Most People Can’t Handle This Level of Honesty - Alex Hormozi (4K)

what did you call this the podcasting booty call we come together for a very intense 3 hours don't see each other for six months until I text you again and say what you doing it's exactly that all right so we're going to go through some of the best lessons I've learned from you over the last couple of months first one control freak is a word people with low standards use to describe people with high standards you're not a control freak you just want it done right the first time you're not anxious you care do not expect mediocre people to support worldclass goals I think most people feel really lonely when you want something that doesn't currently exist and so some people call that dream some people call that goals whatever it is you're trying to pull something from your mind into reality and you want it done a certain way and if it's not done that way it's not what you imagined and so people on the outside will throw stones and call you names that they think will change your behavior and get you to stop and the more I have been the person trying to pull things in reality The more I've tried to weather and build kind of defenses against those things so that when those stones get hurled at you by being called a control freak or by saying you micromanage things or that you have incredibly high standards the answer is yes because I want it done right the first time because either way we're going if you have enough will it's going to get done the way that I want it to get done regardless and it'll be less painful if we just do it right right the first time because we will still have to do it and you may have to do it three or four more times but eventually you'll just succumb to the fact that we're going to do it this way and I think all of the great things that have happened for Humanity have been from one man or woman who had an idea and just wouldn't let people shake it from them the standard of right isn't actually that insane when you think about it it's just right it's just done without error and I guess that the margin that some people consider to be right and other people consider to be right just changes I'm trying to think of a really good example for this but like the level of detail I mean it's it's the difference between it's the difference between a book that gets 10 or 100 festar reviews and a book that gets 100,000 festar reviews and everyone wants a silver bullet but most of the things that make great products is 100 golden BBS and so that's one of the things we have is the there's no silver bullets only hundreds of golden bbb's there's just hundreds of tiny little improvements it's like how can we look at the can how can we improve the way it ships what about the weight what about the color scheme how does it sit on the shelves how are people going to look at it in this market versus this Market are like how does this name appear on hats and on shirts and on and on sites and what's the rgp you know whatever the color SC scope is here versus there and it's just a thousand details that someone who does not care will not put the work to look into because they're trying to check a box rather than to make something that people will love or um I heard this from shoot I can't remember where it was from um but basically that the best art is Art where the artist makes it for themselves and where you see commercial work is where a bunch of people are trying to make something for an audience and so it's they're trying to like rinse and recycle stuff that actually solves no one's problems because no one is actually the audience whereas when you make it for yourself there's thousands of people just like you who will Who will have the same depth of understanding of it but it feels selfish in the moment to make something for yourself but when you make it for yourself you actually make it for everyone well you can be reliably informed that there's some non insignificant minority of people who also think like you yes who also have the same problems as you who also have the same fears as you so I'm going through two projects at the moment one being a book and the other being nutonic that is nent and it's new and that means that there's lots more of the these small things that are actually quite big things but I was telling you before we started about the fact there's a hyphen and there's a hyphen missing between one piece of copy and another piece of copy but it's printed on a million cans think for [ __ ] sake but being concerned about being seen as someone who has too high standards is something that for quite a while I felt ashamed about yeah because you feel like a bother you feel like you're being necessarily it's not even detail oriented it's picky cumbersome yeah yes yes laborious um and I realized probably last year took me until last year to realize that not succumbing to stopping doing that is probably one of the only reasons why I've had any success I mean I think if so for anyone who's listening if you have that I I would consider a gift um it makes sense for the majority of people to be opposed to that because you do make more work for everyone else but the product of that work is so much better and so if you want the work that you have to last and to be meaningful and make an impact it comes from a 100 golden BBS of 100 particularities of 100 peculiarities that you are picky about because the whole thing needs to work and what happens is if you have a big project lots of people have to get involved but there still needs to be one vision and otherwise it looks like a Frankenstein where everyone just checks a box of something they did in the past they just cop and past it over and then it doesn't resonate with anyone because again they just did it for everyone rather than for the artist and so using that as a frame has given me permission to be me in an unreasonable world and so like I told I told this last time I was on but when I did the book launch I had I I practiced that presentation three times a day every day for 30 days so I did 100 run throughs full length run throughs first where I did it out loud and recorded it second time where I would watch the recording um and then edit in real time and then do it again and I did that every single day and so then when I came live and had half a million people or whatever it came out I think flawlessly but people were like man you're such a natural at this it's like well I did it a hundred times and so sometimes people even hear 100 it's just a big number but when you do a 100 repetitions of something the first five times you're like wow I'm so much better but then like the difference between five and the next 95 times is what goes from being great to being a masterpiece and like it's that next 95 that I think is what makes people world class and that's where everyone falls off and that's why most people aren't there is this pull I think from people who don't have high standards to people who do have high standards to drag them back it's this like uh moving back toward the mean yeah is killing the only competitive advantage that you had couldn't agree more it's I mean it's it's conforming right it's like they people want you to do what they find comfortable and most things that are like most companies deteriorate when the founder leaves because and it happens slowly because it's you go to from 100 golden BBS to 99 golden BBS and it doesn't look that different and then there's 98 golden BBS and they're like I don't know and then two years later three years later you're like I I don't know it doesn't have the same like magic as it was what it was and that's because the art behind it isn't there because it's not unified anymore it's not congruent anymore it's a 100 departments making decisions with people copying pasting things for an audience that doesn't exist rather than one person who's trying to be satisfied for an ideal that they are trying with all their might to live up to I suppose this is one of the important reasons to have a singular figure that is the Hub and all of the spokes come off it because they're the only person that gets to see absolutely everything and typically that be the founder in a podcast that would be a host in any other in a um solo music band that would be the lead singer or the songwriter or whatever they get to see everything for instance we've done some episodes before where it's been the night before and I've been not happy with the color grade because the way that something displays on mobile is slightly different to the way that it displays in Premier Pro and it's slightly different to the way that it displays in a 6K photographer videographers curved screen I've gr guys it's like it's not up to scratch well we're not going to be able to get it in time for the export we're not going to be able to get it in time to get it uploaded and then there's checks that go through on YouTube like well it needs to happen like it just make find a way to make this happen and yeah that um that impulse of just actually seeing it as something that you should lean into okay well it's not and if you set the standard and if everybody else gets up to that standard what it shows is the people who continually push up against that and don't meet that standard they're just not built for this particular company they're built for someone else that makes a mediocre product but they're not built for you who's making a world- class product and I I I really want to jam down someone's throat right now um the whole like don't be a perfectionist like your proc like it's just another word for procrastination I actually think that's complete [ __ ] I think that that's my quote being is it perfectionism is procrastination masquerading is quality control yes okay so then I'm going to I'm going to put a sub a sub footnote on it that I think will will add context which is that most people who claim to be perfectionists are not perfectionists they're actually procrastinating because they're not doing anything and so it just is a socially acceptable label because the real perfectionists feel this this sickness where they like want to itch their skin off until the thing's done but they are trying to get it done whereas the perfectionist or the the procrastinator uses that to say like I'm not sure I'm just getting it right but like the person who's an actual perfectionist one wants to finish and is working every hour of every day on the thing and seeing progress towards it because if you don't know how your thing is getting better you're not a perfectionist you're just ignorant they're also moving toward the goal every single step of the way as opposed to just sitting back I this huge list of things that are not doing the thing planning to do the thing isn't doing the thing thinking about the thing isn't doing the thing getting angry at people on the internet that have already done the thing is doing the thing and um there's also a people who are perfectionists within the thing that matters most are prepared to see things that are anciliary to that for instance you're not absolutely a perfectionist I'm going to guess with the short form content that goes out on your Instagram it's like this is sawdust as you call it this is just it's extra right it's for it's it's freebie stuff look if we have one in a 100 videos that have got a a typo or the hyphens missing or something like all right but if we're talking about the school announcement release if there's a [ __ ] typo in that or if in the the video one of the links is broken or even if one of the links is slightly pixelated yeah that's something that I can have a problem with so picking your battles as a perfectionist I think actually or someone as someone with high standards is super important because you can't have that degree of high standards at absolutely everything because if you don't pick your battles you're not going to make sufficient movement at the velocity you need to actually make progress so find the areas that are the highest contribution yeah don't compromise on those and it's funny you say that because I the way that I immediately reframed that was that the perfectionism is around volume it's like that is what we will that is what we are optimizing towards and then we can't because if we look at if we knew how people responded ahead of time to content then we would make things differently than we do but I probably like like you am often surprised pleasantly and sometimes unpleasantly by the stuff that just grabs hold and then just goes you know viral as hell um in content and so I think part of that is making up for our own Ignorance by increasing volume and at Le and so that would be like it my reframe on the perfectionism there is like we know that if we make 10 pieces of content it is more likely that we will have more people see it than if we try really hard at one and so we make 10 because the net benefit of the 10 is great idei for has a fantastic on this where he talks about perfectionism allows people to sit back and not produce work at a rate required to work out what actually works have you heard the the story of the the pottery class oh I feel like the all right wellow this feels like total modern with is this where someone comes in behind and then holds the thing in front so there's two two uh there's a teacher and he's got two classes that he teaches and one class he says the only assignment for this whole semester is that you come with a come back with a perfect uh clay pot that's it that's the assignment the other class he says your objective is to make the most total quantity of clay pots and you'll be measured by how many pots you make and at the end of the quarter the pots that came from the team that had to just make sheer volume not only did they make more pots but the quality of all of their pots was better compared to the teams that only had to make one and it just underlines the the biggest lesson that I've learned in my life which is that volume negates luck is that you can try to be lucky and pick the one perfect thing and try and make it but if you don't want to try and be lucky you can just do so much [ __ ] work that you will you will brute force your way to figuring it out like if you do a thousand podcasts you'll be pretty [ __ ] good at podcasts right but if you try to say okay you're you're rent you're brand new and all you have to do is make one perfect podcast the problem is that you don't have the perspective for which to make a judgment to say what is good because you have zero data to base anything off of and so you're basing your idea of a perfect podcast on something that you've literally never done before and so doing the volume gives you the perspective to then have the best podcast at number 1,000 or 10 one anyways I just thought you'd love The Clay Pot I I know that story but I thought it was photography oh okay so anyway but no I I again I don't disagree and it's finding the thing that is to try and make this tactical what is the thing that you don't need to focus on volume today the goal is not to try and fit 10 podcasts into one set it's to make this one as good as possible but if it's shorts or reals or tweets or something it's lower leverage it's lower input just get just get it out there all right next one here's how to get older without getting better keep relearning the same lesson if you keep making the same mistake over and over the mistake isn't the problem you want so I Define learning by same condition new behavior and so when you go to a video game and you battle through the level and you battle the boss if you keep doing the same thing to the boss and you keep losing then you have not learned because you have the same condition and the same behavior and so I often say that like for anyone who's listening to this podcast if the goal is to get better and you're like man I really want to learn something from this podcast if you listen to this podcast and then you're in the same exact conditions as you were before and then you do not change your behavior you learned nothing and so using that definition has at least allowed me to change my behavior faster which then goes into rate of learning which I Define as intelligence and so a lot of people are like man he's so smart but he just doesn't it's like well then if he doesn't change his behavior and he's in the same conditions he's a dummy he's not that smart and so if you are trying to battle the same boss over and over again and you don't change what you're doing and the boss keeps beating you then it's not the game's problem it's your problem you are the problem and I think that's um like if you if you continue I talked about obviously I'm I talked to a lot of entrepreneurs but I usually do this when I have a crowd I just like hey raise your hand if you work all the hours of the day and a lot you know most of the crowd raised their hand I say okay who here has been stuck at the same Revenue level for six months or more and then I said keep the hands up and like honestly most of the time the same hands are raised and say you're doing the wrong [ __ ] like if you put all your inputs and the outputs haven't changed then you have the same condition and the same behavior and so you have learned nothing and so that has always just been my reframe and so over time if if you're moving up in entrepreneurship you're moving up in career your behavior should change because it means you've learned exposure to information isn't learning great TDR it's true it's true and it's the same with memory it's literally the way that memory works the best way to work out how the human memory system works is repeated recall not repeated exposure right you have to drag it out of memory and use it not just see it a million times and this is kind of the same thing with the lesson it's you can listen to any of the podcasts that exist on the Internet or the ones that we've done or the ones that you love or whatever and if you don't apply anything it it's a waste of time and this is the best solution for this is Tim Ferris is the good [ __ ] sticks look what's the thing from the podcast or the book or the audio book or the the whatever that you read or listened to that you can't stop thinking about that you go to bed and you think about it that you took a screenshot or a screen recording and sent it in the group chat that you like texted your mom about it at 3 in the morning oh this really explains the way that I felt in school or the way that I felt when such and such broke up with me or whatever that's the thing that's the thing to focus on but a lot of the time the me the problem with mental masturbation is that the amount of information you can intake versus the amount of change that you can deploy is asymmetric yeah when I was getting started on my um entrepreneurial journey and I would say this like pre this I was when I was a entrepreneur like I hadn't quit my job yet I started reading all these self-help