like it, they'll give you your money back. Head to the link in the show notes below or go to nomadic.com slash modern wisdom. Use the code modern wisdom at checkout for a 20% discount of everything site-wide. That's nomadic.com slash modern wisdom and modern wisdom at checkout. Thinking about the perils of overoptimization is something I brought up with Huberman last year. I think a lot of people, I have a friend who's a very well-known DJ, that told me he was falling out of love with DJing because he knew that it was damaging his sleep. And because he knew how important sleep was to performance that he'd kind of got him,

the bar stool had been turned upside down a little bit. And the thing that he was trying to do was being sacrificed for the thing which is supposed to facilitate it. And that's where the, you lose more life trying to optimize everything than just living it. The stress of trying to be perfect is killing you more quickly than your imperfections.

All right. So I, I'm glad we came back to optimization because, um, there's obviously on the extreme, there's, uh, guys like Brian Johnson with blueprint who are trying to like live to 200 or live forever. Um, and I, I, I respect that I respect dedication to anything always. Um, and interestingly around, I've always been a maximizer. So I've actually not really been an optimizer in my life. It's just like, as soon as I have an input-output equation

where it's like, N equals X, and it's like, and if I want 10X, I do 10N, I'm like, great, then can we do 1000N? Like, I just wanna do as much of that as I humanly can possible. But when we, like, I love competitors who like optimizing because I always see it as a weakness because it's so easy to exploit. It's like, oh, you need your eight hours of sleep or you need your morning routine or you if you don't have your supplements, you're

just totally fucked or like, I didn't have my coffee this morning, so I can't function. Like I love to compete against people like that because they're so easy to break. It's fragile. Yeah And so what happens is the optimizations become superstition? Correct. And so my my fear around and I and maybe I take a more extreme stance on this but like I've always wanted to Be able to with an internet connection and a laptop and a fold-out chair go make money and always have that as my North Star that anything else is extra. And I feel like I lose more quickly when I get into this optimization cycle around

because I remember years ago, I, um, I bought one of those rings that's tractor sleep and I kept trying to like set sleep PRs and you can only get so high anyways. And then I started stressing more about not hitting sleep PRs that I was sleeping worse than when I wasn't tracking it. And so then I was like, well, fuck this thing. And I slept fine the next night. And so obviously microcosm, I'm a big believer in tracking progress in general, but just the idea that we become so overly romantic around these things that sometimes you just have to break shit.

And sometimes you have to be violent. And sometimes when you're on your journey, you're not going to sleep much and you're going to, you're going to, like there was a two-year period where I did turnarounds for gyms. I flew around the nation every month I would do a new gym. I ate out of gas stations and I ate gas station food and I gained weight during that period of time. And it was for then and not forever and I'm in shape now and so whatever, who cares? And so like I used to tell this when I was selling weight lost to people, I'd say like, who cares

if you get in shape for six weeks out of 80 years? And like right as they're about to sign up for a membership I was like, you wanna sign up, and then this is how I would sell longer memberships, but like, it's also true. It's like, you want to sign up for the six weeks, but like, Susan, like, who cares if you lose 20 pounds and you're still overweight six weeks from now

and then you gain it back the next six weeks and you're still the exact same weight for the rest of your life. And so I just, I think the absolute dedication to maximization so that it becomes a part of your identity and your character has been one of the outsize returns that I've gotten in my life and just being absolutely willing to set like, I'm pretty violent about this, but like list all the things that you aren't willing to give up for the dreams that you

have. And that is what the person who will beat you is willing to give up. There's a phenomenal blog post that talks about why guys aren't getting girlfriends. This is pre-modern mating crisis. So it's not to do with like imbalances on Tinder and tall girl problem and all that stuff. It's a guy who thinks that the bare minimum is acceptable. So he talks about how, I'm always on time. And, you know, I hold the door open and I say please and thank you.

And I'm nice to my mom and the dude, I'll never forget it. There's this line in the blog post with the guy who's like having this pretend dialogue with this imaginary person goes, so fucking what? There's a guy who does all of those things and he plays the guitar. Well, it's like the song lyric, baby you the whole package and you pay your taxes.

Yeah, I mean, I think also to the same degree, I mean, like I'm no mating whatever expert, like no idea, I got married early, did all the things that, you know, whatever you're not supposed to do. But yeah. And yet, if you like, if you're true to you, like, what's the most uncrenched thing, right, is you being you. I'm pretty sure that I turned away plenty of girls who were like, this guy is successful. He's in shape, you know, decent looking, strikingly handsome. But they'd meet me and they'd be like, what a fucking weirdo. But the thing is, is like they like, and I remember I had, there were so many girls that I was like, And I just don't care at all. And so I wanted someone who got my peculiarities, who was not only accepting of them, but just down for it. And so I walked through most of my, and to be fair,

as a side note, for anybody who wants to quote be exceptional, you're going to be different and people are going to think you're weird and like you might not get second dates. But real real, you're not going to want the second date too, because they're not like you. Like when you get unplugged, you're like, oh, wow, everyone's a sheep. This is weird. And you just go on a zillion first dates to be like, you had another one, you had another one. And every once in a while, you see a glimmer in someone who they're like, oh, you think for yourself. Like you can make your own conclusions. I remember when Laila and I went on our first date, we went at a frozen yogurt store. And so of course I'm like, so you know how they make their money here, right? I was like, so these things weigh this, they charge this

per ounce. And I was like breaking this whole thing down. And she was like, oh yeah, and they do this and this. And I was like, wait, you see this too? Like you, it wasn't like just like Alex was talking about this. Like the child out of the fucking sixth sense or whatever it is. I was so excited because normally I would just have to like talk, I would talk about the stuff that at least I like to talk about because then we'd pass the time. Not good dating strategy. Maybe. I'm just going to tend myself. Yeah. But then she also like talk about the stuff. And I was like, Holy shit.

Well, what's the alternative? The alternative is to find someone who falls in love with a role that you're playing. Right. That's the best that you can hope for. Right. And then lock yourself in to a future of having to perform in a way that this person has become accustomed to. And there's nothing that can be more lonely than I can possibly imagine and then pretending every single hour of every day that you're someone you're not. you know who dr. Robert Glover is he wrote no more mr. Nice guy

No, but I like the title had him on the podcast last week. This guy is a fucking boss so cool Like mid-60s or something now huge goatee smoke cigarettes probably probably rip starts that but this this office By the way is completely it's like smoking enabled in Vegas. And he had three essences of an attractive man. I think it's a really lovely frame. The essence of an attractive man, he's comfortable in his own skin. He knows where he's going. He has fun while he's going there. Nailed. Nailed. So good. So good. But like that? If you think about that is, okay, so if you're in like even like an attractive man, whether

you're married or not, like, I mean, on the flip side, it's like, do you want to be married and then choose to become unattractive? Well, no, of course not. And so it's like, if those are three ideals, it's like you have, you have direction in your life. You're internally comfortable. The fun part is what makes you partially attractive. Now, mind you, if you just have one of the three, you will find a mate who's attracted. If you just know with all your fucking soul you're going somewhere, people will want to rally behind you. Even if you're not having fun and even if you're not that comfortable.

He's got 10 kids. Right. Even if you're not that comfortable in your own skin, but you're like, that guy, no matter what, he's going to fucking get there. On the flip side, if you don't know where you're going and you don't even have much fun, but you're like, that guy is comfortable, say what you want, but that guy is good with him. That's an attr...

If you just had one and if you just have a shitload of fun and you don't know where you're going and you're not that comfortable, you'll still have people. I'd probably prefer the first two to the third but you know, but like as ideals like fuck very strong The only insults that hurt are the ones we believe Next time someone insults you remember they're going to die Everyone will forget about them and if no one will remember, then you might as well forget about them now. They are irrelevant. Your dream, your actions, your outcomes. So now you know what the inside of my head looks like.

Um, I mean, I, I, uh, I put almost everything immediately to death. Um, and that's like, maybe it's a coping mechanism. Maybe it's a perspective mechanism. Um, But like, you want to hear, I was really strongly considering having a parody tweet profile of my own that I also run, that no one would know that I run, that is just like all my very, very controversial beliefs. But I'll throw a taster out now. Murder is just picking when someone dies.

So it's like, if you hate someone, it's like, you can just look at them and be like, oh, you're going to die eventually. Like, and so like the idea is like, in your mind, you could murder every enemy you have. You just, just don't get to pick the time. But I just find that so a murder only changes when, not that someone's going to die. And so if you think about retribution on someone's like, this person said this thing to me,

I want to kill him. It's like, oh no, you don't even have to, they'll die. They're gonna die already. Like you don't even have to like, don't worry about it, they're gonna die. And so it sounds so silly, but just connecting those two dots, I was like, wow, that's incredibly peace giving.

So like, why have a vendetta when life will take care of them for me? Uh, and so I just like, you know, as a, as a, as a totally different frame, I was talking to somebody who has cancer, uh, in my life and, uh, they were like, really concerned. They were like, this has a, as a 95% mortality rate over the next five years. And, um, you know, me being me, I was like, well, you know, 70 year olds probably have a 60% mortality rate over the next five years anyways.

I was like, and life has 100% mortality rate. So, you know, worse, yes, but like how much worse? And so like, they didn't think it was funny, but... But just as a, as long as it was intended to be comforting, it didn't succeed. But all that to say, these things that people cast on us, it just whispers in the wind, right? Like if we think that our whole meaning is so infinitesimal, the idea that someone else

can influence our trajectory when they themselves will disappear and become irrelevant seems so silly to me. And they don't have our best interests at heart. No. They have the opposite of our best interests. Yeah, they're literally trying to destroy you. What about the only insults that hurt are the ones we believe? What about that?

Oh, yeah. Well, I, because I like other people get offended with things. And then I've also had times where someone says something with the intention to insult and it doesn't. And I was like, how can I get that to happen every time? And so it's the classic example of, you know, Chris, you have green hair and then you would say, okay, whatever, sure.

But you don't believe it. So it doesn't really matter. And so I think there's, there's a, there's kind of a dual-sided lesson, at least for me in this, is that when we are insulted, I try and pay attention to it because I think, okay, either there's something here that they're right about and that I don't like about myself,

in which case the response is too great. And that's what's so frightening. And so it's like if someone, so recently had, someone made some thing blasting me about, I don't go home for the holidays. I made this video about it. And in the first five seconds of the video, of course, I'm like, if you love your family, fucking go home. This is not, this is for everybody else, right?

But of course, no one actually watches that, who makes that piece of content. And so they just went on this tirade about me. And I just said, God, I suck, period, as my comment. And because there's no, the stoic response to hate is to agree and one up. So level one is agree. So someone says, Alex, you're fucking it. And you're like, believe me, if you knew half of it, you'd think more than that. Because it's the only way you can respond. And so my mental judo for these things, and I've just, I try to,

now the good news for you and I is that we get lots of practice, right? Every day we have people hating on us. And so I get to, I get to practice. So like people, people meet you in real life and they try to insult you. You're like, dude, I have so many reps on this. Like, oh good.

And so it's just like, can I want up their insult? Like if someone insults me, it's like, dude, let me, dude, you think that's good. And so it's just like, can I want up their insult? Like, if someone insults me, it's like, dude, let me, dude, you think that's good. Let me tell you how to really get me. Right? And so just the frame of agreement evaporates conflict. Yeah, that's your thing about most people are more interested in winning than being right. Yeah. So you just say, sure. You're right. Yeah. Alex, you're an idiot. All of your business advice is terrible. I'd be like, you're right. Now what? Where do we go from here? Right? Wasn't that fun? And so we talk about like, because I like it, human behavior a lot, but like it's called, it's a, it's a, it's a extinguishing event. So like when you pull a slot machine, when null is the outcome, it nullifies.

Agreement is the ultimate nullifier for insults. And I think that like the faster I reprogram that. So it's like, if you ever feel insulted, either like first, is it true? Like if you are insulted, you believe them. Okay. Do I believe them because there's an element of truth? If there's an element of truth, why you are insulted, you believe them. Okay. Do I believe them because there's an element of truth? If there's an element of truth,

why am I insulting, I should agree with them. It's just because we have some ego behind it of like, I'm gonna be perceived a certain way. Or maybe because it's poking a hole, it's wedging into the inauthenticity that someone has brought into the light, something which we thought we were able to keep in private. One of my other life goals is to die with no secrets.

