The Pomp Podcast - #1086 Ed Latimore On Don't Get Outworked By A Crackhead

Episode Date: September 7, 2022

Ed Latimore is a former heavyweight boxer, best-selling author, and chess enthusiast.  In this conversation, we discuss the crackhead work theory, Ed's recovery from alcohol addiction, why the world has gone so crazy, critical thinking, and narrative violations in recent years. ======================= This episode is brought to you by Athletic Greens, the best option for easy, optimal nutrition out there. You take one scoop of AG1 and you’re absorbing 75 high-quality vitamins, minerals, whole-food sourced superfoods, probiotics, and adaptogens to help you start your day right. This blend of ingredients supports your gut health, your nervous system, your immune system, your energy, recovery, focus, and aging. Go to athleticgreens.com/POMP to give AG1 a try today. ======================= The number one name in NFT domains and the world’s most powerful wallet are teaming up to bring something new to the crypto and Web3 world: <Your Name.Blockchain> Either sign up for a free blockchain.wallet or visit Unstoppabledomains.com to buy your domain today. ================== Bullish is a powerful new exchange for digital assets that offers deep liquidity, automated market making, and industry-leading security. Combining the innovations of DeFi with the regulated environment of traditional finance, Bullish empowers users to trade with certainty and earn passively at scale across variable market conditions, in an environment backed by multibillion-dollar liquidity contributions from the Bullish Treasury. Visit bullish.com/pomp today to learn more. Note: Bullish is licensed by the Gibraltar Financial Services Commission. Virtual assets and related products are high risk. Consult your investment advisor and trade responsibly. Bullish is available in select locations only and not to U.S persons. Visit bullish.com/legal for important information and risk warnings. ==================== The bridge between iGaming, online sports betting, and emerging technology, such as Blockchain, NFTs, fintech, GameFi, metaverse, and AI, is loud and clear. The largest global summit of this kind is heading to Malta from November 15 to 17. Over a thousand exhibitors and 25,000 industry leaders will be there, including top executives from Draft Kings, Bet365, Socios, crypto exchanges, betting software providers, operators, gaming affiliates, and more. Log on to AIBC.WORLD and SiGMA.WORLD to see all our upcoming global summits! See you in Malta, November 15 to 17 for the leading global event in Gaming & Emerging Tech! THIS IS SiGMA! ======================= Valour (formerly DeFi Technologies) represents what’s next in the digital economy -- providing simplified, trusted access to crypto, decentralized finance and Web 3.0 investment opportunities. Institutions and investors can gain diversified, secure, compliant, and easily tradable access to a diversified set of industry-leading equity products and protocols, through a single stock purchase on a regulated exchange.  For more information or to subscribe to receive company updates and financial information, visit our website at valour.com ======================= If you’re trying to grow and preserve your crypto-wealth, optimizing your taxes is just as lucrative as trying to find the next hidden gem.Alto IRA can help you invest in crypto in tax-advantaged ways to help you preserve your hard earned money. So, ready to take your investments to the next level? Diversify like the pros and trade without tax headaches. Open an Alto CryptoIRA to invest in crypto tax-free. Just go to https://altoira.com/pomp

what's up everyone this is anthony pompliano most of you know me as pomp you're listening to the pomp podcast simply the best podcast out there now let's kick this thing off ed latimore is the former heavyweight boxer he's a best-selling author and a chess enthusiast in this conversation we talk about the crackhead work ethic his life story his break from alcohol addiction and why Ed seems to think that the world has gone so crazy. I really, really enjoyed this conversation with Ed. He is one of the last remaining independent thinkers that I can find on the internet. And we talked about a number of topics, both in the current day and over history. I hope that you enjoyed this episode with Ed as much as I did. Let me know in the comments or on

Twitter what your thoughts are after you listen. Let's get into this episode with Ed Latimore. I Hope you guys enjoy it. Anthony Pompliano runs Pomp Investments. All views of him and the guests on his podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Pomp Investments. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp or his guests as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy,

but only as an expression of his personal opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only. All right, guys. Bang, bang. Very excited about this. uh i thought the first place we could start is a crackhead work ethic and i'm gonna tell you a story before you explain why you talk about this so much but i have a brother i got four brothers but one of them uh used to joke all the time and say crackhead wakes up and uh they're gonna eat

today don't let them outwork you and i came across one of your tweets like two three four years ago whenever it was and i was like holy shit man you know my brother i've seen you talking about this And then I've seen you talk about it over and over and over again. So what exactly is crackhead work ethic? So, you know, people, first off, people wonder where, like, that comes from or why I talk about that so much. And you got to, like, understand where I grew up. Like, I'm a project of public housing.

And if you don't know anything about public housing, you know, there's the at-risk youth, urban elements, gang violence, a lot of drugs, that kind of thing right so so you know crackheads are like this is part of growing up man we used to get babysat by a crackhead like i've seen people smoking the shit and and doing other drugs and and i remember one time as a youngster i didn't i didn't understand why why my mom was arguing with the woman that babysat us because i was like oh i just squirted some water on the couch why is this a big deal i was like three or four well it turns out it was a syringe full of heroin that's what it was it wasn't water i didn't know that and like and my mom's like why you have

this around the kid and the crack is like wow who's gonna pay for this it's all freaked out so that was the debate who's gonna pay for it it was it was silly like i remember asking my mom about this uh probably a few years ago and just like reminiscing and all and that was the the issue you know the she was mad the the addict was mad because you know that's drugs and who's I'm going to pay for it. My mom's like, wow, is this stuff out to where a kid can even get to it or whatever? So you see this stuff, and you have to cope with it. And I always say, you know, you can laugh a little or cry a lot, right?

So I choose to make humor out of my life. And in that humor, one of the things that's just funny to me, man, are crackheads. And I think they're like vampires, man. Like, if you look at them, there's a joke like you can't kill them or you can't catch them. And they're super strong. I mean, the reality is like whether they're strong or fast or whatever, a lot of it is driven by the need to acquire this very addictive substance. And that's where that work ethic comes from. I mean, sure, we could bottle that without the need to get addicted to something that'd be awesome.

Right? But, you know, we can't. So instead I joke about it. And in those jokes, I'm trying to – I'm imparting some wisdom. Because, look, if you've ever seen someone get clean, a lot of times what happens is you don't just break an addiction. Instead, you replace it or dilute it with other things. And a lot of times, these guys will pick up something positive and will just run with it because they're getting their fix from something that has a positive externality associated with it as opposed to getting their fix from an addictive, destructive substance. So that work ethic, that gets channeled into a lot of other things, and that's where the crackhead work ethic comes from.

I have this theory about people and this I think aligns very well with it which is there's high volatility and low volatility people and I've talked to a bunch of times on on the show about as an investor when you're investing in founders you want high volatility people either they're going to build a multi-billion dollar company or it's going to be a big you know hole in the ground but you want it to go big right guys like Adam Newman people like why does he keep getting money well it's because he's going big you just don't know which direction right but like it's going to be big and so that's in investing but in the regular world you know outside of investing there's high volatility and low volatility people and what you're describing

is basically high volatility people where there's an obsession uh like almost personality trait where yes the drug there is a a chemical component to it where they get addicted to it and they become obsessive and all this but if they replace it with something else that then becomes an obsession whether it's a drug or or or not uh that's a high volatility person they can swing drastically and then go like 100 uh miles an hour towards that thing and it's almost like the person themselves is their point in the right direction it's a positive point in the wrong direction it could be catastrophic yeah and then the two things come to mind when you say that right so first i i never described it as high volatility and low volatility the the phrasing i always use but it's not in the

context of of an addictive personality just kind of how you grew up and what you you you know experienced as a youngster, I call it a ceiling, the ceiling on the floor concept, right? When you grow up in a safe environment, when you grow up nurtured without really wanting for anything, I'm not saying you're spoiled, just not destitute, your mentality is to maintain that and to kind of meet the expectations of the status quo you grew up in. So your floor is higher. Like you're not – it's really hard for you to fall off. You've got a support system around you.

You more or less understand how to work and do things and be a constructive, productive, contributing member to whatever group you're part of. Your floor is higher. But your ceiling is lower. You're not going to take risks. You're not going to fly off and do something crazy. Because those moves are highly volatile.

You know, to start a business, right, you know, you could succeed and be great. You could also fail and end up going on the welfare line. And if you've never been in that position, that is, like, devastating. We don't deal well with loss at all. So you're like, I'm going to avoid the loss. But in avoiding the loss, you know, you avoid the gain, the potential gain as well, right? And then the other thing I thought about when you were saying that is, you know, I know some people who who did hard drugs and didn't get hooked. You know, I know a guy that smoked crack like two or three times and he was like, you know, this is not for me.

Now, no one would look at that end of one experiment and go, told you it was a scam. That's not addictive. Like no one will react that way. But what that tells me, there are a lot of different ways to interpret that based on what we know now and how your environment and who you are shapes whether you're going to get addicted to certain things or not. But one of the other interpretations is like, you know, what if there are people who, for whatever reason, they don't take to things like that? And drugs just happen to be an easy example to to look at and measure because we can measure the the negative output or not negative output, negative outcomes. You know, OK, well, you're you're in prison and we can ask you where your drugs, you commit a crime. We can see the drugs behind it. You know, you you get into the system in one way or the other and we can see the effect of drugs. But what we don't see are the people who have that same trait, never pick up something negative, but never excel in something positive either.

you know they're they're the people who it's like who the the balanced lifestyle folks right there's there's that whole thing like oh you know you want a little balance and balance is cool balance is great and there's a lot of benefit to it but one of the things you don't get typically when you have balance is you don't get exceptionality you you get you know there are two ways to be to have a to have a b average right which is to be b's and all subjects are to have like two A's and a bunch of D's, you know, and, and it's still not going to quite work out, but, but you tend to not be exceptional in any one or two areas that it's going to gain you recognition or, or a disproportionately or asymmetrically higher income than if you do the right balance

thing. And you don't, uh, right. I don't like saying right. If you take the balance safe approach to life. One of the beliefs I think that's changed a little bit in business is, uh, it used to be, go find the well-rounded person, go find the person who went to certain school, got the degrees, got, you know, uh, this skill said they were in this club. They did this extracurricular activity. They worked at this job for five years, you know, whatever. Now I see a lot more people talking about no hire for the exceptional skill. So exactly what you're talking about. Don't hire the B student across the board, hire for the person who is amazing at sales and they're horrible at finance, right? Because guess what? When they join the team, they are not going to be running

the finance team they're gonna be running the sales team and you need someone who's actually at sales and so go hire for that but what it makes me think a lot about is like in your life most people are actually aspiring to be the well-rounded person and it always cracks me up like i'll talk to a friend i'm like you know what have you been doing and they'll tell me some like crazy uh uh hobby they picked up or something why are you doing that like it basically because i think i should i'm like do you enjoy doing it like not as hard as sucks i'm like so are you doing it cause it's hard and it sucks. Like, okay. I, you know, I, I see that path of, of thinking, but usually is no, because I think that I, uh, I should be doing this and it provides some social

signal or I want to fit into a certain group or whatever. And I'm just like, man, what a life that would suck to like live just doing shit because you think other people expect you to do it. And, and what you're describing, you're describing a lot of people and, and probably even more than I tend to cluster because to me, I see it as a normal distribution. I see a lot of traits. And even if that's not like exact, and it almost certainly isn't, it's useful and we can make some useful predictions. If I tell you that the average person is balanced and most people fall within one or two standard

deviations out on either side you know they're gonna be kind of good at many things and are kind of bad at many things uh that leaves this rare individual that is that gets it whether and and and whether they get it intentionally or accidentally stumbled into it and had some good experiences and some payback and kept but it uh it doesn't matter but they get it that the rewards are just so disproportionately higher. They don't scale linearly. I wouldn't even say truly exponentially. If you are really good, that's like boxing, for example.

If you're a good enough boxer to get into the top 10, you're going to make a lot more money than a club fighter, but not nearly as much money as the guy who is fighting for the title. by definition one or two okay but to get to one or two you gotta give up a lot even to get in the top 10 you gotta give up a lot i wrote an article about this when i was you know people always ask me why did i stop with the record i had and and it's a complicated answer or at least multi-faceted answer which is why i wrote the essay but one of the things i touched on was that for me to get to the top 10 with my ability where I started my size, that's a huge opportunity cost. Is it worth

it? Now I'm making a decision because I happen to have other skills that have a payoff and I made the trade off. I think it was an appropriate smart one to focus on building my writing career, my website and everything I do on the internet in place of that. But a lot of people don't have that trade-off so you look at you look at the fighters i would choose fighters because that's the example but i think it scales in any competitive domain or domain where there is a i guess zero sum is probably a better way to look at it and the people who make it to the top are so much further ahead of everyone else in the middle but to get there you have to be obsessed like like those like anyone you see playing professional sports on tv those aren't well-rounded individuals

It's actually kind of a joke here in America that we make these guys go to college first, at least in the NFL. The NFL, I think, is the only sport where there's not a direct from high school to pro pipeline. I know there's one in basketball. I know there's one in baseball. And I'm pretty sure there's one in hockey, but not in the NFL. But it's a joke that we're like, you got to go through the NCAA and go to college because who are we kidding here?

You're not making these guys very rarely where you get the guy that's like Myron Roll, remember him? Yeah, right. Myron Roll was like a Rhodes Scholar. He was in like pre-med, and he was also a star on the football field. I'm trying to remember the guy's name. He played for the Ravens. Johnny, I follow him on Twitter.

