Soul Boom - Dopamine Detox: Ending Isolation, Together w/ Alex Banayan

Episode Date: November 19, 2024

Rainn Wilson sits down with Alex Banayan, author of The Third Door, to explore the intersection of grief, spiritual growth, and the mental health epidemic plaguing younger generations. Alex shares his transformative journey from despair to resilience, revealing how moments of pain can lead to profound self-discovery. The conversation delves into the effects of isolating technologies, dopamine addiction, and societal narratives of doom, offering insights into how to navigate a path toward hope and connection. Packed with wisdom, humor, and heart, this episode is a must-listen for anyone seeking to grow through life's most challenging moments. Alex Banayan is the bestselling author of The Third Door, a groundbreaking book that chronicles his quest to uncover the unconventional paths of the world’s most successful individuals. A sought-after speaker, Alex inspires audiences with his insights on persistence, creativity, and the power of embracing life's challenges. Thank you to our sponsors! Airbnb: http://airbnb.com/host Waking Up app (1st month FREE!): https://wakingup.com/soulboom Fetzer Institute: https://fetzer.org/ MERCH OUT NOW! https://soulboomstore.myshopify.com/ Sign up for our newsletter! https://soulboom.substack.com SUBSCRIBE to Soul Boom!! https://bit.ly/Subscribe2SoulBoom Watch our Clips: https://bit.ly/SoulBoomCLIPS Watch WISDOM DUMP: https://bit.ly/WISDOMDUMP Follow us! Instagram: http://instagram.com/soulboom TikTok: http://tiktok.com/@soulboom Sponsor Soul Boom: [e-mail] Work with Soul Boom: [e-mail] Send Fan Creations, Questions, Comments: [e-mail] Produced by: Kartik Chainani Executive Produced by: Ford Bowers, Samah Tokmachi Companion Arts Production Supervisor: Mike O'Brien Voicing Change Media Theme Music by: Marcos Moscat Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey, Soul Boom Generation, I've got a really exciting announcement for you. We've got a substack. If you love the Soul Boom podcast and book and ideas, then you're going to want to get our weekly newsletter substack sent to your inbox. It's magnificent. There's going to be fantastic guest authors. Some are written by me. A lot of them delve into the ideas around the podcasts that we're doing that week. So sign up. Please subscribe. Go to soulboom.substack.com. Thank you. You're listening to soul. I was planted in fertile ground to become obsessed with depression, anxiety, despair, grief, and loneliness. I needed to find my own life raft.

Only after I was able to pull myself out of the water could I see that, oh, a whole generation is drowning too. Hey there, it's me, Rain Wilson, and I want to dig into the human experience. I want to have conversations about a spiritual revolution. Let's get deep with our favorite thinkers, friends, and entertainers about life, meaning, and idiocy. Welcome to the Soul Boom podcast. Thanks for coming to the Soul Boom Studios. Thank you for having me. I'm so excited to talk to you.

I'm fascinated by your story. When you're in your 20s, everything feels chaotic and messed up and just purposeless and random. And when you get older in your 40s and 50s and you're able to look. back on life, you're like, oh, everything unfolded for a perfectly good reason. How has spirituality played a role in this journey, both your personal journey and what you've learned from these incredible thought leaders? One of the best experiences of the past year for me was I read a book called The Surrender Experiment by Michael Singer.

And it moved me so deeply. I tell myself, I want to meet this Michael Singer. I wonder if he's still alive. And I Google, is Michael Singer alive? and it says he is. And it says he lives. He's got a place in Florida, right? I was like, how do you get into this?

How do you go there? And I went to their website and said, we have an open door policy. Anyone can come. So me and my mother go to Orlando for that speaking event and that afternoon go visit Michael Singer. And he said,

the single best sentence you can repeat to yourself to keep you on the spiritual path is the following. So I'm like sitting at attention. And he said, life is perfectly designed. for my spiritual growth.

Everything in my life is perfectly designed for my spiritual growth. And I have repeated that to myself every day for the past year. And the more I repeat it, the more I can see it happen in real time. Because I think what life is, and the way that I see it,

is life is a soul growing, we're in our body, our soul growing machines. That's what we are. We get 90 years in a soul growing machine. And we get a lot of choices along the way. Are we going to grow our souls? Are we going to kick the can down the road, give in, get passive, get victimy, you know, give into the resistance, or are we going to fully engage in growing our souls on our life's journey?

But how does this idea that your life is perfectly suited for your spiritual growth, how has it shifted your perspective to the work that you're doing right now? The best thing it's done is it's helped me appreciate. appreciate the shift in the trajectory because life will, in my opinion, whether you like it or not, life will push you where it wants you to go. The question is, are you going to say thank you or are you going to say fuck you? Okay. Right? When my dad got pancreatic cancer, I was more in, are we allowed to cuss on here?

Yes. No NBC sensors on here? No. I was more in an FU energy when my dad got diagnosed. When was this? This was in 2017. I was 23 years old. And my dad got diagnosed the pancreatic cancer.