Because if we think about, at least for me, if I think about authenticity, to be seen as I truly am, then I would have no secrets. And I try really hard to not hold anything back, content or otherwise, so that I don't need to have, I don't wanna have a hundred faces, because if you always have something in the back room, then it means that to these people, you're this person and this is in the back room,

to these people, you're this person in the back room, but the fewer back rooms I have, the more everyone is in one room and I can be just me. And that means that some people will hate me and some people will like me, but they will actually like or hate me, not the idea or some facet. Like we were saying earlier, when you're in a relationship putting on the act and putting, being the performer, they're not hating the idea of me. They actually hate me. And at least there's some weirdness about like, at least that's true.

In other news, this episode is brought to you by Shopify. Shopify is the global commerce platform that helps you sell at every stage of your business. From the launch your online shop phase to the first real-life store stage to the did we just hit a million orders stage, Shopify can support you every step of the way. From that all-in-one e-commerce platform to that in-person POS system, whatever you're selling and wherever you're selling it, Shopify has got you covered. Shopify helps you turn browsers into buyers with the internet's best converting checkout, 36% better on average compared to other leading e-commerce platforms. Shopify powers 10%

of all e-commerce in the United States, including huge brands like Gymshark and my brand, Neutonic. We literally launched Neutonic on Shopify because it's the best platform for e-commerce. So if you want to start selling without learning to code or design, this is where to start. Right now, you can sign up for a $1 per month trial period by going to the link in the show notes below or heading to Shopify.com slash modern wisdom, all lowercase. That's Shopify.com slash modern wisdom to grow your business now, no matter what stage you're in. There's a lesson that I learned from Rob Henderson, which is like an interesting addition to what we're talking about here. And he asked the question, why do we feel insulted or why do

our cheeks flush when somebody accuses us of something that we know that we haven't done? And the issue here is that we don't exist in a vacuum and we care about other people's interpretations of us. And the disinformation campaign, even if it's grounded in falsehood, can still negatively impact our status. So even if you know that this isn't true and all of the rest of it, functionally to everybody that isn't you, or maybe many people that aren't you, or maybe some people who are influential that aren't you, this can have the same impact as if it was true. So that the man being an island and I have faith in my own word, as soon as you start to build this out, there's a reason for trepidation there though. I think so. I was trying to think about like the,

what are counter examples? So like, if someone attacks your character, right, so let's say someone comes out and says, Alex did some sort of sexual allegation or something like that that I know isn't true, whatever, but they say that. Now that's gonna besmirch my reputation, right? Now I can't be like, you're right.

And if you really knew, right? And I'm like, right? So I can't. You're right. And if you really knew, right? So I can't... If you knew the half of it. So like, those are the situations, right? So like if someone just says like, you're full of shit or your business advice is bad or whatever, then that's one thing. But in those situations, the only counter that I have seen is to be louder.

And so if someone increases the volume on something, I don't believe that you draw attention to that person. I actually, I've more or less not been in the, I'm going to address someone directly. But I may counter what this person says without addressing them and be 10 times bigger and louder about it as a way to counteract that. And so like I had a bad reputation in college, which I've shared some of that in my story before. Um, and the reputation was that I was a Flandre and was, you know, all about girls and whatever. And so I wanted to not have the reputation.

And so it wasn't like I was going to go talk to those girls and be like, I I wanted to not have the reputation. And so it wasn't like I was gonna go talk to those girls and be like, I need you to work out your story. I had to make my actions so much louder that I was no longer gonna be that way for an extended period of time to counteract that thing. And so if we're thinking about like, how to respond to people being shitty to you, if you believe what they say and it's true,

agree and one up. If what they say is something that isn't true, but does besmirch your reputation, then you can only be respond by being louder with the truth. And I think that like, I think about these things because obviously we're in a position where we have to deal with this all the time. As like almost playbooks for dealing with shots.

Well, this is one of the things that people got wrong about Dave Portnoy's cancellation. So I didn't even know it got canceled. Dave had sex with maybe two or three girls that sold the story. No, separately. Oh, okay. Sold a story to the Atlantic, I think, Pussynam. Solder story to someone and they were looking around. And I think they're still going. I'm pretty sure that only a

couple of months ago, they tried to notify some pizza event that he was doing. Do you know that we're investigating him about that? And then he called them out. So what's happened is there's been million, me too, allegation things that things have come across people saw the way that Dave Portnoy responded. He came out of the fences. Absolutely swinging like swinging so hard said this is fucking bollocks it's baseless I think you maybe even somehow had video evidence or audio evidence of some kind maybe internal CCTV Basically, all of this stuff is dog shit. People took Dave Portnoy didn't take any shit, and he didn't back down, and he didn't do an apology, and he didn't do the rest. It's like, yeah, guess why? Because he didn't do it. Because he wasn't in the wrong. If you are the guy that did do the thing, you don't have that, that's a firm foundation.

Right. What you're doing there is just creating this, like, cathedral of lies and dog shit on top of a sand castle of lies and dog shit. Which will then get found out and you'll get hit, you'll get slammed 10 times. Way, way, way harder. Yeah. Rightfully so, to be fair.

You get slapped harder. That's the thing. So learning, okay, why did he do this particular tactic? Well, he ran that play. Yeah. Because the basis of where he was at allowed him to allow to shit about the truth. One, one thing that we talked

about earlier with canceling, and I have so relatively contrary views on canceling, I genuinely believe that you cannot be canceled. You only are you can only be canceled in two ways. You can be canceled if you choose to stop making content, stop being public, or all means and methods and channels of communication that you do not control, remove you from it. So like, for example, there's Tate, right? And he had his, like he's not allowed to be on the platforms, but they allow his content to be on the platform.

So has he been canceled? No, I would argue not. And it's still other platforms. And he continues to make content. So you only, so to me, this is actually really a heartwarming security feeling. And I get warm and fuzzy around that reassuring. Thank you. Because it means that cancellation is you have to agree to be canceled. No matter how bad, like if you mess up... The platform, the platform one. Yeah, the part, yeah. If they had AI face recognizing him

and eliminated him from the platform, he would be canceled. Like there's no method of communication outside of in person. He would have no leverage, agreed. But barring that, if you continue to make content, no matter what you did, people will find out about you. More people will know it about you and your message will get disseminated. And whether you choose to like recant something

that you did or you know, like right or wrong, apologize or do what Dave did and say like, this is complete bolex, he's my little UK term, and just be even louder, you choose to be canceled. And I like that because I like to have as many things under my control as I can. Yeah. I've been like thinking about the Streisand effect because everyone's always said, you know, cancellation makes people bigger.

I think that is cope. I think it's massive cope. I don't think that cancellation makes people bigger. Alex Jones, for instance, when he got, he got about as close to unpersoned, I think it's massive cope. I don't think that cancellation makes people bigger. Alex Jones, for instance, when he got about as close to unpersoned, I think, as you can get, very, very difficult. I wasn't seeing, for the last whatever, five years, eight years, whenever he got taken off Twitter, I wasn't seeing him on YouTube unless he was on somebody else's show. I wasn't seeing him on Instagram. I wasn't seeing him on Twitter. Steve will do it as a good example as well.

Like he can't even be in the background of other people's YouTube videos. And he's got shares in Rumble and he's doing all of this other stuff. But still, that's a pretty big unpersoning. And I think it's kind of cope to say, oh, but so many more people are searching them. Like the entire internet is built on convenience. Yeah. If you think that making it more inconvenient for someone to access someone makes them bigger,

you are fundamentally forgetting human nature. Now, maybe in this, you know, beautifully utilitarian rational view of the world, the person that wants to see the thing, they might go and get the thing, but it's like, hey, guess what? Like TikTok's got an unlimited scroll and they're just going to keep going. And if they don't appear, they don't appear. And to draw this into IRL for everyone who's like, okay, well, that might be convenient for Alex Jones and whatnot.

Like he can't, or he can't be canceled, whatever. I think that at least for me, the through line on this is like, if you do some embarrassing thing, which happens, we're human. The only way it compounds into being like a much bigger problem is if you become a recluse, you choose to not go out, you choose to not, you choose to disassociate with everyone else, like you choose to agree to the terms that the people around you are telling you you have to agree to. And that's where I think you can say no. Destiny's got this idea. He told me this story. I think it was like VidCon or VidSummit 2012.

I think it was like VidCon or VidSummit 2012. And Destiny's spread it around a bit in his career. And he was at this huge YouTuber convention and his ex-girlfriend or something got access to his Twitter account and leaked his dick pics on his Twitter while he's at this VidSummit thing surrounded by his peers. So he's trending, so it's not only, oh my God, look what's happening on So it's not only, oh my God,

look what's happening on the internet. It's, oh my God, the internet has now become real life and it's in front of me and there's thousands and thousands of people and they all know what's going on. And you know, finding Nemo just keeps swimming, just keeps swimming from Dory. His is just keeps streaming. He says, everybody only remembers your last four streams.

So sure enough, you went on first stream, just the chat is lit up, taking the piss out of him and like here it is. Second one, still lots and lots and lots of jokes. Third one, like a few less, then fourth one is pretty much gone. After four streams. It's not funny when we've all heard it. Yeah. So true Jordy got, it's like a British UK YouTuber, big guy. And a few years ago, his DMs got leaked from his verified Instagram account saying some like pretty dirty sex stuff to a girl. And she was of age? She was of age. There was no, it was like, it was kind of, I guess it was intimate.

It was intimate and like embarrassing or whatever for him, but he was silent, pretty much silent for five days. And then got probably the best roast comedian in the UK to come on and annihilate him for 20 minutes in a video and put it out on his own YouTube channel. And it's that be rabbit thing. Tell these people something that they don't already know about me. Like what joke are you going to make that Steven tries like literally the most vicious, funny, sadonic UK roast person hasn't already said. And it showed that he could laugh at himself. Dude, this is the, so this is the take what they say, one up them, right? And so like, I'm going to take what they say, find a person who is professional

at one-upping them and then bring them in and then publish it to your million person YouTube channel. Yes, like we, so we actually teach this from a customer service. I know I'm going totally cross-pollack nation here, but we call it, there's gonna be one person in the angry boat. And so customer comes in, they're shouting, and I learned this from my like,

one of my earliest business mentors. I worked at a fur coat dealer. So like brushing, you know, furs, it's a glorious job. I was 18, it was the summer. And so this lady walks in and I was at the retail shop, which normally I was in the warehouse where the peasants were. And so this lady comes in and she's making a whole mess of noise. And the guy walks towards me, because the owner, and I see him like roll his eyes.

And then as he turns the corner to go where she can see him, his face turns into a smile. And then he's like, he's like, Mrs. Robinson, and then he just goes into rage mode. And I was like, whoa, what's happening? And he was like, wait, there was a button missing on your jacket. He's like, give me that jacket.

He like pulls it out. He's like, who sold this to you? Who let you walk? He said, did anyone see you in this? And he was like, tell me their names right now. I'm gonna get them. They're gonna be out of here. We're gonna get, terminate their employment.

We're gonna make sure that they never eat again, all the stuff, whatever. And she all of a sudden, she was like, oh no, no, no. No one saw me in it. I just saw it when I got home. If you guys could just, of course we're gonna fix it. No question what's our, and so of course he takes the ticket, she leaves, he comes to the back and he just looked at me

and he was like only one person can be in the angry boat. And I, it was a lesson that has stuck with me in like, and so in this instance, everyone is angry at you. And so the only thing, cause people are contrary by nature, all you can do is be angrier than them at whatever it is. And so like getting the comedian to like, oh, you think he insulted me? Like, here's a picture of my cold, shriveled dick after a nice cold, after my polar plunge.