I think we follow each other, but he's got his degree in math, you know. I remember Courtney Brown who played for the Browns. He was an engineering. He had an engineering major at Penn State. But these guys are like rare. rare i mean like we can name them because they're so rare i don't even follow right exactly we don't even follow football that that much at least i don't i follow it well enough to know that like when when someone outstanding like that shows up because that's not normal what is normal is being

so obsessed that you get to that level and you don't do anything else i don't like like no one cares if these guys can even really read i mean i'm not saying that's a good or bad thing i'm just pointing out that sometimes you got to give up but we can read the defense that might be more important to the nfl then you know read love and peace or war and peace you know that's what we're we're looking for yeah all right elon musk when he was on snl he i think he said it best he's like i'm trying to get to mars did you think i was gonna be normal right like no and then i remember seeing all these articles uh a while ago my father actually he pointed out uh i think it was like there's an article written it was like jeff bezos does the dishes at home and like drops the kids

off at work i was like bullshit bullshit right and i get that people want to present like a certain viewpoint right but it's like it's also different between what it took to get to a certain point and then what you do once you're kind of at the peak right but but it's just it's hard work right and goes back to kind of this like crackhead work ethic uh idea of like if you want to be great at something you have to fucking work hard if you want to be the greatest crack addict that's ever lit up a pipe in the hood you're not doing you're not getting a job you know you know look i've met functional addicts like no you're gonna you're gonna be out there every day you're hitting the scrapyard or something right now i i don't i don't want anyone to hear this and go this this

motherfucker is is promoting drug use like no that's not the point you're commenting though on something that is very real, which also a lot of people in society don't see every day. Right, never they don't, there's a whole I think about this a lot and I'll just tell you a random story to illustrate this before I go into the detail

I remember one day in my old neighborhood before I moved it wasn't a, where I lived as an adult, it wasn't a bad neighborhood it was just in the city and I know enough about the drug

game and how it works. I know enough to know that you're not storing a massive amount of product and not everyone that's in the business is going to live in the area where the stuff is sold. In fact, you know, why would they? OK. And I was like midnight or something and I was up and I just heard it was like a rain of bullets for like five minutes. They pulled up on this house and just just eliminated it, drove off, doesn't make the news, I'm like, are we gonna hear anything about this, nope, and, and I said to myself, I know enough about the area I'm in, probably, probably something related to, uh, to drug trade, like, because the, you know, the way that was done, that's not, you know, or maybe revenge, but unlikely where I live, all right, so, so why

I tell that story I tell that story to say that most people are like living in the world and they don't realize there are levels beneath and above them and if you don't see anything else other than what you know you assume that's all there is and that's a that's a that sounds obvious but we don't think about the implication of that I can talk all day about everything I've seen and I think this is one of the reasons people enjoy some of the writing I put out on this topic, because it's a world they're never going to touch. And that's not a bad thing. I tell you, like, you don't want your kids to see this stuff, man. Like, because for every one of me, survivor's bias is real. MF, man, every one of me, you know, there's a thousand or probably a lot more, you know,

in jail, whatever. So I can see this and comment on it and then deliver it up. And it's, I would imagine it's in reverse when you talk to people i call it i call it like uh visiting the matrix when you when you step down into to deal with people who have no idea how how one can make a living the way you make your living they look at you like you got superpowers man from from a lifestyle perspective you're dodging bullets okay and then you step out and leave and go back with other people who interacted and you know who you know from the matrix and there is a loved one And they can't imagine your level any more than they can imagine my level. Most people are sandwiched right in the middle.

And back to what we were saying at the beginning. They don't ever go below that floor, so they don't know what's in the basement. But they ain't never going to leave the house. Forget going to the attic. They never leave it. They're stuck there. When I was in college, I got pulled out to go to Iraq. i came back and uh there's two stories that always immediately jumped to mind uh about this idea of

a kind of understanding the people who are ahead of you and the people who uh want to be in your position right because that's really what it ends up being is everyone's looking up it's just there's very few people who look up and there's nobody else up right and it's like there's like five people in the world uh but the first was when i came back uh i was a white dude with a shaved head who all a bunch of these dudes on the football team knew was he went to iraq there was like four or five kids that maybe six months after i've been back i said something to one of them and he looked like he saw like a ghost i'm like what's up and he goes uh bro i was never gonna talk to you he's like you got a shaved head you went to war like fuck that right and so like this idea of

i had an experience in life that they couldn't you know even comprehend by the way this same kid went to a school uh i think it was in ohio or something i remember him telling me like dude we had clear backpacks and walked through metal detectors like all this and i was like that was in my high school right so like okay like we both have these experiences in life that we probably could learn from each other but just we it's hard to understand without actually going through it and the second thing was uh got paid some money uh while i was away uh in the military and i came back and i was a young kid uh no wife no girlfriend no kids no responsibilities outside to like survive in this college environment which is basically a cakewalk compared to where you know

i just was and so uh somebody uh who i admired had told me about uh foreign currency trading now that just sounds like a get rich get rich real quick so i started doing this and i remember i was sitting in class and i'll never forget i was in a uh chinese economics class and i was sitting in the back i had my laptop up and i could see everyone else everyone's taking notes doing all you know what they're supposed to be doing and i'm not like not trading but i'm like looking at the charts and everything the kid on the football team sit next to me and uh i remember he kept like kind of looking over and being like the fuck is this guy this guy's just as dumb as me right like what's he doing with this and so when he left he said yo pom let me ask you a question like what

was that i was foreign currency stuff and he goes like how does it work and i told him like super high level right like there's these things they move and if you pick the right bet essentially uh you can make some money and he's like all right he's like you just made some money i said yeah so far and he's like how much that's a thousand dollars he literally looked at me and he goes bro that's better than drugs and it's not illegal he said it's not illegal and so you know we started talking to whatever he came from uh washington dc area not the best area in the world or whatever but like to get rich quick that was his experience was people would go into drugs or just do things that weren't go get a nine to five job or whatever and so it it's funny because like those are like

very kind of closed environment you're on a college campus you know it's like weird things that people don't interact with on a day-to-day basis but if you extrapolate that out just the united states versus other you know societies in the world that alone we don't think about how uh fortunate we are to be in a country where look you can go say some crazy shit on the street and you're not going to get abducted and killed yeah right like you know if you go to the extreme example like there are societies in the world where a woman cannot walk outside without her face covered like that's a pretty big fucking difference than what we have here in the united states and and if you never being aware of it is one thing right i think one of the best things about the internet

and social media there's a lot of negative and people it's very easy to point out the negative But I think one of the best things about it is that it really does allow you to interact with, albeit sometimes in a rather explosive manner, other cultures. But if you're willing to learn, you get to see a lot about the world that you had no concept about. And you get like a firsthand, real time experience and conversation and perspective from people on the ground there. 20 years, even 20 years ago, that wasn't really a thing. But now it is. OK. But to go and live it, to experience it, even not to that extreme, but to just talk to people who are not American,

who live every day not caring or knowing about the stuff you consider to be important, that you consider really important, people have told you are important. Like, for example, like our politics. And in politics, everyone makes a big deal. goes oh you know it's about governing the united states and you live here and you have to care about this and you need to be frowned up and this makes a big difference you know and and because i spend i wouldn't say like a lot but certainly certainly more than the average person uh time out of the country i'm just like you know there's a lot of other stuff going on this is this is just

one thing you know there's a whole group of people who don't they don't even get a chance of voting are later because they're not they're not citizens and i just i think about that a lot that a lot of people have their their world and their world is important and in their world they can decide whether they want to interact with other worlds are double down on on standing in the world that they have in the world that they know and what makes them most comfortable and i think most people choose the comfort option of course uh but but one way or the other sooner or later you you get you get introduced to something different and whether you're prepared for it or not is a totally different story one of the funniest things to me in the world is that the

united states taxes illegal immigrants they tax crime too isn't that crazy hold on let's rewind here for a second so we're worried about all this stuff right but uh the united states basically was built on the idea of no taxation without representation and we got people who get taxed but they don't have a say you know what blows my mind and then that same vein is you know when i was considering getting my well not considering i'm still going to do it i'm just not going to do it the way i had anticipated because i just know more now right uh when i was going to grab my my citizenship in in portugal and i was just looking to learn about all the things and our tax grant i was like you're telling me that if i ever stop being an american i still gotta pay taxes

because I was an American once, that blew my mind. I was like, why would I ever get rid of my citizenship then? Like, I get rid of it. That's the worst of all worlds, you know? So some people have kind of gotten to this now, but you know that if you were to renounce your citizenship, you get taxed that day on all your assets, right, as if you died. So basically, you know, call it 50%, give or take.

But you know why they do that? there's a guy who was actually a co-founder of facebook who he renounced his citizenship he i think moved to singapore uh had a couple billion dollars worth of facebook stock and at the time there was no rule wow so if you renounce you're good right if you're a citizen no matter where you live in the world wherever your residency is you you pay uncle sam but if you renounce then then you're good now you don't have the citizenship right and so it comes out a question like how important or how valuable is it but if you got billions of dollars and you take on singapore which is like one of the one of the passports and citizenships that that is more um that gives you

more access yes than an american so after this guy did this they were like hey hold on a second here we're not gonna let this fly so they they implemented this rule and so it's always funny because you can look at a lot of uh tax law and it's because someone somewhere figured out some loophole or did something and then they're like okay let's close that let's change this and they He decided it was too much, yeah, and so now we got to pay. If he had done it with $100 million, no one would have cared. We did a couple billion, and they're like, oh, let's close that one up. This is wild, yeah.

Right? The other taxing that's pretty interesting is, I don't know if you've heard of these opportunity zones. So opportunity zone is basically under Trump. They came up with a map, essentially, and they went into cities, and they said this is not necessarily a bad area, but just an area that has received less investment. and so taxes can serve as a carrot or a stick so let's go ahead and put an incentive in place

if you take capital you invest it in the pre-selected areas and you hold it uh for 10 years right there's a lot of nuance but basically if you hold the investment for 10 years you don't pay taxes so if you make a long-term investment in areas that we're telling you need investment then we will give you favorable tax treatment one of the guys who helped push that through with Sean Parker from, uh, from Facebook and all this. Right. And so you start realizing it's like, well, how did that law get in place? Cause some guys who were rich were like, yo, we got a great idea. Right. Let's go and pitch it and do all this stuff. And so when you start to realize that a lot of laws and regulations and legislation and all stuff is like, there's usually it traces back to

one individual was like, I think something should change and people either get on board or they don't but like that's how the rules get made yeah uh one of my favorite quotes man it's from the wire and he the detective goes you know if you follow you follow drugs you're gonna get drug addicts and drug dealers but if you follow the money you don't know where the fuck you're gonna end up it's true and i think about that that that is what is the wire it's 11 years old at this point uh and i think about that what a poignant observation uh about everything in in our world not just the low level yeah politics in particular too yeah it uh it makes you think hard this episode is brought to you by athletic greens i take ag1 by athletic greens literally every day

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to show that you're a believer in a decentralized future. The blockchain.com community can join a short waitlist to get one for free at blockchain.com slash waitlist slash blockchain domain. Free NFT domains provide all the benefits of premium Unstoppable Domains, including fee-free lifelong ownership if you don't have a blockchain.com wallet no worries there's new free domains available to everyone either join the waitlist for a free blockchain.com domain or visit unstoppable domains.com to buy your domain today starting as low as five dollars unstoppable domains.com well one of the things interesting about you is uh you've said that you've had four lives and i think a lot of people don't think of their lives kind of in almost chapters right but

But I think we're unique in that there's like almost like adolescence, right? Then there's this element of if you serve in the military in any capacity, there's like kind of a time box around that time. Yeah, it's weird. It's very, very weird, right? And people who have been in the military, I think, can understand that. People who haven't, they'll be like, what do you mean? Like, you know, whatever.

No, it's just like that's a time in your life. And then there's these other chapters. Your four chapters, I think, couldn't be more different, it feels like, right? And you've really kind of transitioned between this. Do you ever think that you're all for those people? Or do you just think of it as I used to be this person and now I'm like a new person? If I'm going to look at a transition point, a real differentiation between each life and whatever life comes up, I think it all comes down to what my priorities were and what my weaknesses were at the time.

So, you know, kind of what's driving me and what is holding me back. And sometimes they're the same thing, you know, like like in my mid 20s, my priority was was pretty much, you know, drinking and chasing girls. Imagine how that holds you back from making progress. I look back at it now in my late 30s, and I go, wow, of course, it's obvious. And then I'm like, well, why am I having these issues in my life? Well, because that was my priority, but it was also my obstacle. But I think it's very easy for me to separate that out because there's these clear blocks. I mean, because of the people I was around and the things I was doing and the feedback I was receiving and what I knew and all that,

They look like different worlds and they have different experiences in each world. But I am I'm a product of everything that I've gone through and learned from the lucky breaks and the tough breaks. You're a product of all of it. You don't get to leave any of that, you know, behind. And thank goodness, because if you don't if you don't learn from your mistake, you're going to repeat them. The thing about getting older is that is that what was the best way I've put this? If you take care of a problem early You Get a discount on it

If you take care of it When it shows up You're going to pay MSRP You're paying a sticker price But if you delay it You're going to pay A tax And a penalty on it

And it might exceed your capacity to And I came up with that When I was thinking about the drinking thing. When did you start drinking? I started, this is crazy, I can say, I say relatively late, like 18 is relatively late. But yeah, that's when I started, but it was out of hand

and it was causing me to make just awful, terrible decisions. Right out of the gate, you just drank a lot. Right out the gate, you know, and there's no half step in here. We were just talking about that. Anything worth doing is worth overdoing. Right, you know, and fortunately, I've never been able to be a moderate guy. I actually had, a lot of people don't know this,

I've been sober now, it'll be nine years this December. A lot of people don't know I had another period of sobriety from a year and a half, I think. I can't even remember. No, it was longer than a year and a half. It was like from 20 to 23 I didn't drink because I don't know the middle. There's no middle here.

Why would I? And, like, it cracks me up, man. I can watch my girl. She'll open a bottle of wine because she wants some wine. She'll open a bottle of wine, pour a glass, and drink half that glass and forget it was there. And that bottle then will sit there for, like, three, four months before she even goes back to it.

And I'm like, what is wrong with you? We used to go through 2-3 at night when it was time to drink a bottle of wine. Not us together because she has been a great influence. But in general, us as in the drinking community, 2-3 at night. So there's no middle there. But when I look at that time in my life, that is an example of a life that if I didn't get in front of that problem, I was going to pay a big tax on it and get close because, you know, when you get in front of your problems

and you express real remorse and you express the desire to change and you stick with that change, people forgive a lot, probably more than they should, right? Because you really are making an effort and you made the effort and it shows you're serious. Like I'm sure nobody took me seriously when I was a month in, a year, and a lot more people like, hmm, five years. And I was like, okay, this dude is real.

It's not just an act or whatever. But imagine if I, you know, you say that and you go back and do it again And every time it's like, oh, man, I'm done drinking. I'm done being an asshole. And you go back and you do it again. Like, no, it means nothing. You know, it means nothing. I always say, if I had to go behind bars to stop drinking, imagine that.

