the zurkie show - rock bottom is a trampoline

Episode Date: February 24, 2026

the story referenced: House Fire by Josh Czubalet it burn.you don't have to try and save yourself from embarrassment.take the L, forgive yourself, but realize how you got there in the first place.sending you all lots of love and peaaaaaaaace!https://linktr.ee/thezurkieshow

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My friend Josh wrote this incredible story about a house being on fire in which the main character is somehow in the middle of a disagreement with his girlfriend. The girlfriend is breaking up with him because she wants to move on to bigger and brighter things and she feels as if he's holding her back. He doesn't really care that much. He's preoccupied with finding the owner of the house, one of his friends. Think of it as like a college party. everyone's gone to this one little house off the coast and suddenly it is engulfed in flames.

I love this story because I feel as if a lot of our lives are a house fire in which we are just trying to put out the outside walls to make it okay enough for somebody to enter into our front door. I think all of you have seen that meme of the dog, that's sitting, everything is fine. and the absolute chaos that ensues when you realize that your life is in shambles, it's actually more comforting than trying to lie to yourself over and over again that it's not. Sometimes, right, admitting is the first step. We hear that all the time, but what does it actually look like to tell yourself, dude, my life sucks. dude my life is in chronic pain

I can't get up out of bed because I'm staring at the ceiling I can't even figure out what is the first thing I'm supposed to do when just everything around me is squeezing me like a hydraulic press I think the first thing you need to understand is that this is not something that will only happen once and you are not the first person in the world to experience this this house ablaze effect it actually happens more than you think.

And it will happen to you over and over again in your life if you allow it to. Something that I've actually had to really examine in my own life and figure out is how do I stop myself from getting to a point where I am just overwhelmed with everything, with how things are, with the fact that I'm not present enough, with the fact that I'm maybe making decisions for other people, how do I keep in some kind of balance? And now you kind of have to figure out where you land on that. Because let's say you're somebody right now that doesn't really want balance.

Everyone talks about, oh, you need to be in balance with your chakras. You need to have everything figured out so that you have just enough physical activity so that you keep your gains, just enough focus so you can make sure you know how many swipes you have on a hinge and you haven't ran out. just enough attention in, you know, what's going on in the financial market so you can be investing. And I can't wait to have a Roth IRA one day that's worth a million dollars so I can go buy a cheeseburger for McDonald's for $500,000. That's going to be awesome. I can't wait in 2070. Dope. How do you keep everything in balance?

The truth is in life you cannot. You cannot. There are seasons in your life where it needs to be a hurricane season. You need to get hit over and over again. You have to go through Katrina. You have to go through... What are the other major hurricanes? I'm just fascinated with Katrina

because of the whole New Orleans stuff. If you want a crazy rabbit hole to go down, New Orleans. Katrina. Insane. The levees. Were they meant to break? I don't know.

I guess it's a conspiracy side of me. Coming out. No, but you're going to have to get hit. And usually, when one hurricane comes, another is developing right there in the bottom tropic area that I don't know the name of. It's normal for things to happen and hit you when you're vulnerable. I found that in my life, when one thing is kind of crumbling, the other towers fall down. Now, where the tower is meant to fall down, I don't know. Depends who you ask, right? But what you have to realize is that

You let it. You let it crumble. You recognize that something has caused that to crumble and you have to hit a rock bottom. The more that you try to kind of coerce yourself into thinking, wait a minute, no, everything's fine, everything's okay. The more you are delaying, rebuilding yourself. Welcome aboard via rail. Please sit and enjoy. Please sit and sit.

Play, post, taste, view, and enjoy, via rail, love the way. And learning. A lot of us are so quick to label a bad life, a bad moment. Man, my life sucks. I'm in complete, utter disaster right now. My girlfriend left me and I wanted to get into this school, but I didn't. is talking about layoffs and there's a good chance I'm going to have to move back with my parents because I have zero money. And that's very, very true. What's harder to do is realize all these things.