books and I remember reading like it was probably like my 10th book in a row and I realized that the words in that book contradicted like the second self-help book that I you know one was like it's all about goals the other one's like it's all about taking you know steps or whatever it was right and I and I all of a sudden I was like you know my life is the same I've read all these books but my I I still literally live in the exact same condo in Baltimore doing the same job like nothing has changed and so I just made the commitment that whatever the next book that I was going to read I would just not read another book until i' done everything in that book um and I that's when I quit my job and I did a whole bunch of other things and um I've actually more or less stuck with that in terms of like when I read books or even listen to podcast I usually do it with an intention to get something out of it and um I usually have notes up and so that's so my intake on information because because I get asked a lot I'm sure you do like I actually don't read that much um I definitely don't read non-fiction I read like fantasy Red Rising baby that's right um but it's because usually I get overwhelmed with the amount of things I would have to do and so I'm like I don't need more information I'm like I'm like I could read a chapter and be like all right that's it I like it'll take me two weeks to do this and so then like the rest of the time is doing that and so how do you ensure that the things that you're reading are giving you good advice because if you didn't move on before you took two weeks to go and do the thing but the thing was dog [ __ ] you've spent two weeks going backward so I would probably I would make the argument that I wouldn't have gone backwards cuz I would have gained the experience and so I would have more context to know what the second thing was going to be and that's just kind of like the trial by fire learning through iteration and I think I tend to do more of that um sort of a win all learn philosophy yeah and I I would say that like there there are entrepreneurs who are definitely like super super duper planners and there are entrepreneurs who are more like let's just move and break [ __ ] and we'll figure it out I tend to be really this on the micro in terms of like move [ __ ] and break you know like we'll figure it out as we go and I just tend to be a planner only in the big like very Grand like what do I really want to do in 10 years but the majority of the time it's like let's see and we we we'll learn I've learned so much like so much of the content that I have comes from just [ __ ] up in business and people were like this is such original concept I was like this is just because that's what my life was I just like I made this mistake and it didn't work but I said this one thing one time and then all these people bought and I was like Oho how do I do that again and so like it was always through iteration and I I've read all these books but there's between knowing how uh or sorry knowing that and knowing how like knowing that maybe this works maybe but once you do it it's a different type of learning where at least for me it's about been that way if you could read you could read a hundred books on sales but when you take your first cold call all of that goes out the window because you actually have to you actually have to sell we'll get back to talking to Alex in one minute but first I need to tell you about element element is a tasty electrolyte drink mix with everything that you need and nothing that you don't stop having coffee first thing in the morning your adenosine system that caffeine acts on isn't even active for the first 90 minutes of the day but your adrenal system is and salt acts on your adrenal system element contains a science-backed electrolyte formula of Sodium pottassium and magnesium that helps to regulate your appetite curb cravings and improve your brain health this orang flavor is absolutely insane it is the best way to start the day it's a beautiful salty orangy drink it's refreshing if you've been doing hot exercise and it's just my favorite way to wake up I've been using element every single morning for over three years now and it's still just as enjoyable as when I first used it right now you can get a free sample pack of all eight flavors with your first box by going to the link in the description below or heading to drink LM nt.com slod wisdom that's drink LM nt.com slod wisdom this is related to something I wrote last week don't be so worried about people who imitate your work they only know the what but not the why if you stopped being creative so would they a photocopier isn't an artist even if it can recreate them Mona Lisa I love that because you think like you you are Source in that situation and so everyone is there for like a subset of you and and they require you to live you don't require them and the equal opposite is I think we should be more fearful of when everyone stops cop copying you like the day that no one copies you is far far more frightening than the day everyone's copying you yeah Jimmy car refers to China as a cover band you know it's like they're the cover band of The Beatles And he says you know they're they're good and and in many ways they're able to produce things at more scale and so on and so forth but they're not driving The Innovation forward yeah in that same way yeah the idea of getting upset about people copying is just ridiculous like yeah that's all I that's all I got understand why it's painful right if someone's gone through okay let's test and test and test and test and test and then finally find a particular form formula that works and then 10 people Downstream get the benefit of this hard laborious effortful late night grind and iteration and they just got to be like oh that thing yeah I so I think that like they they'll be able to copy what they can see but they won't be able to copy what they can't see which is understanding why each of those pieces are in place and when something changes in the future they won't be able to iterate from there because they don't know why it was there in the first place right and so like I mean I've obviously dealt this with in a business context where like real dollars are at stake and so like in the gym world you know gym launch for those you don't know I had a big licensing company we had 5,000 locations and anyways so we had basically business processes that we would you know iterate and figure out why this works worked and so then I had I I used to keep a list of names and then I just it got too long and tiresome to keep the names of all the people who tried to take the stuff and then sell it as their own um I say their I say their names every night before I go to bed you think I don't remember you I remember all of you um and so none of them 10 years later are still around and not and none of them even came to a tenth of the size of Jamal and it was because it wasn't theirs like the person that I would be far more afraid of somebody who comes out with a significantly better system than what we had to help gyms make more money and help their you know help their clients more um but like to this day like there still isn't one and that one's Chim lunch is still the category King in that in in that industry and so it's like just and that's because we put and we were talking about this earlier everything is an R&D for us and so we actually like were the only licensing company that had an R&D department and we would test uh we call them plays but we test plays every every 14 days and so we'd spend 50 or 100 Grand on just a test we'd be like all right let's test this new marketing campaign or we'd say hey let's test this new uh High ticket sales processor hey what if we did what if we tried to sell memberships via chat let's just give it a shot see what happens and and honestly 70% of the time it would it was worse than the control like it didn't work as well and what we would do is we'd present it to lenes and say hey guys guess what we just spend 50 Grand on that you don't have to spend money on look at the results of this sale membership yeah yeah the thing is is that most people are actually really happy to to know that it didn't work cuz they it felt like they were scratching it like oh great I don't have to do that one like someone did that test for me so anyways um all that to say uh unless you have that that trail of bodies behind you that led you to figure out this one thing when there is a kink in the system because some external condition changes which it always will they then don't know which means you're always still going to be ahead yeah that's very interesting yeah because if you understand the physics of the system if you understand the Dynamics of why you're doing the thing you're do and something changes you can respond but it goes back to people with high standards you have to presume that you win in the weeds yeah you have to presume that you win in the weeds and if you do and if you're continuing to be this close to it yeah as soon as things change you go that's interesting why has that happened and that then allows you to continue to iterate and you see it cuz you're in the weeds right somebody who's all the way zoomed out just like yeah copy paste that they're like they're one they're late cuz they have to see that it's working see that it's working consistently so they're already 3 6 months behind then they start trying to figure out how to implement it and then they start implementing it and then what they don't see is the things that made the conditions that made it work to begin with and so like if you just assume that you're always in the lead then it means then sure second through 10th place will always copy number one but to the victory go the spoils and so you w like no one gives a [ __ ] who is fourth place at the Olympics reminder that if you want to be exceptional you're going to be different from everyone else that's What Makes You exceptional you can't fit in and also be exceptional both have discomfort when you fit in you have internal conflict because you're not being 100% you when you're exceptional you have external conflict because everyone sees you as different pick one when your friends start to say you've changed remember it's because they don't know how to say you've grown I Define words a lot because it helps me kind of like made sense of the world and um like exceptionals is like an obvious one right we use the word exceptional like you are not like everyone else um but even saying it like that like you are not like everyone else and so if someone says you're not everyone else then you can just reframe that as like I'm exceptional and that's not a bad thing um and most and I I don't and I actually think that most people have like this might be counter to most people's beliefs but I think most people have the potential to be exceptional and I because most people are peculiar in their own way they just stifle that because they want to be accepted by most people but in so doing never accomplish what they want to do because they conform uh and so like if there's probably a lot of things about the world or even your world around you that you're like this never made sense to me but then you do it anyways and I I think that a lot of innovation and a lot of what makes people exceptional is feeling you know thinking that thought or seeing that thing and then being like huh I don't think I'm going to follow that rule anymore like why do I need to shower twice a day huh like I don't know like why do I need to wear different clothing huh like there's just a lot of these social norms that people you know usually passed down to us or they're you know bred into us in high school and college and things like that um but it's like you see a guy who you know wears a cowboy hat and dress a certain way and he basically wants to say I am this I am this archetype of person but if cowboy boots AR as comfortable for you as New Balances are and you know that and you still wear cowboy boots I would call you a fraud because like that is like it's a it's like a micro Rebellion against yourself it's like there is and like I look at old people a lot because usually they don't give a [ __ ] anymore they've just like given up and uh there was a survey that they did where the number one reason that old people like don't have as much drama and they're happier is they say they they cited they literally don't have time for it like literally they don't have time for it and I found that so interesting and I was like well if I'm going to eventually be that way when I'm 80 I might as well just start being that way now and so they usually wear like really comfortable Footwear and like they they keep their surroundings like whatever weird peculiarities they have they just accept them and so I think a lot of like if if life is a long journey of self-acceptance I think the earlier you can accept your own peculiarities as just part of you rather than trying to justify them or mold to what you to the archetype that you think is acceptable within your Social Circle um at least for me like there's this period of discomfort when you change anything because everyone around you wants you to fit within the label that they are comfortable with but they also have the anchor of what you were before yeah exactly and so they try and like they they people don't like that and so they're like no no I like you in this box so just say I I know you're having a little thing right now don't worry just just and they just wanted to shove you back into it and there's there's a lot of uncomfortable conversations that you have to have where it becomes really socially awkward um and so like I I said one the other day about like going home for the holidays and the reason I don't like doing it is because often I have to confront a lot of people that I haven't seen in a long time and they'll speak to me in a way that I don't like and before that I would roll it off like whatever no big deal but um I don't accept that didn't you torpedo a family holiday a couple of years ago many yeah I think but that's the when your friends start to say you've changed it's because they don't know how to say you've grown and because they see so few people who have so it makes sense that they don't have that so I see that as a lack of skill not not malice like it's not that they're bad people they just don't even know it because so few people do change so few people do grow have seen this image it's a person whose heart and head are flowers it's kind of a 2d drawing it's a bit of a sketch and um they say this person with the kind of smaller flower head and heart says you've changed and the person on the other side with this huge Blooming Thing says I should hope so yeah I haven't seen it but I see it in my head yeah it's brilliant one of my friends George Mack told me this five years ago I think I'm astounded by how many people want to be spectacular in life but also want to be normal by being normal You Are by definition aiming for average normal people get normal results exceptional people get exceptional results you literally can't do what everyone else does and expect to not get what everyone else has got by doing what everyone else does you guarantee average results okay so this comes down to everything that like business I mean obviously I come from the business and investing world um like if everyone is jumping onto crypto like by the time you have all the information to make a perfect decision it's too late and by the time you have consensus where everyone's like that's a good investment it probably isn't because it's already been mispriced because it's already like it's already inflated it's above what its intrinsic value is and so like good investors fundamentally can think for themselves and it's such an easy thing to say and such a hard thing to do and so it's being able to say if I shut myself in a room and I had to come up with with a value for something and just use my own mind to come up with what I think this is worth it's that that answer that you get in a room in isolation with no internet connection that you believe in that number more than every single other person's and most people can't do that but like that ability and then what happens though is if you really have to believe in that rather than everyone else's you double check your [ __ ] math because if it is different than everyone else's you have the op you like that is what opportunity right it's like and you have the potential make a shitload of money or lose a ton of money because you didn't check your math and so the more I've been reinforced for thinking independently and in the beginning it's on small things and then you just continue to reinforce that cycle of huh I came to this conclusion on my own it seems different than everyone else's but I think I think my thing makes sense so I'm going to do that how would you advise someone to overcome that regression to the mean that pull to not make waves to not be heterodox or non-typical when it comes to their decision making because it's hard you're talking about this internal conflict versus external conflict how do you make the internal conflict more important than the external conflict for me I was more miserable trying to make everyone else happy that I now with everyone else unhappy with me and so I think like from the social group I had before I quit my job before we going all the way like Ground Zero to today I talk to no one from that time in my life compared to today and I was absolutely miserable and unhappy and unfulfilled and I would say that the majority of those people probably don't like me today because I changed I didn't do what I was supposed to do he thinks he's so fancy now etc etc and I think I'm just okay with that and so I think coming to terms with the idea that I could be absolutely rejected by everyone I know but like me I was more okay with that because the alternative was I didn't want live anymore and so obviously there's degrees and there's continuums and there's stages of where people are at with that but as that being the Tak to its logical extreme would I rather live for them than live for me I would rather be hated by everyone and like myself there's a degree of honesty is the right word but it's also too simple like being completely 100% truthful with yourself if that's the way that this is why if I told you about the uh Motocross the rally cross thing that me and my housemate love M okay so you know like Colin McCrae these guys that drive four-wheel there's the dude in the the co-pilot seat and it's five left Bend all that [ __ ] um these guys that go to go and watch this are in the middle of some [ __ ] wood in Asia right in Scotland and it's pissing wet and it's November and they've got a pawn show on and they get to drive for however long to get to this display you can even see thinking about it the hairs on my arms are