Then no one cares if I stop. Then it's, you know, society made me stop and I've done some damage likely. You just stopped cold turkey or kind of weaned yourself off? It's funny, man. I went through these phrases. So in 2012, September 2012, I had moved back to Pittsburgh where I'm from, where I live now. I was out in Los Angeles for like two years because of something related to boxing. So I moved back.

And I would do these on and off things, man, like I tried to go. I was like, I'm going to go one week without drinking and see how it is. Go 30 days without drinking and see how it is. and get back on and go hard and go the other way, right? And then finally, when I came back from my basic, I did my basic, and then I did my AIT. My AIT was 22 weeks down in Fort Lee, Virginia. Basic was in Fort Leonard Wood, did that together.

They let out, I think I got back like December 18th, something like that. Then went out and drank crazy, made a fool, and got somewhere, and I didn't remember getting there I just knew I drove and I was like yo this is this is mad and I got a bunch of stuff in the line I like cared about myself more as weird as that goes and then I was able to finally

like stop but I made like a public not a public declaration but I texted my five closest friends and I was like I'm just letting you guys know I think I got a real issue I'm gonna stop

I understand if you guys don't wanna kick it anymore Because I think a lot of people who stop drinking are worried about that. And rightfully so, because if they're not good friends, like I've lost friends. I mean, they didn't like cut me out and be like, we can't be friends. But they stopped hanging out with me or two or three years in when they saw I was serious and my life was making progress and moves. Then, you know, we shifted away. Misery likes company. Oh, and not just misery.

That's only part of it. But more than more than misery, people like feeling like a position. they're in a position of superiority that people do not like when the status changes and it changes because you moved it not because they they're not very happy about that like people can cope with them falling off and you you know staying there but when they stay still or think they're doing well and then you make a change and you you leapfrog them it's a it's a different game entirely but we made those or we i made those changes and then it was able to stick and i was busy I had things that I was – what's my fighting career?

I was back in school. What else was going on? I was writing for the website. I was trying to be a decent boyfriend. I was doing well. And it's work because you're still here, you know, 10 years later. And something else was going on. And when you said that you were going to stop,

so the reason I'm so interested in this is in January of 2021, January 1st, the night before I got hammered, uh, as I think most people do on new years. Um, and all through 2020, like I never been a huge drinker, but I like going out. I like partying and doing all this stuff, especially, you know, my twenties and stuff. And, uh, for whatever reason during the pandemic, uh, I joked that like I kept the liquor store in business down the street, New York city. Right. And I was just getting wine, but I would go out, pour a fat glass of wine. I could not do what your girlfriend was doing. Right. In terms of drink a little bit and then just whatever, I was just going, just

drinking but it wasn't like uh uh i was addicted it was almost out of like a boredom right because there's nothing to do you're sitting inside five o'clock bam all right let's get a get a glass of wine and so i was just like man not maybe as coherent as you would be in like have a problem as much as it was like uh uh january dry january i've never done that before that sounds cool let's see how i feel if i just don't drink and i'd start to take health a little bit more seriously sleep more you know do all these different things during the pandemic whatever because i had time to kind of think about like you know and after 30 days i actually felt pot committed right because i felt like i was on a streak right like hot streak i can't drink on day 32 right because i i get 32

33 whatever and i haven't drank since and so it's been a you know almost a year and nine months or whatever but i don't have the same i think uh sense of like accomplishment maybe as you do in the sense of you were like i have a problem i gotta correct it and what i think about a lot is like uh fortunately i think most people probably are more in my seat than in yours where they drink but they don't think that they have a problem they don't think it's like too much yeah it's more so just like maybe i should drink less right and it's less of like a black and white like in some ways the black and white of like i have a problem let me stop it's a lot easier than it's easier Right?

Yeah, that gradient, man. I just don't do well with it. And that's in anything in my life. I mean, while I'm sitting here right now, I had my coffee this morning that I made in the room, then the coffee that they brought me, and then I went, I got to the studio a little early, and I said, let me walk down and get a coffee at McDonald's.

I got a coffee here. The difference is after three coffees, I'm not slurring my speech and making an ass of myself, so we can do that. But that middle ground, you know, So I think so. So first of all, on alcohol, I'm not like anti, you know, alcohol, you're leading a prohibition charge, anything like that. You know, we want to drink, you want to drink. With that said, I always remind people there is no health benefit to alcohol. Right. It is in the purest sense of the word a poison. It's one we've we handle, you know, better than cyanide.

Cyanide, but, like, it's still not, like, your body's going to be okay without it. Even our sweets, you know, one could argue you need carbohydrates. Well, not argue. You know, you do, but, you know, and the sugar is just the carbohydrate. And I bring that up to say, you know, some people go, you don't need sweets either. I'm like, okay, you don't need sweets, but the things that sweets are made out of, you do need is where I go with that.

Not the case with alcohol. So it's this ground But it's not going to like You know a glass of wine Here or there is not going to kill you Though there's a great movie One of my favorite movies One of the best ones I've seen

Called Shot Caller And Shot Caller is about this guy He's a I think he's like some type of insurance Or trader or something like that Like a white collar dude And he goes out with his wife And their friend

And he has like a few glasses of wine and gets into a car accident and ends up doing a, because the guy, I think, I can't remember if the guy died or everybody ends up doing like a year and a half in jail, but they sent him to like for real no shit prison. I think it was like Chino or San Quentin or something like that. And while he's inside, he clicks up with the white gang and they ask him to do something and he ends up,

he ends up killing somebody in a fight and he gets seven years. So he goes from one year to seven and it's about his transformation from this guy who is just a regular old, like, dude who has a job and a family and all that. Insurance salesman. To become, like, a shot caller in prison. And what I took away from that movie, though, when I watched it, is, I mean, it's a great movie.

The lead actor is the guy who plays Jamie Lannister. I can never remember his name. But one of the things I took away from it was, like, yo imagine going out totally it's not like he was drunk and got into the accident it was just it he just happened to have a bac when he he did and that's how your life goes down the shitter is you had a few glasses at one completely not not impaired whatsoever but things just there's a coin flip i think about this this idea to coin a lot well humans are adaptable too right you you could take a human and put them in the insurance business and they have some path and depending on

their personality the environment like all these different things they adapt and uh i think of it as like uh they're playing a role in the movie yeah right in the movie of life of like you ever like meet somebody and you're like bro you could have done seven other different things and you're here and you got the suit and tie on but like you do not want to be wearing that suit and tie right now i got a good friend one day he was actually my best friend growing up when we were kids and Because I lived in two projects. I lived in anybody who's from Pittsburgh, they'll recognize these names, but I'm giving them because they're important.

From birth to eight years old, I lived in the Hill District projects up in Addison Terrace. Then we moved to Northview Heights, and that's where I lived until I was 18, and those were both projects. My friend when I was a kid was this kid, very similar. The world's strange, man. We were good friends. His birthday was a week before mine.

I don't know if you're into astrology or anything like that. But no, we were really good friends. And then we split off. We kind of stayed in touch. And then I didn't hear from him for years. And then social media made it easy to get in touch. And I reached out to him. And we connected and started talking.

And life was good. But the first time we met up, we met up at a bar. And he was conned out of it. And then I didn't hear from him again for like two years. And then we linked up again And he was like I want to apologize for how I was The last time we met

I think he was like detoxing or something Because he was just about to go to jail Because he managed to become One of the most Well, powerful One of the most powerful drug dealers In the city By sheer luck on some sloppy police work

When they busted him They busted him They were waiting to catch him with all the drugs in the house, everything, to put him away. And I think they jumped the gun or something. This is the story he told me. And when they made the raid, he was out doing the re-up and was able to discard the product. So when they pinched him, he didn't have a bunch of weight on him. And when he was telling me, because one day he just sat down and I recorded it.

It was a cool conversation. And he was telling me everything, how he moved from like weed to heroin and how he started in high school, selling and everything, how it all worked. And I'm listening to this and I'm watching him now because he's still got the same personality and talents and gifts. And I'm just like, man, you could have been anything. But where you ended up and what was around you, you took your acumen and your skills for leading people and you became the plug. And I was like, wow, that's crazy to me. Just listen to it, because now he's doing, it's funny, man, how this stuff works. Now he's doing substance abuse recovery work, helping people get off the stuff.

And he's also got his music on the side. He works and everything. And I think it's really cool when you mention that, that there are people who can do anything. And I think about my friend in the same group, because if we had stayed together and I had moved and I'm coming up with him, I mean, I have, I naturally, for whatever reason, we all come out a little different. I naturally have a little more regard for the law, a little more fear of its consequences. But I could have ended up right next to him. We could have been running and ruling things together, but I don't know.

I would never know because I went down a slightly different path and that little divergence made a big difference. It also makes me think of Jay-Z's got a new verse on DJ Khaled's album, God Did. And in it, he basically is talking about the fact that he used to sell drugs, and now he's like, now they got weed in the stores. He's like, how crazy is that, right? Like just 20, 30 years ago, you could get locked up,

you could go to jail, your entire life could be derailed. For something that now you go- You go to the grocery store. It's a little like the Apple store now, man. you go wild right and then you look at the hypocrisy of um you know all this talk around britney griner uh being locked up in russia and now there's a lot of um complexity sensitivities geopolitical chess i mean there's a lot going into it but at the end of the day we're talking about is a substance that she's locked up for there and we've seen multiple people come out and say

wait a minute we got people locked up for similar shit here in the united states right and so like Is it hypocritical? Is it, no, is the geopolitical sensitivity that's playing into it? Like, you start thinking about it. It's like, wait a minute. We got people in cages for plants. You know, one of the things, you know, and I keep meaning to do a deep dive on this because I have an intuition based on what I've experienced growing up

that informs this opinion, but I haven't done a deep dive into the numbers. So I always like to preface that so people don't think I'm just talking out my ass and don't know what I'm talking about. I am, but it's based on my experience. And if the numbers contradict me, then the numbers are right. A lot of those people in jail for weed, they're not in jail just for some weed. One of the things that happens when you sell an illegal substance is you don't have the protection of the law. So you have to compete differently. And a lot of those competition methods, well, those are problematic,

especially when we start talking about big weight or anything that is hard, you know, like what they consider hard drugs, you know, pretty much like, you know, the Coke and its derivatives to crack, right? So that's like a different thing. People go, you know, we can debate the difference between the laws on Coke and crack but that's a different argument because no one is going okay coke's legal we should be releasing the crack dealers talking about the weed i don't you know unless you're moving big way yeah you know then we start looking at your your case and go should you be out you you should

be not a not even a doubt should we be removing stuff off people with records absolutely that is a big problem but i don't think there are people who are doing big big sentences like football numbers in jail i don't think they're the people doing anything like that because just for just for weed uh and just and even just moving i don't i don't remember what the um the the amount difference is for distribution versus uh you know consumption or something like that but i i know that you know i don't even think even in even in the early 2000s where i would be like mostly aware and it wasn't just like a thing in the background noise in my life as I was when I came.

I don't think anyone was really – I mean, you had to get caught with a lot of stuff. But enough to where they were like, you're not smoking this all on your own, you know, pretty much. And that was the big deal. The one that always cracks me up is when they arrest somebody and they're like – he had a lot of money on him. I'm like, okay, how much is a lot? Right.

And they're like, he has $700. and i'm like i know a lot of people that got seven hundred dollars in their pocket when they're walking around right i also know a lot of people who don't have seven hundred dollars in their pocket but like you know whatever the the amount is but then there's the people who are like well we caught him he has seventy five thousand dollars at some point well what are you doing with that so i i think the other piece that that's fascinating about this is um there's a book and i've mentioned a couple times now uh on the show because uh is less about what's in the book as much as how the book came together but it's written by robert green the guy wrote 40 laws

power human nature yeah and 50 cent yeah the 50th law i got that you got that all right so first thing is it looks like the bible they got it all they got the gold pages they got the whole thing right but what's fascinating about that book is robert green is writing the way that he's always written in a very eloquent, articulate, uh, kind of, uh, theoretical sense. And then he juxtaposes it to 50 cents life. And what you realize is like 50 cent and his lived experience is very similar to what Robert Green is talking about. They just use completely different language and they had never had any clue that the two of them existed until Robert wrote a book and 50 cent reached out to him and all this stuff. But it's like, man, that tells you a lot about society right there.

Human nature is the same. You know, I was just, I made a tweet about this and someone commented something interesting that I agree. And the tweet was about, you know, I don't think that people need to get their ass kicked for disrespecting people, but I do think you need to be aware that there's a penalty for disrespect and usually the deterrent you know that that penalty is enough to deter people from acting like assholes okay and and that's like the whole idea that you know mike tyson has said like you know people have gotten way too comfortable with disrespecting people from behind social media because no one thinks they're going to get punched in the face and look i'm not a pro-violence guy in fact i'm probably probably the most peaceful

fighter you're ever going to meet but people who know how to conduct violence are pretty much pacifist until it's time to because i know how bad it can get and how quickly right what that says somebody said something real interesting and i was like yeah that makes sense and he goes you know he goes a lot of a lot of the societies were were civilized because men got together and were like, okay, if we make these mistakes, we're going to kill each other, and that's not good for anybody, so let's come up with a set of rules, and to make it real clear, and a set of conduct, expectations for conduct, so it's very clear when someone's being disrespectful, and what they expect for that confrontation, right, which was pretty much eliminated,

this is why I hate passive aggression. I mean, I really think it's a weak thing to do because what passive aggression tries to do, it tries to get the benefit of a conflict without paying the price for it. It tries to get a jab man or get something snarky or whatever, but you do it in such a way to where it's not obvious that you're doing it or trying to. So when somebody freaks how you you maintain plausible deniability well you know in a in a um depending on your perspective more primitive or more advanced society you wouldn't be able to do that you have to speak clearly and make your point otherwise you just get ignored or you don't have one and if you make a point and it is in disagreement with someone else's you got to express that in a certain way

otherwise you're inviting trouble there's certain things you just don't do those and fight trouble You know, so I think about that a lot. The wording changes because because we all use a different language and a different vernacular. You know, our lexicon is filled with different words and things like that to describe the same thing that we're observing. And we're all observing human nature. We just come up with different words for it. So, you know, Robert Greene and his education and his writing and 50 Cent with his lived experience, they both have seen the same thing. and have different words to describe it, but it overlays perfectly. And then because it's from two different perspectives,

you create, it's not one plus one equals two, it's like one plus one equals seven. And you get an even deeper and wider perspective on these things. This episode is brought to you by Bullish. They've reinvented the digital asset exchange. They give you access to DeFi features like automated market making and liquidity pools

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with half your iq who's accomplishing 10x what you are because they're not smart enough to doubt themselves which is just like yes like talk a little bit more about why did you think that was So such an important point. Because you get a lot of people who everything is planning, planning, planning, planning, planning, planning, planning, planning, planning, but the execution. Because the execution is where you get to find out, is it a good idea? Now that's where you face rejection. I'm working with a kid right now. He has been training, fighting.