You see how London Bridge is falling down and you sit there and you say, okay, I'm going to watch this kind of fall down, but I'm going to see where I need to start building back up. I weighed myself today on the scale for the first time in a long time. I'm too. 240 pounds. And in the past, what my first thought would have been is, wow, you are a fat pig. I can't believe you got this far. You are a loser. You need to start running yesterday.

And what would happen in the past is I would go on a run. Eight miles. Oh, I'm back. We're so back. I would run the next day, four miles. Because it's kind of like, you know, eight miles the day before is a lot and my legs are cooked. And then I'd stop running. and I'd feel bad for the fact that I stopped running and I wouldn't change anything about my diet because that's really 90% of the problem.

And so I would binge to get back at my guilt. This time I looked at that 240 and I was like, this is the heaviest I've ever been in my entire life. Good. Good. Now I have a chunk of marble to carve. It's up to me if I want to do it. I have to now figure out what that looks like. but I am no longer a victim of all of, oh my goodness, I've made all these bad decisions. I can't reverse them.

Because what got you into that hole was you. What got you into a position where, you know, you had, I don't know, a bad string of boyfriends, a bad string of girlfriends, just like a terrible partner one after another. We can sit there and say, yeah, that's the dating market. Or we can kind of look at it and be like, dang it. We keep finding these people. Why? Why is it that I am just somehow in the thick of everything?

In the fog that is this dating world, picking out the worst people. Accountability becomes your friend. It doesn't become this enemy that I think a lot of us have learned to grow up with because taking accountability oftentimes meant facing punishment. I'm sure you had that right when you were a kid. if you mess something up or let's say you were playing with a soccer ball inside your mom told you you're not allowed to

and you break one of her Tiffany stained glass lamps you were you were in for a treat you were in for no Xbox no nothing for weeks or whatever so it was easier to lie it was easier to be like no that's not me and say that that wasn't you so that you could avoid the consequences of your actions and although that would work in that kind of

scenario and then all of a sudden oh it was the dog that somehow got up on the on the you know weird island that's in the kitchen and knocked it down i don't know how he did that you you save yourself for another day but that only works with that situation i mean it also works i guess in work and in school you can always like blame somebody but when it comes down to your own life and the and the decisions that you made within it there is nobody to blame except yourself Asterisk, sure. All of us are, we're given different starter kits, right? Some of us, we ain't got to worry about money a day in our lives. Some of us, we got to worry about being profiled in the street. What I'm trying to say is that regardless of your circumstance, there is a point where you have to look critically at your life and realize where did the flame start in your house. Why did it start on fire? Because there's a good chance.

It was you. Even if you didn't even know that it was going to be you. Maybe you had a blindness to it. Maybe it's a belief system. For me, I'll be honest, sometimes I don't feel deserving of love from other people. It's this weird limiting self-belief that has followed me throughout my life. And so I feel as if I don't deserve the love that I think I do deserve. It's this weird thing.

I know what I want. But there is a blockage. There's something telling me, no, no, no, no, no. You don't deserve that. That's not what you deserve. You deserve the bare minimum, and you're going to be happy with the bare minimum. I'm like the Matt Diavella of dating, right? I'm like a minimalist in that sense that I don't need much, right?

but sometimes it's nice to wear a cool t-shirt. I don't just need to have black and white t-shirts all the time. So that's become a thing that I've had to really address. And part of that probably comes from the fact that I had to, a lot of the love that I received from people that I admired growing up was conditional. It was if I did X, Y, and Z I was loved. And I did also get unconditional. love, don't get me wrong. But that really tripped me up because that was kind of my closest

relationship growing up, was this conditional balance. And I had to know how to people please, and I had to know when to accept the bare minimum as good enough. This has followed me into all of my romantic relationships. I've had serious issues in my dating life with real intimacy and just accepting scraps as something, oh, that's good enough. It even led me into places that I never thought I would be. I never thought that I would be destroying a relationship as like the third guy you know, third guy, what? Big guy, big guy, no.