standing up this is how [ __ ] dope it is so these guys are there and they see some dude in overcast rain freezing cold soaking wet go and then they turn to turn to all of their boys and they're like watching someone who loves anything with that much Purity yeah fires me up it fires me like we love watching we don't watch it for what the cars are doing we watch it for what it does to the spe and that degree of like just unencumbered passion yeah not being apologetic like they've probably they're probably wearing comfy [ __ ] they're not wearing cowboy boots you know what I mean no one they they look like a like a large condom in this pwn show do they care right they don't care and that's Purity yeah that's truthfulness and and honesty and really like what what are you hoping to be able to look back on your life or for people to say after you're gone if you don't do that he was such a good guy and he never rocked the boat yeah he was such a good guy and he always conformed to our expectations he was such a good guy and he was so predictable right like people think and I did throughout a lot of my 20s I thought that what people wanted from me was someone that they could easily predict but I realized when I thought about the people that I loved in my life I didn't love them because of how predictable they were yeah I love them because of how unapologetically themselves they were mhm I have a friend who nearly ended a relationship that he's still with who the love of his life who's probably going to end up marrying because he refused to not sleep on the floor for 6 months as part of a Alex Becker's doing it at the moment like he's like sleeping on the floor seems to be a pretty dialed idea and she's like I'm not sleeping on the floor well I am so they didn't sleep together for like you know for for like a long time yeah like that's those are the people that you love and those are the people that you can because they pay such a high price to do that yeah you can be very reliable at presuming that they mean what they're saying mhm because if they didn't really mean what they're saying they would conform they would take an easier path I love all of that my I was trying to kind of consolidate it for for myself and the listeners for me it it just it comes down to truly valuing your opinion of yourself more than other people's opinion of you and it's it's just it's an easy thing to say and it's incredibly hard to do because that means that if you disagree with everyone else in the room there's this meme that I love I don't know if you've seen it there's this little cartoon of this one little guy and then there's like an ocean of people that way and it just says yes you're all wrong and I just like I feel like that Meme I my uh Jor cashi my my uh brother and editor in the books in the battle against nihilism and and and towards truth um we send that Meme back and forth to one another when we're like yes everyone is wrong about this word like we are right and I think it's just being willing to like but the only way you can believe in a thing or an idea or even yourself is because you have the evidence behind you that supports that your belief isn't full of [ __ ] so that when you're in that room and you come up with that one number and you say I think everyone's wrong I think this is actually what it's worth you're not just making it up to to say you believe something different you actually have proof and evidence that you're not full of [ __ ] and I think that's the work is like I did a I looked into a lot of the stuff on the on the floor sleeping I think it it checked out I'm going to do it like I think everyone else is wrong I think everyone else is wrong and everyone's like you're an idiot and you're like I think you're wrong and that's okay you know what I and and it's just most people can't do that just the idea of being weird is too much like just like did you see did you ever um this is quite old now it's at least a decade old I think it's called 50 days of rejection or 100 days of rejection I love it already so it's a it's a a series of experiments that you do every day for 100 days there's a different one each each day and uh one of them is ask for a free coffee when you go to Starbucks oh I love it just say hey can I have this for free yeah and it's I don't know whether it escalates over time but there's like weird stuff things that you do to people in public things that blah blah blah and it's trying to overcome that like it sort of it's in your throat you know when you feel that and your cheeks get flush and everything kind of gets hot embarassed around here yeah it's that embarrassment it's that shame it's that what if they think yeah what yeah what if they think what yeah so yeah I I someone should redo that it's like a decade old now but someone should redo I think I'm certain it's called 100 days of rejection YouTube idea that would be a great YouTube idea to do 100 100 days of rejection or whatever it is um all right next one next one I I just want to like I promise you if you can actually go through 100 days of rejection your life will change because you will realize that at the end of The 100 days you're still alive and nothing changed but it's I'm going to die that's the fear the fear is I'm going to ask for the coffee and they're going to say no and then everyone's going to laugh at me and then I'm going to be alone and then I'm going to be unshed and then I'll be dead yeah it's catastrophized to death we all do it and so I mean obviously I come from a sales background so getting people to say no to me is something that I'm now if you've asked drunken Newcastle girls where they're going tonight darling for a decade and a half on the street trying to give out wristbands for a free entry to a club night no one wants to go to you you get good at rejection as well that's what I think I honestly think that uh Everyone is always going to campaign for the thing that they did right you're always going to say something along the lines of I think people can learn a lot from sales and I'm always going to say I think people can learn a lot from being in club promo but like honestly dude the the Insight that you get into human nature from doing that from seeing what do people object to and why do they object in that way and what happens if someone like gets physical with you because youve tried to do and you go oh well I wasn't in the wrong so de-escalating there should actually be quite easy and I can have faith that everyone's going to see me as the right guy even if somebody else took objection with what I was doing so yeah long story short become a club promoter all right next up next one there's a big difference between becoming known and becoming respected don't let an algorithm convince you otherwise I mean I think this is probably super ptin for for people in our position um but I'll go from the internet perspective and we can Circle back to IRL um but I mean a lot of people will make content obviously I Mak stuff for me too like talk about artists making things for themselves like I make most of my tweets are just like notes to self um but like if I ever feel like I have to sacrifice who I am or the values that I believe in in order to like get more views or something like that I see it happen more times than not because the algorithm and the views and the likes become kind of a proxy for conforming in in their own way like Everyone likes this type of thing do more of that that and that makes me feel very like dance monkey dance and um I think there's there's few things that kill my soul more than that and so I would rather you know I would rather the algorithm shut me off tomorrow and I continue to make stuff that I find interesting that 10 people find interesting that is actually the same stuff is me then just have these viral hits that I feel like I'm Ronald McDonald in um and just feel like I've completely lost my soul and I I do think as a side note that if you do the first one where your intention step maybe help find the 10 people who are really interested in your thing you probably will create more of the viral hits but when you solve for the other way I think you accomplish neither I have this theory that more creators fall out of favor because they become cringe than because they become irrelevant I love that you yeah I love that I think it's I think it's true I think if you think about the thing that you do almost anything that anybody is creating is public facing because if it wasn't public facing it would just be a hobby doing your painting because you love painting is a hobby doing your painting to try and sell it is something that you do as a business or as a a public project the flywheel is so vicious in the positive direction and even more vicious in the negative direction if it becomes cancerous or uncool or untrendy or catastrophic or cringe to be seen to be watching or listening to or consuming the thing that you make it is you are permanently going to be swimming upstream and it is only going to get worse which is why you look at Shane Gillis is a really great example of this at the moment he's someone who is great at his craft big platform moved to Austin got all of the multipliers in place but he isn't cringe and because he's not cringe if you've watched beautiful dogs his Netflix special it's not uncool it's like there's this idea in publish I've been doing my research ahead of the book there's this idea in publishing called the subway test right would someone be prepared to have the full dust jacket version of your book out on the subway all right and if your book is like stop erectile dysfunction now the erection problem right like yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah like like no more flatulence today or something like if that's if that's your book it's going to be very difficult or if it's written by somebody where it's like oh really don't want to do that so and this is the point where there are tons and tons and tons of people on the planet who have huge platforms that nobody respect mhm and I've seen even within my seven-year career of doing this the Arc of people trade Integrity for exposure and not be able to buy it back yeah because there is no return policy on your integrity on your reputation and those people would give anything to be back in the Cool Kids Club I I mean this is a like I love this entire train um I was thinking like what what creates like what's what's timelessly not cringe right like so like if cringe is the ultimate like what we don't want then like what would what is forever not cringe and the only thing that I can like really think of is is just true authenticity which is an overused word but again easy to say hard to do I think what is what is forever cringe on the equal opposite side is is pandering like whenever you're seen as someone who's only doing stuff for other people's opinion approval likes whatever especially double cringe when it's for your own personal gain and so if the equal opposite of that is uh something that is to my personal detriment um that is truly something that I believe in it honestly doesn't matter what it is because there are some people that probably believe things that I don't believe but I genuinely think based on what I see that they genuinely believe it and it's and they don't really stand to gain much for believing it yeah there's no cringe there it's just like that fan that man [ __ ] believes that and I think that um some of the you know some of the characters in our current you know piosphere and things like that like many people you know you say the word Trump and you have half the you know people who hate you and the other half that love you it's like I think most people agree that he believes what he says now whether you believe the content of what he's saying is a different story but like I don't think many people have called him as somebody who's like I think he's he doesn't really think that about himself like no I think he I think he really does and even I'm just going to push the edges because that's where you have to like explore the fringe look at someone like Kanye who's been borderline cancelled for I mean multiple times right but like why is Kanye quote uncan cuz he hasn't been right not really like if he came out tomorrow with hits a Hit album I'll bet you it would [ __ ] sell because I think that at least for me from what I see I think he does what he believes and people might be like he's mentally unstable there's all these other but like no one thinks he's being fake and I think that like if that becomes the north star of like I just never want to become cringe then it's just never be fake in other news this episode is brought to you by marrick health I wanted to get my blood work done last year and after a ton of research found that marck Health has the most sophisticated and comprehensive service in America in fact I loved the process so much that I reached out to the owner to partner with them on the show because that's how much I believe in their service they don't just provide you with supplements they also suggest lifestyle interventions training diet and everything else it really is insanely comprehensive it's great to feel like you have someone professionally trained who is in your corner helping you to understand what's going on inside of your own body when I started working with marrick my testosterone was $495 which isn't super low but isn't great and after 6 months of working with them it was at 1,06 so in less than 6 months they more than doubled my testosterone without using trt right now you can get the exact same blood panel and service that I got with a 10% discount by going to the link in the description below or heading to Mari health.com wisdom and the code modern wisdom checkout that's MK health.com wisdom and modern wisdom a checkout I think that avoiding cringe and and aligning authenticity as best you can and it's a permanent battle because you are not inside of a vacuum and you see other people doing things and there is Temptation and you need to respond to the audien's feedback in some regard or else you're just going to be making something that nobody [ __ ] cares about but you also need to not compromise too much one of your old ones related to this people are attracted to authenticity but it's hard to Define for me here's my best attempt true alignment of what you think what you say and what you do the hardest part is realizing that our thoughts are [ __ ] and that we have to fix them instead of Faking the next two wholeheartedly agree you said it man yeah that's de on well I've got a I've got a really cool idea herostratic Fame many people would rather be hated than unknown in ancient Greece herostratus burned down the Temple of emus purely so that he would be remembered nowadays we have nuisance influencers who stream themselves committing crime crimes and harassing people purely for clout herostratic Fame yeah that's like the you gain the world but you lose your soul kind of I mean I I'm also the last person to judge uh and so like if that's what you want then by all means I don't think it's what people want I think that they they think it's what they want I've been playing with this idea or this name one of the concepts that the book will be focused on intentionalism mhm and essentialism by Greg mccuan is one of my favorite a buck and I figured it would be a nice like hat nod doing what you mean to do and wanting what you want to want is so [ __ ] hard to do and so rare because we're built to confirm I think one of the my life goals and I can summarize it in a question but um is to be fearless and it's I mean equal opposite C courage is another word but I love this question which is what would you do if you weren't afraid and I just I love thinking about that when I'm thinking about big life decisions like what would I do if I weren't afraid and it's usually like the big one the the bigger thing that I really want to do but I'm afraid to do it it's like that's what I should do um and to your point about you had the five things that you told your team the one that we have is um originally it was something that we called oneof one which is make only things that we can make like you'll never see a Coca-Cola business breakdown from Alex rosi because anyone can do a Coca-Cola business breakdown that's not oneof one content but if I say I doubled the sales of this company by implementing these four things no one else can say that because no one else did it right and so it's one of one and so as the book lunch and whatnot came um we took one of one and it became this big massive thing and it wasn't it stopped being about like what can only do things that only we can do it was about doing things that we didn't even know we could do yet which became one of zero and that's why that became the brand that I'm going to continue to wear for the next few years um and build that Association but I think that that kind of encapsulates my personal life goal which is like what would I do if I weren't afraid and what would I do if I didn't if I knew I couldn't fail and the idea that I will never wish for fewer epic stories at the end of my life and I've never regretted failures I've always regretted things that I didn't try and so just along those lines of trying to create more bias internally towards action rather than inaction and normalizing consequences of failure as as we said earlier win or learn and I think that that little frame believe it or not um for anyone who's like on the teetering edge of like what should I do that thing when I was debating quitting my job which is still the hardest decision I've made to to this day still of the many that I've made um was I figured that if I didn't make the entrepreneurship thing work I would have a hell of a story for business school and that was actually like the the reasoned argument that I gave myself for being willing to quit was that I think that with my experience I'll still be able to get a job and I'll have a really cool story of Entrepreneurship that I could use to apply to get into business school and then eventually get a job later and so most times we catastrophize any failure to death right which is like I'm going to I'm going to fail I'm going to lose all my money I'm going to be homeless no want to talk to me I'm going to die right but like if you if you play it out two natural steps like okay I lose everything what do I do I would probably have a couch or floor that someone would lend me because at least socially I haven't been I haven't [ __ ] everyone I know and so I have that it's like okay so I would have some capacity to do that okay is there anything that I could do in the meantime in order to make money well sure I could drive Uber and strip and I've already you know I've told this story before but for me that was genuinely my plan because I knew that I could probably make 7080 Grand a year driving Uber I could probably make 150 stripping maybe 