He's been in the gym, going to like a real MMA boxing for four years. How many fights do you think this guy got? Zero. He got no fights. And I'm like, what are you doing? Like, do you want to fight or do you want to just say you train to fight? If it's the, you know, the latter, cool. It's cool.

What are we talking for? But you want to fight. So go fight. Go sub-novice. And every time we talk, you know, he's got a reason why he hasn't done it yet. And I'm like, no, just take the fight. Just do it. And when you notice that a lot of people live like that because execution is scary.

Every idea is a good idea in your head. And there are some people who are not able to deal with the idea that perhaps it's not the best idea. perhaps reality is going to go you know let's go back to the drawing board with this one it's terrifying represent like it represents so much of what we're afraid of wasted time rejection embarrassment but the people who get far they're the ones that embrace that in fact you know one of my favorite sayings is look when you're living true to yourself you look forward to being rejected because that is that's the most efficient way to cut out the fluff when someone like like when you know it is not a good idea when you know it's not going to

work when you know and then you know that because the market it says yo this is some bullshit uh you can go back with it but if you take it personally you'll never do it and that's the problem people take it personally you ever heard you ever heard the story elon musk uh when they start a boring company no so he's at spacex and uh at some point putting tunnels becomes a topic of discussion and uh my theory is that they're practicing for mars because they believe that we're gonna have to uh be underground for some period of time and so if you want to be get good at uh doing tunnels on mars you probably should start on earth uh but other people say it's cause of traffic or whatever the, the, the reasoning is, but, uh,

they're talking about it and he basically says to a room of engineers or whatever, he says, uh, all right, figure out, uh, you know, could we dig a tunnel? And so they talk for a few minutes or whatever. I suppose if somebody says to him, uh, all right, I think we could figure this out. And he goes, uh, when can we get started? And they say, uh, it takes us about two weeks and it's on Friday. And he says, how about you go out in the parking lot right now and see how far you get by

sunday and they literally within two hours they were out in the parking lot digging a hole in the ground to see how big of a hole they could dig and it's like two weeks to most people would be like damn we're moving and he was like right this fucking second go outside in the parking lot don't worry about permits don't worry about getting equipment just go outside with whatever we got and see how far we could dig by Sunday. And that, look, this is something I struggle with, too. That speed of implementation. Because, look, the sooner you do it, the sooner you get it.

And, look, it might be a great idea by itself. You don't need to add anything else. You might discover something you didn't even, that you, we can come over. I always used to think about this when they're doing quality testing for video games, like how they figure out all the ways this can go wrong. I always wondered that. What if they have a bunch of beta testers? They know how it should work, right, based on their design and what they think,

and even with their simulations. But until you get real people and they're testing and going, they have no idea. And that's why that testing period, they discover and fix the things. It's the same way with anything that goes on in your head. You get to it. You just get out there and go quick. And look, I am not the biggest offender anymore. I'm getting better.

But that planning phase is, to say overrated is incorrect because you need something. But you need a lot less, especially when the cost for failure is so low. you know it's not like it's not like heart surgery like this is a pretty big big penalty if you you know you go in there you get a bunch of people and you're gonna figure this out oh now let's get the butter knife and we'll just see what happens but but when it comes to something like like starting a company or writing or not even something like that you know just start a website you want to write start a website right just get it out there because the cost of you making a mistake is so low but what you learn the experience you get is so high that there really

isn't a better way what are you gonna do go study writing for four years and what's your degree uh now i'm qualified right no it doesn't work that way real world i think that's one of the biggest changes in the real world now is that we have moved from your your credentials mattering to you watching people who know a lot less in the same field that you study making real big moves. I mean, it would absolutely, I don't even know how one gets here, but I would just be sitting there kind of hot if I'm watching, if I studied marketing for four years out of college,

paid like $120,000, and I come out and there's this 19-year-old kid this figured out all i gotta do is make some catchy videos on tiktok and put a link in the description hold up if you think about it that is right now i think a lot of uh street versus the boardroom like my entire not my entire worldview but a lot of my worldview is informed by those two things which is the there's the street approach there's the street mentality there's the street you know like all these different components to life and then there's the boardroom and what does the boardroom do they plan what does the street do action right boardroom they sit there and they say okay well you need the credentials you need this

the street says hey you got the product or do you not right i mean it's like it's like a very different view of the world but that but marketing is a great example i actually think today the person who is able to i don't know take a twitter account or tiktok account or whatever and then say to a company hey in three months i went from nothing to 50 000 followers here's the engagement all this stuff and another person shows up and says i went to harvard for marketing i How much of the company picks the person who's doing it? At least the company should. Yeah.

Yeah, at least they should. Like my website, you know, Google has been Google. And what that means is that once the technology really became viable to implement mass, like we've always had, to my understanding, GPT-3 or something to that effect. uh pretty much the predictive kind of what this is what the ability to write and the ability to read and kind of figure out what words mean quickly and and that's like a combination of a huge database and processing power and then i guess on the on the last and you need um some conduit like like fast internet right okay so so you see this with google translate and that's what

google translate does and how it gets better and how it kind of figures out the difference between regions and and that's why like you can you can type something in today and get one translation and in six months get a better one because it is in a sense learning and this and i and i bring this up to say that is the basis as i understand it for a lot of the updates google has made to the algorithm for its its searches you know they go in there and tweak what they wanted to to emphasize and downgrade like for example it made a big adjustment back in 2019 or 2018 where you know we were talking about health stuff but you didn't have the credentials behind it like it was a dot edu or dot gov or or some like webmd or something like that you know you were downright

because they're like yo these people you know have credibility you're just this site let's figure it No matter how well it's written. Why did I bring all this up? These changes wiped out a lot. There were a lot of people that enjoyed, you know, had their websites and blogs. People were complaining that these changes, you know, disrupted everything. Because it wasn't just like, that's just the field I used, medicine. But, you know, the like finance, it took hits too, all of these.

Well, I'm not going to give up because that's my site. We took a hit, man. We did. I was cruising along, about to crack 20,000 followers, visitors per month, organic, and we just got dinged. And I was like, all right, what are we going to do? Well, I'm going to learn SEO. I'm going to learn the street way, though, which is pretty much what I did, man, because everything in my mind, I'm actually putting together now so I can teach somebody directly. And then from there, I'll probably produce a product.

But I learned a lot about how SEO works because I had a vested interest in having my site work. And on the last I checked, you know, this is over three years almost now, but been figuring out, taking different dings, learning, seeing what works, what doesn't, and figuring out tools. Well, now it's 60,000 visitors per month organic. And that is because I didn't give up and it continues to bump and bump and go up. But it's all from that street approach. In fact, I didn't take any classes until even someone's course. I didn't do anything probably until the last three months when I was well on my way up. But I was like, oh, let's learn and see if there's anything I don't know because I've been figuring out a lot here.

Let's see who else knows what. And I think that's really the best approach. Even learning, learning works this way, I think, great, too, because because every time I come to Miami, I'm reminded of sometimes I feel good about my Spanish and other times I'm just like, OK, right. But but the way I discovered a method on on YouTube, I was like, wow, this guy's brilliant. He put together this thing where he may where he took himself to fluent in French and Spanish in 45 days. Right. Now, now he did it devoted eight hours per day, which I don't have. But you look at it and you can pull a lot from it. And one of the things I took from it, this was so cool.

One of the things you do, you sit and you tell a story very personal to you. You just need to have the ability in the language to construct a sentence. And when you don't know the word you want to use for the story, you write that down. You put it in the translate, you pop it in an Anki deck so you can read, review it, review it. And then you come back and you just keep trying to tell the same story, tell the same story, tell the same story until it feels that you can go through the whole story. And a funny thing happens with this very simple bump into the wall method as opposed to studying different things. One, you've got a working vocabulary that is personal to you because you're telling a story. Like the first story I put together was like the first date with me and my wife now.

And I'm like, oh, now I know these words. I thought I knew when I didn't know. But now I have it because it's very personal to me and then the tense of speaking and all that. But I picked it up from bumping into the wall. Okay? That's so much better than how we typically go about teaching language, which is go and learn some grammar and hear a bunch of sentences that mean nothing to you, so why would you remember them?

Like, you know, even Duolingo, I love Duolingo. Duolingo was based in Pittsburgh. I better love Duolingo, right? Even Duolingo, like, because it's just an interface and it's good for some things, no method can do this where you put together a vocabulary and an approach that's valuable to you, that has meaning to you. And when you do that, combined with just trying to bump into the wall, trying to talk to people and use these words, then you really, and then you start to feel confident. And then you can go, okay, let me look at a book because I'm like, man, I have no idea how to use the imperfect for this verb.

And let me go look this up now. But you get a feeling that you need something like what you do for there, but for a new situation and you're not going to find it. So bumping into the wall, street method, however you want to call it. I'll call it bumping into the wall, but I think I'm going to start calling it the street method. It's a lot better. I've always thought of these people as Googlers. Now, that term was co-opted by the company Google. That's what they call their employees are Googlers, but put that aside for a second.

They got the pinwheel hats. Didn't know that. I'm going to have to remember that because- Yeah, yeah, they call themselves Googlers, and they got the, you ever seen, I forget what the comedy movie is, but they got the pinwheel hat, you know, like the multicolored hat, and he's got the little thing that spins at the top. That's real. They give those to the Googlers on campus.

But I always think of Googler as you ever like hang out with somebody and they're just constantly on their phone or their computer, but it's everything you talk about, they don't know something, they immediately just go and they look it up. I love those people. It's so much. We have like the world's knowledge at your fingertips. I love this, man, because I'm always in awe of technology.

Like I never stopped being in awe of the world I'm in. I mean, we were in Juneau, and I just was watching the planes coming. I was like, man, we figured out how to put a metal tube that weighs tons into the air full of people. And stuff like that makes me feel in awe. Like, whenever I read about old cities, and I'm like, man, we have sanitation and plumbing. Like, you can, like, go to the bathroom, and it's not going to end up on the street. Like, that's cool. One of the things that just amazes me is that we have this handheld.

Handheld. not this big old room, a handheld device. And in that handheld device, you are simultaneously connected to every other human on the planet who has one. And they all have one because you need them now. And the whole sum of human knowledge is at your disposal. All you have to do is develop the skills to ask the right questions. And Google has a commercial incentive to make sure they Figure out how to best pair your Your question with the best answer And if they didn't you know

If you really wanted to dig deep you just go in a dark Web or figure things out things like that But there's so many resources and so Many ways like there's no reason to Not know anything it's crazy Like every time someone goes I'm not sure Oh let me just look it up and there are very few Situations where it's inappropriate to pull my

Phone out and look it up So there's no there's no reason To ever like doubt facts and then you know And then from there and people go that makes the quite the conversation drop. I'm like, no, no, no, no, no. We don't have conversations to discuss and swap facts. We have conversations to connect and see perspectives

and understand one another. It puts the focus back on the conversation, why you have it, if you don't have to debate a fact. And it also adds clarity. Sports is the place where you see this the most. People start debating each other, and they're pulling all the stats, right? And they're just doing whatever. The other thing around technology,

I'm reading a book right now called The Rise and Fall of American Growth, which is absolutely the worst book if you want to be entertained, but it's 700 pages of super dense information all about the economy and all this stuff. And somebody recommended it to me and I've enjoyed it so far.

But the reason why I enjoy it is the lessons are pretty simple. Like his argument is basically economists think that economies grow forever as long as no one touches them. I disagree. like that's basically he wrote 700 pages on it right but the book is littered with all these super interesting facts so one of them is uh in like 1908 the ford model t comes out uh it was

950 dollars by 1923 15 years later they'd gotten the cost down 70 percent like 269 dollars well well they used a uh a manufacturing method where there was a line of people who were manufacturing the product and you just did the doors right and like okay well that's how we manufacture everything today there was literally somebody who pioneered that implemented it and now that is how manufacturing is done then they talk uh in the book i think it's like 1870 or so uh which we think of like the 1800s 150 years ago right all homes were completely disconnected from the world you had an outhouse you had water that you had to go get like you had to be self-sufficient by 1940 which again sounds like kind of a crazy thing but it's only 70 years

pretty much all homes in any urban area had water gas electricity like they were hooked up now right or what they call networked and so you think man 70 years when someone was born it was self-sufficient completely unconnected world before they died everything was completely different and so you're like okay like that's a lot of change but then he makes an argument where he says the speed of transportation has not changed since 1950 when we went from the stagecoach to automobiles automobile is not like all some we're all going 200 miles an hour right like they pretty much have been going the same speed you know since the 50s okay planes the boeing 707 is the example he uses like 1953 or whatever uh goes about the same speed it's not like we're making these you know

10x improvements over what is now 70 years in the speed of transportation and so his point is basically like there's very compacted time where there's immense innovation uh uh inventions progress like all these changes and we go like really long periods of time and nothing happens and so for you and i we think about like google's like a fucking crazy thing right and it is around information and technology you know like this information technology world but if we actually sat here and we're like what are the major innovations that we've seen in like the physical world over the last you know 50 years sure tesla with the electric car like we can come up with a couple a few yeah self the smartphone versus a dumb phone like you know like shit like that right

okay i got it but not like the invention of fucking electricity right something it is the in fact i think the last thing like the invention of electricity would be like the internet right and even that is still a like a digital thing yeah now it helps right and this is where it gets kind of a nuanced conversation because the internet obviously drastically uh kind of created innovation all these industries and all this stuff but like it is interesting to think about how many inventions happened in a certain period of time and then if you think today like it's not like you and i wake up every day and we're like damn somebody created you know like we get super excited over like pretty small stuff now and so it leads to this conversation

around like yeah everything is digital where all the innovation is happening are you are you bumping to this is a new problem and it's one that like when you you talk about it's like of course but But then until you run into it, you're like, wow, this is really a thing. There are no physical mediums anymore that people distribute. Pretty much the age of physical medium for distributing entertainment is over, at least in terms. Because we went from, in my, in our lifetime, VHS, DVD, and then they were like, yo, we can help you out with the illegal copies of your download and download and download. Bluetooth, or Blu-ray, not Bluetooth, Blu-ray. And then full circle, because now everything's digital, so now everything is hidden behind, like, and now it's much easier to secure.

like good luck trying to trying to download stuff now i mean sure you can but you really got to be about that life it's not like hopping on limewire or bit torrent you know where anyone could do it limewire was a fucking lottery you didn't get in the file you getting the virus you didn't know you didn't know what you was getting but now you know boom mama i was thinking about because we went to a um just to watch a local band perform and afterwards they were selling merch selling copies of their work and they had cds and i was like where the hell am i going to play this like i never thought about that before it was like oh do you have the tape then we've been around long enough to go oh do they have the tape version i don't have a cd player yet

to oh i'll get the cd but you have the mp3 now it's like there's only really one way to get this don't don't give me a cd what am i doing this like i can't my my macbook doesn't have one of my home there's no none of my you gotta get an extra piece of hardware to have a play why would we have that that's old yeah you know the the other uh the other piece i think a lot about um i'm assuming based on our conversation that uh you read a decent amount uh do you read physical books you got kindle you do audiobooks how do you consume so okay so it it depends on From what I'm reading, I will not read fiction on my Kindle or my phone. Okay.