As like, you know, a second option. That's what happened. And it was because I've gotten enough scraps to just kind of be like, oh, I can win this over. There's something that I can get if I just fight for it that will be mine. And now I'm sitting at, you know, age 24 looking at my house that's burning down being like that's not good in fact when I go out of my way to look for conditional love I let so many other parts of my personality my life my lifestyle go down the drain you know people talk about relationship weight that's real and it's this um this bar that you

hit this XP that you complete where you're like I don't need to try anymore I did it I did what I needed to do. I got the relationship. I got whatever. And now I have some kind of self-worth. In reality, though, it ain't that simple. Because as you get what you want, you'll realize what you don't have. And it's not in the other person. It's in yourself. Whoa. I don't even know who I am. Whoa, I haven't even done any of the hobbies or the things that I think are me. whoa all these other things that I sacrificed in order to keep this relationship beating wait no no beating in relationships okay one second this relationship alive um it's gone bro it's gone like that's really that's really hard it's so difficult not to mention like if you start going you know and working your way

back now that you've taken this accountability, you can see where you started the fire. And, you know, I forgive myself. Like, I was a kid. I don't really know any better. And you should forgive the child version of yourself that maybe started this all, oh, you know. But like, you got to build that relationship now. There's nothing you can do other than focus on that relationship that's going to take away or, like, make you mask the pain. There's no sad Bart

Edit that you can watch That will make you realize I'm just all I'm not no longer lonely You have to tackle these feelings man Oh line you got to defend it But when is it time to rebuild When is it time to be like all right Like I've been beat down so bad

I need a win I need to actually figure something out here I think that you you have to realize it takes longer to build yourself up than it takes to tear yourself down. And that's true for anything in life. It takes longer to grow a tree than it does to cut it down. It takes longer to build buildings than it takes to, you know, remove them. Oh, man. Okay.

Let's just, yeah. Okay, let's keep going. There's been a lot of references to buildings today. Anyways. Yeah, man, that's normal. You're not going to fix your life overnight, and there is no fixing your life. What you have to then realize is how do you learn from how you fell down? How do you actually pick yourself back up and figure out a better way to keep yourself in check? Big thing for me has been realizing that the things I procrastinate on, the things that I push off, doing are easy. I reframe it in my mind that they're not going to take forever.

They're realistically going to take three hours. If that really an hour and a half of work, another hour and a half of reels in between, you know, hard parts of work where you step away, lay down in your bed and then you go, oh, I got to go back to this. So when I reframe it in that way, it makes me think, okay, like,

I don't have a, I don't have a bigger reason to procrastinate. I don't fall in that same habit. And it's so easy, I think, when you make it a part of your personality that your life is perpetually spiraling out of control and everything is bad. Part of it, if I'm real with you, is just faking it until you make it. There's never going to be a point where you will feel so much better about things. It is entirely when you choose to exercise a perspective of optimism, a perspective of, yes, I got dumped, yes, you know, that 53rd job that I applied to told me that we're not, we love your application, but we're just, we decided to go with another candidate or we put the job on, on pause.

If it's not working the way that you're doing it, chances are you have to change the way that you're doing it. like it has really appalled me the amount of times in my own life but i see it in other people where they complain about the fact that something isn't working and they haven't exhausted all the options if you genuinely have tried everything and it hasn't worked maybe it wasn't supposed to maybe that's just not something that is in your cards and guess what the more that you harp on the fact that it should be the less time you have to figure out what you can do within your lifetime with what you have.

Not all of us are going to bag the person that we've convinced in our minds is our soulmate, our OTP right away. It just, it's not something that all of us will experience and that's okay. Maybe you need to go through a couple hurdles. Maybe you do need to go through many rejections to get that one opportunity with somebody, with some business, with some school to be like,

wow, I matter and I did this and I worked my bunda off. but instead it becomes so easy to be like wow oh my goodness like everyone just hates me i'm a loser whatever it is to convince yourself that it's not worth trying other ways of whatever you want man i'm just i'm always on the apps and it's cooked why are you always on the apps why are you always on the apps what about people in person bro i'm cooked my looks are cooked whatever all right i got my own opinion on that I don't really think your looks are cooked, but let's say they are cooked by your standard. What are you even doing to improve that?