14 months later, he passed away. And over the course of the same year, my dad passes away, my childhood friend passes away, my grandpa passes away, and then 30 days later, my grandma passed away. And I did not think everything was designed for my spiritual growth. I thought I got delivered a shit sandwich. Yeah.

Of death and despair. Right. Yeah. So life doesn't care if you want the spirit to grow with or not. Life will give you exactly what it wants for you. Only now in hindsight can I see that if that year didn't happen, I would not have been researching everything. I've been researching the past two years.

Definitively. There was nothing in my childhood that I was planted in fertile ground to become obsessed with depression, anxiety, despair, grief, and loneliness. Not from a selfless place, but actually from a profoundly selfish place of, I didn't care about what everyone else was going through. I needed to find my own life raft. And only after I was able to pull myself out of the water, could I see that, oh, a whole generation is drowning too.

Last year, more teens have killed themselves than ever in American history. the CDC reported that one out of three high school girls, one out of three has seriously considered killing herself, which is hard to wrap your mind around, that if you're walking through a hallway where there's 100 high school girls, 33 of them is seriously considering killing themselves. And then Harvard put out a study recently

that showed that 50% of all high schoolers, 50% self-reported being either anxious, depressed or rather not be alive. Tell me this is not the single most important crisis facing a generation. And throw loneliness on top of that. Throw loneliness on top of that. The surgeon general has reported as an epidemic. Yeah.

This going on, and I think everyone, especially myself, needs to be humble enough to say, we have no fucking idea what's going on. Because if we did know exactly, If we have an accurate grip on this problem, it wouldn't be growing at 60% a year a year after year. It wouldn't be happening.

So the first step is to admit maybe we all have misdiagnosed this on a mass scale. And what's beautiful about that is it actually creates a complete blank canvas to start thinking in a new way. So what I've been doing the past couple of years is asking that question of what's going on, What's created the worst epidemic of a generation with mental health? And then, just because of the way my brain is wired, is what are we going to do about it? So that's what I've been working on the past couple years. Well, first, before we go there, I just want to say, I lost my father in 2020.

He was 79. So in a lot of ways you could say, oh, he lived a good life. and in a lot of ways you could say, God damn it, he really should have been until 89 or 99. I wish he had had that extra 10 or 20 years. But it was pretty devastating. I mean, for me, he was the family member that I was closest to.

My mom had left when I was two years old. I stayed with him. He was kind of the constant family member in my life. We were very, you know, it was very, it was often contentious, and there were periods of great, conflict, but at the same time, kind of at just a core heart-based emotional level, he was my connection to this world. And it was pretty devastating. I wrote about it a good deal in Soul Boom.

We both lost fathers around the same time. I was, you know, I'm in my, I was in my 50s, you were in your 20s, but can you tell me a little bit more about that period of grief? Well, I can tell you how I measure. whether it was successful or not. First of all, if you would have asked me this five years ago, I would say no, I'm drowning. And five years ago, I would not have even imagined that today I would say things like this is the happiest

I've ever been in my life. Tomorrow's my dad's birthday. And where we are recording this is actually right next to where he's buried. So I decided that after seeing you, I was going to go visit him. And this month, morning when I was getting dressed. Something felt a little bit empty, and I went into the drawer and the nightstand next

in my bed. I can't believe I'm showing this too. I put his favorite ring in my pocket. May I? Yeah. So a part of him could come with me today. And even though I know spiritually he's always with me And it's not about a physical object

It's also like a part of You know, I see his hand when I see this Yeah And a friend asked me One of my best friends asked me just a week ago Because his dad just passed away from pancreatic cancer A few months ago You asked me

What's your relationship with your dad now? And for the first time my life I was able to say with complete honesty, it's never felt better. It's ever felt closer. And that would have made no sense to me 10 years ago when my dad was alive. You responded that way or you responded? I did it. I said this.

I said this last week. You've never felt closer to your father. And I didn't know. Six years after his passing. I sound like one of those kooky people on the street who I used to sort of roll my eyes to when I was a kid. that it's possible, at least for me, I feel like he's more intimately in my life now than he's ever been. I ask him for help all the time.

You commune with him, communicate with him? I ask him for help. I sometimes ask him what he's working on. He tells me, yeah, I'm telling you this, but sometimes I'll be like, where are you? And he's like, I'm with your sister right now. I was like, okay, cool. And I'll call my sister.

And I'm like, hey, I just got a weird message. She goes, I feel him with me right now. Like, right before you called, I felt that. I was like, mm, mm. And it's, on the one hand, do we know we're right? Who cares? It feels, all I know is that when I meet someone whose parent has passed away,

they understand what I'm saying. And when I talk to people who's never had a parent pass away, they look at me like, Like you're a woo-woo, crystal-loving angel. Someone check him in somewhere, you know? I 100% have had similar experiences, connecting, communing with my father, feeling. I want to say feeling a presence because it's like one of those ghost shows where it's like, oh, I'm getting tingles and I'm feeling a ghost. Yeah, it's not that.

It's just a little intimation of, you know, a little of a hand-on. on a shoulder in a way. You know, I've asked my dad specifically to really help my son on his journey, who's 19 in college and, you know, has had a lot of ups and downs in his teenage years, like so many teenagers have had. And I feel that at work, and my son is doing better than he's ever done. And I completely relate and completely understand. And really thank you for sharing that.