But nonfiction I do because it's just easier to take notes and then transfer those notes out. And then on top of that, I love this little thing you do on your Kindle where you highlight a section. And you can write what you're thinking and type that in. And that really helps me absorb the information and really helps me learn it. But I won't read fiction that way. I think fiction is a special thing. and and if we if we consume it that way i think we rob the specialness of it which is which is one it's not a note-taking medium it's not even the thing you holler i mean maybe maybe you like see

a quote you really like but then you just go remember write it down but because i'm reading it in a physical book then i know it is this thing i can take with me and immerse myself into but when i read on my kindle i'm automatically thinking all right there's probably gonna be some information i'm gonna like take down so i'm not not reading it with the with the undiluted focus that i should that i you know approach my fiction with i don't read fiction so i can't speak to oh well here's uh we're going back to our conversation around uh uh i read a lot but i know what i'm good at i know what i'm not and for fiction whatever reason i just it's like a lack of interest which is probably makes me less well-rounded but that's just what that is what it

is right but the reason why i bring this up uh three four months ago uh up until then i pretty much read everything either some sort of kindle type device or whatever or audiobooks i did a lot of audiobooks i sat down i tried to read the physical book my head hurt i couldn't concentrate no kidding and it like pissed me off i was like what do you mean i can't sit and just read a book i literally could not read the book my my head started hurting my eyes were hurting like all my eyes hurt sometimes just like the fluorescent lights or whatever right but like i was like this is bullshit like i think i was like mad at myself right so for the last like three four months i only will read the physical books now i've like forced myself to be able to read the physical

books now. And, uh, so over the weekend, um, I was on a flight and, uh, I listened to audio, but first of all, I listened to it. I felt like I was on crack. I was like, Oh shit, this is two X speed. Like I was blowing through this book. Right. But then what it goes back to is like, I don't know, retention wise, like maybe I get like 90% retention out of the physical book. Maybe it's like 75% of that audio. So it's like, it's pretty similar, but definitely a little less on audio um but the physical book it made me think i was like all this technology all this information at our fingertips all these things like the physical book made my head hurt yeah and all we hear about is how the computers are gonna make our heads and our eyes hurt

it blew my mind so there's some there's some some interesting i guess you know weak core maybe weak maybe strong correlations, whatever, right? But we talk about there's this rise in ADHD diagnosis. And it's like, and it doesn't really make sense when you look at it. It goes, okay, we've known about this thing forever. And all of a sudden skyrocketing, skyrocketing amounts of diagnoses. And I only know about this in context to a speech I gave about how boys are treated kind of like

defective girls in the school system and one of the points I raised and how I found that data was that this raise in ADHD, boys are represented four to five times more than girls. It's a rising tide on all

fronts. And I think about this a lot in terms of screens because although we're looking at this thing and And in an ideal world, you know, we're just focusing on pulling it in. I think by nature what screens do, you know, with the notable exception, you know, being if you read your Kindle that way. Well, no, screen, even with the Kindle, because you can swipe your screens, allow you to change the speed.

They allow you to be distracted typically however you want to be. They change how you bring in the information. And if you're still bringing in the information, that means something has to fundamentally change about how you're processing it. And when you go back to a book without those things, I think my guess would be that it's like the opposite of training with weights on and then you go take the weights off. Well, you go on faster. Yeah, it's great because you're in control of it. But if you remove all these stressors, then you can't – in fact, here's a great analogy, and I just thought about this. There's this great book called The Epidemic of Absence, nonfiction if you want to check it out.

The basic thesis of The Epidemic of Absence is that our immune systems evolved in a hostile environment, full of pathogens, full of disease, full of filth, whatever, right? and now that that we don't have that we live in a clean society you see that's why you see this rise of allergies because the the immune system is like yo i need to i need to give me something right that looks that's a protein it looks kind of like the other proteins and viruses and bacteria i'll attack it and so you get your allergies to you know shellfish and eggs and milk etc right and that's the other thing then like the author goes and like infects himself with a tape worm and it tamps down his allergies to his hay fever and stuff like that. But I think about that a lot, especially in this context,

which is we have this, our immune system didn't take a break. It didn't change. Our environment changed and it was like, I'm going to attack something else. And that thing is typically helpful to you, but it looks close enough, like what I'm used to dealing with. let me go do something let's take that that that uh analogy and what and we will use it for for reading you get used to pulling in your information just right there in front of your face you devote all your mental activity to it because that's what you'd have to do to read i don't mean

like i think reading one musical is probably a relatively new thing but but i can see how um it's it's possible without it interfering too much but i know like i have trouble reading especially uh music with with words in it i couldn't do it i looked this up recently because i thought to myself as i was trying to figure out the book i said i wonder if uh it's better or worse and as you just alluded to with words uh scientifically is shown it distracts your brain it it screws up your ability to read uh but even music without words they say It's like classical music because of the distraction. It gives me trouble.

So it's like you have this method of pooling in information, total focus, and then you bring in a new method. By its very nature of design comes with a new, you're not turning pages. You're able to kind of skim not as much as on in front of you at the same time as there would be with a book. you have all these new things that aren't necessarily improvements in the sense of

they make you a better or more efficient reader maybe faster but not necessarily more efficient because your brain's like well I'm gonna give you I gotta do something, give me something and there's only so many words I can pull in here alright we're gonna mess with your eyesight

you know or we're gonna make you every time you see something you'll look it up immediately and get pulled out. And we know how long it takes for you to get your focus back when it's broken on something. And so you may not even be able to focus as long as you used to be able to because your focus is now used to being broken up, broken up, broken up

whenever you get a push notification or something like that or you want to look something up or you want to highlight something. And that's very unnatural to highlight while you're reading where you're used to just pulling in information. But this is all just my, I never put these two things together before, but in this conversation, putting these ideas together, that's my guess. That is, or at the very least, that's an interesting explanation, and it's an easily testable one.

What happens when you go back to reading without the screen? I enjoy it more, too. And you're able to focus a lot more, I'd imagine. this episode is brought to you by valor which represents what's next in the digital economy they provide simplified trusted access in crypto decentralized finance and web3 investment opportunities institutions and investors can gain diversified secure compliant and easily tradable access to a diversified set of industry-leading equity products and protocols all through a single stock purchase on a regulated exchange they currently are listed in the u.s

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start investing today. One of the science research kind of paths that I find fascinating is there's a lot of work, Stoics, there's Ryan Holiday's written books, like all the stuff around just like focus, stillness, like all this type of stuff can lead to more idea generation or whatever. So if you basically sit for 30 minutes while a lot of people get ideas in the shower, right, because they're not doing anything else, their mind kind of wanders, they think of something, whatever. But there's also a bunch of research around walking. And so the walking becomes really interesting because you could take a person and they aren't moving. That is the least, you know, kind of beneficial thing. And then the other extreme is that they're literally walking

outside, but there's this middle ground. What about walking on like a treadmill, right? Or like, oh, you got these standing walking desks, whatever. It's actually shown that part of the value of walking to the brain is one, there's a physical component, but two is actually the movement forward. And so the research on lock saying like, no, if you're going to walk, get your ass outside and walk, not mimic almost like a lab rat, you know, walking on the trail. Now it's better than sitting or you're just standing there. Uh, but the benefit to actually walking and moving through the environment, your brain does something different than just walking on like a treadmill stationary. It's fascinating. Not only that, and this is a rare case. I can't remember the name of

the author and not the book. I can't even see the cover of the book in my head. Weird. But Barbara Oakley is the author, and she writes about learning. It might be that the science of learning something to that effect. I'm not sure. But Barbara Oakley is the author, and she talks about the diffuse mind state versus the focus. And when we're focused, we're like trying, we're like the analogy she gave was the focus is you're looking at each individual dot and trying to navigate around it and figuring out. And diffuse is where you step back and you see this whole pattern and you see the whole layout. You may not be thinking about how to get through it, but you're just absorbing it. Your brain's kind of working on the process to get through it in

the background. One of the things that walking does, showering does, doing anything else but working on the immediate problem does is that it lets it lets you kind of step back and it's always there it's in the back of your mind otherwise it's not important but then when you're not thinking about it that's when you make these connections that you couldn't see kind of like you know the whole forest for the trees analogy when you're looking at the individual trees because you're trying to get out the forest you don't realize the path the the most optimal path to follow unless you know it but if you step back and you're or step up in this case or raise up and you're able to look down and see oh the path is really clear but now you're out the force how are you going to

communicate it down hopefully you carry it but it's but it's only uh it's only in that diffuse mode that we make a lot of the these connections that we're able to see how things work and play together like i mean i wasn't even thinking about the epidemic of absence and i make this connection to reading and those are two two fields that don't really why would they ever match but you know because i was thinking and talking about this and this is in the background and that's like an analogy kind of like a mental model that i that i use a lot that i find a lot of people don't have which is that you know the the idea that a thing has a purpose and when you remove that purpose the thing doesn't change it just figures out another way to to do what it thinks it's supposed

to do these connections get made it's um tool versus environment a lot of times right and uh i always think of it uh in the most extreme situations right so i just jumped to the extreme so i can take a gun and all the gun debate and all that goes on in america today right it's like look there's a lot of different tools but uh they can be used for good or bad and uh that doesn't mean necessarily that we shouldn't address the use of the tool or that certain people should have access or not have access or whatever like there's all this nuance you and i aren't gonna solve this whatever but it always shocks me as to the level of uh uh elementary analysis i was i was gonna say binary thinking yeah just just like like yo this is a tool like can we all at least

at least agree on that part which is a important almost building block to have a discussion around what should the rules be and there's like a whole group of people who just like no it's not a tool Exactly. And it's really hard here because, you know, something when you learn a stat, something they tell you, you just kind of take for face value. They tell you that intelligence is normally distributed. You just take that for face value because most people are never going to have the opportunity to verify that at all, to put it to the test. And then you're on social media and you have a large, following a lot of interactions and you realize, holy shit, this is, not only is this true, it might actually be exaggerated. and one of the the difficulties humans have and i have no idea what like or if there's even an iq level or something like that or cut out point is is to consider contrary thoughts without being

attached to our well the ability to detach their personality from the thought their ego because i think that's what what uh inhibits a lot of constructive discussion is people if i if i'm pro-second amendment and and i make you know guns a part of my identity right that's who i am i can't entertain any discussion that might reduce my access to them or anyone else's access to them i can't do it if i see that as part of my personality and i'm not open to to any way to actually make the world a better place by perhaps making, you know, perhaps by being more pro-gun.

You know, as weird as that sounds, people go, okay, I'm going to have to give ground. Well, what if you don't have to give ground? What if the ground you think you're given actually makes your position stronger? You know, I have this talk all the time with people about guns. Guns is just a great way.

It's the most extreme case, right? Well, not only is it the most extreme, It's really an easily discussable one because we have so many examples and so many, not just examples of when things go wrong or right. Interestingly enough, though, for things to go right, they have to be wrong, but that's a different discussion. But we also have a lot of different debates we've seen and have them pop up. But if you entertain the idea For example Man, funny how relevant these things happen

I was just having a discussion I said, look, I'm as pro-gun As anyone, you know, can be But I think If you're going to have a gun You need to train with that thing Have you really ever gotten My instructor tells me this all the time

Most people don't go to the range And they need to go to the range Because when I bring up Everyone goes, oh, they cite you Your boy, I think it was down in Texas maybe, or Illinois, where he shot the guy who was going to do a shooting in the mall and he stopped it. And I go, look, you got to understand, I don't know where that guy got his training or where

he trained, but that is a trained dude. It's like 40 yards. He hit him like eight out of 10 shots. At 15 yards, the average person is not going to even hit the target, let alone center mass. It's not happening. So all I proposed, I said, look, everybody who has a gun, they should have to put in training hours. I really believe that. You shouldn't be walking around with something that can end a life with just that, with just pulling a trigger, and you don't have to train with it.

And the blowback I got on this idea, they were like, I don't think people should have to train. I don't think people, you know, if they want to have a gun, it's our god given right. I'm like, I'm not telling you to give up your guns. What I'm saying is you'll actually be a better gun owner. Like, do you realize that? And it didn't, they couldn't give any ground on everyone should have guns. I always like to ask people who seem to be kind of dug in on a topic. You know, so let's take a very pro-gun person.

I would ask them, is there ever an instance where you think somebody should not own a gun? Yeah. Right? like just like just again by the way uh they'll be like no i'm like all right so uh if somebody has killed multiple people before has a documented mental illness like this you know like just go to the extreme right like do you think that person have a gun if they say yes i'm done talking to you yeah right and then you go to the other end though right you say that the anti-gun people is there ever a situation where you think somebody should be allowed to own a gun yeah and if they're

like no my okay well what happens if somebody is breaking into your house with your child you know like all these different things, right? And if they still say, no, I don't think I should be able to defend themselves, it's okay, I'm done talking to you too. That's actually, you know, that's a great, great tactic. That's probably going to save me a lot because my weakness on the internet,

I'm one of the, I would like to think anyhow. I'm one of the more patient, respectful people on the internet. That's changed a little bit, but only because, one of the cool things about knowing you have a kid on the way is you start thinking about what's important. And I'm like, your stupid opinion isn't important to me. I have no interest in changing it. That's relatively recent, but I'm sure I'll go back to my baseline.