You want to see, like, so it's just, it's like, can you do that? And it's just leaning into what feels unnatural and uncomfortable, but it's the only way to respond. You cannot wish for a strong character and an easy life. Each is the price of the other. What if what you're going through isn't hard? What if you're just sensitive? I think that most of us can look back on our lives to 10 years ago and think about the problems that we were dealing with then and think about how much of a pittance and how small those problems were compared to the problems that we were dealing with then and think about how much

of a pittance and how small those problems were compared to the problems that we deal with today. At least that's how I probably feel. Maybe you feel the same way. And so I then think, okay, well, if I feel that way about the problems that I had 10 years ago, then 10 years from now, Alex will look back at the problems that I'm dealing with today and feel the same way. And so if he feels that way then about the problems

that I have now, then the only difference is the perspective that he has that I don't have. And so I might just be a sensitive little pansy and maybe these aren't problems at all. Maybe these are just facts of life and I need to habituate to them. Because I remember my first lawsuit, right? Cause it's like when you're in business long enough,

you make enough money, you're just gonna get sued. It is what it is. And I was listening to Elon Musk talk about this. And at any given time, Tesla has hundreds of lawsuits. At any, like just they have massive departments of legal, just for all the different things that are going on. And it was thinking that a requisite for success is a problem.

Like you cannot become the wealthiest man in the world and not get sued. Like getting sued is an indicator that you're actually is a requisite for being there. There's no, no person has been there without this. And so reframing what I used to consider a problem as a point of evidence that I am on the path that I originally chose.

I remember the first time that I ever tried to incline chest press 20 kilos. And as I got it up, this is in the center for sporting excellence in Newcastle Gym. And as I got it up there, I didn't have the tricep strength to be able to keep it. And I watched this thing slowly come down to one. And it just landed on my nose. And I like sort of bailed it bailed it out off my nose. And now that's not even I just not even the warm up to the warm up to the warm upset. So the problem is that

we don't have very good memory. We don't have theory of mind for ourselves, for a previous version of ourselves. I've always thought that it would be such an amazing tour. Maybe Neuralink can do it at some point in future. You know how people want to go back in time and they want to see a different place? I would love to go back in time in my own mind and remember the texture of my own existence and what were the things that I thought about? I've told this story before, but it's pretty illustrative. Day one is a journal that you can use for your phone. It's pretty good. And for me, it's big shit. It's like big things are happening. If I open day one, some fucking shit's going down. And breakups and illnesses and being worried about people dying or whatever the whatever the fuck I

once opened it to write down that the MC in Room 2 the R&B room of our Saturday night club night had told me that he was leaving to go to a competitor event 15 miles away and I remember thinking that it was so salient to me that it deserved to go in along with breakups and do I go on this reality TV show or do I not? Because I was adamant that that would be the beginning of the end because the only reason the Asian sock, the Asian society came down was because they liked this particular MC. And if he went, then Asian sock would stop coming. And if Asian stop, stop coming, then that would mean this. And then the whole business would go and I'd be dead.

But I don't think that anymore. And there was one time where I hadn't worked our events for quite a while and a DJ that used to work for us came through and he thought that he'd wind me up by saying three minutes before we opened that something was up with one of the CDJs. Something's up with one of the CDJs a couple of minutes before you open. Things are bad because there's usually not a spare and it means that the night's going to be delayed or whatever and there was lots of people outside waiting to come in or whatever it might be. And he was expecting a response from a previous version of me, which would

have been the one that would have gone into day one and typed about the fact that the CDJ hadn't worked. And I just said, Oh, okay, well, I don't know, we'll fix it. And he called out, broke the fourth wall and said, Oh, I like, it's not broken at all. Like, I just thought that I'd wind you up, but you didn't play the game. I'm like, Oh, right, it's the like, you've grown, or you've changed thing. Yeah. He was a juke the don't do don't punk the game. Yes, don't punk the game. Yeah. I think the point is to always punk the game as many times as you possibly can especially if you're the one getting the gameplay

Don't you buy yourself What's your framework for quitting things and moving on to something new? How do you know when you're quitting? Because you're being a bitch. Yeah, and how do you know that you're moving on from something that's no longer worthwhile? Man, so there's a there's a handful of questions that I think everyone faces that you never know the right answer to. And so it's like, how much is the right amount to invest versus consume is one of those answers.

Like if you invest, if you consume nothing and you invest everything into it tomorrow, you end up with a life where you enjoyed nothing and then you have a big pile of shit. Delayed gratification in the extreme results and no gratification. Right. And so like, these are rather than either or, is there continuums? And so to be managed more than problems to be solved. And so I think just from a decision

making framework, that's number one. Number two is so with regards to this one, which is, do you push or do you pivot, which is how I frame this one, which is, do you push or do you pivot? Which is how I frame this question. Pushing, like, do I push through whatever this hardness is? And there's like something that's in sight that I think I can go to, or there are fundamental things that have changed that make my original hypothesis wrong.

And so I'm telling the secret right now, but for me, I won't quit if no new information has come to light. And so if I say I'm going to do this based on these assumptions, if those assumptions have still held, then it's a push situation. If there's new data that's come to light that changes the nature of why I'm pushing or the outcome for what I'm gonna get from pushing or the way that I'm pushing is incorrect, then I would quote quit. But quitting has a lot of heavy terminology in, you know, I'd say personal motivation masturbation.

Pivot's much softer. Right, because I think that everything is a pivot except for stopping. And so I think even reframe it like language matters a lot and I care a lot about language. And so like nothing is quitting unless you stop. And if you continue to pivot and you continue to push either of those are activity. And so you will stumble upon something that does work, in which case do more of it. And so that has always been my frame, but I have an initial assumption or series of assumptions for a desired thing. So let's say I want to build my social media brand.

I say, okay, I believe that if I make content about things that no one else can make content about that is more higher level business stuff than is out there because most of the YouTubers are YouTubers, not business people, there will be an audience for that. And in the beginning, I will have fewer people who follow it, but if I make really good stuff, over time, eventually people will tell people and I will get better at making content and that will grow. So if I'm at year two and the thing is,

is like, do I have leading indicators? And so like even in business stuff, we're like, I don't need the outcome, but are there leading indicators that are telling me that this I'm on the right path? And so identifying ahead of time, just like we have a problems that we identify, like, okay, if we succeed, like people are going to

recognize you in the street, you're not going to be able to go out as much, or like all these other, these are problems that I'm gonna have to deal with. Cool, I'm willing to pay for those. But what are the, what are the things along the way that will tell me that even though I haven't achieved Mr. Beastdom, that I'm on the right path. And so I think having those little indicators

allow you to keep taking steps towards the ultimate thing and continue to push. I mean, I have a different tweet, which is that the world belongs to those who can continue to work without seeing the result of their work, continue to do without seeing the result of their doing. And it's really the person who can do that for the longest period of time. And that's usually because they're still getting leading indicators. It's just that it's amounting to a much bigger mountain. And so like if you want to do big shit, it takes a way longer period of time because the easy shit, the little hills, everyone conquers really quickly.

I'm on time. I say please and thank you. It's like so fucking what? And so like if you want to do something that most people can't do, literally just extend the time horizon on the things that most people can't weather. Like there's so much opportunity on the other side of being willing to persist for an extended period of time on the correct path without getting positive reinforcement from your environment. And the longer you can stick with something without that positive feedback loop in terms of the big external thing, the easier the opportunities are because so few people can pursue them.

In James Clairs atomic habits, I think he interviews maybe the Chinese weightlifting teams head coach and he asked, what is the difference between the absolute elite world champions and the ones that simply qualify? And the coach said, the absolute elite world champions and the ones that simply qualify. And the coach said, the absolute elite are the ones who can continue to come in every single day without getting bored. That was it. And Matt Fraser talks about it as well, where he says that doing an hour and a half of monostructural work on the rower,

you've got to do zone two. Hey, guess what? You don't even get the benefit of feeling like you on the row. You've got to do zone two. Hey, guess what? You don't even get the benefit of feeling like you work that hard. You just get to kind of whatever like 24 strokes a minute or something like slow zone two, whatever the thing is. But no one's fired up for that. He said, people make a mistake in believing that I'm fired up to go and do that session. I'm not fired up to go and do that session. I just go and do that session. We've been saying, um, so there's a lot of people say, like, do the work, um,

and in Jim launch, and it's continued into our stuff today, but do the boring work is what we call it. And, uh, boring is what make you rich, boring, the boring activities. It's the, it's the double checking the emails. It's writing the follow-up sequence that you really don't feel like writing. And honestly, just getting it done will make you significantly more money than not getting it done.

And so it's like, it's falling with a lead from a month ago and just being like, hey, by the way, are you still interested in that thing? It's the stuff that you don't wanna do. Like no one's like, I can't wait to follow up with these leads that haven't responded to the last two text messages I sent. But if you respond, if you follow up to everybody, you will make more sales than you don't.

Presuming that it's an effective strategy because there are ways that you can continue to chug away and do a thing with no positive reinforcement. But hey, guess what? That's the direction that you're supposed to be going in and you're walking over there. That's a push and pivot. Like if no one responds, then I would say I have zero leading indicators, but if you have enough response rates, then it's worth the toil.

But I, so, I mean, Michael Phelps talks about this too, with swimming, like just laps after laps after, like he doesn't even have the variety of like different moves or different, like it's just laps, just sheer volume of work. And I call the Rocky cutscene and almost every successful person that I have ever encountered has gone through not a month or a year, but many years of doing work without reward, where they have to do things that other people find boring, and they have to do things that other people find boring and they have to

sacrifice things that everyone finds interesting that most people want to do during that entire season of their life and they basically sacrifice a season of other things that they would prefer to do to do stuff that they would not prefer to do because of the one thing they want most. And that's the Rocky cutscene. And instead of lasting five minutes, it just usually lasts five or 10 years. You're going to lose sleep. You'll doubt whether it'll work. You'll stress to make ends meet.

You won't finish your to-do list. You'll wonder whether you made the right call and have no way to know for years. This is what hard feels like, and that's okay. Everything worth doing is hard and the more worth doing it is, the harder it is, the greater the payoff, the greater the hardship. If it's hard, good. It means no one else will do it. More for you. I think a lot of entrepreneurship and even personal growth is training yourself on how you respond to hard.

Because in the early days, hard was, ooh, stop. This isn't good. I should, I should, this is a warning sign. This is a red flag. I should slow down or I should stop, you know, I should pivot. But the more I think about it as a competitive landscape, as I'm clear on what this path is supposed to look like, and these rocks and these dragons are things that I'm gonna have to slay along the way

to get the princess or get the treasure, I get happier about the harder it is because I know that no one else will follow. It's a selection effect. And I think if you can shift from this is hard to no one else will be able to do this, then it flips from being this thing that you're like, oh, poor me to oh, poor everyone else who's going to have to fucking try. And I think that is so much more motivating as a frame for the exact same circumstance.

Yeah, that's awesome. I was thinking a lot about the lonely chapter that we talked about the last time. That was the best, most powerful idea, idea i think that we came up with and. If you see. That basically being no shortcuts toward getting the thing that you want there are ways to be more and less efficient there are ways to do things with more and less of a positive disposition which can actually make the journey feel an awful lot easier. and less of a positive disposition, which can actually make the journey feel an awful lot easier. But ultimately, if you assume that largely everyone needs to go through the same challenges that you're going through. Every single difficult thing that you do is kind of like a massive wall that you need to get over. And you go, wow, fuck, I'm so glad that I've got over that wall.

And think about how many people are going to be selected out. It's like the Hunger Games, you know, think about how many other people are going to fall that wall and think about how many people are going to be selected out. It's like the Hunger Games. You know, think about how many other people are going to fall that wall there. People only root for people who don't need it. Like the amount of times when I was on my lonely path where I was too different from the friends that I had, but not successful enough to be friends with the people that I wanted to be friends with. That's when you want people

to root for you. That's when you want people to support you. Once you've already won, people are like, he's amazing. He's so good. But like, that's the time when you need it the least and so You always have to be the person who roots for you before I want to also does and It's usually a single clap in the auditorium for a very long period of time It is a slow clap. That's just you rooting for you and That visual I think is one that you can kind of take because it is people struggle to do things alone. And the path of the exceptional person is one of an exception, which means that you are not with other people. And rather than fighting that or bemoaning it, see it as an indicator that you're on the right path.