Yeah, the Buddhist... teacher Pema Chodron has a line that says, suffering can either break you down or break you open. And I can say now, I'm grateful to say it broke me open. I feel more open harder now than I did 10 years ago. I feel more compassionate now that I did 10 years ago. I'm closer with the biggest success. I'm closer with my mom

I've ever been. Ten years ago, I would roll my eyes and this and that. Without any hyperbole, I sometimes just cry of gratitude spontaneously, thinking I can't believe

she's still alive and I get to see her tonight. Which I never was like that 10 years ago. I'm closer to my sisters than I've ever been. That's beautiful. You were saying something really sobering statistics earlier.

And if anyone's like me, where they were maybe now or in the past, I've been going through a hard spot, I wish I would have known this when I was in my rock bottom. So I like to sort of split into two things.

What's causing the crisis and what are things that we can do to reverse it? Okay, great. So the causes, in my opinion, are actually very clear and simple. Okay.

Because when I had started, they felt complex and impossible. Okay. In hindsight, they're actually very clear and simple in the sense where the question really is, if we're looking at specifically the current mental health crisis amongst young people, especially in America, our timeframe we're talking about is the past 15 years. Because if you look at the charts of, let's say, teen suicide, it's only the past 15 years we've seen this exponential growth.

Before that, it's been linear. So we actually have a narrow timeline and a narrow question, which actually is good for science to say what happened right here. Yeah. So there's three things as a society that changed right here over the past 15 years that makes the symptoms of depression, anxiety, and teen suicide make complete sense. Okay. So these are three things.

The first thing that changed over the past 15 years is there has been exponential growth in isolating technologies in every industry. Okay. So if you think of it this way, you go to the grocery store, it's self-checkout. You go to the gym, everybody has AirPods in. You go to an office, even if everyone's sitting at the office, everyone's on a Zoom call. Mm-hmm. It has never been easier to not look another human being in the eye in human history.

I mean, you take that as a fact that you'll go to teenagers at a birthday party, and you'll walk into a room, and there's 27 kids all doing this. Right. And maybe they're doing this, and two people are watching, but everyone is on their phones, and it's either TikTok videos or stranger things or some other form of social media, but isolation together. Right, but what's the crazy part

about isolating technologies is that it's very similar to cigarette smoke in the sense where even if you're not on your phone yourself and you're sitting at dinner with someone on their phone, you get the secondhand smoke of isolation. And kids are getting that from their parents. I see this all the time. You go into restaurants and parents are on the,

the kids sitting there with like their French fries and all the adults around are all on their phones. Right. So the isolating technology is exponentially growing and there's no signs of it slowing down. Even, again, think of the most simple things. Like when you're a kid and you wanted Chinese food takeout, you have to get out of the house,

go to the Chinese restaurant, look at them in the eyes, say thank you, and come back home. Yeah. Now it's at your doorstep. You don't even want to meet. You don't even want to meet. I would actually love to meet the Uber Eats data scientist and ask them,

how many people say meet at the door versus leave at the door, don't look at me. Again, isolating technologies in every industry. To blame this just on social media is to miss a much larger epidemic. That's number one.

Number two is also in the past 15 years. We've had extreme innovation when it comes to dopamine dumping devices. And a dopamine dumping device is any device that dumps a massive amount of dopamine, which is the chemical in your brain that makes you feel good at once. the best analogy to understand this is...

Are you talking about devices or platforms? Like TikTok. So to me, that's a device. That's a device. So the phone that uses TikTok, right? A phone without that isn't really there. But the dopamine dumping comes in. The best analogy for me is when I was a kid,

my mom forced me to watch I Love Lucy. You know, 30 minutes of a couple chuckles. You get a nice drip of dopamine in your head. Now, when you look at a teenager who's spends six hours binge watching euphoria before they go to sleep at night, that is a dump of dopamine. And you have, it is completely normal if you ask a parent of a teenager, that those kids are spending three hours doing some form of dopamine dump before they go to bed, whether it's TikTok, Snapchat, Minecraft, Netflix, Hulu, whatever is their thing.

Yeah. You can even get it from the kids these days playing the stock market. Whatever it is. Like Robin Hood or whatever that's called. Whatever it is. Yeah, sports betting, which is huge bigger and bigger. So online gambling, poker. Right.

Yeah, the list goes on and on. Right. Isn't that crazy? Every industry is massively just barreling towards increasing the levels of dopamine that get dropped. So what happens to a young brain when they're doing massive dopamine dumps on a daily basis, because this is not a one-time thing.