But I tend to give people the benefit of the doubt. And I think overall that's a good strategy because it allows me to at least have a conversation and see where they're at. From a tactical perspective, like I have a good strategy, but that's a sound tactic to start. okay do you think there's ever an instance where you would change your stance okay well and then you give some nope well then we can save ourselves some time but if we can find that if we can find some ground we're like it i mean i guess that's common ground if we're like if we're gonna debate about guns and we can both find that common ground there is there's a situation where you should not have one okay now we can talk but if you're not even you know it's basically

it's my way to filter uh i just want to know i'm talking to a person who could have a rational conversation yeah that's a good way to go like like i have no interest in talking to irrational people where it's become a religion right or it's become like because you never want to get through to that i don't talk to people and try to convince them to give up their religion right and if you do that amazing i feel uh that makes you happy that's great i'm guessing the success record of that is pretty low right and so if you then just say to yourself like cool i just want to talk to people who uh can see a little bit of nuance that's okay we don't agree but at least i it's like a good faith conversation where i know that like all right right you you see a piece of the conversation

that the most extreme in your camp don't see and that then makes it at least worth the time to start a conversation you know always man a little body's conversations are great because once again a another insight that just came to me that I never really made on my own. So I think that's a defining characteristic of someone who would be considered extremist, at least to me, because I'm always really fascinated with the idea of, one, what makes a person extreme, and two, do people who are on their side but not as extreme see them as extreme or not?

Those are two really interesting. a question to me. And that idea that, okay, can you see a situation where your perspective is incorrect? Or at the very least, your perspective is inadequate, where there needs to be a modification. If you can't see that, then yeah, I think that would qualify as someone who's extreme. But if you can see how it will change and be – then it's different. And I think that's a really good – if I apply that filter to a variety of social issues, that we face everything from race to religion to abortion or guns, you apply that filter to – you can pretty much suss out relatively quickly

who the extremists are and who are the people who can have reasonable conversations. I think that if you take this exact same framework and during the debates on the political side, every candidate should have to answer what is one thing that your candidate believes that you agree with that goes against your own party. And if you say nothing, you're disqualified.

right like like to to some degree that just that alone like what is something that the other person believes that you tend to believe more than what the standing you know kind of uh line in the sand of the party is but you know uh politics at least in this country they they've done a really it's almost it would be impressive if it wasn't so destructive they've made it so so you know there's the we'll just say left and right there are the ideas on the left and the ideas on the right all right and the odds of you you know if you believe one idea on the left the odds you believe in the other ideas are pretty high whether that's accurate or not is irrelevant what is relevant is that i can typically with some accuracy and consistency uh if i know how you

fill in one thing, I don't know how you fill in a bunch of other things, okay, they've weaponized this, because now you can't, if you're, let's say you're left-leaning on the abortion issue, right, but you're a pro-gun, mm-mm, pick one, you can't be both, even though those things are not related, you're either going to be a, you got to decide, are you going to go on everything for the left or everything on the right, but they're not going to let you mix and match and the people who do that they they almost in like an insult almost like censure centrist because because you know no one wants to be called a libertarian anymore because now they're trying to make that like uh oh it's just a way to be a right winger that's

what they they say because they don't they don't want that neutrality you know even even street gangs recognize neutrality man but not the thing um that i do uh believe is a very powerful force in politics right now which no one is uh uh uh acknowledging or talking about is the weaponization of extremism where there's pulling to the extremes which i think people recognize that and they say okay x candidate or x uh politician they are on the extreme of that party right so we recognize that but what people aren't yet talking about is the labeling of extremism so the right winger thing is like a perfect example where it doesn't matter what you actually believe right like uh uh i've heard joe rogan talk about uh the fact that they were

like oh this right-leaning uh republican people he's like i've voted for fucking democrats my entire life right yep and i don't know maybe it's a nostalgia or whatever but 20 years ago if somebody came out and said i am a democrat i vote for democrats i whatever then like people like that's a democrat that doesn't happen now it's all about the label the label is actually almost more important what they thought and now in reverse it works the same way the right will label certain people and say uh that's socialist that's a you know whatever the terminology uh that kind of proves the point and so if you kind of again just take a step back and you look at kind of the whole playing field what you realize is it's not about the truth nope it has nothing

to do with the truth this is all a propaganda war that is being fought by two different factions and if it wasn't in the United States, if we looked at it and this was Iraq, for example, you know what the storyline would be in the United States? The two warring factions led by, like the language would be so different and we would all sit there in the United States and we'd be like, that's crazy and move on with our day

because it's our politics. No one sees it. You know, one of the observations I made, You know, look, here's the here's the problem would be in a call it. I would like to consider myself a free thinker. Now, I will also say at the same time, a lot of people who consider themselves free thinkers haven't all think the same. And don't you think that's funny? But canceled. But one of the things about about being black is you're expected to think and toe a certain line.

And I think that's one of the most destructive things that can happen is people look at me – and when I say people, I mean a general group of politically motivated people who see me being black as a card to play. They get them on our side, speak, platform, whatever. OK, but. When I when I question things that that I go, well, that's not racist, right? You know, and you try to get them to pin down a definition of racism and then they can't do that. I think one of the dangers here and I get to say it because I'm or at least I used to now. Now I'm an Uncle Tom and a coon when I bring it up. But I can say that's not racist. Like, you might not like how it feels, but let's not throw it and call it racist. And here's the thing.

When you call everything that's a slight against you, when you try and put a racial spin on it, then what happens is actual racism is kind of gets to slip in because you don't even recognize it anymore. Like there's this great video about the voter ID laws where a guy goes and asks a bunch of people on Berkeley's campus what they think about voter ID laws. And everyone's like, oh, you know, they disproportionately affect minorities because they have less money and they can't figure out the Internet and they can't go get to the DMV. and so we need these and I'm sitting here listening I'm like

do you hear like you don't you don't hear like that's the real racism to assume that because and then he goes by contrast

and goes into Harlem and asks someone's wife yeah I know what a DMV is like everybody's got the ID you can't even you can't buy alcohol without the ID everything

so I thought that was like when I saw that I was like wow because we're not because we're not allowed to question or they try to make it so you you know you you can't question things or pin down definitions and that's a totally different conversation uh the manipulation of our

language and really trying to make it ambiguous so that it can fit whatever purpose we needed to fit all right let's call let's call it racist when we introduce you know when we oppose something called the voter ID law but it's not racist when you go over the reasons which all center around degrading either at least you know pointing out our lack of function that's why we need it we obviously can't get to the dmv uh then we have a problem and so that is that is one of the other problems with politics today is the manipulation of these labels and i think words are powerful man i think that's why i'm drawn to them because i understand how powerful they are and if you watch Just the manipulation of these things is incredible.

Did you see the Black Lives Matter donation slash lawsuit? Yep. So I don't know a ton about this. I saw a headline. I think I read two paragraphs. I want to be careful that I don't fuck up any of the facts, frankly. But there was one specific sentence in this statement that my head was in a blunder. I couldn't understand kind of how this all plays out,

so I would love to hear kind of you riff on it a little bit. There's two, I guess, factions, right, that have kind of come out of the situation. There was a bunch of money that was donated. One of the co-founders being accused of taking or using $10 million. It's basically a personal slush fund. That's my words, not theirs, but that was just the general kind of accusation. that individual appears to almost be saying like oh uh the other group is using the white man's system to oppress me and so when i saw like it just like on that alone it was just one of these

situations where i was just like holy shit we're headed into a world like i don't even worry about like today it's like 10 years from now it almost gets to the point where like it will be impossible to navigate the world without offending someone yep and and whether that's by design or not that's a different conversation but when you when you when you decide that words don't when you strip away the meaning of a word right are you modified slightly but there's a consistency we we understand that that's that's what a dialect kind of is you know you use these words a certain way and we all agree with that what they mean the problem is uh when you are allowed to change them whenever the situation suits you and then no one calls you out or checks you on it like like oppress who's

oppressing you you have 10 million dollars man like that's like it's crazy that one can go can say that with a straight face because you know hopefully hopefully you know the the powers that be take care of this problem but let's navigate the mindset to get you to the point where you think that's that's an okay like like and probably genuinely believe it i don't i don't think it's a cop out that's another important piece of a lot of things not just race related just across society i do always ask myself um given the facts that are publicly known does it appear that this person actually believes what they're saying yeah and i actually do think in most cases people do believe what they're saying which almost makes it crazier oh yeah

right because you're like oh no that person really believes that they're wrong they're like completely wrong but they do believe what they're saying you can correct ignorance or at the very least you can remedy it you know by by putting the correct information in front but but insanity uh you like you almost by definition you can't really do anything about that so so when a person says that they really think they're being oppressed that they really think they suffered at the hands of something you know they're how do you prove to them that they haven't how do you get them to go no it's not quite that way yeah you can't do it so you know what man the whole blm thing um I used to think it was just somebody's really bad marketing and that's what I called it

BLM because because if I'm going to attack it like let's let's say I'm an opponent and I'm going to attack I'm going to go well well they're they're you know Chirac was on fire this weekend well you know and it was a lot of black lives you know do those not matter but they only matter when they're taking out the hands of what you believe is someone who you can profit from and rile people up. I used to think that was just bad marketing. And now I am almost 100% convinced it's intentional if you call it this good name. And in that sense, it's brilliant marketing. You call it this name, it's very easy to get behind, very simple. Black Lives Matter, let's get out there, they matter. and then the fine print that no one sees no reason they matter when the police officer

shot them as white when the crime that happened against them was it was perceived to be by another model well by by white men and we're not going to worry about any of the interpersonal violence um or interracial violence and things like that uh because that's not important and we can't profit from that right that's like i mean that's how the fine print has to read based on their actions and I tried to have this discussion with somebody who's very pro call him pro Black Lives Matter and I was like well you know we just had this

crazy shooting and we gonna see them show up here but I know it's for the police I'm like well why are they called that you know and that is the power of words you get people who logically you can get them to follow it like okay they're not

showing up when there are other crimes when there of when there are violence and when there's violence in black communities at the hands of other black people uh and we can we can get them to logically take that step but then when i get them to go so we can agree that it's not that black lives matter it's that when there's a situation we can spin oh i won't even say spin that's my worst but they only matter when the people who are taking them are not black and you can like see the breakdown because either they admit that and i'm right or it's in denial and the concept is wrong like in general

just not right well they can't give and so they just go back and now we're talking more about people who can't you know yeah the um the other situation uh and i always get so nervous that i misspeak on uh on the exact details so this is a general recollection of it but the kid who his mom like drove him across uh state lines he had a gun he was at one of the protests uh he shot and killed two people uh i think it was the kenna shaw uh oh yeah written house written house carl written house yeah so i remember when like the trial happened i believe he shot two white people oh yeah it's crazy isn't it no no and the people on twitter were like whoa hold on that's That's not what we were told.

And this is something because I followed this like probably as closely as you'll ever get me following mainstream news. It doesn't affect me because I was curious because I didn't know things and and I wanted to see like what's the what's the deal is are we going to see. OK, but here's the thing. I'm not one way. We got to make sure justice is is distributed well and be aware of that because it's important for people who do wrong things to be punished. Right. Because if he if he was out there just randomly shooting black people, right, that's a big deal if they let him off any. But but but it's also a big deal if he's like not. We got to figure out what it is. And so when you go and learn the details of the case and the background of him, you know, this is a guy who, like, had been talking about Black Lives Matter himself.

He's a white kid. And as I remember, he was either donating or contributing or cleaning up. But he did shoot, you know, white guys. And so that's a great spin because, you know, what did Mark Twain say, man? A lie is halfway around the world Before the truth gets his shoes on And that was before the internet

So now You got people going up into the trial Who really believed that And I didn't dig too deeply into it But when I found out I was like okay Let me follow this little one closely Because there's a lot to learn here

And then you still You stay The whole state lines thing You know I believe that was his there was his grandmother or father's neighborhood it wasn't like he was just randomly on a bus i'm gonna go hunting like nah i uh that was the one time where i seems like similar to you and then like i don't really pay that much attention to like the national news about a lot of this stuff

and uh frankly the most interest that i have in you know kind of what i'd consider more local regional things that blow up to the national level is like oh there's a police chase like is a cool video which like you know good or bad whatever that's human nature like there there's some crazy thing that ends up being entertainment unfortunately for for some portion of population but this one uh i don't know if it's because it was being pushed so hard by the national media or whatever but like i feel like i kind of popped my head up and i was like oh that's uh not exactly what i what my assumptions were what i had thought i uh were the facts or whatever and then it was kind of one of these things where like i couldn't wait to like pull my head back down and just like

yeah yeah yeah that's not i don't want to be paying attention i'm not happy when i'm reading that stuff every day in terms of like the national news it really messes with you yeah and it was just one of these situations where i remember saying to myself like for me somebody who's on the internet a lot uh and like i don't know i like generally aware maybe of like the national news stories i don't pay a lot of attention to them but like i see what's trending on twitter you know all this stuff if i was that surprised i didn't even want to go why what was fox news saying an msnbc because again it's just like the mainstream twitter conversation you could see the shock and like the the outrage probably too extreme of a word but just like people being like

well there's more here that maybe we don't understand right that you could imagine the extremes of the mainstream media just pulling every detail spinning it doing all this stuff and you're just like it's just like we're all gonna die one day i don't want to spend i don't want to spend my time trying to figure out that's how i feel you know some of this people always ask me well not always they don't always ask me but but it comes up a lot because i've been i'm fairly vocal about it about my disinterest in politics and current events and i know that seems weird because we've just spent the last you know 20 or 30 minutes discussing these things but It's only because you can't really

Like it's very hard to be on the internet To the level we are And not be at least aware of things And some things you will You will dig deeper into Because they're just For whatever reason Whether it's because the details seem interesting

Or Or they just won't go away That's really the big one It just won't go away But for the most part, I try to maintain what I call a willful ignorance and active disinterest in a lot of the stuff that is on the politics and current media. Because, you know, at the end of the day, I figure like this. But let's forget the stoic stance. I really believe in that, which I'm going to die one day.

I would rather enjoy it. if something's a real big deal like real big deal that's gonna affect my life i'm gonna find out like oh like let's say i didn't know anything about real id and i just went on my way i'm gonna find out uh that my id is wrong i might have to do something about that even if but because i travel i'm gonna hear about anyway you know and and i think about the number of things that have happened in politics that bug me or that affect me, not bug me, that affect me. And I'm like, I can't think of much. And when they do, thank goodness I've structured my life in such a way.