200 strip at the gay bars the guys pay better uh and then uh and you know boom I've got 280,000 a year I could live on the floor and then I could restart again and so that's because I don't have a lot of Shame with that kind of stuff that's not like that doesn't matter to me but I think playing out the fear Leela says this and I love it but that fear is a mile wide and an inch deep and so it looks like this ocean that you're going to step step into and drown but as soon as you step into it you realize it was not that deep at all and you can keep walking through it and um I just love that visual because a lot of times when it's like we have this anxiety around this big decision we have to make if you actually take the step and realize that it's not death you're not going to drown immediately there's plenty of other steps you can take from there even if you get a little wet did I tell you my story about a friend who went through a canellation and was worried he was a coward oh like a like a public cancellation thing okay so I went for dinner quite a while ago now with this guy that I was pretty interested in and he knew what I did and we went sort of bumped into each other and what are you doing uh let's go for dinner and I knew about the situation that he'd been through but he didn't know that I knew so I was like tell me like I'm there's no pressure and he was able to be unincumbered and basically went through like a a tough cancellation where kind of the whole world came down to bear on him and he was telling me this story I was in a very interesting time I was like being very reflective and he said my whole life I'd been worried that I was a coward was terrified that I was a coward but I'd never been through a situation where I'd had to bring absolutely everything to bear on my life and I'm a hard man and I like to hang around with hard men and I like to shoot guns and do Jiu-Jitsu and and and be around Navy Seals and stuff like that but I always had this fear in the back of my mind that I might secretly be a coward and then he said the cancellation thing happened and it wasn't a very difficult one rep max it wasn't a really hard crossfit workout it was something outside of his control he used this term that I love and he said uh I could always hear my better self clearing his throat in the room next door and I always wondered what would happen if I had to really really Wrangle everything if the whole world came crashing down on me and I wanted to work out whether or not I was a coward and he said thankfully he kicked the door in and came through but I just love that I could always hear my better self clearing his throat in the room next door but he'd never been fully tested done lots of hard things lot of a claim very successful blah blah blah but we all know that's your thing right like but I'll know about whether or not you've left something on the table and uh yeah he there was always just 5 sent still in the tank when he was doing things about how he felt about how invested he was he always had to get out of jail free card in one way or another and uh yeah I love that I [ __ ] I could always hear my better self clearing his throat in the room next door two things on that so I think if we're if we're consuling some of the points we were making earlier the but I'll know refrain I think that a lot of the personal Excellence comes down to making the but Al know more important than the but everyone what will everyone else think because the I think the true test of whether you're a quote perfectionist or not is if everyone else in the room says it's exceptional and then you say but I'll know it's not because I don't think it's exceptional yet if you still break what everyone else believes is beautiful so that you can make the thing that you make it the way you want it to make or make it the way you want it to be I think that is probably like the the truest test of whether or not you really do value your own opinion over those of other people's and if you really want to be true to quote the art whatever your art is AR I'm using as a generic term it could be the career or the even like the the the financial projection that you're supposed to do at your company like there is a way you could do it and do it absolutely [ __ ] excellent and there's a way you could do it that you could phone it in and probably not get in trouble but the things that you'd know and then you'd be the type of person who always phones it in and that to me is disgusting and that would make me disgusted with me and that is the thing that would make me want to peel my skin off because I would hate me and I think that's why so many people do hate them because they do settle and they do make these things and they do know and still ignore it and so they ignore the man in the other room who's clearing his throat and they shut the door and they lock it and they never let that guy in and so they look like everyone else they act like everyone else and they get what everyone else gets America was built on the backs of men who smoked cigarettes drove without seat belts and had bacon for breakfast if you miss your biohacking routine this morning you're going to be okay there's a time for leverage but there's also a time for violence which is just brute force people get really obsessed with optimal which is getting the most bang for your buck but there's also maximizing which is just getting the most bucks you lose more life trying to optimize everything than just living it the stress of trying to be perfect is killing you more quickly than your imperfections I think that's an Ode to Being being willing to take huge amounts of imperfect action towards one goal and being willing to sacrifice other things for an extended period of time despite the fact that other people say they're making a sacrifice like when we enter Seasons I call it you know the season of no which is where you have I have extended duration where I say no to almost everything and most people say that's unbalanced and they that as though it's a bad thing they're like that's so unbalanced you're like yes that's the point because if I had a balanced outcome then I won't have the outsized return on this one thing and so again like there's so many these little insults that people will throw at you like you're unbalanced you changed you that they intend as insults but if you actually don't take your Society programmed response and say oh they mean to insult me but if you actually think about what they're saying they're saying something that's true and then we just need to be okay with that truth because that was the choice we made to begin with and so I think about that a lot which is like how many things do people tell me that they intend to insult me with that I can take as a compliment didn't someone bump into Leila walking down the street yeah it was it happened so recently so yeah we're walking in the street someone bumps into her I like we don't always walk like side by side cuz there's lots of people so we like split up sometimes anyway she she comes back to me and she was like like guess what this guy just said and I was like what and she was like he called me a skinny [ __ ] and I was like what and she but she seemed so happy and I was like and I was like like I just kind of shook my head like tell me more like explain she was like I mean he said I was skinny and I was like this is the this is the perfect example of him hurling an insult and her choosing not to be insulted thank you yeah thanks really yeah do you really mean it it it like there like I wonder how many times we've been insulted even like in my younger days where someone said something to me that like if I had my current brain I could have been like you you really mean it thanks man and um yeah like so unbalanced I mean remember I remember I took that as such an insult for such a long period of time now part of that was because when I I was being brought up balance was like one of the big frames of my household was like you have to be balanced which really just meant you have to be awesome at everything um but balance was the was the word so being unbalanced was was a term that was used as an insult and so um for so many years I wanted to be balanced um but then I was like well nothing great was ever achieved by people who tried to be great at all things and so I was like okay I'm just not going to I'm not I might not have a great relationship for a long period of time I mean there was like a lot of people don't know this but in the early days of our Rel of our relationship um even when we were married I told l so the first three years um I said the business comes before our marriage a lot of people don't know that um and I was like well and to me it made sense it was like most people break up over money the business makes money so the business feeds us and then we will be okay that was kind of my my thinking around it um and we eventually flipped that said like if we're good the business will be fine uh but took three years to get there um but all that to say like I think having periods of imbalance and maybe to be fair if we if I hadn't had that priority at that time maybe much wouldn't have been what it became and so I can't look back and say like I should have done it different because it's really easy to say that now but like I might not be here to say that if I had been that way Oliver burkman's got this Great Frame where he talks about choose in advance what you're going to suck at oh yeah it's in 4,000 weeks and if you are a type a go-getter person who has what I call the curse of competence your options in life are restricted more by what you choose than what you can do mhm you will feel dis Qui when something that you used to be great at begins to slip because you focused your attention elsewhere you used to be in really great shape you said that one of your goals this year was to get a raise or to be able to buy your first house or to find a partner or to do whatever hey guess what if you're spending four or five nights a week going to places where you can maybe date or going out on dates or doing whatever you're probably not going to have as much time to dedicate to the gym if you want to get that or be able to sa for your first house or whatever you're going to have to work later which maybe means that your friends are going to drop off if you pick whatever the thing is there is a price that you begin to pay and this cycle began for me so frequently toward the back end of my 20s where I would dedicate myself to a thing then something else would begin to slip so I would then go oh I'll just I'll I'll just give a little bit I'll just give a little bit to that and it's not an additive system it's multiplicative it's not to plus like three it's 2 * 3 and that means that the more that you attend to the thing that you say that you're going to do the more the gains acre to you and then you can still pivot back but you need to periodize things and this is this is a frame that I wish even now it's it's still something that I struggle with realizing that now isn't forever the thing that you're doing right now doesn't need to be forever yeah if you are coming out the back of the searching for the partner thing and you're like hey guess what I gained 15 all right well dedicate yourself for the next 6 months to going to the gym but this isn't the rest of your life right and once that thing's done oh well guess what I'm back to you know 12% body fat I feel great about myself what's next it's not forever yeah it's just for now yes we have a frame that we actually use a lot um I I've I always think about these things from a business context but they end up retroactively you know applying to life um but when we're making big strategic decisions we say like which problems would we prefer and so rather than talking about like the gains and what's the upside if we have like you know let's say we're going to make a big investment in software for this company or we're going to make a big you know huge a new service line or we're going to just decide to develop a physical product right I mean I know you you're like you literally on the just back half of of a big decision like this yourself it's like okay let's imagine what the problems are going to be if we if we decide to do this new service category well some people are going to complain that they're not getting results from this thing uh we're going to have a ton of like we might have some negative reviews in the short term that we're going to have to deal with like let's look at what happens when one of our favorite customers tell us the [ __ ] off like what like what like let's really sit in what each of these problems is and then when we when we spell out all of the problems and we don't even think about the upside say which of these problems do we prefer and which Are we more equipped to deal with sometimes we have really amazing Innovation and in my opinion like really solid decision making that comes afterwards that minimizes kind of the the post-decision regret because we also know what negatives would have come with the path unchosen because most most times like our regrets Come From the Path unchosen because we imagine it only with the upside we only think about I think there's a um there's a [ __ ] there's a book that where a girl lives many different versions of her life and Midnight Library yes and the thing is is that there's these pieces of her life that she imagins are going to be amazing but then she realizes her best friend's dead or all of a sudden she's pregnant and you're like whoa happened and so we don't take into account on the paths not taken the things that we would have lost along the way and so I think really good decision-making and also regret minimization is that when you make the decision you think about the downsides too and you remember what those downsides are and for me that has been one of my strongest frames for like I didn't decide to do that were all that oh yeah those were a lot I'm glad those are problems I'm very happy I don't have to deal with now in other news this episode is brought to you by nomatic you might have seen that I recently was on the road for a full 28 days using just hand luggage because hold luggage is a scop meant to keep you poor and late and almost everything is down to this backpack and the carry-on that I was using this is their travel pack their 20 L travel pack and honestly it is the best backpack that I've ever found it would take way longer than I've got to explain all of the different pieces of tech that are inside of this but it basically allows you to pack so much more stuff with so much less fuss and it's outstanding they're beautifully designed not over engineered and has a lifetime guarantee so this is literally the final backpack that you will ever need to buy also you can return or exchange your bag for any reason within 30 days so you can buy it try it use it and carry stuff in it for a full month and if you don't like it they'll give you your money back head to the link in the show notes below or go to nomatic dcomm Modern wisdom use the code modern wisdom at checkout for a 20% discount off everything sitewide that's nomatic docomo wisdom and modern wisdom a checkout thinking about the Perils of over optimization is something I brought up with hberman last year and you know I think a lot of people I have a friend who's a very well-known DJ that told me he was falling out of love with DJing because he knew that it was damaging his sleep and because he knew how important sleep was to Performance that he' kind of got him the bar stool had been turned upside down a little bit and the thing that he was trying to do was being sacrificed for the thing which is supposed to facilitate it MH and that's where the you lose more life trying to optimize everything than just living it the stress of trying to be perfect is killing you more quickly than your imperfections all right so I I I'm glad we came back to optimization because um there's obviously on the extreme there's uh guys like Brian Johnson with blueprint who are trying to like live to 200 or live forever um and I I I respect the I respect dedication to anything always um and interestingly around I've always been a maximizer so I've actually not really been an Optimizer in my life it's just like as soon as I have an input output equation where it's like n equals X and it's like and if I want 10x I do 10 n I'm like great then can we do a thousand n like I just want to do as much of that as I humanly possible um but when we like I love competitors who like optimizing because I always see it as a weakness because it's so easy to exploit it's like oh you need your 8 hours of sleep or you need your morning routine or you if you don't have your supplements you're just totally [ __ ] or like I didn't have my coffee this morning so I can't function like I love to compete against people like that because they're so easy to break it's fragile yeah and so what happens is the optimizations become Superstition correct and so my my fear around and I and maybe I take a more extreme stance on this but like I've always wanted to be able to with an internet connection and a laptop and a foldout chair go make money and always have that as my North Star that anything else is extra and I feel like I lose more quickly when I get into this optimization cycle around CU I remember years ago I um I bought one of those rings that tracks your sleep and I kept trying to like set sleep PRS and you can only get so high anyways and then I started stressing more about not hitting sleep PRS that I was sleeping worse than when I wasn't tracking it and so then I was like well [ __ ] this thing and I slept fine the next night and so um obviously microcosm I'm a big believer in tracking progress in general but just the idea that we become so overly romantic around these things that sometimes you just have to break [ __ ] and sometimes you have to be violent and sometimes when you're on your journey you're not going to sleep much and you're going to you're going to like there was a a two-year period where I did uh turnarounds for gyms I flew around the nation every month I would do a new gym I ate out of gas stations and I ate gas station food and I gained weight during that period of time and it was for then and not forever and I'm in shape now and so whatever who cares and so like I used to tell this when I was selling weight loss to people I'd say like who cares if you get in shape for six weeks out of 80 years and like right as they're about to sign a for a members I was like you want to this is how I would sell longer memberships but like it's also true it's like you want to sign up for the six weeks but like Susan like who cares if you lose 20 lbs and you're still overweight 6 weeks from now and then you gain it back the next 6 weeks and you're still the the exact same weight for the rest of your life and so I just I think the absolute