Because if everyone else were cheering you on, then it means you're not in the right place because it means you're just like everyone else and that's not where you want to be. It's an interesting paradox that the energy it requires to start doing something is way more than the energy required to continue doing the thing. And that the beginning of doing anything results in the lowest amount of reward, both internal and external, than when you've been doing it for ages. So I think about this a lot with the show that, there was this stat that Spotify told us 85% of the listeners of this show found us in

2023. Right. And I thought at the end of 2022, remembering at that point, I'd been on Rogan, we were at like 650K, we've been doing 550, 600 episodes deep. Like, I've got it, I've done the thing. Like this is me doing, if this isn't fucking doing the thing, I've moved to Austin, Texas, I've got an 01 visa, I've got like all I've done the thing. Like this is me doing, if this isn't fucking doing the thing, I've moved to Austin, Texas. I've got an 01 visa. I've got like the, all the rest of this stuff. Jordan Peterson's been on twice. You've been on. And yet the, what? Everything up until that point

is two months of growth. Yeah. I mean, we made more money, just from a revenue perspective, we made more money and more subs in one month, December of last year than we did in the entire first three and a half years of the show. So it's this odd paradox. And one of the things that you need to ensure, I've had this idea about protect your passion at all costs, because if you begin to hate the thing that you do, you negatively change your trajectory. And that means that at the time when you can benefit the most by every single unit of work, which is the later that you go, presuming that you continue to hit that upper trajectory, if you've completely killed any passion or

desire to do the work in the early stages, because you've, you've not protected it appropriately. That can be by focusing on the wrong things, by not rewarding yourself, by not building it with people that care about you, by just not celebrating when you hit milestones, all of the things that actually help to keep you going. Being a character. By the time you get to the stage where each unit of effort allows you to gain a thousand or a million of each of the things that it would have done at the very beginning, you've inverted the passion equation, takes way more energy to start a thing than to continue doing a thing. And yet, in the beginning, the rewards

are way lower than they are at the end. But if you don't protect your passion, your motivation is at its lowest when you are at your highest amount of efficiency in terms of returning your time put in. I think a hopeful message that anyone can think about who's in that hard period or in that start period is that it won't get harder. Like this is the hardest part. And so if you can just make it through this, everything else is downhill. It's not that the things that you're, the dragons are gonna slay aren't gonna get bigger, they are, but you become so much more equipped

to slay them back. And you have so many more allies. You have people in the stands cheering for you. You have the audience. You have all of these other things that are behind you. But at the beginning, it's just you with a stick against a bear. And arguably that fight is a harder fight to win

than beating a dragon when you have a nuclear bomb and six nations behind you. And so it's not even like the size of the hardship, it's just also the resources and how few of them you have and how so much of the beginning is literally burning the one thing you have, which is time, because you have no leverage. You don't have the money to pay other people to help you.

You don't have the resources to pay other people to help you. You don't have the resources to go get someone to... No one can learn it for you. It's like there's a lot of the things that we care about a lot. No one can work out for you. It doesn't matter how much money you have, no one can learn skills for you. So in the early days, it feels so painful because you look around to see who can help you and then you're like, fuck, it's me again. And I think getting comfortable with the idea that each of these things, kind of like Slumdog Millionaire, if you've seen that movie where he, I'll give you the TLDR, he goes through his entire life of randomness and he gets on the who wants to be a millionaire version in India. And it has 12 questions to make a million dollars. And from only 12 random

experiences in his life that seemed meaningless at the time, was he able to answer all of the questions and then ultimately win. The skills that you develop along the way, like Steve Jobs learning calligraphy that then became Apple fonts that, you know, transformed how we type. Those early days that little trench winning in the weeds, oftentimes gives you these huge advantages later on because you have more context than anyone else. And so rather than lament them and hate the fact that you're going through it, remembering that these will be arrows that you put in the quiver that you're going to be using to slay the future bigger dragons. And so expecting it to be easy is what makes it much harder than it ever is. Expecting it to be easy is what makes it much harder than it ever is. I've always loved earning my stripes with the things that I've done, whether it was with

nightlife or running the podcast or doing whatever. And I think there's like a degree of nobility to it, but functionally that's kind of, that's just like it's a nothing. Like where's the nobility? But I think the reason that you can feel noble about it and the reason that it gives you a positive reward is you know that you understand every single inch of the things and that if you want to hold a conversation, we went out for dinner with our new CFO and accounts people on Saturday. They said, you ask a lot of questions. Most people don't ask very many questions. And I also don't care at all about accounts really.

Like I'm not doing this for money, but they said, you ask a lot of questions. Is that, well, I don't ever really want to walk into a room and not be able to hold my own, at least just competently, if it's to do with something that I care about. The same thing goes for this. I started to learn about focal lengths and frame rates and negative fill, reverse contrast lighting. Then sure enough, two years after we started doing it, a bunch of different, I sent you the Instagram thing, like this really awesome film Instagram that I've been following for ages, picked us up for what we were doing and gave us

props independent of the talkie thing, which is fundamentally what we're here for. And we created this entire new industry of like cinematic podcasting, which was recognized by as far as I'm aware, like the best cinematic, it's called film lights at film lights. People can go and see on Instagram, like the best decoder and analyzer of cinematography. And two years ago when we started, I remember thinking,

fuck, like, I love the way that they've broken down what happens in ad Astra. Oh my God, the whole thing was shot on 35 million. Each different scenes got two pairings of colors and stuff like that. And then, but the reason that we were able to get there there at least in some part is I can have a conversation with people So each of the things that you do when you not only win in the weeds, but live in the weeds Then allows you downstream from that to see the things that other people aren't seen

There's a quote that I love from Dr. Cash I'll probably butcher it but experts Have more ways to win than beginners do. And so if an expert goes into any setting that they're expert in, they have so many faster feedback loops that reward them in the moment before the ultimate outcome. So if you're a master video editor, there's so many things that you can do that while editing, you make one change and then it looks right, you have a positive feedback loop. And so I think when you're on the start path, you can't look at the outcome as the only positive because you will never make it. And so the positive frame that I've always used is, sure, you can have the external ones of like, I like thinking about my first videos had like 13 views. And I'm like, well, if I had an

audience of 13 people, I used to spend years pitching, you know, weight loss stuff to rims of 13, and that was fine. And so thinking about that way was helpful. But the, the most helpful frame was thinking about who I was becoming as the asset that I was building. So in real time, whenever I finished a long day's work, I was becoming more like the type of person who could work for five years without reward. And that would be part of the story I would someday tell. And so some of the biggest reinforcers I've had in my life has been future casting the story that I would tell

about the shitty period that I was in. Like I remember when I was sleeping on the floor at my gym because I didn't have enough money for two rents. And I was like, I will fucking tell this story. And when I lost sleeping on the floor at my gym because I didn't have enough money for two rents. And I was like, I will fucking tell this story. And when I lost everything for the first time, I like, I have the screenshot of the bank account. Like when I show it, people are like, oh, look, there's that thing,

but they forget that there was a person who screen-shotted it to be like, this won't fucking happen again. And I think having a larger narrative of where you're ultimately going, one gives you the vision of where you're like the like knows where he's going, but

it allows the dragons that you have to slay along the way, the hard things that you have to overcome to feed into the larger narrative of who of the story that you'll someday tell. And so like no one ever tells stories about the hero who made it all happen immediately and had no hardships. No one cares. Right? Like, okay, you were born to a billionaire. Is there a story there? Not really.

But everyone loves the story because we can see ourselves and the character and how much we hope to be like them. And it's the being like them, not the having what they have that we usually like. And so reframing ourselves as the hero of that narrative in my harder times was what really got me through that and thinking, I will tell the story someday. Have you heard Rogan talk about the be the hero of your own story thing? Dude, it's his old now. I think this is maybe, maybe even 10 years old, maybe 10 years old. And he's in one of his old, he's in the LA podcast studio.

And he says, imagine that you're in a movie and imagine the movie begins now. And you're the hero of the movie. Yeah. What would that guy do? Yeah. What would that guy do right now? Yeah. Because you are.

I just got into business. Um, so actually, I just made the investment in school. And I was talking to Sam, the founder, and I said, what? Sim. Sam? Sim. What's Sim? Sim, that's the way he says it. Oh, yeah. And I was, and I was talking to him and I said, I want to give you the single easiest razor to predict my behavior. And I said, whatever will be the most epic story

is the thing that I will most likely do. And so oftentimes the most epic story is not the shortest outcome to victory. It's the long saga that results in this big thing later eventually. And I was like, if you ever want to know, if you're like, I'm not sure what he's going to do in this situation, just wonder what the most epic story to tell would be. And that's usually what I will do. And I don't know if that's

self-aggrandizing, but that's genuinely my razor for even making that it's like the big decisions about, okay, I'm going to sell gym launch. I'm'm gonna marry Layla. I'm gonna slum it and live at the gym. I'm going to fly around and do turnarounds. I'm gonna start this whole idea of a media company that just gives exclusively. They're like, how do, like, how do I put all these together? It's like, well, what would be the most epic story? And I thought of this idea of just like, when I think about who that story I want to tell is, is this billionaire that documented the entire thing the whole way and just gave. Because I always thought I was like, I wish that Elon Musk and Warren Buffett and all these guys would have like, and Jeff Bezos like would have just like, I would love to have seen 1997 Amazon content. And a lot of the content in terms of like,

it's getting five views. It's like, it's okay because when we make it, they're gonna come back and watch this. So I don't need them to watch it today. I want them to know that it's here when I do. And I think that got me out of the loop of it. I have to win right now. And then every one of them is just dropping

a kernel or a breadcrum for future me to refer back to. Until you win, effort always goes and noticed. Get used to it. No one roots for you until everyone roots for you. That's just how it works. Yeah. People only root for those who don't need to be rooted for.

only root for those who don't need to be rooted for. It's strange to think about how mimetic and fallible everyone mean you, everybody that's listening to this is. There's stuff that I've said on this podcast for like 60 years, since the first time that I ever said it, seven years. And it's only been within the last 18 months that it's gone viral. It's the same sentence, the exact same sentence said into the same microphone, slightly nicer lighting.

And in some ways it's reassuring because you go, I fucking knew that was right. I knew that thing that I was saying was right and I kept saying it until people realized that it was right. Another part of it is the medium matters more than the message in many ways. The frame matters more than the picture. I would say that the medium and the message are inextricably linked. Like if Elon Musk tweets, I'm taking a shit, it will get a zillion shares because he's the richest man on earth and has done more entrepreneurial endeavors that have pushed humanity, I think more than anyone else at this point.

And so like, you can't separate the message from the messenger. And I remember when I was in middle school, I learned this lesson where I was in Spanish class, and there was, you know, there was the class clown or whatever. And I was like, I want people to laugh at my jokes. And so I made a joke that was a joke that that guy probably would have made. And it was a self deprecating joke. But the thing is, is that like, that guy was kind of a bum. And like him making self-deprecating jokes made sense because of the context of who he was. But I was a straight A student who was really good at sports. And no one thought it was funny. And fast forward, you know, 10 years, there was a joke that I had in our fraternity,

which is there's nothing funny about an in-shape body. And so, I agree with you in that the medium of the message matters. And so, people won't root for you because we use the delivery mechanism usually as a filter for whether we should even trust the source. And so, I tell the story of the teacher who's talking about dollar cost averaging into the S&P and giving investing advice. Like they might be like, man, like I give better investing advice than Warren Buffett does. Like he's saying the same thing as me. It's like, and you know what, you're probably right. The only problem is you didn't build Berkshire Hathaway. And so no one gives a shit. And so the thing is, is that we use someone's evidence and authority as a filter for how little we need

to process the information. Because if you're listening to a teacher, you have to then think, okay, can I separate the message from the person? Can I independently analyze this and say, is it good, is it bad? If Warren Buffett says, you should buy this, you don't need to analyze it.