If something really bothers me, like it's a really big deal, I'm just going to leave the country or move to another state. And a lot of people did that over the last two years. Right. They moved states. Moved states and moved country. I've just seen an article, it's trending about how Mexico people are complaining in Mexico City how there's too many white people in Mexico City.

And they're like, go back to America. And they're like, go back. And it's funny. I'm seeing that from Mexico. My wife's Portuguese. We're hearing record numbers of Americans in Portugal now. And it's still a small percentage, but there's a lot of people leaving. But that's where my stance is.

I have created this agency around my life. so that I don't have to worry about that stuff. And I think outside of people who make a living by knowing the game, like my brother-in-law, he's a wealth planner, and he makes a lot of his decisions on where to put money at based on what he believes the economy will do, and he comes to those conclusions from years of experience and watching the news.

Yeah, he probably should watch the news. I don't do any of that, so I don't pay attention to it. You know, and if it's a big deal, I'm going to find out. My life is going to get a real hard reminder quickly. There's one other thing that started to happen that I noticed, and it always scares me when I notice I got a new reaction to things I see. But it hit home this morning, actually. I was on Twitter, and I saw an account which, you know, in the gray area,

So, you know, something like a double check, uh, but they retweeted, uh, an account that I've never seen before. And, uh, it was a video and it said, uh, I thought Ukraine was being invaded or something to that effect. And it was, uh, allegedly a video of a party in Kiev of a bunch of what looked like 20 something year olds party in their faces off drinking no different than if on Friday night you went out in Miami and somebody took a video, right. And it looked like people playing beer pong, almost like a college party, right?

And there was like two or three levels, and it looked like maybe 50, 100 people there. Not what we would expect, right? Because on the same day, the same morning I see that, the president of Ukraine is ringing the stock market bell and basically pitching on CNBC the investment in Ukraine. And I just thought to myself, my first reaction was not good or bad. It was, is this video real? what's man people really look ukrainian oh like you know you start thinking to yourself like ah like what time could this video have been posted like you all of a sudden you're like now we're in

this weird world on the internet of like i don't even know if that video is really and so you can't even put the energy right yeah i just you know yeah i'm trying i'm slightly at a loss for words only because i have this this exact reaction to everything in fact you ever see the matrix and and the first time um neo meets morpheus or not not the first time but it's it's it's early in their meetings he goes you have the look of a man who accepts everything he sees because he's expecting to wake up funnily enough that's not too far from the truth right and i'm like huh that's how i feel about a lot of stuff i see because you can't you you you don't know you don't know anymore and then and because so much has come out where the the angle has changed

and leaving out something vital or it's outright fabricated or it's an old photo used to represent something new you just got to look at everything with a grain of salt and go okay look if i want like if you you know how they say if you want to find something to be angry about if you want to be angry you'll find something to be angry about it's a perfect example you don't know if any half this stuff is real half the stuff that comes out is fake like like yo it's so crazy i'm aware of all the news and all the numbers around inflation and and even i have to go sometimes i'm at the grocery store i'm looking at the price i'm going is it really that bad like because i'm looking at the meat my and the price and i know what i paid because you know and i'm just like is it really

that bad or is it really happening and then i think about 1984 and i think that's a book everyone should read it's fiction so all right i have read 1984 but but that when when they explain that they're not really at war and they break down the way things really really work because we just you know we tell everyone they are but and everyone proceeds if it is it is like that because when when things are that way you don't have to innovate you don't have to create you know as long as people think you're at war they just listen and follow and it gives it gives everyone And the power to create Not everyone

A part of the government To enact laws And we don't have to worry About innovation Or educating our citizens I think about that a lot Sometimes like that Like you could

In fact If you don't want to read Anyone listening If you don't want to like Read 1984 Just get to that part Where I can't remember The character's name

But he's explaining How everything really works When he gets I think he finds a book Or something That explains how How the war And all that is manufactured

And you start And then you start Looking around Or you go, okay, this is a little too close to home. I'm going to step back because it's really designed. I think this, I believe this in my heart of hearts because it makes sense. Following the money, this makes sense. Forget the conspiracy angle.

It makes sense that you being enraged is good for the network's pocket because the networks work on a CPM model as far as I understand it, especially on the internet where you don't even got to buy anything. You just got to keep reading. You just got to be on the site. And so they get paid. You go on, and you're going to go because you're angry, and you got to find out more information.

And so they figured it out. Let's just put the most negative, extreme, polaristic standards on something, almost to the point of it not being accurate, like when you read what the article is about versus what the headline says. But it's okay because they got you to click through and read, so there's more money.

Everyone goes unhappy when you're angry and polarized. Do you remember during 2020, CNN had the, I called it the death scoreboard. remember they had that on there they literally had a scoreboard they just kept at the bottom of the screen and it was it was a big panel it showed how many people were and the reason why i know is uh at the time i was living in new york and uh in the building uh there was a tv in the elevator and they never had anything else on like i requested like a hundred times i was like yo can you please get this because it was depressing right right it was like man like this

is like not what i want to do when i get in the elevator is look at this thing and it was there every day every day every day and i remember being like holy shit like that is in terms of getting people enraged and holding attention doing all this stuff that single thing that's the most innovative thing they've ever done you couldn't you couldn't ask for a better uh piece of i guess piece of reporting than this negative scoreboard on on a very related note have you ever seen anchorman 2 not for them they're probably both funny movies but uh anchorman 2 is is really underappreciated because it's a brilliant piece of social commentary on how the news spins things to keep you engaged and when i first seen it at this point man it might be i don't know

I feel like it was definitely over 10 years ago, probably like 15 at this point, Anchorman 2. I remember I thought that when I seen it. This was before I got like really into social media and seen anything. And I was like, wow, they really summed it up. If you can make people, the basic premise is news by itself is boring and doesn't keep people engaged. And so we don't make money and we're going to be off the network.

So let's figure out how to make money. oh this is the kind of stuff we got to cover let's cover that and that saves the network when you when you when you see that you go wow this is nuts and you know it's funny and so that's probably why people missed the main I did a main point but that's what I took away from it all those years and I see it in place now I see how it's working now and yeah that scoreboard great idea you know that was a great idea going back to the race conversation let's not report on the shootings when the perpetrator is white or when the victim is white or the police officers are black we don't want to report on those those that's not good news all right you know it is

good news when a white guy shoots a black dude like like that video that that story about them cops beating the crap out of i mean well there's so many i don't even know what's wrong right uh I mean, it makes news. It pops up because it's a violent video. It's dropped away. It goes away. The internet, I actually think, has a much better memory now than the news does. That's true.

Right? Because they'll pop this stuff up. And also, I think a lot of people on the internet now have moved from fact to entertainment. So I see a lot of videos on the internet. And if you're, like, new to the internet, whatever that would mean, like you'd be trying to figure out is that really where it's from or whatever i saw i don't know if you saw the uh uh it's allegedly a russian dash cam video where uh there's like two cars driving at night one kind of pulls in front of the other driver hops out in the middle of the highway it's

like banging on the driver uh door and then four people get out and they're in like full-blown halloween costumes and they beat them up right and they jump back in and they take off and it's like oh this is the most amazing dash cam whatever uh and i saw it recently was circling circulating again and uh people are retweeting it and now i just said to myself i'll give a fuck where that is like that's just funny yeah right like like strip away all the like uh uh um kind of chaotic uh like um sensitivities that everyone's trying to get everyone enraged or whatever and it's like by the way the video's probably fake it's probably staged like if you look at it through the lens of like that's a youtube stunt all of a sudden now people are like yo look at this funny ass video

and people man they're really coordinating these youtube stuff i only know that because i just shared this video absolutely hilarious but but it it blurs the line well you're from new york you've seen the way these these these homeless people just kind of set up shop on a car and they just stroll back and forth so the sort of video is of a homeless guy walking through a subway He's got no shirt on No shoes So pretty much Everyone's just kind of ignoring him

Like you would in New York When you see Nothing new And then he stops Looks at a woman With her food And then just grabs it And just runs off

Now no one knows It's a stunt But the guy who's recording And the guy who is Running off with the food But that's why It looks so real Oh he faked it

Yeah Did he Did he fake it well what's what's a fake that would mean that everyone was in on it yeah i don't think i think the only person that was in on it was the guy filming it and the guy who was but so so is he really you know i know he's being an asshole when filming it is it better to look at it but but what does that do to our perception like the way i shared i was just being funny like oh man these homeless people aren't just sitting around waiting for you to tie some chains they're taking it now

right if i'm looking at that video i'm thinking oh man that is crazy that a guy would do that he must it must be real never mind the fact that like someone just happened to be filming some my buddy but it is kind of funny and weird i've done that take pictures of crazy shit i see or videos and the guy just happens to run off and with the food but it blurs this line where everyone around you doesn't know it's a joke you know it's a joke in the and but the only part of it that makes it a joke is that he's not actually a homeless dude and it's set up for entertainment it's kind of like um it's like candy camera remember that like same idea i always think you couldn't do some of these things that they used to get away with you couldn't do them today

oh absolutely not there's some of those like prank shows and stuff that they could absolutely get away because they wouldn't get punched in the face or whatever like society's kind of gotten softer and people would just be offended or whatever and then there's some of those shows like uh uh punked or whatever like now i think people would just go to blows oh yeah this is bad you know like there's a whole in fact there's a whole video series somebody sent me or uh i guess it's in new york but but he's behind bulletproof glass which is important here it says chicago new york it's one of those big big cities and the guys come in and he goes and pays for his stuff It's a dude

Behind the counter It's a dude And the dude goes Alright thanks daddy You have a good night And he said Yo what you call me He was like

I just called you daddy Man what's up He was like Like what you mean That's what you call me It's just like Dudes like that He's like

Nah don't call me that Don't play that way And he just keeps And he goes Alright cool Alright Nice one sugar lips And you know what

And he's just like But because the guy Can't get behind the camera He's okay But you're right Like if he could You know Cause some of the dudes

Were like Oh you lucky you back behind that glass like you seen where they do the nba players they go they go up to the nba players and like the most recent one uh they had um what's the kid that uh was in uh philadelphia and he got traded to the uh brooklyn ben simmons and i think it was ben simmons and they went up to him and they're like what's up what russell uh russell westbrook and they like go up to the players and they pretend that they don't know who they are or like they think there's somebody else and of course you're nba i mean get the fuck out of here right and so they chase the

dude out of a store because he because they realized immediately he was it's like now become a thing where it's like you're trying to disrespect me now it's like get out yeah it's the other thing uh that i think a lot about is uh sometimes something happens in life and you don't know if it's like uh if they're trying to not punk you but like you see stuff happen and you're just like oh is that is that real and you start kind of looking around and And in today's society, you're kind of just like, is there a camera somewhere? Is there something happening or whatever? And I don't think that that's necessarily the best thing, you know, over the long run.

If everyone is always just thinking about, you know, like, how do you capture footage? Like if life became basically a TV set, that don't seem like a good path to go down. You know, I'm in the creator space on, I guess, the Internet, Twitter, social media, YouTube. And one of the things I observed, and I comment on it pretty regularly, much to the dismay of many of my fellow creators. But I go, look, man, I'm 37, and I was putting together my life because of my age. I was putting together my life as if there wasn't going to be no cameras around. You know, I didn't start boxing so I could make videos of it, for example. I certainly didn't go back to school so I could talk about it on the Internet

and study physics. Like, no, that's like hard things you do to form my life that, like, look, let's be real here. I could probably, with what I understand about Internet and making money now, I could probably never do anything worthwhile again and just make a living for the rest of my life on the derivatives and lessons from that. But I never do that because I don't think that way. You see, though, especially with the guys under 30,

because it's a different generation. And that sounds weird. But under 30, what would that make you? You'd be born in 93, 92? Something like that, yeah. Yeah, 92. Afterwards, it means you're going to come up. And at the very least, in your high school days,

that's when social media is going to start popping off. By the time you reach your 20s, your early 20s, you're like, why would I ever go do something hard and challenging and push myself? I'm going to instead, I'm going to try this internet thing. I'm going to try and make this money thing. So you've got a whole generation of guys who have figured out how to make money online, talking about and doing a lot of the same things that everyone else was, because they all sound the same, slightly different flavor,

but all talking about the same thing because there are certain topics that are just more engaging. But if you don't have a life to go behind, I can talk about it in platitude when I say it because you can look me up. I went through it, right? It's real life. But if I can't, you know, if you're like some kid from a middle class suburb family, you start talking about, you know, disciplining habits and, you know, pulling yourself up and fixing it later, it comes off. You can get away with it in one platform and another or whatever. But the whole idea, the whole point is that you only, you really gain perspective and life experience and real, these things start to mean something when you have to use them. You know, it's like, why would a kid join the Army now?

You know, that's another discussion, right? But why would he, you know, go enlist in the armed services or take up a combat sport or think of things I've done. Armed service, take up a combat sport, learn a very difficult subject, pick up a language or two, learn an instrument. There are all these things, but they take time and they're hard and the failure is there and you're not going to face it. And on top of that, it's not good instant screen time. It's not a good investment, right? It's not, you know, you can't capture it. Everyone wants to be the man, you know.

Because I know a lot of guys personally And I see some of the things they post And I'm like, man, I know what you're really doing and making That's kind of, it's a little misleading I'm not going to say, you know, because it ain't my thing You're not really selling money So I make it, but I look at it and go, that's really misleading Because they're positioning themselves to make more than they actually do

Well, because, yeah, because you can, you know One of the cool things is what I like about travel And it's like this about anything But travel is just the first thing that comes to mind is that if you don't know, you assume it is a very expensive thing to do. Once you know, you go, it's not really, you know, it is what it is,

but it's a good selling point. If you're good at the internet, you can find how to get a lot of places in the world pretty cheap. Man, if you're good at the internet, you can get a Lambo for two. Have you heard about these guys? They're renting the Lambos to make it look like a life. You can really make your life look a certain way.

But when I sit down in front of you and I talk and I realize you don't have any type of skill, you don't have any type of experience, you don't know or do anything. Talk to a lot of marketer guys. I'm really big on the relationships in your life. I think, I'm not saying you got to have a bunch, but I think one of the telltale signs of somebody who has gone through a life is they have long-term friends. I'm not interested in a guy who really took that advice to heart,

get rid of your old friends when you level up. No, because there should be some people in your life that they bring something more to the table than or other than advice and ideas on how to hustle, you know? I get, like, good, solid relationships, all these things, right? What are all these things to make a life? We have really become about, and I'm not even going to say we, man, because I'm not in that generation.