dedication to maximization so that becomes a part of your identity and your character has been one of the outsides returns that I've gotten in my life and just being absolutely willing to S like I'm I'm pretty violent about this but like list all the things that you aren't willing to give up for the dreams that you have and that is what the person who will beat you is willing to give up there's a phenomenal blog post that talks about why guys aren't getting girlfriends and this is premodern mating crisis so it's not it's not to do with like imbalances on Tinder and tall girl problem and all that all that stuff it's a a guy who thinks that the bare minimum is acceptable so he talks about how I'm always on time and and you know I hold the door open and I say please and thank you and I'm nice to my mom and the dude I'll never forget it there's this line in the blog post where the guy he's like having this pretend dialogue with this imaginary person goes so [ __ ] what there's a guy who does all of those things and he plays the guitar well it's like the the song lyric uh baby you the whole package and you pay your taxes um yeah I mean I think also to the same degree I mean like I'm I'm no meeting whatever expert like no idea I got married early did all the things that you know whatever you're not supposed to do um but yeah and yet if you like if you are true to you like what's the most unringed thing right is you being you I'm pretty sure that I turned away plenty of girls who were like this guy's successful he's in shape uh you know decent looking strikingly handsome um but they'd meet me and they'd be like what a [ __ ] weirdo but the thing is is like they like and I remember I had had um there were so many girls that I was like you're pretty and I I I just don't care at [Laughter] all and so I like I just I wanted someone who got my peculiarities who was like not only like accepting of them but just like down for it and so I I walked through most of my and to be fair as a side note for anybody who like wants to quote be exceptional you're going to be different and people are going to think you're weird and like you might not get second dates but real real you're not going to want the second date to because they're not like you like when you get unplugged you're like oh wow everyone's a sheep this is weird and you just go on a zillion First Dates to be like you had another one yet had another one and every once in a while you see a glimmer in someone who they're like oh you think for yourself like you can make your own conclusions I remember when Leela and I went on our first date we were we were we went at a at a frozen yogurt store and so of course I'm like so you know how they make their money here right I was like so these things weigh this they charge this per ounce and I was like breaking this whole thing down and she was like oh yeah and they do this and this and I was like wait you see this too like you it wasn't like just like Alex just talking about the child out of the [ __ ] SI sense or whatever it is I was so excited because normally I would just have to like talk I would talk about the stuff that at least I like to talk about because then we' pass the not good dating strategy I'm just one to myself yeah but then she also like talk about this stuff and I was like holy [ __ ] what's the alternative the alternative is to find someone who falls in love with a role that you're playing right that's the best that you can hope for right and then lock yourself in to a future of having to perform in a way that this person has become accustomed to and there's nothing that could be more lonely than I can possibly imagine than pretending every single hour of every day that you're someone you're not do you know who Dr Robert Glover is he wrote No More Mr Nice Guy no but I like the title had him on the podcast last week this guy is a [ __ ] boss so cool like mid-60s or something now huge goatee smoke cigarettes uh probably probably rip starts that by this this office by the way is completely it's like smoking enabled R Vegas um and he had three Essences of an attractive man and I think it's a really lovely frame the essence of an attractive man he's comfortable in his own skin he knows where he's going and he has fun while he's going there nailed nailed so good so good but like that if you think about that as okay so if if if if you're and like even like an attractive man whether you're married or not like I mean on the flip side it's like do you want to be married and then choose to become unattractive well no of course not and so it's like if those are three ideals it's like you have you have Direction in your life you're internally comfortable and the fun part is what makes you I mean partially attractive and now mind you if you just have one of the three you can you will find a mate who's attracted like if you just know with all your [ __ ] soul you're going somewhere people will want to Rally behind you even if you're not having fun and even if you're not got 10 kids right and even if you're not that comfortable in your own skin but you're like that guy like no matter what he's going to [ __ ] get there on the flip side if you don't know where you're going and you don't even have much fun but you're like that guy is comfortable like say what you want but that guy's good with him that's an like that Al like if you just had one and if you just have a shitload of fun you don't know where you're going and you're not that comfortable like you'll still have people um I'd probably prefer the first two to the third but you know but like as ideals like [ __ ] very strong the only insults that hurt are the ones we believe next time someone insults you remember they're going to die everyone will forget about them and if no one will remember them then you might as well forget about them now they are irrelevant your dream your actions your outcomes so now you know what the inside of my head looks like um um I mean I I uh I put almost everything immediately to death um and that's like maybe it's a coping mechanism maybe it's a perspective mechanism um but like you want to hear I I was really strongly considering having a parody um tweet profile of my own that I also run that no one would know that I run that is just like all my very very controversial beliefs um but I'll I'll I'll throw a taster out now um murder is just picking when someone dies so it's like if you hate someone it's like you can just look at them and be like oh you're going to die eventually like and so like the idea is like in your mind you could murder every enemy you have you just just don't get to pick the time but I just find that so such a like murder only changes when not that someone's going to die and so if you think about like retribution on someone's like this person said this thing to me H I want to kill him it's like oh no you don't even have to they'll die they're going to die already like you don't have like don't worry about it they're going to die and so it sounds so silly but just connecting those two dots I was like wow that's incredibly peaceg giving so like why have a vendetta when life will take care of them for me uh and so I just like you know as a as a as a totally different frame I was talking to somebody who has cancer uh in my life and uh they were like really concerned they were like this has a has a 95% mortality rate over the next 5 years and um you know me being me I was like well you know 70y olds probably have a 60% mortality rate over the next 5 years anyways I was like and life has 100% mortality rate so you know worse yes but like how much worse and So like um they didn't think it was funny but but just as a as it it was intended to be comforting it didn't succeed um but uh all that to say uh these these things that people cast on us um it's just Whispers In The Wind right like if we think that our whole meaning is is so infantes the idea that someone else can influence our trajectory when they themselves will disappear and become irrelevant seems so silly to me and they don't have our best interest at heart no they have the opposite of our best interest they're literally trying to destroy you what about the only insults that hurt are the ones we believe what about that oh yeah um well I cuz I like other people get offended with things and then I've als had times where someone says something with the intention to insult and it doesn't and I was like how can I get that to happen every time and so it's the classic example of you know Chris you have green hair and then you would say okay whatever sure but you don't believe it so it doesn't really matter and so I think there's there's a there's kind of a dual-sided like lesson at least for me in this is that when we are insulted I try and pay attention to it because I think okay either there's something here that they're right about and that I don't like about myself in which case the response is too agree and that's what's so frightening and so it's like if someone so recently had someone someone made some thing blasting me about um I don't go home for the holidays I made this whole I made this video about it um and in the first 5 Seconds of the video of course I'm like if you love your family [ __ ] go home this is not this is for everybody else right but of course no one actually watches that who makes that piece of content and so they just went on this tie rate about me and I just said God I suck period as my comment and because there's no the the the the stoic response to hate is to agree and one up so level one is agree so someone says Alex you're a [ __ ] idiot and you're like believe me if you knew half of it you'd think more than that because it's the only way you can respond and so my mental Judo for these things and I've just I try to now the good news for you and I is that we get lots of practice right every day we have people hating on us and so I get to I get to pract so like people people meet you in real life and they trying to insult you're like dude I have so many reps on this like I'm good and so it's just like can I want up their insult like if someone insults me it's like dude let me I dude you think that's good let me tell you how to really get me right and so just the frame of agreement evaporates conflict yeah that's your thing about um most people are more interested in winning than being right yeah so you just say sure you're right yeah Alex you're an IDI all of your business advice is terrible be like you're right now what Where Do We Go From Here Right wasn't that fun and so we talk like because like I like it human behavior a lot but like it's called it's it's a it's a extinguishing event so like when you when you when you pull a slot machine when when null is the outcome it nullifies agreement is the ultimate nullifier for insults and I I think that like if the the faster I I reprogram that so it's like if if you ever feel insulted either like first is it is it true like if you are insulted you believe them okay uh do I believe them because there's an element of truth if there's an element of Truth why am I insulting I should agree with them it's just because we have some ego behind it of like I want I'm going to be perceived a certain way or maybe because it's poking a hole it's wedging into the inauthenticity that someone has brought into the light something which we thought we were able to keep in private one of my other life goals is to die with no secrets why just be because if we think about at least for me if I think about authenticity um to be seen as I truly am then I would have no secrets and I try you know I try really hard uh to not hold anything back content or otherwise um so that I don't need to have I don't want to have a 100 faces because if you always have something in the back room then it means that to these people you're this person and this is in the back room to these people you're this person in the back room but the fewer back rooms I have the more everyone is in one room and I can be just me and that means that some people will hate me um and some people will like me but they will actually like or hate me not the idea or some facet like we were saying earlier like when you're in a relationship putting on the ACT and putting being the performer they're not hating the idea of me they actually hate me and at least there's some weirdness about like at least that's true in other news this episode is brought to you by Shopify Shopify is the global Commerce platform that helps you sell at every stage of your business from the launch your online shop phase to the first real life store stage to the did we just hit a million orders stage Shopify can support you every step of the way from that all-in-one e-commerce platform to that in-person POS system whatever you're selling and wherever you're selling it Shopify has got you covered Shopify helps you turn browsers into buyers with the internet's best converting checkout 36% better on average compared to other leading e-commerce platforms Shopify Powers 10% of all e-commerce in the United States including huge Brands like gym shark and my brand newtonic we literally launch newtonic on Shopify because it's the best platform for e-commerce so if you want to start selling without learning to code or Design This is where to start right now you can sign up for a $1 per month trial period by going to the link in the show notes below or heading to shopify.com wisdom all lowercase that's shopify.com wisdom to grow your business now no matter what stage you're in there's a a lesson that I learned from Rob Henderson which is like an interesting addition to what we're talking about here and he asked the question why do we feel insulted or why do our cheeks flush when somebody accuses us of something that we know that we haven't done M and the issue here is that we don't exist in a vacuum and we care about other people's interpretations of us yeah and the disinformation campaign even if it's grounded in falsehood can still negatively impact our status mhm so even even if you know that this isn't true and all of the rest of it functionally to everybody that isn't you or maybe many people that aren't you or maybe some people who are influential that aren't you this can have the same impact as if it was true yeah so that the man being an island and I have faith in my own word yeah as soon as you start to build this out it's there's a reason for trepidation there mhm I think so I was trying to think about like the what are what are counter example so like if someone attacks your character right so let's say uh someone comes out and says Alex did some sort of sexual allegation or something like that that I know isn't true whatever but they say that now that's going to besmer my reputation right now I can't be like you're right and if you really knew right right so I can't if you knew the half of it um so like so like those those are the situations right so like if someone just says like you're you're full of [ __ ] or your business advice is bad or whatever then that's one thing um but in those situations um the only counter that I have seen is to be louder and so if someone increases the volume on something I don't believe that you draw attention to that person I actually I've more or less not been in the I'm going to address someone directly but I may counter what this person says without addressing them and be 10 times bigger and louder about it as a way to counteract that and so like I had a bad reputation in college which I i' I've shared some of that in my story before um and the reputation was that I was a phander and was you know all about girls and whatever and so I wanted to not have the reputation and so it wasn't like I was going to go talk to those girls and be like I need you to recant your story um I had to make my actions so much louder that I was no longer going to be that way for an extended period of time to counteract that thing and so if we're thinking about like how to respond to people being shitty to you if you believe what they say and it's true agree and one up if what they say is something that isn't true but does bmer your reputation then you can only be respond by being louder with the truth and I think that like I I think about these things obviously we're in a position we have to deal with this all the time um as like almost playbooks for dealing with shots well this is one of the things that people got wrong about Dave portnoy's cancellation so I didn't even know he got cancel Dave had sex with maybe two two or three girls that sold the story no separately okay sold a story to the Atlantic I think yeah [ __ ] num um sold sold a story to someone and they were they were looking around and I think they're still going I'm pretty sure that only a couple of months ago they tried to notify some pizza event that he was doing do you know that we're investigating him about that and then he called them out so what's happened is there's been million Meo allegation things that have come across people saw the way that Dave portno responded he came out of the fences absolutely swinging like swinging so hard said this is [ __ ] bollocks it's baseless I think he maybe even somehow had video evidence or or audio evidence or some kind maybe internal CCTV cameras basically all of this stuff is dog [ __ ] yeah people took Dave py didn't take any [ __ ] and and and he didn't back down and he didn't do an apology and he didn't do the rest it's like yeah guess why because he didn't do it right because he wasn't in the wrong yeah if you are the guy that did do the thing yeah you don't have that that's a firm foundation what you're doing there is just creating this like Cathedral of of lies and dog [ __ ] on top of a sand castle of lies and dog [ __ ] which would then get found out and you get hit you'll get slamed 10 times way way way harder right so to be fair get that's the thing so learning okay why did he do this particular tactic well he ran that play yeah because the basis of where he was at allowed him to loud as [ __ ] about the truth one one thing that we talked about earlier with cancelling and I have um so relatively contrarian views on cancelling um I genuinely believe that you cannot be canceled you only are you can only be canceled in two ways you can be canceled if you choose to stop making content stop being public or all means and methods and channels of communication that you do not control remove you from it so like for example uh there's Tate right and he had his uh like he's not allowed to be on the platforms but they allow his content be on the platform so has he been canceled no I would argue not and there's still other platforms and he continues to make content so you only so I to me this is actually really um uh I know heartwarming uh security feeling I I get warm and fuzzies around it reassuring thank you um because it means that cancellation is you have to agree to be canceled no matter how bad like if you mess