You figure he knows more than me, he has more perspective and I will just take it as fact. And so it's actually lazy consumption on behalf of everyone else that gives authority so much resonance and so much shareability because they're also protected because if you share something Elon says, you're protected by Elon and his brand. And so the hard work is getting to the point where you have the evidence that people are willing to feel safe agreeing with you. And the only way are willing to feel safe agreeing with you. And the only way for them to feel safe agreeing with you is for you to disagree with them for a very long period of time until you prove that you're right.

Roy Sutherland's got an idea where he says, no one gets fired for hiring KPMG. Yeah, such a good line. And it's true, people would sooner fail by following a blueprint that's been done before than risk succeeding by trying something new. Because if you try the new thing, any failure is on your shoulders. If you follow the blueprint, even if it's been total dog shit, the last 10 times that you tried it.

But we followed the blueprint. You know, we did the thing that was the same before. Michael Malice, like, a person, literal professional internet troll, told me when we were one of the first times that we met, I wouldn't be able to say one-tenth of the shit that I can if I was taller than five foot seven. He's like a small guy, but he can get away with being kind of like the low key of politics on Twitter. Because if he's, you know, six foot five and built like Alan Richard, yeah, it's going to seem like he's bullying. Yeah. But it's something funny about him like, like, you know, dip, how fallible people are

around success. So do you remember Billy McFarland, the guy that did Fire Festival, that festival at Pablo Escobar's Island, and then everyone got stranded and nearly died? If he'd been able to pull off an even remotely passable event, people would have hailed him as a marketing genius. Regardless of the fact that he was continually flying back to New York to raise money in an unethical way for a project that he didn't know if it was going to work and all the rest of the stuff. So literally the line between

Charlotte and Grifter, who's out of his depth and visionary pioneer who makes things work when no one else believes that they can is just outcome. Everyone thinks you're crazy until it works. And so, I mean, if you think of the outcome as the Trump card, then all of the pain and suffering that you lead up to that point, if you're just, I'm trying to think of an appropriate saying, I was gonna say, balls deep certain that no matter what you will die or you will get there, then the likelihood that all of the things that you've done up to that point will then be justified in retrospect is super high. And I actually see that as super compelling as a thing to latch onto in harder times.

Yes, but the ends justifying the means is a slippery slope. I'm a Machiavellian guy, so. Have you seen, speaking of that? And you mentioned Robert Green earlier on, uh, you should buy the 25th anniversary edition of 48 loads of power, which just came out last year. Yeah. Leatherbound, golden boss. Oh, you got it. And you've seen the thing on the edges. Yeah. This face is very cool. The best. The, the, the, dude. So for the people that don't know, you remember, you would get those things in packets of cereal when you were a kid, and you could sort of move a little bit of plastic from left to right, and it would look like a football player was running or something like that. It's basically the same

but on the edge of a book. If it's flat, it's just gold foil. If you open it one way so that the pages splay out, it's Robert Green's face. And if you open it so the pages play out and the other way it's Mackey Valley's face. The fucking coolest book, just, and I've seen a lot of influencer gifting of books is a big deal at the moment, you know, send the book out and maybe they'll post about it and it'll help with sales or whatever. And there's some very elaborate ways, I'm sure that you've received some of these. I know that you're on the same mailing list as I am. There's some of these that are super, super elaborate. And I remember being like,

that was like, I don't know, like cool or whatever. But that Robert Green book, as soon as I saw that it did that, and like I'm sending a fucking video of this to anyone that I can. This is like magic. So yeah, what is it? You're doing sales because you sucked at marketing.

You're doing marketing because you sucked at product. That's a great novelism. Yeah, it's so funny You're doing sales because you sucked at marketing. You're doing marketing because you sucked at product. That's a great novelism. Yeah, it's so funny because like with the book launch, I didn't do any of that. I just always, I wanted people, I want people to read the book because like if someone posts about the book before the book's out, then like, I wanted no one to have read the book until the day it was out, you know? But yeah, the longer I've been in at least the business game and we were talking about legendary foods, it's just product. Like I had a roommate way back in the day

who's now a really successful entrepreneur and we were both like early days, poor as shit. We happen to live together. And he read this book, he just told me the title and it just like stuck with me. He said, too good to fail. And I just love that as a frame. It's like, if I open a sandwich shop,

how can I make the sandwiches too good? Like just if someone takes a bite, they're like, fuck, this is the best sandwich I've ever had. Like if you just get that, then the rest of it doesn't matter. And so when you're like, I mean, I think about this in business decisions, but probably also in life decisions. I think Tim Ferriss talks about this, the one big domino.

It's like, what is the one thing that if I just get this one thing right, everything else shrinks into a relevance. And I think about that from like the hero story of what you said with Joe Rogan, which I love that frame, it's like, okay, boom, now you're present in your movie, what would that guy do? It's like, well, what one big thing could that guy accomplish that would make all of the all of the mediocrity of your life up to this point irrelevant? And why are you not putting every single ounce of your effort to prove that one point so that you could then justify everything up to that point? So it wouldn't have been mediocrity. It would have been the path to get there. Exactly. Thank you. It would have been the journey.

People want to find their passion, but you don't find it. You create it. And you create it by getting good at something. And to get good at stuff, you start by doing something you suck at. Then you get good. Then you like it. Then people ask how you found your passion answer by starting when you sucked and not giving up. Yeah, I hate the passion mantra. I really do. I mean, part of it was because I'll even I'll even play it out. So I read all the same self-help books early on when I was, you know, in my entrepreneurial days and I was trying to find my passion and I was into fitness.

And so I was deciding between fitness test prep because I was good my entrepreneurial days and I was trying to find my passion and I was into fitness. And so I was deciding between fitness, test prep, because I was good at test prep, and frozen yogurt because I like dessert. So I have like, these are my three quote passions, which let's just translate that into things you're interested in. And so as soon as I started the gym, my passion disappeared. It became work. And I had a different mentor later in my life who said, never create work around your passion because then it'll become work. And he was a very successful business guy and i think about that actually more than i'd share because it's just complete and utter bullshit because it assumes that what you're going to be doing.

Every day is the thing that you're currently really interested, which also doesn't make you money. And so your behavior has to change. And whenever you're doing these new things, one, they'll be new, which means you will suck at them, which means you'll probably not like them, but it's also part of it. And so like I would prefer to take the extreme opposite position of everything will suck, and eventually you will get good at the things

that you suck at, and then you'll enjoy being competent at that thing which will then probably give you status and you'll enjoy the fruits of status more than the pain of doing the thing and in so doing create a positive feedback loop that you'll actually keep sticking with it. And so I'd rather set the expectation that everything is terrible all the time forever. Now let's see if we can make our... now let's see if we can become the person who can still do it anyways and start that as the baseline rather than trying to assume that I need perfect conditions in order to start because starting is the perfect condition. Whatever condition that you're in that you start was the perfect condition. There is such a thing as intrinsic motivation though,

as well as extrinsic. You can do something, there's a whole myriad of things that you could be potentially good at. And many of them could give you renown and money and social clout and that feedback loop. But there are some that you will enjoy doing for the sake of doing them more.

I don't disagree. I remember a note that I wrote to myself when I first started the podcast and I decided to turn pro with it, which is one way to turn something you love into a labor is to monetize it. Okay. Because as soon as you decide

that you're going to really, really go for this, if you want to turn pro at something, I use this example in my live show of a pickleball player. So this guy loves playing pickle ball and he gets to turn up on a Saturday and play with his friends. You know, if it's cold outside, he doesn't need to go and play. And if he's tired, he doesn't need to go and play. And if he's hungover, he doesn't need to go and play. And then he decides to turn pro and he thinks, I'm turning pro at this thing that I love. I can't wait to make what I love into my career. But he doesn't realize

that, Hey, guess what? If you're hungover, you still need to go and train. I love, I can't wait to make what I love into my career. But he doesn't realize that, hey, guess what? If you're hungover, you still need to go and train. I actually know you don't get to be hungover anymore because the guy that isn't hungover is the guy that's training better. So you now need to stop going out with your friends and you need to train when it's cold and you need to work on game tape and mindset and hydration and nutrition. You need to do S and C and you need to have a physio and you need to not see a

family as much. All of these things came along for the ride as soon as you decided to turn pro. Is that a price that you're prepared to pay? And that's an interesting question to ask yourself. Am I prepared to sacrifice my pure unencumbered, unmalested love for this thing in order to try and become the best at this thing? I think it's really tough and I'm gonna shoot my own advice right now in the head, or at least my positioning right now, which is that it's very easy for someone in my position

or in your position to say this is kind of what it takes. Or rather, this is like you should find your passion. Because like transparently, what I do now every day, I actually really do love. I live more or less the same day, seven days a week. And like, I'll tell you what it is just so we can have context. But I wake up and then I go to my office here and I work for six hours writing my next book. And then I take two hours-ish of calls typically. And then after that, I lift in the gym that I custom designed with all the pieces that I love, and then I go and eat with my wife, and then I go to my condo, and I sit in my recliner that

overlooks the entire city, and I read, and then I go to bed, and I do that every day. And I love every aspect of the day with the exception of maybe the two hours of calls that I have to take, but I see those as a necessary thing for everything else that I have there. Now, could I stop doing that maybe? But for me to say that that's what your day needs to look

like in order to get into the top floor with the view that looks over these things. And so that you can not make money for two years while you write a book that eventually makes money or whatever is not true. And so it's the difference between like, oh, I should fly private because that's what rich people do. I should play basketball because I want to be tall

and modeling the top, the behavior at the top of the mountain rather than the climb. And so they're completely different. And so this whole idea, unfortunately, and I don't blame the people who do this is they see their current life, like I would see mine, and say, well, what do I do now? I do everything that I love.

Okay. But I didn't get here doing everything that I love. I did a fuckload of shit I hate, and I did it for a very long period of time. And I did not have anyone to root me on. And in fact, I had many people who were actively trying to destroy my path and tell me why it was a terrible idea. I had this idea about why you should stop taking advice from successful people

because most of their advice is not about what they did when they were at your stage. It's about what they do now. And it's the same thing around pushing work-life balance. of their advice is not about what they did when they were at your stage. It's about what they do now. Right. And it's the same thing around pushing work-life balance. You know, what I found after 50 years at Disney is that really the most important thing is what, all right, well, how did you get to this stage? What did you do when you were two years in? Because that's where I am.

Yeah. What did you do when you were broken living on the gym floor? Because that's where I am. What did you do when you were broken living on the gym floor? Because that's where I am. Don't tell me about the complicated routine or the balance or the flying private. The bar stool is upside down and you're mixing up the ends for the means. Everything on my ride up. I remember in a lot of excruciating detail what it took me to get here, but I will say that I had a ruthless focus on dollars

per hour, and so I'm just giving tactical advice right now, but everything that I could trade away for more time doing the thing that made me money was what I did. And so I remember the first time I made a $500 sale and it took me 30 minutes. And I was like, every hour of every day, this is what I'm going to do.

And anything that is not talking to someone in exchange for them giving me a credit card so that I can charge it and make $500. Anything that makes me less than $250 per hour or per 30 minutes, I'm giving to somebody else. And so after that first sale, I was like, I'm never cooking again. I'm never going grocery shopping again. I'm not cleaning again, because I knew that in one sale, I could pay for that person for the month. And so the ruthless focus on what can I do that creates an input to output being money equation and me, at least for me, it was pouring

everything I possibly could into the input and eliminating everything else. I made this video on Facebook before I was quote Alex Ramosy years ago when I still had six gems before I even did the turnarounds. And I made this video almost as documentation, but I said, so I want to open up my seventh, eighth, ninth and 10th location. And I have the spots picked out.

And I'm already working all of the hours that I'm awake and I've already given up Saturdays. So the only thing that I have left is like Sundays and evenings. And so I am no longer going to be watching any football, and I'm no longer going to have Netflix at all. And that is what I'm giving up for 7, 8, 9, and 10. And I remember just making this video of like, that's what I'm sacrificing.