You stay up until 5 a.m. and then you say, oh, my looks are cooked. Yeah, bro, you don't even get enough sleep. You don't even drink water. The last time you drank water was probably in middle school. Like, no, duh. And this is something I've had to examine within myself. Like, I'm like, oh my goodness, I don't understand why I'm so, you know, I feel so big and so bloated. bro, I'm eating like fast food, 50% of my diet.

No, duh. All these processed foods are just like, give me that to my fat levels and just going right up. The body fat percentage is probably 40% right now. Hey, I'm catching it. All right, this isn't working. The way that I'm approaching myself isn't working. You're not happy.

It's not working. You got to change it. You don't have to change it. You can stay the same. I'm not going to force you to do that. But if you've got one life to live, maybe it's worth just trying. Maybe it's worth just that. I always think of it in this way.

If the house is already on fire, what do you have to lose trying to put it out? Trying to pour water on the fire, trying to find a fire extinguisher, trying to find a window that is open. But what if all the windows are sealed? You dig a tunnel out of there. I don't know. You have to find something. Because the truth is,

nobody's probably going to come and try to get you out of the fire. Because most people don't even know that there is a fire. They think they look at your house and they're like, you're doing great. Man, the outside is beautiful. You got all these things going for you. There's no problems going on at all. And those houses that are the most wonderful and the most beautiful are the ones that usually have the worst interior, the worst deepest, darkest secrets, insecurities, affairs, whatever.

Just beware. Just beware. And this is where comparison really comes in, right? I was somebody like growing up. I'd compare my house. We lived in like a townhouse, bro, in Palatine, Illinois. And when you would go across the train tracks to Inverness, big mansions, like, like, you know, lawyer doctor money which that even i've i've come to found there's levels to that then you go to

palm beach it's like what where are these people getting this money i don't know there's some interesting people on palm beach by the way um yeah unreal unreal then you're kind of brought into this reality where you meet some of the kids that live in these big houses and they tell you about the stuff that goes on in these houses Yeah, my dad's on a business trip in Thailand. Oh, how long has he been on that business trip? Oh, like two years. He has a whole different family there.

What? Oh, man, sorry, dude. Well, at least you can go to Thailand, I guess, you know? That's cool. Get some Chang, you know? Ooh, yeah. Frozen lasagna, medium power, 15 minutes. Sounds like Ojo time.

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Habaniero? More like habanier, yes. Save the everyday with Amazon. You want the honest truth? I'll give you the honest truth. The fire never stops. Never stops. You just learn to control it. you just learn where you got to set the line and where how much you even realize that you have to feed it and that some chaos and some fire can be very good for the soul it can actually help you because if you have too much comfort and you don't have enough fire you start wishing for more fire you actually miss the fire because fire keeps you warm so it's about figuring out how you can take it and harness it from the inside of your house and put it into a little chimney, how you can keep it

burning so that there is some kind of unpredictability, there is some kind of, not even drama, but there is some kind of excitement to the changes that you're making, but it doesn't feel like it's out of control. And also, it's not all or nothing, right, with diet, with fitness, with people, with, you know, you're alone time. Balance is about listening. to what you need and not judging yourself. There might be times where you need two weeks of pure alone time, where you're not hanging out with your homies, you're putting out the stiff arm and you're being like,

hey, I need to just lock in on whatever I got going on. I'm going to just go to the gym. You can meet me at the dining hall. You can meet me at Chapoelais. We can share a bowl or whatever. And that's that, because I want to spend this time figuring out what I got to figure out. There might be times where you've got to be a social,

animal for two months. You've got to go and travel and visit your friend that's going to school in Pittsburgh. You got to go and travel and visit your distant relative that lives in Orlando somehow and trains dogs for a living. You have to go and take that group chat trip to Japan and just hang out in Osaka for a week. Sure, you have to do it. But do not feel like that's something you got to keep up. It's not. It's not. You just have to find what it looks like for you to have a balance to feel good. That's it. That's what it's about. Nothing more, nothing less, man. Because the minute that you begin to model your existence on other people, you begin to model your happiness on what other people deem is the most optimal morning routine, the most optimal