I am very much a damner, an elder millennial at this point. We have, or it has become really cool to have the sizzle without the steak. You know, to put it in real easy terms. really easy let's look the part we don't really want to be the part but i don't think they're trying to do that they don't even know what the part is to be this is uh uh in business specifically in the tech industry in like the startup world uh i used to call it a blog post founder versus a real founder what i mean by that is like you could be a founder who went and read a bunch of blog posts and you learned all the things that you're supposed to say and so to the

untrained eye you could trick a lot of people you could raise some money you could do this this whatever but to the trained eye it takes like two questions and it's just bam you know you could break it down now the benefit and this is like kind of a larger story of all of society part of the positive of that story is that information that used to be behind closed doors into like good old boys network all the stuff is now available on the internet because there's somebody who reads it who's a real entrepreneur right and will go and implement it and now they know how to work with their board or they had to put together a fundraising deck or there's a database of investors to reach out to or you know whatever but with positives comes negatives and there's a lot

of people who now can kind of fake it better because they read the blog post and they think they know what they're supposed to say whatever that's business and usually it's in an environment where they're asking somebody for money it's the same idea yes it's like okay cool now take it to the successful people and one of the things i tell all the young kids who uh i see doing some of this stuff so i always tell my say man uh you ever seen a picture elon musk on his on his uh jet right no and by the way the picture you saw of him on a yacht that's somebody else's yacht and he didn't want the picture taken right one of the things that i really pride myself on man uh is is you know when you see because i use rg like everyone else but i used to promote my writing

really like heavily but one but I do like to show that I'm a real person and I exist so I put pictures of my life and stuff but it's always like

you know it's me with some friends with my girl or with with the you know it's the last picture

posted I was standing in the water making a silly pose on the beach man like just showing like because I think after a certain point

like when you you learn the negatives that come with a lot of that in fact I would say like

I'm really big on posting stuff that show me living life and actually living life you know we were in Budapest

for one of this is one of the coolest things about the internet and I'm sure you're like you get this right so we were in we were in Budapest for a week

and then took a river cruise down Danube we stopped in Bratislava Vienna Litz and one of the

places Munich right and And when we were in Budapest, she was there, though, because of what my wife does. She's involved in travel and scheduling stuff and helping people take these amazing trips, places. And so she was there for our River Cruise conference. So I was like, I'm going to go.

But that week, she was busy. So what I did, I just let people know I was in. And every day, there was somebody else to hang out and show me stuff. And so I got, like, real tours and just a different view and experience. And I took pictures with everybody because I wanted to show, like, this is what's really rich of our life, being able to, like, touch down and have real conversations with people. People I talk to now still. I'm not in Budapest. And so that's really trained in a gym and worked out.

That was hard because I'm not trained like a fighter anymore. But that's the value. And that was one of my favorite pictures to post is all these people that I got to meet and run into. You don't see me sitting in a picture of me in my first class or something like that or with the Lambo's or posing with my jewelry or my watch. No, it's the people. But if I don't show, that's what they think. If I don't show that stuff, people aren't going to buy from me or deal with me.

And I get it. There's like this whole image to project. But why would you want to, I wonder what the motivation is to do it, I guess. It brings it back to street versus boardroom. Mm-hmm. Because there's people who their entire life, they're trying to project the boardroom. And then when they get there, I think a lot of people realize like, nah, man, you'll always want to try to get back to the street mentality, to this approach of those people are trapped. Yeah.

I think about it a lot. Actually, I'll tell you another great filter I have. My wife and I talk about it a lot. I don't think this will have any identifying information. I don't know the person's name, so that helps. We were in Austin, Texas two years ago, kind of end of 2020. And we went out to eat and we were somewhere on 6th Street or whatever, kind of where if you were a tourist, this is where you would go.

But it was kind of a nicer place. And a guy walked in and, you know, I have a problem. I pretty much only just wear T-shirts. so every once in a while you catch me maybe in like a uh a black collar shirt that's a big dress up for me but uh i was sitting there and you know just regular clothes whatever my wife's same thing and this guy walks in and he had a uh like a button down like a dress shirt right some jeans and nice shoes and he was like you know cool goes over and it's like an outdoor patio and this guy's a regular he knows every staff person like all this stuff and people are showing up and he's

pointing he's doing this he's ordering drinks he's he's got the whole thing going and for whatever reason i just turned to my wife and i said i bet you a hundred dollars that dude's a medical device salesman right and she was like what do you mean and i said he's got just enough money where he could ball in the local bar but he ain't got a yada jet a ferrari like whatever right and by the way i always go back to like if he's happy amazing congratulations you fucking crushed life but i always ask myself like did he one day say i'm gonna go and i'm gonna become successful whatever the job actually was right and uh i want to have enough money to go to local bar and like basically you know ball out yeah probably not right and so like it was less about this one

individual as much as it was just like there's a whole lifestyle that i think people go and they do and and they're almost like fooling themselves a little bit but it does go back to the fact that If they're truly happy, you've got to just high-five them, celebrate, and like, hey, you killed life. I think the reason why people always point out these situations is because a lot of people aren't actually happy. And not only – I think happiness is hard, too, because there'll be moments where you're good and moments where you're not, whatever, right? But ultimately, I think – I don't know why I don't like the word happiness to describe it. But but I do wonder if fulfilled. That's the word I want.

Yeah, it's a great word. Fulfill kind of purposeful because was I got a good friend and he described it like this. You know, there's a lot of because there's a lot of guys that figured out how to make money and they figured it out by by positioning themselves as opposed to generating value. and you're just really getting in the right place where the money changes hands and you take a cut, however that looks, whether it be an affiliate cut or a founder's fee or something like that, whatever, right? You're just getting in the right place, the right plumb, or moving somebody else's product.

And we associate money with value, but personal value, so it gets mixed up. They think, have this and that. And there's a lot of skeezy people Money, and there's a lot of cool people Who are broke, and it's not This goes back to what I was saying about You know, why would you drop your friends Right, now you drop somebody's problem

For various reasons, but If you cut out hanging out with somebody It's because they're happy doing something It might not be a financially A lucrative move But they're content They're fulfilled, they're still your solid Homie, you guys still have

are able to connect, and they're a good person, right? But if it ain't about that, that image, that money that you can project, what are you doing now? And that's where we're, we got a weird relationship with money in this society. We, you know, because I think a lot about the stat 75,000 and above to be happy. They say you make $75,000, and any more than that doesn't add to happiness. I think, you know, I think, you know, we add inflation to that. It's probably somewhere around 90.

But, like, the point is there's a small, there's a place you reach where everything after that is kind of, right, doesn't make you feel more fulfilled. And so you start going, okay, well, how do I get there? That's what makes a difference. And a lot of people just want the money. They don't consider that it's path dependent. You look because you can go selling dope. okay you don't want to be you don't want to do something illegal you could probably do do 18 to 20 hour shifts every other day uh doing day work combine that with some some uber you get that

money there right you want to know one of the number one jobs in america make 100k what's that driving truck for walmart yep oh starting pay 100k yep right if uh i forget the stat maybe vp at walmart a million bucks a year you ain't even got no one's gotta know your name you ain't gotta have a linkedin profile just a million bucks a year and you run some division or whatever now again like it takes time to get there you gotta be smart you gotta know what you're doing you know what i mean like it's not like you just wake up one day and go apply and bam you're 22 years old you're the vp at walmart but 100k as a truck driver and look exactly i actually made that suggestion to a buddy of mine who was trying to make the money i was like look man if it's just

about money it's gonna be a truck job like now if you want to like if there are other things that are important yeah but when you make it about money then you you miss out on i just i don't see a lot of truck drivers posting on instagram saying six figures by 26 right but you got your truck drivers i know a guy in the uh a boiler maker i mean he's doing he's doing like 50 55 $55,000, blah, $50 to $55 an hour, depending on the job, which works out to be about $100K a year, a little less. But, like, there are so many ways to get to this land of plenty. And, you know, you get there and you go, all right, well,

do I like how I got there? Is it all cracked up to me? What do I need? You know, lifestyle creep is a real MF, right? All of this, you go, you figure out what matters to you And that's what I think this all comes back to Is that people have let social media Let other people determine what's important to them

So they think I have to make this life on this screen Capture, remove almost all authenticity Create a somewhat fraudulent image Fraud might be too strong of a word Misleading is probably better Someone misleading an image To keep the money train going And it's not that much money

Because, well, I don't have much to show For my life outside of this Like if you removed it I think about this This imaginary scenario Like if there was a Say tomorrow The power grid is shut down

And we got to start over from scratch What am I going to do? Well, I'm probably either going to work on Something mechanical or are turned into a soldier. That's going to be one of them. They're out there foraging, hunting, figuring things out, and defending the new settlement with skill.

But to have that skill, you know, you got to go do things and figure these things out. I'm kind of rambling, but I'm about to. No, it's a mentality. Yeah. And I think that's probably the biggest thing of a lot of the people who maybe seem a little lost or they're trying to project an image of uh somewhere where they're not yet that mean that they can't get there or whatever uh but but

i do think a lot about could you take that person drop them off somewhere how long does it take to come back yeah like in fact you know it's funny man was just having this conversation conversation with the wife i was like yo you know i'm i'm really happy with the the life i've built and the connections and everything like that because i was talking about it's not about who you know I mean, it's not about what you know, the older I get and the more I learn, it really seems to be, you know, who you know, at least that helps a lot more than what you know. But I was like, you know, I think about this, like if I was wiped out tomorrow, how long would it take to recover? I still have all my knowledge and all my skills and I'm really happy that, you know, I'm not going to like immediately bounce back. Well, this should take more than a year

Given what I know And how I know how to interact with people And reach out with the internet or not And the skill I have I think that's That's a worthwhile kind of metric to stand at Like, if you were wiped out Like, all your social media

Everything would be gone, right? You just I was just regular old Ed Latimore And I showed up All I have are my skills and my knowledge I don't even have the cool boxing record I put together I got, you know

How would I come back? Okay, well I know enough I thought I'd do one thing, a few things, and it would make it. That to me is true for very many people in the sense of if they had to start over from scratch, they probably would end up being further along over the long run because they get it. Well, I don't have to bump into as many walls, that's for sure. A lot of walls, man.

Yeah, that's the game. You just figure it out over and over, over time. You know, one of my favorite jobs I had, in fact, it was my favorite one. and I did it longer than I had to. I was a tutor for high school. High school was physics and mathematics. I took on some English kid ones, and I was like, never again. I just, I mean, and I like reading,

but I don't like the way that school makes you read and what you have to know and what the work is. But I can teach you how to gain the right answer, your thought process through physics, chemistry, or math. And I think about that a lot because, now granted, because the people with that skill set, there's not a big overlap between who has enough time to teach it and who knows enough.

Most people with that skill set have jobs using them. So I was able to charge a premium, but the impact I have is that I still have many of the kids I worked with when they're not adults now, they're 20, 21, They still reach out. I just had coffee with the other one today, and, you know, she was telling me about, you know, her dad was like, you know, ask him about X, Y, Z and stuff like that because it was working in the world, man.

It was a physical – it was that, to be there and connect with humans. That means a lot to me. It was my favorite. Second favorite job, most entertaining one after that, though, definitely would have been when I worked at the homeless shelter. You get a lot of stories, man. But that's neither here nor there. You just figure these things out and have a good time.

I think there should almost be a component where you've got to do some physical work before you can talk about doing stuff online. Yeah, that's very true. where can we send people if they want to buy the books or read any of your writing or get more of these ideas because a lot of people will hear this and they'll say hey wait a minute this guy's got some stuff figured out he's still pretty open about

figuring out more things in his life and he's been able to become self sufficient on the internet which a lot of folks I think are trying to figure out so where can we send them to learn more from so I am at latimore everywhere on the internet at latimore.com is my website at latimore

is my twitter at latimore is my instagram Ed Latimore's my Facebook and LinkedIn. So, yeah. There's no more Ed Latimore's? You're the only one? Yeah. You know, it's funny, man. I usually say when people ask that, I go, look, if somebody's born after the name Ed

Latimore, I feel bad for them. I'm not going to name my son that, man, Ed, because if he ever wants to go on the internet, he's going to have to beat the SEO machine I've built behind the name. That's amazing. Ed Latimore. So, yeah, that's how you find me, man. I'm everywhere under that name. All right.

EdLattimore.com and then Ed Lattimore and all the social media sites. All the social medias, yeah. I really enjoyed today. Hey, man, I enjoyed it too. It was a great, great conversation. Very, I made some insights that I did not necessarily connect before. Now I've got to dig deeper. Like, this is what I do.

Like, when I have an idea and it's a flash, you know, I'll let it be a flash for a minute. And if I keep thinking about it, I'm like, okay, I have to, like, sit down. That's why I write. one of the reasons why I write because it makes me smarter because if I get I describe like right now that this thought the link

between the immune system and reading right it's not really connected at all but now it's a thought and I'm thinking about all the ways it connects and they're like little spinning magnetopoles and what I'll do when I write it's like running a magnet over a piece

of steel and they all point the same direction and now that piece of steel has forced like it's a magnet and can move things itself. And that's how I look at my thoughts when I write is that I'm putting them all in the same direction. Writing is for clear thinking. Absolutely.

Clear thinking makes you a better writer. One of my favorite sayings, you know, I don't write because I'm smart. I'm smart because I write. That's very, very true. That's a great place to end, my friend. I appreciate it very much and I hope everyone enjoyed this. Hey, thank you. Thanks so much for listening to today's episode. I really hope

you enjoyed this one. Make sure you're subscribed on Apple, Spotify, or your favorite podcast player. And if you're looking to transition into a brand new job in the Bitcoin or crypto industry, we've got you covered. Head over to thecryptoacademy.io. My team and I have been working with the top HR teams in the industry to develop an intensive three-week training program with over 50 live events. We teach you exactly what you need to know to break into the industry, including live interview prep and resume review. Our students have been hired at over 75 of the world's best Bitcoin and crypto companies, go to thecryptoacademy.io to learn more. Again, that's thecryptoacademy.io. If you enjoyed today's episode, make sure you share it with

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