And I think a lot of people create these to-do lists when in my experience it's been so much more useful to write down all the things that I'm willing to sacrifice. Because if you sacrifice everything, there's nothing left than to do the one thing that matters. And I think Jerry Seinfeld talks about this from a writing perspective. He says that every day, no matter what, he sits down and he writes for two hours. Now he doesn't have to write, but he's not allowed to do anything else. And so he can sit there, but there's nothing else to do except for write jokes. And so I think a lot about that from the climb perspective, which is like, most of everyone who's listening to this, who isn't achieving what they want

is fucked with their time. They think that they're fucked with their time. They think that they're spending all their time working, but your output, like you don't even know how to work. I'm being really real with you. Like you think you know how to work, you don't know how to work. Like the amount of output, like, and I will measure this by like, what is your output?

It's probably not as high as you think. And so rather than trying to learn all these productivity hacks, the ultimate productivity hack is no. And no, is you stop doing shit. And then when you create space, then you can fill it with a thing that matters, but trying to add on more to your schedule of all the things that you're not willing to sacrifice is the very reason that you're not doing

what you need to do. A lot of people would look at that life of I'm going to sacrifice evenings and I'm not going to watch football anymore and say well, what's the point if you make yourself miserable en route to achieving the goal if most of your life is journey not destination. And it makes you miserable en route it's going to last forever. How can I be okay in that circumstance? And I do have the fundamental belief that circumstances, nothing to do with how what your subjective well-being is.

And so if monks can be super chill in wherever monks do monk things and have nothing and have higher subjective well-being ratings than anyone else here in the Western world, it clearly isn't external. And so then if I'm going to be just as miserable being mediocre as I am doing this shit that's going to amount to something, then I might as well do the shit that's going to amount to something and be miserable there and at least have something to show for it. There's this story I learned about Victor Hugo, famous writer from history. Do you know this about what he did with his servant? So Victor Hugo needed to make himself right. So he paid his servant each night during the middle of the night to come into his bedroom and remove the bedclothes from him, turn the heating off off and then lock his bedroom door from the outside. And he wasn't allowed to leave until Victor slid six pages of handwritten work underneath. So, you know, you look at Opal, which is this app for iPhone, which stops you from using apps or frozen Turkey, cold

Turkey, which is the same thing for desktop. And that's just the digital equivalent of Victor Hugo being locked in his bedroom with no bedding and just a quill and a few pieces of paper and then having to slide it underneath the door. And I want to push back on something that you said right before Victor Hugo, which is, you know, somebody, somebody might ask, like, why would you do all this stuff if you're not happy? That assumes that my goal in life is to be happy. What is your goal in life?

To do epic shit. Genuinely, to be useful. And so why place do epic shit over be happy? Because when I look back on my life in retrospect, the things that bring me the most joy in the moment are the things that I was willing to sacrifice for for an extended period of time. And those pay memory dividends far greater

than the momentary cost that I had at the moment. And so I think it's a long-term, short-term thing. But a frame that continued to paralyze me for a long period of time was an obsession with happiness. Like it was truly an obsession. It was an obsession of mine in college. I almost got into positive psychology because I thought that was really interesting, and that's what I, that's what I, my passion, right? I consumed all that stuff, and I drove myself mad with it, and I actually was more sad and depressed than anything, which is probably why I was trying to find

all this positive hippie-dippy stuff. And I just cracked one day and I was like, fuck happiness. Because it felt so out of reach that I was like, just fuck it, I'm not even gonna shoot for it. I'm just gonna do stuff and that's all I'm gonna do. I'm just going, I'm not even, I'm not even gonna shoot for it. I'm just gonna do stuff. And that's all I'm gonna do. I'm just going to do stuff. And what happened was like a few years later, a few days later,

I looked up and I was like, huh, I'm not miserable. And so I actually identified for a very long period of time as I'm not a happy person, comma, and that's okay. I'm fine with that. I accept that. And there was this huge conflict for such a long period of time where I was like, you're supposed to be happy.

Why aren't you happier? Like there's something wrong. There's something wrong with you. Something needs to change. Rather than saying like maybe the level of happy that you are is fine. Who am I? Like, what happy am I comparing myself to? And also, if whatever your current state is, if you just say like, happy or, which is really

when people are like, I want to be happy, they're just saying I want to be happy or than I am. Which means that you create this distance between where you are and where you want to be, which is the recipe for being unhappy is saying that I want to be happy. Er, so it doesn't matter how happy you are, you want to be happy. Er. And so by relinquishing the desire to be happy, I ended up enjoying a lot more of the stuff that I was doing because I didn't make it a requisite for, for my activities. So then it became a pleasant surprise.

I was like, oh, this doesn't suck. Huh. How nice. Two famous psychologists, Daniel Gilbert and Daniel Kahneman, have quite divergent views on happiness. It's quite interesting. So Daniel Gilbert talks about how if you spent every minute of the rest of your life on a floaty, Lilo, in a pool, drinking cocktails. In retrospect, you might not have found much meaning, but each individual moment of experience would have been enjoyable. And he believes that constitutes to him a life that is well lived. I disagree with

this guy entirely. Daniel Kahneman. And this is my position to which is a well lived life life is one which in retrospect you are glad that you lived, right? So one is leaning toward hedonic pleasure and the other is leaning toward meaning. So one you could say is happiness and the other is meaning. It's my belief that your disposition largely influences where on that spectrum from Lilo to do hard things, you need to sit.

And you will have friends. And I did for a very long time in the nightlife industry have friends that just seem to be so fucking happy, not doing stuff. Like just they would float through life and they wouldn't ask themselves, am I actualizing my fucking virtue? Is this the highest integrity that I can do with these things and all the rest of it? And I was envious of those people. You ever seen a dog? You see a dog on the floor and it's just lying there and you think, oh my god, if only I could be that dog. Like it just wants to go for

walk and have food and like go pee pee. That's it. That's all it wants to do. And you think, fuck, it would be great to be that dog. But like, guess what? If your constitution doesn't allow you to be that dog, the only way out is your constitution doesn't allow you to be that dog, the only way out is through. And this was something, the first time that I went to go and see Peterson, someone asked him a question and they said, the depth of my consciousness causes me to suffer.

Is it a blessing or a curse to feel everything so deeply? He thought for a little bit and he said, take more of the thing that poisons you until you turn it into a tonic that girdles the world around you. The only way out is through. It's kind of like as soon as you realize that there are things that you do that give you satisfaction. And there are things that other people do that give them happiness.

And you've tried that route. The only way is to continue doing the thing that you know that works. And I think that you were an example of someone who is optimizing heavily for meaning rather than for hedonism. And that's not to say that there are people and this is, I said this on the last episode, the fundamental thing that people don't understand. As far as I can tell about your worldview is that the thing that you do for work and the thing that you do for fun are the same thing. They can't imagine your world view is that the thing that you do for work in the thing that you do for fun of the same thing. They can't imagine that because that's not the way that it is for them and it's not maybe the way it is for most people.

But if you're the sort of person. That finds meaning more enjoyable than happiness. You need to optimize for the thing that you enjoy the most. And I'll toss in meaning lasts longer. And so I'll be super upfront. If that those friends of yours in the nightlife, I've there's nothing wrong with that in my in my way. Like as I see the world, like if that's you and you're like, nightlife, there's nothing wrong with that in my way.

Like as I see the world, like if that's you and you're like, I fucking love everything I do, then like you won. Like just keep doing that, you know what I mean? But I think a lot of the message that Chris and I are saying here is if you've tried that path and it hasn't worked for you, then you have this dark door that's in the corner that you've been trying all the other ones that have nice gold edges and really shiny things, but there's that door that you keep looking at, and it's the other side of you

that's clearing his throat in the other room. It's like, you just have to bust through the door. And I think that the, like giving yourself permission to be unhappy, or at least for me, giving myself permission to be unhappy for an extended period of time in order to get what I wanted, gave me so much relief from, honestly, I don't like using the word nowadays because it has so many associations, but just from like the depression or the funk that I was in for a few years. The tension, right?

Yeah, I just didn't like my life. And I had achieved by most measures, because I don't have the, you know, school failed me, I was whatever, like I wasn't that. I finished in three years and I did really well in school and I had a really good job, but it was empty for me. And so my goal is things we talked about earlier, but my personal goal is to squeeze every ounce of potential out of whatever I have. And I think that if you feel like

you have potential left over, then it will eat you alive until you do something about it. Not to piss off the positive polys in the room but if you haven't gotten what you want then you're not worthy of it period and that's okay. Now you can admit that you suck and improve better to know you're bad for a season and pretend you're good for a lifetime. You're not making as much money as you want because you're not as good as you think you are. You're not struggling from imposter syndrome you're a student and pretending to be a teacher. No students say they feel like frauds for trying to learn. You're a fraud when you get up to teach the class and you've never done it. Deep.

I think it's just giving yourself permission to suck. It's giving yourself permission to be unhappy. It's giving yourself permission to not achieve while you do for a long period of time. It's giving yourself permission to lose friends. It's giving yourself permission to do things that's different than people in your social circle or your age group are doing. It's giving you permission, giving yourself permission to be an exception so that you can become exceptional. And a lot of that, the whole positive poly mantra of like, I saw that, I saw a post a girl made and she was like, you are worthy. And that's what made that tweet.

All my tweets are just responses to shit I see. And so this girl was like, I say this to myself in the morning, like, you are worthy, you are amazing, you are a goddess. And I was like, you're not a goddess because you don't control me. And you don't have the things that you want. You keep thinking that you saying that you're worthy is gonna somehow make it true. But like the way that you know you're worthy

is that you have it. That's it. Like that is the litmus test. Are you worthy of a billion dollars? Well, are you a billionaire? No, then you're not worthy And so just like I think we have these things. It's just like you're unbalanced It's like you're not worthy. There's these things that were programmed to say, oh, that's bad You have to tell everyone they're worthy. You're everyone's beautiful

No, if everyone are beautiful then no one's beautiful and yet again, we're back at square one. And so it's, I guess, drinking the tonic, it's going through the shit, which is honestly the boring stuff that no one wants to do for an extended period of time. Accepting that you suck. And that it is okay because the first step is accepting that you suck. And that it is okay because the first step is accepting that you suck so that you can do the second step which is doing something about it.

What about you're not making as much money as you want because you're not as good as you think you are? That's, I mean, I'm obviously in the business space and that follows up with the other one with the imposter syndrome. I people are like, man, how do you not suffer from imposter syndrome? I was like, because I've done what I said I've done. And the people who get up on stage and try and teach class on shit they haven't done, it's like that, like you feel like an imposter when you're an

imposter, like don't try and kill that voice, listen to that voice and get the evidence to make that voice shut the fuck up. If I get on stage and I say, I can bench 315, do I feel like an imposter when I say that? No, I stay fact. Presumably, if you're pioneering and breaking new ground, you just put the biggest investments that you ever did into this new thing. That is a new level that you get to. And that's one that's to do with finance, but there could be another one that's to

do with capacity or competence. You could be sitting down in a room doing a deal which is time bound in a way that it's never been before or is in an industry only tangential to one that you've been in before. Each time that you do something new, by definition, you're an imposter because you haven't done it before. Now, if you're teaching, that's different. But if you're entering, if you're growing sufficiently quickly, most of the time, it's fresh snow. So, this is a fact, a topic I love. But I think the difference between doing something new and being an imposter is one is pretending to be something that they're not. So like I made the biggest investment school, I'm making a bet that I think communities are going to be huge.

And I think that there's a ton of people who want to, you know, teach skills they have in communities, etc. And school.com can help. But like it would only be an imposter if I said this is like, I guarantee it, no matter what, this is gonna be the biggest thing ever. And one of the big things that I repeat and from the marketing front, I said all the time, I say, state the facts and tell the truth. Like the best marketing in the entire world is truth.

Now, if the truth isn't compelling, it doesn't mean you lie. It means you change the world to make the facts compelling. As in, if I say, man, I want to be like, I, you see this one all the time, 18 year olds are like, I want to be a motivational speaker, right? And say, okay, well, what are your facts? You've done nothing. Great. So they then lie so that they can try and claim success that they don't deserve so they can get authority

that they can't back up and eventually are called out and are flattened to be fair, they only impress people who don't know anything anyways. So if they're honest about it, they look at their fact sheet and say, what would a motivational speaker have to have in order for them to have authority? And then that becomes your action list

of what you need to do. And then once those facts are the truth, then you can state the facts and tell the truth. And then people will be like, wow, that's so motivational, but all you did and tell the truth. And then people will be like, wow, that's so motivational, but all you did was tell the truth. And so like, that is why I so wholeheartedly rejected one, like you are worthy, you're not worthy. If you had it, then you wouldn't even need to say

you were worthy because you'd already fucking have it. And if you were in like, I struggle with imposter syndrome. Why? You only struggle imposter syndrome because you're fucking lying. Like that's why you feel like an impostor. And now they're like, why didn't, the thing is, is you can fudge the truth.