the platform yeah a yeah if they if they L if they had AI face recognizing him and and eliminated from the platform he would be canceled like there's no method of communication outside of in person he would have no leverage agreed but barring that if you continue to make content no matter what you did people will find out about you more people will know about you and your message will get disseminated and whether you choose to like recant something that you did you know like right or wrong apologize or do what Dave did and say like this is complete bollocks use my little UK term uh and just be even louder you choose to be canceled and I I like that because I I like to have as many things under my control as I can yeah the i' I've been like thinking about the strion effect because everyone's always said you know cancellation makes people bigger I think that is cope I think it's massive cope I don't think that cancellation makes people bigger Alex Jones for instance when he got he got about as close to unpersoned I think as you can get very very I wasn't seeing for the last whatever five years eight years whenever he got taken off Twitter I wasn't seeing him on YouTube unless he was on somebody else's show uh I wasn't seeing him on Instagram I wasn't seeing him on Twitter uh Steve will do it as a good example as well like he can't even be in the background of other people's YouTube videos and he's got shares in Rumble and he's doing all of this other stuff but still that's a pretty big unperson and I think it's kind of cope to say oh but so many more people are searching them like the entire internet is built on convenience yeah if you think that making it more inconvenient for someone to access someone makes them bigger you are fundamentally forgetting human nature now maybe in this you know beautifully util Arian rational view of the world the person that wants to see the thing they might go and get the thing but it's like hey guess what like Tik tok's got an unlimited scroll and they're just going to keep going and if they don't appear they don't appear and to draw this into IRL for everyone who's like okay well that might be convenient for Alex Jones and what not like he can't or he can or can't be canceled whatever I think that at least for me the through line on this is like if you do some embarrassing thing which happens we're human the only way it compounds into being like a much bigger problem is if you you become a recluse you choose to not go out you choose to not you choose to disassociate with everyone else like you choose to agree to the terms that the people around you are telling you you have to agree to and that's where I think you can say no Destiny's got this idea he told me this story I think it was like VidCon or vid Summit 2012 and Destiny's sprayed it around a bit in his career and he was at this huge YouTuber convention and his ex-girlfriend or something got access to his Twitter account and leaked his dickpics on his Twitter while he's at this vid Summit thing surrounded by his peers so he's trending so it's not only oh my god look what's happening on the Internet it's oh my God the internet has now become real life and it's in front of me and there's thousands and thousands of people and they all know what's going on and you know Finding Nemo just keep swimming just keep swimming from Dory his is just keep streaming he says everybody only remembers your last four streams yeah so sure enough you went on first stream just the chat is lit up take a piss out of him and oh like here it is second second one still lots and lots and lots of jokes third one uh like a few less then fourth one was pretty much gone yeah after four stream it's not fun anymore we've all heard it yeah so true Jordi got um it's like a British UK uh YouTuber big guy and um a few years ago his DMS got leaked from his verified Instagram account saying some like pretty dirty sex stuff to a girl and she was of age she was age there was no it was like it was kind of I guess it was intimate it was intimate and like embarrassing or whatever for him but he uh he was silent pretty much silent for 5 days and then got probably the best roast comedian in the UK to come on and annihilate him yeah for 20 minutes in a video and put it out on his own YouTube channel and it's that B rabbit thing tell these people something that they don't already know about me like what joke are you going to make that Steven Tes like literally the most vicious funny sardonic UK roast person hasn't already said and it showed that he could laugh at himself dude this is the uh so this is the take what they say one up them right and so like I'm going to take what they say find a person who is professional at one-upping them and then bring them in and then publish it to your million person YouTube channel yes like we um we so we actually teach this from a customer ser I know I'm going totally cross poot Nation here but we there's there can only be one person in the angry boat and so a customer comes in they're shouting and I learned this from my like ear one of my earliest business mentors I worked at a fur coat dealer uh so like brushing you know Furs it's a glorious job um I was 18 it was a summer and so this lady walks in and I was at the the retail shop which normally I was in the warehouse where the The Peasants were and uh and so this lady comes in and she's making a whole mess of noise and the guy walks towards me cu the owner and I see him like roll his eyes and then as he turns turn turns the corner to go where she can see him he like his face turns into a smile and then he's like he's like Mrs Robinson and then he just goes into rage mode and I was like whoa what's happening and he was like wait there was a button missing on your jacket he's like give me that jacket he like pulls it out he's like who sold this to you who let you walk he said did anyone see you in this and and he was like tell me their names right now I'm going to get they're going to be out of here like we're going to end like we're going to get terminate their employment we're going to make sure that they never eat again all the stuff whatever and she all of a sudden she back she was like oh no no you know it no one saw me in it I just got I just saw it when I got home if you guys could just of course we're going to fix it of like no question whatsoever and so of course she he takes the ticket she leaves he comes in the back and he just looked at me and he was like only one person can be in the angry boat and I and it was a lesson that has stuck with me in like and so in this in this instance everyone is angry at you and so the only thing you CU people are contrarian by Nature all you can do is be angrier than them at whatever it is and so like getting the comedian to like oh you think he insulted me like here's a picture of my cold shrivel dick after a nice cols after my Polar Plunge you want to see like so it's just it's like can you do that and it's just leaning into what feels unnatural and uncomfortable but it's the only way to respond you cannot wish for a strong character and an easy life each is the price of the other what if what you're going through isn't hard what if you're just sensitive I think that most of us can look back on our lives to 10 years ago and think about the problems that we were dealing with then and think about how much of a pittance and how small those problems were compared to the problems that we deal with today at least that's how I probably feel maybe you feel the same way and so I then think okay well if I feel that way about the problems that I had 10 years ago then 10 years from now Alex will look back at the problems that I'm dealing with today and feel the same way and so if he feels that way then about the problems that I have now then the only difference is the perspective that he has that I don't have and so I might just be a sensitive little pansy and maybe these aren't problems at all maybe these are just Facts of Life and I need to habituate to them because I remember um my first lawsuit right because it's like when you're in business long enough you make enough money you're just going to get sued it is what it is and I was listening to um Elon mus talk about this and at any given time Tesla has hundreds of lawsuits at any like just they they have they have massive Departments of legal just for all the different things that are going on and it was thinking that a requisite for success is a problem like you cannot become the wealthiest man in the world and not get sued like getting sued is a is an indicator that you're actually is a is a requisite for being there there's no no person has been there without this and so reframing what I used to consider a problem as a as a point of evidence that I am on the path that I originally chose I remember the first time that I ever tried to Incline chest press 20 kilos and as I got it up this is in the center for sporting excellence in Newcastle gym and as I got it up there I didn't have the tricep strength to be able to keep it and I watched this thing slowly come down toward my face and it just landed on my nose and I like sort of bailed it bailed it out off my nose yeah and now that's not even there not even the warmup to the warmup to the warm-up set so the problem is that we don't have very good memory we don't have theory of mind for ourselves for a previous version of ourselves I've always thought that it would be such an amazing talk maybe neuralink can do it some point in future you know how people want to go back in time and they want to see a different place I would love to go back in time in my own mind MH and remember the texture of my own existence and what were the things that I thought about I've told this story before but it's pretty illustrative day one is a journal that you can use for your phone it's pretty good and for me it's big [ __ ] it's like big things are happening if I open day one some some [ __ ] shit's going down um and breakups and and and illnesses and and being worried about people dying or whatever the whatever the [ __ ] I once opened it to write down that the MC in room two the R&B room of our Saturday night club night had told me that he was leaving to go to a competitor event 15 mil away and I remember thinking that it was so Salient to me that it deserved to go in along with breakups and and do I go on this reality TV show or do I not because I was adamant that that would be the beginning of the end because the only reason the Asian sock the Asian Society came down was because they like this particular MC and if he went then Asian sock would stop coming and if Asian stops upcoming then that would mean this and then and then the whole business would go and I'd be dead but I don't think that anymore and there was one there was one time where I hadn't worked our events for quite a while and a DJ that used to work for us came through and he thought that he'd wind me up by saying 3 minutes before we opened that something was up with one of the cdjs something's up with one of the cdjs a couple of minutes before you open things are bad because there's usually not a spare and it means that the night's going to be delayed or whatever and there was lots of people outside waiting to come in or whatever it might be and he was expecting a response from a previous version of me which would have been the one that would have gone into day one and typed about the fact that the CDJ hadn't worked and I just said oh okay well uh I don't know we'll fix it and he called out broke the fourth wall and said oh I like it's not broken at all like I just thought that I'd wind you up but you didn't play the game I'm like oh right it's the like you've grown or you've changed thing yeah he was it Juke the don't don't punk the game yes don't punk the game yeah I think the point is to always Punk the game as many times as you possibly can especially if you're the one getting the game played on you by yourself what's your framework for quitting things and moving onto something new how do you know when you're quitting because you're being a [ __ ] yeah and how do you know that you're moving on from something that's no longer worthwhile man so there's a there's a handful of questions that I think everyone faces that um you never know the right answer to and so it's like how much is the right amount to invest versus consume is one of those answers like if you invest if you consume nothing and you invest everything into it tomorrow you end up with a life where you enjoyed nothing and then you have a big pile of sh delayed gratification in the extreme results and no gratification right and so like there these are these are rather than either ores they continuums and so to be managed more than uh problems to be solved and so I think just from a a decision-making framework that's number one um number two is so with regards to this one which is do you push or do you pivot which is how I how I frame this question um pushing like do I push through whatever this hardness is and there's like something that's in sight that I think I can go to or there are fundamental things that have changed that make my original hypothesis wrong and so I'm I'm I'm telling the the secret right now um but for me I won't quit if no new information has come to light and so if I say I'm going to do this based on these assumptions if those assumptions have have still held then it's a push situation if there's new data that's come to light that changes the nature of why I'm pushing or the outcome for what I'm going to get from pushing or the way that I'm pushing is incorrect then I would quote quit but quitting has a lot of um heavy terminology in you know I'd say personal motivation masturbation pivots much softer right because I think that everything is a pivot except for stopping and so I think even reframing like language matters a lot and I care a lot about language and so like nothing is quitting unless you stop and if you continue to Pivot and you continue to push either of those are activity and so you will stumble upon something that does work in which case do more of it um and so that has always been my frame but it's I have an initial assumption or series of assumptions for a desired thing so let's say I want to I want to build my social media brand I say okay I believe that if I make you know content about things that no one else can make content about that is more higher level business stuff than is out there because most of the YouTubers are YouTubers not business people there will be an audience for that and in the beginning I will have fewer people who follow it but if I make really good stuff over time eventually people will tell people and I will get better at making content and that will grow so if I'm at year two and and it's and the thing is is like do I have leading indicators and so like even in business stuff like we I don't need the outcome but are there leading leading indicators that are telling me that this I'm on the right path and so identifying ahead of time just like we have a problems that we identify like okay if we succeed like people are going to recognize you in the street you're not going to be able to go out as much like all these other these are problems that I'm have to deal with cool I'm willing to pay for those but what are the what are the things along the way that will tell me that even though I haven't achieved Mr Beast them that I'm on the right path and so I think having those little indicators allow you to keep taking steps towards the ultimate thing and continue to push I mean a different um tweet which is that the world belongs to those who can continue to work without seeing the result of their work continue to do without seeing the result of their doing and it's really the person who can do that for the longest period of time and that's usually because they're still getting leading indicators it's just that it's am mounting to a much bigger mountain and so like if you want to do big [ __ ] it takes a way longer period of time because the the easy [ __ ] the little Hills everyone conquers really quickly I'm on time I say please and thank you it's like so [ __ ] what and so like if you want to do something that most people can't do literally just extend the time Horizon on the things that most people can't weather like there's so much opportunity on the other side of being willing to persist for an extended period of time on the correct path without getting positive reinforcement from your environment and the longer you can stick with something without that positive feedback loop in terms of the big external thing the the the easier the opportunities are because so few people can pursue them in James Clay's Atomic habits I think he interviews maybe the Chinese weightlift team's head coach and he asked what is the difference between the absolute Elite world champions and the ones that simply qualify and the coach said the absolute Elite are the ones who can continue to come in every single day without getting bored that was it and Matt Fraser talks about it as well where he says that doing an hour and a half of monostructural work on the rower you've got to do zone two hey guess what you don't even get the benefit of feeling like you work that hard you just get to kind of yeah whatever like 24 Strokes a minute or something like slow zone two whatever the whatever the thing is um but no one's fired up for that he said people make a mistake in believing that I'm fired up to go and do that session I'm not fired up to go and do that session I just go and do that session we have a saying um so there's a lot of people say like do the work um and in gym launch and it's continued into our stuff today but do the boring work is what we call it and uh boring is what makees you rich boring the boring activities it's the it's the double checking the emails it's writing the follow-up sequence that you really don't feel like writing and honestly just getting it done will make you significantly more money than not getting it done and so it's like it's it's it's following with a lead from a month ago and just being like hey by the way are you still interested in that thing it's the stuff that you don't want to do like no one's like I can't wait to follow up with these leads that haven't responded to the last two text messages I sent but if you respond if you follow up to everybody you will make more sales than presuming that it's an effective strategy because there are ways that you can continue to chug away and do a thing with no positive reinforcement but hey guess what that's the direction that you're supposed to be going in and you're walking over there yeah that's a push and pivot right like if if no one responds then I would say I have zero leading indicators but if you have enough response rates then it then it's worth the the toil um but I I so I mean Michael Phelps talks about this too with with swiming like just laps after laps after like