cold plunge, you know, grind set, whatever, all that. Not even that. I've been do dogging on that a lot. If you want to do a cold plunge, do a cold plunge. I'm talking about this forced productivity that is not making you more productive. It's making you feel like you are obligated to do things because somebody has told you to do it. And it might not look like the healthy kind of grind set, whatever. It can look as simple as, well, I'm told that I shouldn't be hanging out with my friends in the mornings because mornings are best spent reading a book. Go hang out with your friends. I'm told that I shouldn't, you know, watch any movies because books are better.

Bro, books are great. Trust me, I love books. Go watch a movie. Go, go do these things. Listen to yourself. I guess that's the main thing. And I've been realizing this more and more because it's something that's been coming up in my own life that I just, I struggle with still. But I'm very proud of myself.

yesterday I was feeling like I had a lot of stimulation you know that like that kind of like hole that you get into Josh Chuba would call it a dopamine hole that's the name of his book where the house is already on fire is from you almost cannot pull yourself away

from the corner that you've gotten yourself into I remembered in the back of my mind though as I was watching clips of this CIA guy. You know who I'm talking about? The guy that's always talking like, so I was in a foreign country and all of a sudden there's this guy

and he says, I'm going to end your life. And I was like, what is going on? Like there's all these clips that are like sped up and slowed down. Oh my gosh. But anyways, I was watching that.

And I just, I remembered, I want to go swimming today. I haven't done. that in a couple of days. I want to do that today. Even if I go for five minutes, I don't care. I want to go swimming. So I turned the phone off. I took it with me. I turned it off. And I went to Barton Springs, which is this pool that we have in the middle of Austin. It's wonderful. I don't understand how more people don't use it. It is, it's a spring in the middle of Austin. It's free right now because they're about to do maintenance on it, but throughout the winter that's free. So I just went swimming.

and the sun was setting it was wonderful i went into the water and the water is glowing with this like iridescent kind of glow it like looks platinum almost i'm swimming i'm doing my little breaststroke and i i could just i could just remember like this is this is what i wanted and i'm doing it and it feels good and i got to prioritize this a little bit more I got to kind of pull myself into these situations because the more that I will do it, the more naturally I'll lean into doing it. Because yes, the idea of packing up and going

and putting on my swim trunks and my goggles and being like, dang, I got to do all this, it kind of does, it doesn't really motivate you to do it. But pulling yourself out and taking yourself and forcing yourself to do the thing that you actually want, afterwards, it's that serotonin that makes

you go, oh, I got to do more of this. I got to do more of this. And again, it's about channeling that fire and finding your own version of that Zirky Show. Today's episode of the Zirky show was filmed here in beautiful

Austin, Texas at Walnut Creek. If you ever are in North Austin, you want to go for a walk, clear your head, or go on a sweaty run with your run club tattoos all over, and short shorts. This is the place to do it. It's a wonderful nature preserve. And there's a little canyon in the middle of it, too. There's plenty of dogs you can pet. Yeah, tell them Zirkei sent you. Did you know that the Zirky show is everywhere you go? That is correct. You can watch it.

You can scroll it. You can stream it. The choice is yours. It's the Zirky show all over the globe. So if you're going to tap in, tap in. Do the things that bring you joy and say yes to some impromptu plans. Your homie's having a bunch of people for board game night. Say, yes. Your other friend is like, we should sneak into this fashion show. Yeah, go. Just like do it, you know, legally, obviously. Yeah. And just know, man, if you're going through a hard time right now, things pass. They don't just stay hard forever. I wish. That'd be pretty awesome, man. You could stay hard forever. I mean, you will be okay. Trust me. If you're trying something new, just know that I believe in you. And as always, Zirky Show, I am sending you lots.

of love peace peace