Like you can not lie is very different than telling the truth. Like I can make something seem a certain way without deliberately breaking the law, but I'll know. And that's why you feel like an impostor, because you fucking know, and there's the guy in the other room is clearing his throat, be like, that's not fucking true.

And then that discord. But if you just say what you have done, or you say what you are doing, I'm making this big investment. It's a big bet for me. The reason I'm making this bet is because I see this trend and I think it's a good idea. I could be fucking wrong,

but I'm not gonna feel like an imposter because that's the truth. Thinking about the community thing, I had a conversation a little while ago. I don't think that you're far off wrong, especially in an age of automation. This guy made a really great point, which you probably thought of,

which is one of the very few things that you can't automate is community. Can AI community? No. What you're gonna have, I mean, yeah, maybe a zillion bots in a... Yeah, exactly one guy, one guy and 1000 bots that are all doing it, maybe GPT 10 can do that or whatever. But

the next this interquartile period, whatever we're coming up to is the easiest way to to hedge against automation, I think is to focus on community. Alright, next one. If you can be in a bad mood for no reason, you might you can be in a bad mood for no reason, you might as well be in a good mood for no reason. If it's not going to change your life, it shouldn't change your mood. If the cost is peace of mind, don't buy it. Yeah, if you can be in a bad mood for no reason,

then you can be in a good mood for no reason, which means that if you can do something that's amazing and still have a shit day, it means you can do something that sucks and have a good day, which means the entire excuse around, I don't want to do all these hard things because as a proxy, it makes my mood sad is ridiculous because it means that we are ultimately in control of how we want to perceive the work that we do. And so I think that is ultimately the most freeing thing that you can ultimately in control of how we want to perceive the work that we do. And so I think that is ultimately the most freeing thing that you can do in terms of how you can equip yourself to get through those harder periods.

Why do you think there's so much cynicism at the moment, especially on the internet? It's easier. You can always defend no. We actually deal with this a lot at acquisition.com from an investment perspective. And we actually have to check ourselves, which is it's always easy to find a reason not to do an investment. So we have a no bias.

And then you should have, I mean, you should overall have a no bias. Like you should say, okay, here's all the things that could go wrong. And you have to kind of think that way because you have to manage risk. But if you say no to everything, you're always right in the short term. But if you never make an investment, you're wrong in the one way that matters, which is

you get no return. And so like you always miss the short term losses, but you lose the big, long-term gain. And so it's meant, again, this is a continuum to be managed more than a problem to be solved, but cynicism is short term. It's like every, so when you, so, okay, this is, so when you go home, right, and you want to start a new business or you have a girl that you're bringing back, and your friends and your family are like, she's not going to last or like, this isn't going to, this isn't going to be forever. They are right literally every single time except for the one time you bring your wife home. And in that time, they're all wrong and it's the one time that fucking matters. And so the idea that, but the thing is, is because of the false positives or the true positives, they might have been right literally 19 out of 20 times. And if they were right the first time and the second time and the third time and the fourth time, why would they

bet against no on the fifth time or the fiftieth time? But you only need one yes or one positive to change your entire life. And so there's this habit and that's where cynicism comes from, where we get so many positive reinforcers for saying no and being right. But it's only short term being right because you have to make big bets to win big. And that also means that you're wrong plenty of times and people aren't willing to look stupid for being wrong. This school bet could go wrong. I'm betting it's not. But everything has risk. And I've been public about it. Right? And so like, if anything, but like, I've played this out. So like, I'll tell you how I played this out. I was like, if it goes wrong, I'll document the things

that I learned and that I'll apply next time. And I'll do what I've always done, state the facts and tell the truth. It is strange to think about how being cynical or skeptical or kind of sadonic or cutting or aloof. It's used as a proxy for being smart. The worst thing that anybody could be accused of is naive. That's what they're trying to optimize against. They don't want to be seen as naive.

Oh, you fucking, you hope that everything was gonna be good? Oh, that's, I mean, that's cute. Like, you know, the world will teach you, don't worry, don't worry. It's like, it'll, it'll, you'll learn, you'll learn. People don't want to be naive. And they'll be right. And that's what's, that's what's painful

is that it takes more effort to start in the beginning. And more people are right about the fact they're like, hey, you're not gonna hit it big. And guess what, a month in, you're not. But they're only measuring on months. And at six months, you're also not gonna have hit it big yet. And they're gonna be like, I'm still fucking right. And at a year, you're still not gonna have hit it big.

And they'll still be fucking right. And every day that you haven't hit it, they're gonna feel like they were right. But they're wrong because they're measuring in days and you're measuring in decades. Does this idea from Gwenda called the cynical genius illusion? Cynical people are seen to be smarter, but sizable research suggests they actually tend to be dumber. Cynicism is not a sign of intelligence, but a substitute for it. A way to shield oneself from betrayal and disappointment without having to actually think.

There was a tweet on a Doomsday Money Twitter guy and he said, yeah, he's predicted 16 out of the last three recessions. And the thing is, is that no one recalls the other 13 times that guy was wrong. And they don't recall all of the gains that probably were made in the marketplace by people who didn't sell during that time period. There was this broad, you know, people forward shit on WhatsApp. And if it's been forward lots of times, it even says at the top forwarded many times. So a little warning. And this happened, I think around COVID, there was an image of one guy, one squaddie wearing army gear, walking through the streets of London. And this was forwarded on WhatsApp as evidence that the army was going to come and hold people in the house at gunpoint. And if you left, it was going to be martial law was going to be deployed on the streets of London. And this went fucking nuclear, completely interstellar, absolutely everywhere. What happened with that? What happened with what happened with that thing?

Not a single person who decided to spout this half fucking baked opinion that never turned out to be true, ever got held to account for that. And I must have received that message like five times. Yeah. Like, hey, you don't get to just make these like ridiculous, like actually stupid fucking claims about the world. And then no one called you to account. I'm going to hit on the cynicism point.

Um, the world belongs to optimists. I'm going to hit on the cynicism point. The world belongs to optimists because if you're going to do anything big, you have to believe that it can happen. Otherwise, it never will. That Sean Puri thing, the cynics get to be right and the optimists get to be rich. Yeah. If you look at it from a percentage of success rate, I've been wrong more times than I've been right.

I've failed more times than I've succeeded. But you always succeed more and are right more in the big ways than the people who've been right all along and are wrong. Trevor says this, my editor. He says, 99% right and 100% wrong. So like, they're right 99% of the time, but they're wrong 100% because the only thing that matters is the big one at the end.

Like your family and friends will say that every girl that you ever date is not good enough, except for the one time you find the girl that you're actually gonna marry. And then it doesn't matter or like this won't last or like this business idea is not gonna gonna work and you might have nine failures. I felt my first nine businesses didn't really amount to anything nine Nine as in the first one spent time fucking failed

Second one this one will be different fucking failed third one this one This is the one and then seven six more after that right? I'm just painting this picture because like it's painful as shit because the whole time everyone is telling you I told you so and they're right today But not forever If the cost is peace of mind don't buy it why I mind, don't buy it. Why?

I use the peace of mind as a, as a indicator for breach in values. So that's the, I want to become known rather than and sacrifice my reputation in order to do so. And so for me, I would lose peace of mind like right on the edge. I'm like, I don't know, this is a little bit edgy. I had a guy who shared a bash clip of me. And- What's a bash clip? Oh, like somebody like took my clip and then was like,

this is wrong. Oh, okay, right. And so I looked at the guy's profile and I saw he was a VC and I was like, huh, okay. I know who this is. Oh. And so I DM a VC and I was like, huh, okay. I know who this is. Oh. And so I DM'd him and I was like, do you disagree with this? And he said something and then I just eviscerated him and he was like, you're right, I overstepped because I wanted to try and do a viral clip. You are fundamentally right and I was wrong.

And so like that is what I would never want to be. Like that is disgusting to me. And so the cost of making a viral clip to try and trend jump when I know that fundamentally the thing isn't right is not worth the price. There's a, this shows up in other ways. So I had it. What the fuck did I do? I think I tried to throw a used Splendor packet in a bin in a restaurant. You know, like, yeah, did that. but I was leaving. And I was like, it's next to the bin.

Someone will get it. And I walked 30 yards away. Fuck, turned around, went back, put it in the bin. No, you'd know. That's the peace of mind. Yeah, I know. This is another one of those interesting reframes. This is really, really interesting to me.

If the cost is peace of mind, don't buy it. You can see, and I did for a long time, my inability to move in as ruthless of a way as I, as other people do, as a weakness, as a vulnerability. And I realized in retrospect that it's just a higher standard that I'm holding myself to. And that can be, that will result in many times me doing things, and having things that I need to overcome. I'm working on my people pleasing tendencies as hard as I can at the moment.

To not? To not, yeah. I end up, I don't like to disappoint people. I don't like to do things that causes other people to feel bad or feel hurt or to tell them things that they don't hear. That's why that Dr. Robert Glover, no more Mr. Nice guy was just so fucking like very, very, very incisive. But I realized even with that, I had to add a conversation with a friend.

And it's to do with this book. And there's a bunch of ideas that everybody's been working on in my friend group for quite a while. And I was like, I really want to write about this thing and send him a long, overly arduous voice note explaining about how conflicted I was because it's not my idea. Now that no one owns the truth. That's one of the brilliant things about working through quotes and things like this is no one owns it. Right like if it's accurate nobody gets to own the truth.

It's just an insight about the way that reality exists. So I sent him this big long voice note and he replied to me and said. And I in it I'm over pattern matching a lot of the things I'm doing as people pleasing. Like it's the, I think I sent you that tweet about, I just learned about the recency bias and of all of them I have to say it's my favorite one. Right. So you see this new thing and it's the hot new toy that you're playing with or whatever, like shiny new toy. And he responded and he said,

I wanted to say how grateful I am that you in amongst all of the stuff and the book and the show and all of the different people pulling on your attention that the first place that you would go to when thinking about this idea is how I would feel rather than how you can like weedle it so that you get the outcome that you want or whatever. I would be very hesitant in you saying, are you calling that people pleasing when it's one of the reasons that I love you as a friend? I was like, huh, that's interesting. That's a reframe that I hadn't anticipated.

And that is again, the peace of mind thing. Now, your level for peace of mind may be different to somebody else's, but I don't think that that's something that you should be ashamed of. You know, it's a fun challenge for anyone who's listening. Try telling the truth in social settings. So when someone invites you to a party, instead of coming up with a fake excuse that you both know is a fake excuse, just say, I don't want to go. Really fuck with you. And if someone says, hey, can you help me move? You're like, I don't want to.

It's very freeing because the thing is, is that like their response is on them. And if I just, I try and anchor myself to truth. If I just tell the truth and state the facts, I'm good with me. And if someone, and I asked them, because I had a exchange recently where I said that, um, I say it often and now people who are around me are accustomed to the fact that I will just state the facts and tell the truth. I said, would you have preferred that I've lied to you? And the guy just like, I was like, so you would prefer that I lie. I will not be associated with someone who would prefer that I lied to them because it

makes my life difficult because then I'd have to lie, which then would breach one of my values. So in the future, you know, I had someone who recently was like, hey, if you need anything, you know, let me know how I can help. I'd be like, you don't mean that because if I actually need something, you will not help. And so it's really uncomfortable for a lot of people because it breaks a lot of social norms. But I think that it's kind of like the hundred knows

is like being comfortable, like it's just being comfortable with the truth. And the truth is one of the scariest, ugliest things, you know, like, why don't you wanna go on another day with me? I don't like you. You're not worthy. But like people are so uncomfortable with that.