he doesn't even have the variety of like different moves or different like it's just laps just sheer volume of work and um I call the rocky cut scene and almost every successful person that I have ever encountered has gone through not a month or a year but many years of doing work without reward where they have to do things that other people find boring and they have to sacrifice things that everyone finds interesting that most people want to do during that entire season of their life and they basically sacrifice a season of other things that they would prefer to do to do stuff that they would not prefer to do because of the one thing they want most and that's the rocky cut scene and instead of lasting five minutes it just usually last five or 10 years you're going to lose sleep you'll doubt whether it'll work you'll stress to make ends meet you won't finish your to-do list you'll wonder whether you made the right call and have no way to know for years this is what hard feels like and that's okay everything worth doing is hard and the more worth doing it is the harder it is the greater the payoff the greater the hardship if it's hard good it means no one else will do it more for you I think a lot of Entrepreneurship and even personal growth is training yourself on how you respond to hard because in the early days hard was ooh stop this isn't good I should I should this is a warning sign this is a red flag I should slow down or I should stop you know I should pivot but the more I think about it as a competitive landscape as I'm clear on what this path is supposed to look like and these rocks and these dragons are things that I'm going to have to slay along the way to get the princess or get the treasure I get happier about the harder it is because I know that no one else will follow it's a selection effect and I think if you can if you can shift from this is hard to no one else will be able to do this then it it's it flips from being this thing that you're like oh poor me to oh poor everyone else who's going to have to [ __ ] try yeah and I think that is so much more motivating as a frame for the exact same circumstance yeah that's awesome I was thinking a lot about the lonely chapter that we talked about last time that was the best most powerful idea I think that we came up with and if you see the basically being no shortcuts toward getting the thing that you want there are ways to be more and less efficient and there are ways to do things with more and less of a positive disposition which can actually make the journey feel an awful lot easier but ultimately if you assume that largely everyone needs to go through the same challenges that you're going through every single difficult thing that you do is kind of like a massive wall that you need to get over and you go wow [ __ ] I'm so glad that I've got over that wall and think about how many people are going to be selected out it's like the Hunger Games you know think about how many other people are going to fall at that wall there people only root for people who don't need it like the amount of times when I was on my lonely path where I was too different from the friends that I had but not successful enough to be friends with the people that I wanted to be friends with that's when that's when you want people to root for you that's when you want people to support you once you've already won people are like he's amazing he's so good but like that's the time when you need it the least and so you always have to be the person who roots for you before everyone else does and it's usually a single clap in in the auditorium for a very long period of time it is a slow clap that's just you rooting for you um and that visual I think is one that you can kind of take because it is people struggle to do things alone and the path of the exceptional person is one of an exception which means that you are not with other people and rather than fighting that or bemoaning it see it as an indicator that you're on the right path because if everyone else were cheering you on then it means you're not in the right place because it means you're just like everyone else and that's not where you want to be it's an interesting Paradox that the energy it requires to start doing something is way more than the energy required to continue doing the thing and that the beginning of doing anything results in the lowest amount of reward both internal and external than when you've been doing it for ages so I think about this a lot with the show that there was this stat that Spotify told us 85% of the listeners of this show found us in 2023 right and I thought at the end of 2022 remembering at that point I'd been on Rogan we were at like 650k we've got you know we've been doing 550 600 episodes deep like I'm I've got it I've done the thing like this is this is me doing if this isn't [ __ ] doing the thing I've moved to Austin Texas I've got an 01 Visa I've got like the all the rest of the stuff Jordan Peterson's been on twice you've been on and yet the what everything up until that point is two months of growth yeah I mean we made we made more money for just from a revenue perspective we made more money and more subs in one month December of last year than we did in the entire first three and a half years of the show so it's this odd Paradox and one of the things that you need to ensure I've had this idea about protect your passion at all costs because if you if you begin to hate the thing that you do you negatively change your trajectory and that means that at the time when you can benefit the most by every single unit of work which is the later that you go presuming that you continue to hit that upper trajectory if you've completely killed any passion or desire to do the work in the early stages because you've you've not protected it appropriately that can be by focusing on the wrong things by not rewarding yourself by not building it with people that care about you by you know just not not celebrating when you hit Milestones all of the things that actually help to keep you going being a character by the time that you get to the stage where each unit of effort allows you to gain a thousand or a million of each of the things that it would have done at the very beginning you've inverted the like the passion equation takes way more energy to start a thing than to continue doing thing and yet in the beginning the rewards are way lower than they are at the end but if you don't protect your passion your motivation is at its lowest when you were at your highest amount of efficiency in terms of returning your time put in I think a hopeful message that anyone can think about who's about who's in that hard period or in that start period is that it won't get harder like this is the hardest part and so if you can just make it through this everything else is downhill it's not that the things that you're the dragons are going to slay aren't going to get bigger they are but you become so much more equipped to slay them back and you have so many more allies you have people in the stands cheering for you you have the audience you have all of these other things that are behind you but in the beginning it's just you with a stick against a bear and arguably that fight is a harder fight to win than beating a dragon when you have a nuclear bomb and Six Nations behind you and so it's not even like the the size of the hardship it's just also the resources and how few of them you have and how so much of the beginning is literally burning the one thing you have which is time because you have no leverage you don't have the money to pay other people to help you you don't have the resources to go like get someone to to you no one can learn it for you it's like there's a lot of the things that that we care about a lot like no one can work out for you doesn't matter how much money you have no one can learn skills for you and so in the early days like it feels so painful cuz you're like you look around to see who can help you and then you're like [ __ ] it's me again and I think getting comfortable with the idea that each of these things kind of like Slum Dog Millionaire if you've seen that movie where he I'll give you the tldr he goes through his entire life of Randomness and he gets on Who Wants To Be A Millionaire version in India and has 12 questions to make a million dollars and from only 12 random experiences in his life that seemed meaningless at the time was he able to answer all of the questions and then ultimately win the skills that you develop along the way like Steve Jobs learning calligraphy that then became Apple fonts that you know transformed how we type those early days that little trench winning in the weeds often times gives you these huge advantages later on because you have more context than anyone else and so rather than lament them and hate the fact that you're going through it remembering that these will be arrows that you put in the quiver that you're going to be using to slay the future bigger dragons and so expecting it to be easy is what makes it much harder than it ever is I've always loved earning my stripes with the things that I've done whether it was with nightlife or running the podcast or doing whatever and I think there's like a degree of nobility to it but functionally that's kind of that's just like it's a nothing like what's the where is the the nobility but I think the reason that you can feel Noble about it and the reason that it gives you a positive reward is you know that you understand every single inch of the things and that if you want to hold a conversation we went out for dinner with our new CFO and and accounts people on Saturday they said you ask a lot of questions most people don't ask very many questions and I also don't care at all about accounts really like I'm not doing this for money but they said you ask a lot of questions said well I don't ever really want to walk into a room and not be able to hold my own at least just competently if it's to do with something that I care about the same thing goes for this like I I started to learn about focal lengths and frame rates and negative fill reverse contrast lighting and then sure enough two years after we started doing it a bunch of different I sent you the Instagram thing like this really awesome film Instagram that I've been following for ages picked us up for what we were doing and gave us props independent of the talkie thing which is fundamentally what we're here for and we created this entire new industry of like cinematic podcasting which was recognized by as far as I'm aware like the best cinematic it's called filmlight at film lights people can go and see it on Instagram like the best decoder an analyzer of cinematography and two years ago when we started I remember thinking [ __ ] like I love the way that they've broken down what happens in adastra oh my God the whole thing was shot on 35 mil each different scene's got two pairings of colors and stuff like that and then but the reason that we were able to get there at least in some part is I can have a conversation with people so each of the things that you do when you not only win in the weeds but live in the weeds then allows you Downstream from that to see the things that other people aren't seeing there's a quote that I love from Dr cash I'll probably butcher it but experts have more ways to win than beginners do and so if an expert goes into any setting that they're expert in they have so many faster feedback loops that reward them in the moment before the ultimate outcome so if you're a master video editor there's so many things you can do that while editing you make one change and then it looks right you have a positive feedback loop and so I think when you're on the start path you can't look at the outcome as The only positive because you will never make it and so the positive frame that I've always used it sure you can have the external ones of like I like thinking about my first videos had like 13 views and I'm like well if I had an audience of 13 people I used to spend years pitching you know weight loss stuff to rims of 13 and that was fine and so thinking about that way was helpful but the the most helpful frame was thinking about who I was becoming as the asset that I was building so in real time whenever I finished a Long Day's Work I was becoming more like the type of person who could work for 5 years without reward and that would be part of the story I would someday tell and some some of the biggest reinforcers I've had had in my life has been futurecasting the story that I would tell about the shitty period that I was in like I remember when I was sleeping on the floor at my gym cuz I didn't have enough money for two rents and I was like I will [ __ ] tell this story and when I lost everything for the first time I like I have the screenshot of the bank account like when I show it people are like oh look there's that thing but they forget that there was a person who screenshotted it to be like this won't [ __ ] happen again and I think having a larger Narrative of where you're ultimately going one gives you the vision of where you're like the r like knows where he's going but it allows the dragons that you have to slay along the way the hard things that you have to overcome to feed into the larger Narrative of who of the story that you'll someday tell and so like no one ever tells stories about the hero who made it all happen immediately and had no hardships no one cares right like okay you were born to a billionaire is there a story there not really but everyone loves the story because we can see ourselves in the character and how much we hope to be like them and it's the being like them not the having what they have that we usually like and so reframing ourselves as the hero of that narrative in my harder times was what really got me through that and thinking I will tell this story someday have you heard Rogan talk about the be the hero of your own story thing M oh dude it's is old now I think this is maybe maybe even 10 years old maybe 10 years old um and he's in one of his old he's in the LA podcast studio and he says imagine that you're in a movie and imagine the movie begins now and you're the hero of the movie yeah what would that guy do yeah what would that guy do right now yeah because you are I just got into business um so actually just made the investment in school um and I was talking to Sam the founder and I said what sim sam Sim what's Sim Sim that's the way he says his own oh yeah um and I was and I was talking to him and I said I want to give you the single easiest razor to predict my behavior and I said whatever will be the most epic story is the thing that I will most likely do and so often times the most epic story is not the shortest outcome to Victory it's the long Saga that results in this big thing later eventually and I was like if you ever want to know if you're like I'm not sure what he's going to do in this situation just wonder what the most epic story to tell would be and that's usually what I will do and I don't know if that's self-aggrandizing but that's that's genuinely my Razor for even making the like the big decisions about okay I'm going to sell gym launch I'm going to I'm going to marry Lila I'm going to slum it and live at the gym I'm going to fly around and do turnarounds I'm going to start this whole idea of a media company that just gives exclusively like how do like how do I put all these together it's like well what would be the most epic story and I thought of this idea of just like when I think about who that story I want to tell is is this billionaire that documented the entire thing the whole way and just gave because I always thought I was like I wish that Elon Musk and and Warren Buffett and all these guys would have like and Jeff basos like would have just like I would love to have seen 1997 Amazon content and a lot of the content in terms of like it it's getting five views it's like it's okay because when we make it they're going to come back and watch this so I don't need them to watch it today I want them to know that it's here when I do and I think that got me out of the the loop of it I have to win right now and then every one of them is just dropping uh a kernel or a bread comom for future meat to refer back to until you win effort always goes unnoticed get used to it no one roots for you until everyone roots for you that's just how it works yeah yeah people only root for those who don't need to be rooted for it's strange to think about how mimetic and fallible everyone me and you everybody that's listening to this is there's stuff that I've said on this podcast for like six years since the first time that I ever said it seven years and it's only been within the last 18 months that it's gone viral it's the same sentence the exact same sentence said into the same microphone slightly nicer lighting and in some ways it's reassuring because you go I [ __ ] knew that was right I knew that thing that I was saying was right and I kept saying it until people realized that it was right but another part of it is the medium matters more than the message in many ways the frame matters more than the picture I would say that the medi the medium and the message are inextricably linked like if Elon Musk tweets I'm taking a [ __ ] it will get a zillion shares because he's the richest man on earth and has done more entrepreneurial Endeavors that have pushed Humanity I think more than anyone else at this point and so like you can't separate the message from messenger and I remember when I was in Middle School I learned this lesson where I was in Spanish class and there was you know there was the class clown or whatever and I was like I want people to laugh at my jokes and so I made a joke that was a joke that that guy probably would have made and it was a self-deprecating joke um but the thing is is that like that guy was kind of a bum and like him making self-deprecating jokes made sense because of the context of who he was but I was a straight A student who was really good at sports yeah and no one thought it was funny and fast forward you know 10 years there was a joke that had in our fraternity which is there's nothing funny about an in- shaped body and so like the the I agree with you and that the me the the medium of the message matters and so people won't root for you because we use the the delivery mechanism usually as a filter for whether we should even trust the source and so I tell the story of the the teacher who's talking about dollar cost averaging into the S&P and giving investing advice like they might be like man like I give better investing viice than Warren Buffett does like he's saying the same thing as me it's like and you know what you're probably right the only problem is you didn't build Burkshire haway and so no one gives a [ __ ] and so the thing is is that we use someone's evidence and Authority as a filter for how little we need to process