This is every day for five years, 10 years, 15 years now. what happens to a young brain is number one they have dopamine deficiency when they wake up like a mom might make you waffles if you're a little kid and you love it right and you don't smile anymore

and the mom goes what happened to my kid he's depressed is he depressed or did he just watch three hours of TikTok before they want to sleep last night and they literally don't have the dopamine levels left in their brain because it's being dumped so fast so that's the first thing that happens the second thing is more concerning

just like any drug, our threshold raises if you dump it big enough and hard enough. And you have a whole generation who is used to such a high threshold of dopamine that all of a sudden every part of their life needs to start matching that level. So they start dating more toxic people. They start, the CDC just reported that drugs and alcohol has gone up the past year amongst college students where it's been downward for a whole generation. and they're wondering what's going on. Tell me that the dopamine dumping on these devices

is not affecting their need to actually drink more to feel something. So it affects the brain chemistry across the board. So that's the second one. But the third one is what actually pushes things over the edge. Because if you take someone who's depressed and anxious who's using isolating technologies and doming dummy devices every day

and you introduce this third variable, that's where we get this epidemic of self-harm. And it's that over the past, 15 years, there has been a proliferation of narratives of doom in all forms of media. All forms of media. So the obvious, you know, you turn on cable news, they tell you the world's ending. That's the obvious stuff. You go on a streamer, the top things are a serial killer documentary.

You turn on Spotify, the top thing is a serial killer podcast. Let's say you're a good person who really just only wants to focus on making good in the world. So you create an Instagram account and you follow just. Jane Goodall. The algorithm, within a few months, we'll start showing you cities burning down, town's getting flooded, we have convinced a whole generation

that tomorrow will be worse than yesterday. But that goes hand in hand with the dopamine dumping. Because... They're all tied together. Outrage and doom scrolling keeps you on your device and keeps you pressing and clicking buttons and clicking links.

It's simple. Simply, if you're- It's a machine that's working perfectly. And it's perfectly, and it's just making you money because those clicks equal money. They equal ad space, and that's how it works. So if you're a parent and you're wondering why your kid is walking around a third-degree burns,

the question is, what fire did we invent that we hand it to them? The equivalent of this is 100 years from now. We will look back and see it the same way we see 10-year-old smoking cigarettes in the past century. There was a time in American history where a 10-year-old smoking cigarettes was not a crazy thing.

By the way, my uncle smoked cigarettes. He's my uncle. That's not that far away. And he was 10 years old. So we as a society have to start seeing that these isolating devices, these dopamine dumping devices, is the equivalent of giving mind-altering, drugs to a child.

The sailboat. Tell me about the sailboat. So the sailboat saved my life. I was 18 years old. I had this crazy idea to go on this quest to go learn from the people who I looked up to the most. And naively, I thought, well, why don't I go? Okay, I'm going to pause you there. How does an 18-year-old get that idea?

How does, literally, I mean, I'm sorry. When I was 18, I was thinking about Dungeons and Dragons, girls, and how to successfully pop my zits without them getting worse. I had two of the three. I wasn't big on Dungeons and Dragons. Okay. But then how does an 18-year-old think about, like, I want to go, which is, by the way, so much of your work interviewing these thought leaders.

How does an 18-year-old go? I want to interview thought leaders. If I have to look at it in hindsight, every significant moment in my life happened because of significant pain. So to understand the sailboat, you have to understand that months earlier, I was on my dorm room bed,

staring up at the ceiling, going through the what I want to do with my life crisis. And the reason it was so extreme for me, it felt like I had sort of gone into this abyss. And I never felt that before, where you feel great. groundless, and there was a degree of terror that can only be understood if you understand that I'm the son of Persian Jewish immigrants, which pretty much means, you know, I came out of the womb,

my mom cradle me in her arms, and then stamped MD on my ass and sent me on my way. MD, because Dr. Lawyer Engineer is the only path for... Yeah, no, I had a very welcoming family. You can be a doctor, you can be a lawyer, or you can sit outside. Like, very welcoming, like, very inclusive. Like, we will put a dog bowl for you. Because being a Baha'i, which started in Iran, I have so many Persian immigrant friends. And it's really that same story. And it's not just a Persian thing.

And I get it. It's an immigrant story. Those are occupations that have status as well as money and security. There's a kind of like a doctor. My mom is very lucky because my sister's a lawyer and my other sister's a doctor. There you go. I'm a call a dropout, so it balances out. Perfect.

fairly well. But that was my life as a kid. And I was very, if I'm being honest, I was very judgmental and I thought they were tightly wound to say the least. Only in hindsight can I see they had left their whole home country and came to America with the sole belief that if they sacrificed everything for us to get an education, we wouldn't have to suffer the way they suffered. I remember when I was thinking of leaving pre-med going through this life crisis, my grandma looking at me and saying, they can take your money, they can take your house, but if you can save people as a doctor,

they can't take that away from you. So this was less of a like a career hope and more of a deep terror from being refugees. But I had no understanding that when I was 18. I just thought they were being like way too aggressive, way too serious, way too serious. So when I was going through this life crisis, not only was I going through it, I couldn't tell them I was going through it. So my mom would call and say, you know, how are pre-med classes going? I was like, oh, they're going great. And then I would hang up the phone and spiral. So how that leads to the sailboat is I had this crazy idea of, okay, I don't know what I want to do

with my life. And on top of that, I had no idea how all the people who I looked up to do how they did it. How did someone like Bill Gates sell software out of his dorm room when nobody knew his name? How did someone like Steven Spielberg become a director at 19 without a single hit under his belt? These are the things they don't teach you in school. And that's when my naive 18-year-old thinking kicked in. I thought, well, if no one's written the book, I'm dreaming of reading, why not write it myself? And I thought, you know, I thought it would be super simple. I thought I would just call Bill Gates, interview him, interview everybody else, I'll be done in a couple months. That, I thought it would be the easy part because I had no idea how the world worked. How hard could it be?