And I think that the, I've just tried to shed bullshit as much as I could for my life. And it's just made thinking a lot easier and also dealing with relationships a lot easier because you also, by shedding social niceties, when you do also state the truth, when I say, I think you fucking killed that. People know it fucking carries weight because you don't just say that. And so I would say most of my team, for example, if I pay a compliment, they know that I mean it.

And I don't have to say like, hey, like, if I'm being honest, I really feel like, I don't have to, I don't like, and it makes your words mean what you say. And I think that is like, I aspire to be a man who when I say things people know that I mean them. And I think a way to do that is to stop saying things that I don't mean. And so I'm trying to cut as much of the words that are niceties and things that I don't mean and are nonsensical and bullshit that I've been taught to say

in this social situation. When someone says, that makes sense, I say, no, it doesn't make any sense. People are like, oh, because when someone says makes sense at the end of a sentence, we are trained to just nod and say, yeah, yeah, even though if you didn't even process it, but if I don't think it makes sense, I say, no, I don't think it makes sense or no, I don't understand. And again, you don't want to look stupid, but looking stupid in the moment

so that you can better understand something makes you not look stupid for the rest of your life when you actually understand it. And so I've just, that has been a huge effort of mine is to make, make words great again. Make words mean what they mean again. Yeah. And I really, I sparred with that with my writing and especially in my social relationship

because time is so valuable when we have so little of it and I don't want to waste any of it pretending to be someone or say things that I don't mean. It's normal to not know what you're doing. If you did, it wouldn't be called growth. High five your fear, uncertainty, and doubt, and carry on. Do you get tired, stressed, sad, hungry, frustrated, and focused? Do you feel misunderstood?

Great. You're human. You don't need medication. I have a huge vehement distaste for mental medication. And I think one is because it's over prescribed, two, because people over web MD themselves. And fundamentally people find a problem with being human. And I think a lot of that is because of the social norm

that we should be never hungry, never sad, never angry, never frustrated, never feel like we're misunderstood. And those are the troughs and peaks of humanity. And we can't only wish for sunny days, because otherwise we'd have droughts and knowing what everyone would die. And so it's wishing for something that isn't true and will never happen. It's wanting a lie, which is why I'm so against it. Now, are there people who they can test their neurology and whatever, maybe?

But like, honestly, a hundred years ago, this shit didn't exist. And people just dealt with life. And I think people are happier than they are now. And so clearly this solution hasn't been much of a solution at all. And so I, if I, you know, I try to have, I don't have that many extremes dance. Well, maybe I do. But one of my extreme stances is that there is nothing wrong with you.

Because even if there is something wrong with you, how do you benefit by saying there is something wrong with you and then accepting that label unto yourself? Because the alternative to that is accepting your current existence as, maybe this is better than everyone else's and I'm just choosing to believe that it's wrong. And all of this is around some big, mighty should that we think and that we worship, that we should be a certain way that we're not. And I think that discrepancy, that word I've tried to eliminate as much as humanly possible

from my vocabulary because like I shouldn't what? I should nothing according to whom? Why should I be happier? Why should I be have less anxiety? Why should I feel more understood? And so like pretty much the beginning of every ad for like Levitra or whatever, you know, whatever the new serotonous, you know, serous thing is, it's like they describe humanity. They just say like, are you hungry?

Are you tired? Are you horny? Are you dissatisfied in any way? Well, the cure of that is a pill, which I wholeheartedly decry anything that gives it if-then statement for happiness. So like you will own nothing and be happy. Like you want to say that you're going to change my external condition to change how I feel.

I just, I just reject it as a, as any kind of if then I will be happy. But like the pill, the over medication part, I am, I've had too many people too close to me ruin their lives, topping from SSRI, SSRI, and getting on cocktails of pills and they've got to sleep med and they've got to wake up med and they're just a walking pharmacy. It's crazy for people who aren't American to look at the way that America deals with this.

I remember, so in the UK, just for context, you can't get prescribed melatonin. You can't buy it over the counter. You can't buy it on Amazon. My video guy, when he flies over here, takes it back like some, like he's fucking smuggler, like he's like Pablo Escobar, but with melatonin tablets instead, like going into CVS. Am I allowed to get this? That's the degree of difficulty that it is to get prescribed anything. And in America, the first place that people term when they have a problem is the pill bottle. I mean, I have two physician parents.

So like, and I would say Western, you know, for the most part Western medicine through the just belief in all pharmaceuticals and all that kind of stuff. And so I've I grew up really close to it. My grandfather was a physician. So like just lots of medican medicine in the family in general. And I, um, I just hate it. I really do. I don't hate a lot of things, but I really, I really, I hate, I hate what it does to people. And more the underlying thing is that they reject being human and they think there's something wrong with them. And so many people waste all of their time trying to solve a problem that is life rather than living it. And it drives me nuts. Like they

search for the medication rather than confronting the problem. Like you don't have an anxiety problem. You need to deal with whatever the thing you're worried about is. Like I mean, man, I have too many controversial beliefs. I'm getting into too much of it. You drink a lot because you're stressed. If you deal with the thing that stresses you, that's the trigger for you drinking. So yes, there's addictive properties to drinking. I'm not going to, I'm not denying that. But the thing that leads to the drinking, the condition that creates

that, that's something that you can attack. And so I think so little attention is given to accepting reality rather than saying there's something wrong, that people waste their entire lives searching for an answer that doesn't exist. What about it's normal to not know what you're doing? If you did, it wouldn't be called growth. High five your fear and certainty and doubt and carry on. If you knew what you were doing, then you would be stagnating because you'd be doing nothing new. And so if you're going to do something new, then that is what would be the catalyst for growth. And so you can't want to grow and also want to know everything you're doing at the same

time. It's like the two beliefs contradict one another. And so I think that's a lot of a lot of the discontent that people suffer from is they want two things that are polar opposites. They want the really strong character, they want the easy life, like one is the price of the other. You have a hard life to have great character. You have an easy life. You have a shitty character.

Everything came easy. You want to grow. You don't want hardship. Hardship creates growth. And so they want both and you can't. It's wanting the Jordans without paying the price. And the price isn't bad. It's just the price is what it is.

And so it's just, do you want the Jordans or not? And if you do, then don't lament the price tag, pay the price tag, and be happy you have the Jordans. And if you don't want the Jordans, then don't buy them. There's something in here is around comparing the lessons that people who have achieved success tell you about how to also achieve success when they're using that pattern, which is, well, they look like they know what they're doing. I should look like I know what I do. I should feel like I know what I'm doing.

But you don't know what you're doing. You're a white belt and that person's a third degree black belt and whatever it is that you're trying to pursue. State the facts and tell the truth. I mean, the amount of 900 follower Instagram accounts that all I see is people espousing advice on how to grow their social media following. You're never going to win Like you don't get it. Like you're like, I've been following like you don't get it because the content of what you're putting out, sorry, the evidence that encapsulates your message disproves literally everything you say before you open your mouth. And the thing is is that people are obsessing about the algorithm and this type of font.

And I should do vertical format and I should do horizontal format. And I use this as an analogy that you can draw to anything. But everyone has that friend who is a train wreck on relationships who gives relationship advice. It's just like, it doesn't even matter

if the advice is good. You're a train wreck. It's the fat friend who gives advice on how to be fit. It's just like, and they're like citing all these studies and you should try these supplements. It's just like, you're a fat fuck. Just shut up, stop. Like there's don't waste your breath.

No one is listening. And so it's just, it's missing the big obvious thing. And so again, it's like that big domino. You're like, I want to get into fitness. Like there was a friend of mine actually who's in the fitness space. And he's like,, I want to get into fitness. Like there was a friend of mine actually, um, who's in the fitness space and he's like, I really want to grow my fitness business. And obviously like I have books on it and I have videos and did that for a whole

past life. And, um, I was like, dude, you're not in shape. It's like, but I know all these, I was like, you don't look like someone that anyone wants to look like. And so the thing is like, for whatever you're doing, the big one thing is like, if you were looked like a shredded god, you could say, eat fried chicken every day, and people would buy your shit. Because like, what's the one big domino that if I just did that, everything else would take care of itself.

Do that. And every ounce of effort you're putting into not doing that is a waste. Basically, the V-Shred model. They're actually really nice guys. Yeah, they're here in Vegas. Well, it was like public enemy number one. For the fitness pros, yeah. What was your definition of trauma that you taught me on the phone?

Oh, yeah. Because this word is so thrown around on social media, my God. I was like, okay, I have to define this so that I can try and understand it. So I believe trauma is when you have a punishing event that permanently changes behavior. That's it. So if you

you know our kid and you touch the stove and you burn your hand and You never touched a stove again. You were traumatized Now the thing is is that that's a positive consequence So is trauma bad? I don't know what's the consequence bad in that situation. No and so a lot of people use the, this person traumatized me as the, as the, the transgression, whereas the question is what was the result of that quote trauma because trauma is just accelerated learning.

And so if you have PTSD, for example, if you were abroad and had lots of bombs going off, then you had rapid learning. So you have trauma that permanently changes your behavior around loud noises. And so you generalize loud noises from this environment to now when someone honks, you freak out and you think about those situations, right? And so just defining the world around me has helped me navigate it a lot better so that I can understand what we're talking about. Because there are so many, you know,

trauma is a feeling in your body that you have to, you have to release the trauma. I'm like, what the fuck are you talking about? You don't release trauma. You change behavior due to a stimulus. That's it. And so if you want to change your behavior back, you create a new condition that reinforces

the new behavior you want, period. Because otherwise we appeal to mysticism and we just say lots of like nonsensical bullshit that the whole woo woo world is all about. I actually spoke of woo woo event, which was really funny. How did that go? Surprisingly well. I just started by being like,

you will all disagree with most of the things I say. But they kind of mysticized my nihilism, so it worked out fine. How did you do that? Because I just describe actions. And so they describe those actions as attraction for whatever. And it's like, attract, repel, whatever. If you make 100 calls, you'll have more people who know who you are than if you don't. That's the same as putting out an energetic frequency to the quantum realm. It's that stuff. Saying that you want money. I have no idea what any of that means.

Dude, there was a podcast that I got linked to from a girl in Austin who got inducted into some weird cult that was sacrificing period blood at the full moon so that they could get Birkenbags. Yeah. Austin's a weird place. So you were there for a while. I was. Yeah.

Well, two weird moments. Spat you out. Alex, I appreciate you, man. Thank you for coming on. What's next? What can people expect from you next few months? Well, all my effort is in the school games. I can talk about them. I can not talk about them. I just made the biggest investment in my life. I'm not a co-owner of school.com. It's a platform where you can build what you want to build, learn what you want to learn.

Schools will give you the tools, the community, education to help you. And so we've actually created a whole thing where people can start all this stuff for free. Because I just, I believe my whole platform is meant education. That's what I believe in. I think the education system is broken and teachers don't get paid or given the resources to actually teach students and they're, you know,

they're supposed to teach tests that they know don't help students. Students get educated on stuff that doesn't matter in the real world and they go into amounts of debt for a piece of paper that doesn't make them anything to pay off the debt that they're in for the rest of their lives. I hate all of it, which is why we started making the content that we do. This is one big investment that I'm doing to try and make my small debt towards helping fix that. And I don't, like I obviously talk about business, that's what I know, okay.

But one person can't do that. Like I can't change, I mean, I can try, you know, but like, I don't think one person's gonna change the world. And so, I wanted to invest in a platform that would help other people do that for one another. And so, whether it's like, you know how to paint and you want to teach me how to paint, you know how to fix Hondas and you want to teach me how to do that. Like there are so many more useful skills that we can trade with one another. And I think Ben Franklin said, there's no more noble a deed than to help another no more to educate. And I wholeheartedly believe that.

And so, I mean, that's what I'm investing my dollars and my time into. And so, yeah, that's like my whole next year in terms of what I'm investing. Obviously, at acquisition.com, we continue to invest for a family office. And so, if you have a business that you want to sell or scale, you can hit us up. Hell yeah. I'm going to enjoy watching it happen, man. Appreciate you. Thanks for having me on. Thank you.