So I thought that would be the easy part. The hard part I figured was getting the money to fund the journey. Because I was buried in a student alone dead. And I see somebody on Facebook offering free tickets to the game show the price is right. I wasn't too far from where the show filmed and the tickets were for the next morning. And my first thought was, oh, what if I just go on the show and win some money to fund the book? you know, it was an idiotic idea primarily, not only because I had finals the next day,

but also I'd never seen a full episode of the show before. I'd seen bits and pieces. Everyone's seen bits and pieces of the prices right. I haven't seen the prices right since I was 11 years old in 1979. Right, but it's what you watch when you're a kid, homesick from school, because it was the only thing on TV at the time, right?

So that night I decided to do the logical thing and pull an all-night air study, but I didn't study for finals. They started to hack the prices right. And I went on the show the next day, and I did this sort of ridiculous, strategy and I ended up winning the whole showcase showdown, winning a sailboat. I sold the sailboat and that's how I funded the book. And that's how the journey set off. Now wait, you're 18

and you own a sailboat. If I was 18, I'd want to sail somewhere in my sailboat. But you wanted to fund the book. How did that work? I was so obsessed at that point about, I thought that if I just had the cash, the whole book would fall into place immediately. Right. I had no idea that the book would end up taking me seven years. Okay. I thought it would take, I'm not. I'm not. I'm not. I'm not. I'm kidding, I thought it was a summer project in between freshman year and sophomore year of college. I thought I would do it for a few months since I have nothing to do over the summer. And I thought, naively, if I just had some cash, I could fly up to Seattle, interview Bill Gates, fly to Omaha, interview Warren Buffett, put it all together and move on with my life. So it was actually my

naivete that was the best asset for me because I had no idea how bad of an idea this was. And ended up working. How much cash did you get out of this boat? After I won the game show, I got a call from a boat dealer saying, oh, we got contacted from the prices right, saying that you are now the owner of a new sailboat. Yeah. How would you, how would you like it delivered to your house? So I was like, first of all, I don't have room in my dorm room for my sale boat. It's funny. I also, not only did I want a sale, but I also want a billiard table. And the billiard table was, again, too big to fit into my bedroom. So I ended up selling it to my next door neighbor in my who I grew up with.

So I didn't have room for anything. So I told the sailboat owner, I said, how much cash would you give me if you just keep the boat and sell to someone else? And he told me $17,000, and I didn't know how to negotiate. So I said, deal, you know?

Great. And I took that $17,000 and I thought I had a million dollars. That was the most amount of money I've ever seen in my life. I remember, I'm not kidding, the next day, once I had the check, I took all my friends out to lunch,

Chipotle, you know, free guacamole for everybody. Like, I was, I thought I was a baller. Yeah. I had 17 G's, and I was like, I'm going to use this for a year. Like, this will never run. That was my thing. I was like, this will never run out.

I worked as an actor for 10 years in New York City doing theater. I never made over $20,000 in a year. For 10 years, I was essentially under the poverty line for New York City. supplemented by unemployment and doing odd jobs and catering and driving a moving truck and stuff like that. But we got bought out of our apartment because we were in a rent-stabilized apartment and the landlords wanted to fix it up and make a ton of money. I forget what it was. I think it was even like $35,000, which was almost double what I had ever made.

And it was the same thing for me. I was like, and I paid off the credit card and some student loans and did this and bought a, you know, bought a used van and blah, blah, blah. And then we moved to Los Angeles using that money. And then it was like, it was crazy like four months later. The entire money was gone. I was like, what have I done? Because I thought in the same way. It's never going to run out.

I thought like, oh, a year and a half, this is going to get me through. That was really the start of the whole journey. And to my surprise, Bill Gates said no and ended up taking two years to finally sit down with him. It took three years to track down Lady Gaga. But how did you track down all these celebrities? How did you like, how did you twist their arms to say, spend an hour with me and a microphone and let me interview you? It was a lot less like Albert Einstein and a lot more Forrest Gump in the sense where every single one was different. Like with Larry King, I chased him through a grocery store and begged to have breakfast with him.

For one person, I emailed them 37 times. And by the way, some of them were disaster. Not all of them ended well. I would say the majority I didn't know. Warren Buffett, I spent eight months writing letters to him and going his annual shareholders meeting to the point where he blacklisted me. He's like, this guy's a stalker, get him away from me. Oh, it was, the Buffett story is extremely embarrassing. Go, I want to go there. Let's go there, please. Please, let's go there. Welcome to Rain Wilson's trauma therapy session, where we go into your worst memories. Okay, so this one was the hardest lesson out of all of the interviews.

Because it's the one that I worked the hardest on that ended in the biggest disaster. You know, I had this dream to interview Bill Gates. I was getting straight nose from Bill Gates's office. So I thought, you know what? He's friends with Warren Buffett. Warren Buffett's the best investor in history. And Warren Buffett talks every day about how much he loves young people and helping college students. That's going to be the cakewalk.

So let me do that. And then he'll get me into Bill Gates. Yep. I was a genius. I thought I had this master plan. Just be friend Warren Buffett to get to Bill Gates. So I am so embarrassing. I end up deciding, and I just read, I don't know where I read.

I read in some business book that focus is the key to success. And if you just focus on one thing, you'll get it eventually. So I decided, you know, I'm going to do nothing else in my life except focus on Warren Buffett. and I'm not kidding, I woke up at 5 o'clock in the morning, I would run down the street listening to Warren Buffett audiobooks. I would get to my office at 7 o'clock in the morning and I'd have 14, 15 Warren Buffett books. I had this Warren Buffett fort I had built in my tiny little storage closet office, um, 24-7 Warren Buffett until two or three months in, I felt I had done enough research that I could

write what I thought was the best, most heartfelt letter. And I really poured my heart into it, hand wrote it, mailed it one copy to his home address, one copy to his office, and he actually hand wrote a response back. Beautiful. And I remember it was like, it felt like the choir was saying. But he didn't say yes, I will interview you. No, it said, dear Alex, I have too much on my plate to grant all interview requests, wishing you the best of luck, Warren E. Buffett.

And I thought, if he's taking the time to handwrite a response back, he must love me. He must be like 1% away from saying yes, so all I have to do is just keep knocking on the door. And I decided to do nothing else with my life until he finally said yes, because I incorrectly thought, I want it to be a yes more than he wants it to be a no.

And I'll win that arm wrestling match. So I spent every single week calling his office, every month handwriting letters sending it to his office, flying out to Omaha, Nebraska during winter storms, going to where he got his haircut to get my hair cut, going to where he goes. His McDonald's where he gets his McDonald's in the morning? I don't recommend this to anyone.

Again, I want to caveat this is this is a bad story. Do not repeat this. This is what a stalkers do. It was more of a loving pen pal. Stalkers. A loving stalker. I'm going to say if he's handwriting response back, I think I'm free from the, I'm free from that category.

That's what stalkers say. Like, I went to her premiere of her movie. And she looked at me. And she looked at me and she shook my hand. That means I'm the special one. Do you see what's happening here? You really should have been put behind bars. Round them up, guys.

So keep going. How does this? So now it's, you know, four months in. And if you're getting rejected for four months, it feels like there's a cloud above your head. by six months of straight rejections, I'm like ready to cough up blood. And for some reason, by the grace of God, I'm on the phone with Warren Buffett's assistant Debbie because it's Wednesday morning and that's what I do on Wednesday morning.

I call Debbie. And for some reason that day, she said something different. She goes, you know what, Alex? I can't take these phone calls anymore. But I feel your heart is in the right place. So how about as my guest, I send you tickets to our annual share. shareholders meeting. And I was like, oh my gosh, that would be amazing because I had done my research. I knew what the meeting was, this is their shareholders meeting where 30,000 people go.

And you can only enter if you're a shareholder of the company, which I didn't have enough money to be. So I was like, that would be amazing. And she goes, you can even bring your friends? And I said, can I bring five friends? She goes, I'll send you six tickets, my guest. And while I was on the phone with her, I said, hey, Debbie, isn't it true that people at the annual shareholders meeting during the Q&A portion can ask Mr. Buffett question? during the open mic Q&A. And she goes, Alex, Alex, Alex, you know, I know what you're thinking, but it's not possible. There's 30,000 people there and only 30 get to ask questions,

and it's a random lottery. I wouldn't get your hopes up. Your odds are 1 in 1,000. But what Debbie didn't understand about me is I'm the king of hopes up. So me and my best friends from childhood, all six of us, go to Omaha, Nebraska. We have enough money for one room at the motel 6. We're all like six guys.

So we go to the motel 6, 4 o'clock in the morning, on the day of his annual meeting, we're out there in the blistering cold in line. And by the time the door's open to the shareholders meeting at 7am, there's already a thousand people in line to get in. We're 20 years old, 21 years old at this point, wearing like our fanciest white t-shirts, our best of our best clothes. Everyone else is in suit and ties. These are all like professional, you know, money managers.

And the second the door is open, there is a mad rush. it's first come first serve seating. There's no assigned seats. So you have these people in suits and ties, pushing and shoving, you know, pardon me, pardon me, you know, it's like a business casual running of the bulls. And everyone's going in. And me and my friends are fast, so we're jumping down the staircases. And we get seats right in the front.

But the second we get there, it finally hits me that I have no idea what we're going to do with this lottery system. I just sort of had this inclination that hopefully it's like the price is right, which is there will be away somehow. We end up talking to all these different people and we end up finding a potential loophole in the lottery system. And out of the six of our friends, out of, you know, there was one in a thousand odds,

out of the six of us, four got winning lottery tickets. And that's how I asked my interview questions to Warren Buffer in front of 30,000 people. The only downside that I didn't plan for is Warren Buffett is very smart. and after the first question, and you have to understand, all the questions being asked

during the Q&A are, what's the Q4 analysis for this company? This is a shareholders meeting. Yeah, sure. I'm going in, Mr. Buffet, when you were 19 years old and you were trying to launch your career,

and this is after six months of writing letters to him, I'll never know exactly what was going on in his mind, but what I know for sure is by the time my fourth friend went up to the microphone, Buffett, cut off the audio,

ended the meeting, and said, you know, there's a good place to end the meeting, thank you everyone for coming. and the end of the meeting right there. Now, the reason this was a train wreck was because, as life happens,

a couple months later, through a completely different way, I ended up getting the interview with Bill Gates, miraculously. And the interview ended up going so well that at the end of the interview, as I was walking out of the office, Bill Gates' chief of staff said,

Alex, we love what you're doing. How can we help? And when Bill Gates's office is, how can we help, I recommend you take out a very long sheet of paper and you hand it over. Sure. And I handed over my whole interview list, which I used to carry in my pocket everywhere I went.

And he's reading it. And he goes, oh, we can take care of all these in the next couple weeks. Buffett will take care of tomorrow. Him and Bill are best friends. I'll never know exactly what happened. But what I know for sure is a week later, I got an email from Bill Gates, Chief of Staff saying, dear Alex, please no more contact to Warren's office. Thank you.

and I had to learn the hard way that there is a such thing as over persistence, where it's not about knocking on one door a hundred times, it's about knocking on a hundred different doors. And I essentially had to learn the hardware that you can dig yourself into such a deep hole that even Bill Gates can't pull you out. So after spending seven years doing all these interviews from people of all different industries. So Maya Angelou for poetry, Jane Goodall for Science.

what I ended up realizing is while all their stories are completely different on the surface, at their core, they all treated life in business and success the exact same way. And it didn't make any sense to me. But what I started to realize is it's almost as if they treated life like a nightclub in the sense that there's always three ways in. So there's the first door, the main entrance, where the line curves are on the block, where 99% of people wait around hoping to get in. And we've all seen that line, people standing out on the cold, hoping the bounce

so that's the minute. That's the first door. You're talking to the wrong person about a nightclub analogy because literally, I think I've been to two in my entire life. The 20K a year didn't help you get to nightclub? It did not. So there's the first door, the main entrance where everybody waits in line, but then there's the second door where the billionaires and celebrities go through.

And for some reason, society has this way of making us feel like those are the only two ways in. You either wait your turn or you're born into it. But what I've learned, and what I'm sure you've seen in your own career, is there's always, always the third door, where you jump out of line, run in the alley, bang on the door, crack open the window, go through the kitchen, there's always a way in. And it doesn't matter if that's how Bill Gates sold his first piece of software or how Lady Gaga got her first record deal. They all took the third door.

But isn't there a certain amount of narcissism in that? Doesn't it kind of like the rules don't apply to me? Because I'll push back on this. And I know that you've devoted your life to this. You know, it's on your social media, and I've read and seen interviews with you. But for me, I'm no Bill Gates. I'm a moderately successful sitcom actor at best with a middling podcast. Hi, everybody.

But for me, it was kind of like, I just wanted to be a professional actor. I just wanted to get a check for acting. Whether it was $300 or $3,000 or $300,000, I just wanted to like be a professional actor and play characters and say lines as characters and get paid for it. That's all I wanted to do. And so I was like, I'm going to get the best training possible. I went to get to the best acting school I could get into.

I got rejected from Juilliard and Yale, and, you know, but I was lucky enough to get into NYU. And I worked in the theater, making $17,000 a year, you know, cutting my teeth, paying my dues, et cetera. And then things were kind of tapped out in New York, went to L.A. by hook by crook I lucked into some good jobs it wasn't me banging on the door in the alley it was me trying to get my I guess maybe I was in the 99% line and and then luckily enough you know

got on the office and six feet under and a couple other things and had kind of a a nice career run and I'm still lucky to to be able to play some parts but isn't it there are a certain kind of like narcissism like I'm not going to follow the rule you can't have everyone banging them down the the the you know this the guest entrance door or the window in the alley trying to get in because it's kind of like I don't have to follow the rules I don't it's great you have a lot of moxie and hutzpah and you and you're you have a great heart and you've learned so much along the way that you that you want to share like I love your journey and this isn't an aspersion on you but my experience with a lot of

people who want the kind of the shortcut in is that there's a narcissism that they feel like the rules don't apply to them and they don't want to just do the hard work. So I actually agree with everything you just said. Okay. From my perspective, what you just described in your own journey, the going to L.A. with the rent check and all. That was the third door for you. and every third door looks very different for each person.

The idea of the analogy is that we all know, and I'm sure you can think back to actors that you came up with, who didn't end up on the office or their own equivalent of it. And it's almost more of an energy of, am I going to sit back and hope and demand life gives me what I want? Or am I going to ride through the 20K a year, years, work through the depression, work through the give-ups, and keep at it. So if I may, I heard you just describe your third-door journey.

Okay. Because I, again, in my opinion, it's much more, and I didn't understand this at the time when I first wrote it, but I can actually see it now in hindsight. It's much more of a spiritual endeavor where I'm not going to, A, stand around, and just expect to life to work on my terms. B, I'm not going to expect that I'm so special enough that I'm going to be ushered in. So I'm going to see, work my ass off.

Be as creative as possible. Ask as many people for help as possible. And keep at it. Because the idea of the third door is that there's always a way. And it's not going to be the obvious way. And it's actually, again, if I may, the opportunity to give yourself the permission

that you're allowed to stop standing around and waiting and actually go out into the world, knock on doors, and ask for help. Yeah, I always say to people like, I had just enough breadcrumbs in front of me, just enough to keep going. But if I hadn't had those, I would just like, you know, I'd get an off-Broadway theater job

and then I'd get at a slightly better, the next year a slightly better theater and I'd still be broke but the next year I'd like I'd get a three month gig in a Broadway play and it was like oh and then I'd get like oh I got one line in a in an independent film you know and then it would you know it just it just kept going and I and I I for me it was about kind of maybe it's part of my spiritual journey it's kind of like And this is a problem that I have a lot with the kind of, there's an online culture about like success and you can make it and achievement and like get up at 4.30.

Force your way in. Yeah, get your ice bath and do your 40 minute meditation and then your workout and then, you know, then your vision board. And I listen to these people and I just get over. Even me. It's a recipe for anxiety. Yeah.

And a recipe for just feeling like a fan. Because I look at all that, I'm like, I can't do that, you know? And if I'm 20, if I'm the 24, 27 year old version of me, I'm like, I'm not going to do an ice bath and a vision board. And I do think that, you know, my wife studies Tai Chi and she's just, works with a Tai Chi master and takes these classes. And so much of life just feels like it's just like listening and reacting to the universe and taking the energy of the universe. and cycling it and moving in. And it's much less willpower, force, and determination. Although determination is a great quality.

And much more about being attuned to kind of the winds of the universe and where they want to lead you so that you can be sensitive enough to see where the fourth door. I'm going to write a book called the fourth door. But, you know, where that might take you. this is a very far stretch, but if I may. Yeah. If we just want to get real spiritual and cosmic for a second.

Okay. I'm not saying this is the truth or even what I believe, but it's just a possibility that's fun to even step back into. Okay. What was the purpose of that apartment building getting renovated? The landowner thought is so he can make money. if you ask an 18-year-old today who's depressed and feels lonely, and the thing that brings her the most joy is watching Dwight's Trute every night,

tell me what the purpose of that apartment building being renovated was. Yeah, because if I hadn't gotten that check, we couldn't have moved to Los Angeles. And also, as a testament to you and your heart being in the right place, I would say most people, if they got a big-ass check, would go on a crazy vacation or buy a fancy car or do something else to boost their ego and what other people think of them. You put all the money into paying off your debts,

first of all, cleaning your side of the street financially. And then getting a, you said, a rundown van, moving to Los Angeles. We drove it across the country with our pit bulls and our walk and a bunch of books. And you had no. no idea that that decision would make the lives of millions of young people happier and more joyful.

Alex, I just love your work. And I love the way your mind and your heart works. And from writing the third door and going on that journey now into this mental health social experiment chapter of your life with everything that you've learned and you've learned really an insane amount of wisdom for a 29, 30-year-old, you're talking to the equivalent of yourself who's 1819 in that dorm room. And as a pre-med, feeling the pressure, feeling his mom's and cultural pressure to be a doctor, kind of lost, confused. What do you have to say to that young person? This person is also being dopamine dumped and filled with isolating technology. Like what, from the deepest part of your heart,

what do you say to yourself at that age or to another person at that age at the beginning of this spiritual journey? The pain you're going through is okay. It's here to teach you something. Listen to the pain. It's not going to last forever, but it's here to tell you something very, very important.

you're doing just fine. That's true. And I hate to break that spell, but I think it's part of the way that we've set up contemporary society, it's almost like it's not okay for young people to feel, and they don't know how to process quote-unquote negative emotions. For a 16-year-old or a 19-year-old to be with some anxiety, some depression, some loneliness, some fear of the future,

fear of failure. And that those feelings are natural. It's part of being a human being. It's part of why we have joy is maybe joy is less because pain is less. We have to grieve to experience joy and to experience transformation. So feelings themselves are not trauma. We can have feelings. Say that again for the people in the people.

Feelings by themselves are not trauma. You can feel pain, loneliness, grief, and fear, and you're gonna be okay. The only way out is through. So we medicate in so many ways. We medicate with edibles, medicate with alcohol, and we medicate with the endless distraction and dopamine from our phones.

But I love that. How do we? How do we teach the youngest generation to that, that they can have their feelings and move through them? What I had to learn the hard way is when you numb the pain, you silence the teacher. When you numb the pain, you silence the teacher. That's beautiful. And I think what you just said is one of the most important lessons in life.

Gorgeous. Alex Bonnion, you're awesome. I love you. Thank you, man. I love you, too. Thanks so much. The Soul Boom Podcast. Subscribe now on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and wherever else you get your stupid podcasts.