the information because if you're listening to a teacher you have to then think okay can I separate the message from the person can I independently analyze this and say is it good is it bad if Warren Buffett says you should buy this you don't need to analyze you figure he knows more than me he has more perspective and I will just take it as fact and so it's actually lazy consumption on behalf of everyone else that gives Authority so much residence and so much sharability because they're also protected because if you share something Elon says you're protected by Elon and his brand and so the hard work is getting to the point where you have the evidence that people are willing to feel safe agreeing with you and the only way for them to feel safe agreeing with you is for you to disagree with them for a very long period of time until you prove that you're right Rory Sutherland's got a an idea where he says no one gets fired for hiring KPMG yeah such a good line and it's true people would sooner fail by following a blueprint that's been done before than risk succeeding by trying something new because if you try the new thing any failure is on your shoulders if you follow the BL blueprint even if it's been total dog [ __ ] the last 10 times that you've tried it but we followed the blueprint you know we did the thing that was the same before Michael malice uh like P literal professional Internet troll told me when we one of the first times that we met I wouldn't be able to say onet of the [ __ ] that I can if I was taller than 5 foot s he's like a small guy but he can get away with being kind of like the Loki of Politics on Twitter because if he's you know six foot five and built like Alan richer yeah it's going to seem like he's bullying yeah but it's there's something funny about him like like you know dip dip dipping away there's also something the like until you win effort always goes unnoticed I realized this with and and it made me like a little dispirited how fallible people are around success so do you remember Billy McFarland guy that did fire Festival that festival at Pablo Escobar Island and then everyone got stranded and nearly died um if he'd been able to pull off an even remotely passable event people would have hailed him as a marketing genius yeah regardless of the fact that he was continually flying back to New York to raise money in an unethical way for a project that he didn't know if it was going to work and all the rest of the stuff so literally the line between charlatan grifter who's out of his depth and Visionary Pioneer who makes things work when no one else believes that they can is just outcome everyone thinks you're crazy until it works and so I mean if if you think of of the outcome as the trump card then all of the pain and suffering that you lead up to that point if you're just I'm trying to think of a an appropriate saying um I was going to say balls deep certain um that no matter what you will die or you will get there then the likelihood that all of the things that you've done up to that point will then be justified in retrospect is super high and I actually see that as super um compelling as a as a thing to latch on to in harder times yes but the ends justifying the means is a slippery slope I'm a mchy villain guy so have you seen speaking of that and you mentioned Robert Green earlier on uh you should buy the 25th anniversary edition of 48 Laws of Power just came out last year yeah leather bound gold emboss I have oh you got it and you've seen the thing on the edges yeah his face is very cool the the super goal printing yeah dude so for the people that don't know you remember you would get those things in packets of Serial when you were a kid and you could sort of move a a little bit of plastic from left to right and it would look like a football player was running on something like that it's basically the same but on the edge of a book if it's flat it's just gold foil if you open it one way so that the pages playay out it's Robert Green's face and if you open it so the pages playay out and the other way it's Macky Val's face the [ __ ] coolest book just and I've seen a lot of influencer gifting of books is a big deal at the moment you know you send the book out and maybe they'll post about it and it'll help with sales or whatever and there's some very elaborate ways I'm sure that you've received some of these um because I know that you're on the same mailing list there's some of these that are super super elaborate and I remember being like Oh that was like I don't know like cool or whatever but that Robert Green book as soon as I saw that it did that like I'm sending a [ __ ] video of this to anyone that I can this is like magic yeah so yeah what is it you're doing sales because you sucked at marketing you're doing marketing because you sucked at product it's a great noism yeah it's so funny cuz um like with the the book launch I I I didn't do any of that I just always I want wanted people I want people to read the book cuz like if someone posts about the book before the book's out then like I wanted no one to have read the book until the day it was out you know um but yeah I'm the the longer I've been in at least the business game and we were talking about legendary Foods um it's just product like I had a roommate way back in the day who's now a really successful entrepreneur and we were both like early days poor as [ __ ] um we Happ to live together and he read this book he just told me the title and just like stuck with me he said too good to fail and I just love that as a frame it's like if I open a sandwich shop how can I make the sandwiches too good like just if someone takes a bite they're like [ __ ] this is the best sandwich I've ever had like if you just get that then the rest of it doesn't matter and so when you're like I mean I think about this in business decisions but probably also in life decisions is I think Tim Ferris talks about this the one big Domino it's like what is the one thing that if I just get this one thing right everything else shrinks into irrelevance and I think about that from like the hero story of what you said with Joe Rogan which I love that frame it's like okay boom now you're present in your movie what would that guy do it's like well what one big thing could that guy accomplish that would make all of the all of the mediocrity of your life up to this point are relevant and why are you not putting every single ounce of your effort to prove that one point so that you could then justify everything up to that point so it wouldn't have been media it would have been the path to get there exact thank you it would have been the journey people want to find their passion but you don't find it you create it and you create it by getting good at something and to get good at stuff you start by doing something you suck at then you get good then you like it then people ask how you found your passion answer by starting when you sucked and not giving up yeah I hate the passion Mantra I really do I mean part of it was because um I'll even I'll even play it out so I I read all the same self-help books early on when I was you know in my entrepreneurial days and I was trying to find my passion and I was into fitness and so I was deciding between fitness test prep because I was good at test prep and uh frozen yogurt cuz I like dessert right so I've like these are my three quote passions which let's just translate that into things you're interested in and so as soon as I started the gym my passion disappeared it became work and I had a different Mentor later in my life who said never create work around your passion because then it'll become work and he was a guy who's a very successful business guy and I think about that actually more than I than I share because it's just complete and utter [ __ ] because it assumes that what you're going to be doing every day is the thing that you're currently really interested which also doesn't make you money and so your behavior has to change and whenever you're doing these new things one they'll be new which means you will suck at them which means you'll probably not like them them but it's also part of it and so like I would prefer to take the extreme opposite position of everything will suck and eventually you will get good at the things that you suck at and then you'll enjoy being competent at that thing which will then probably give you status and you'll enjoy the fruits of status more than the pain of doing the thing and in so doing create a positive feedback loop that you'll actually keep sticking with it and so I'd rather set the expectation that everything is terrible all the time forever now let's see if we can make our now let's see if we can become the person who can still do it anyways um and start that as the Baseline rather than trying to assume that I need perfect conditions in order to start because I mean starting is the perfect condition like whatever condition that you're in that you start was the perfect condition there is such a thing as intrinsic motivation though as well as extrinsic you can do something there's a whole Myriad of things that you could be potentially good at and many of them could give you Renown and and and money and social clout that feedback loop but there are some that you will enjoy doing for the sake of doing them more I don't disagree I was remember a note that I wrote to myself when I first started the podcast and I decided to turn pro with it which is one way to turn something you love into a labor is to monetize it okay because as soon as you decide that you're going to really really go for this if you want to turn pro at something I use this example in in my live show of a pickle ball player so this guy loves playing pickle ball and he gets to turn up on a Saturday and play with his friends you know if it's cold outside he doesn't need to go and play and if he's tired he doesn't need to go and play and if he's hung over he doesn't need to go and play and then he decides to turn pro and he thinks I'm turning pro at this thing that I love I can't wait to make what I love into my career but he doesn't realize that hey guess what if you're hung over you still need to go and train yeah actually no you don't get to be hung over anymore because the guy that isn't hung over is the guy that's training better so you now need to stop going out with your friends and you need to train when it's cold and you need to work on game tape and mindset and hydration and nutrition you need to do snc and you need to have a Physio and you need to not see your family as much all of these things came along for the ride as soon as you decided to turn pro is that the price that you're prepared to pay and that's an interesting question to ask yourself am I prepared to sacrifice my pure unencumbered unmolested love for this thing in order to try and become the best at this thing I think it's really tough and I'm I'm G to I'm going to shoot I'm going to shoot my own advice right now in the in the head or at least my positioning right now which is that it's very easy for someone in you know my position or in your position to say this is kind of what it takes and or rather this is like you should find your passion because like transparently what I do now every day I actually really do love um I live more or less the same day seven days a week and um like I'll tell you what it is just so we can have context but I wake up and then I go to my office here and I work for 6 hours writing my next book and then I take two hours is of calls typically and then after that I lift in the gym that I custom design with all the pieces that I love and then I go and eat with my wife and then I go to my condo and I sit in my recliner that overlooks the entire city and I read and then I go to bed and I do that every day and I love every aspect of the day with the exception of maybe the two hours of calls that I have to take but I see those as a necessary thing for everything else that I have there now could I stop doing that maybe but for me to say that that's what your day needs to look like in order to get into the top floor with the view that looks over these things and so that you can not make money for two years while you write a book that eventually makes money or whatever is is not true and so it's the difference between like oh I should fly private because that's what rich people do I should play basketball because I want to be tall and modeling the top the behavior at the top of the mountain rather than the climb and so they're completely different and so this whole idea unfortunately and I don't blame the people who do this is they see their current life like I would see mine and say well what do I do now I do everything that I love okay but I didn't get here doing everything that I love I did a fuckload of [ __ ] I hate and I did it for a very long period of time and I did not have anyone to root me on and in fact I had many people who were actively trying to destroy my path and tell me why it was a terrible idea I had this idea about um why you should stop taking advice from successful people because most of their advice is not about what they did when they were at your stage it's about what they do now right and it's the same thing around pushing work life balance you know I what I found after 50 years at Disney is that really the most important thing is what all right well how did you get to this stage what did you do when you were two years in because that's where I am yeah what did you do when you were broken living on the gym floor because that's where I am don't tell me about the complicated routine or the the the the balance or the flying private the bar stol's upside down and you're you're mixing up the ends for the means everything on my write up so this is I mean I I remember in a lot of excruciating detail what it took me to get here um but I will say that I had a ruthless focus on dollars per hour and so and I'm just giving tactical advice right now but everything that I could trade away for more time doing the thing that made me money was what I did and so I remember the first time I made a $500 sale and it took me 30 minutes and I was like every hour of every day this is what I am going to do and anything that is not talking to someone in exchange for them giving me a credit card so that I can charge it and make $500 anything that makes me less than $250 per hour or per per 30 minutes I'm giving to somebody else and so after that first sale I was like I'm never cooking again I'm never going grocery shopping again I'm not cleaning again cuz I knew that in one sale I could pay for that person for the month and so like as like the ruthless focus on what can I do that creates an input to Output being money equation and me at least for me it was pouring everything I possibly could into the input and eliminating everything else I made this video on Facebook before I was quote Alex Orosi years ago when I still had six gyms before I even did the turnarounds and I I made this video almost this documentation but I said so I want to open up my seventh eth nth and tth location and I have the spots picked out and I'm already working all of the hours that I'm awake and I've already given up Saturdays so the only thing that I have left is like Sundays and evenings and so I am no longer going to be watching any football and I'm no longer going to have Netflix at all and that is what I'm giving up for 7 8 9 and 10 and I remember just making this video is like that's what I'm sacrificing and I think a lot of people create these to-do lists when in my experience it's been so much more useful to write down all the things that I'm willing to sacrifice because if you sacrifice everything there's nothing left than to do the one thing that matters and I think Jerry Seinfeld talks about this from a writing perspective he says that every day no matter what he sits down and he writes for two hours now he doesn't have to write but he's not allowed to do anything else and so he can sit there but there's nothing else to do except for write jokes and so I think a lot about that from The Climb perspective which is like most of everyone who's listening to this who isn't achieving what they want is [ __ ] with their time they think that they're spending all their time working but your output like you don't even know how to work I'm being really real with you like you think you know how to work you don't know how to work like the amount of output like and I I'll measure this by like what is your output it's probably not as high as you think and so rather than trying to learn all these productivity hacks the ultimate productivity hack is no n o is you stop doing [ __ ] and then when you create space then you can fill it with the thing that matters but trying to add on more to your schedule of all the things that you're not willing to sacrifice is the very reason that you're not doing what you need to do a lot of people would look at that life of I'm going to sacrifice evenings and I'm not going to watch football anymore and say well what's the point if you make yourself miserable on rout to achieving the goal totally if most of your your life is Journey not destination and it makes you miserable on root to it why do that so that was the thing I was mentioning earlier where it's like let's take the absolute extreme of it's going to suck and it's going to last forever how can I be okay in that circumstance and I do have the fundamental belief that circumstance has nothing to do with how what your subjective well-being is and so if monks can be super chill in wherever monks do monk things and have nothing and have higher subjective well-being ratings than anyone else here in the Western World it clearly isn't external and so then if I'm going to be just as miserable being mediocre as I am doing this [ __ ] that's going to amount to something then I might as well do the [ __ ] that's going to amount to something and be miserable there and at least have something to show for it there's this story I learned about Victor Hugo famous writer from history do you know this about what he did with his servant mm so um Victor Hugo needed to make himself right so he paid his servant each night during the middle of the night to come into his bedroom and remove the bed clothes from him turn the heating off and then lock his bedroom door from the outside and he wasn't allowed to leave until Victor slid six pages of handwritten work underneath so you know you look at opal which is this app for um iPhone which stops you from using apps or frozen turkey uh cold turkey which is the same thing for desktop and uh that's just the digital equivalent of Victor Hugo being locked in his bedroom with no bedding and just a quill and a few pieces of paper and then having to slide it underneath the the door and I want to push back on something that you said right before Victor Hugo which is you know somebody somebody might ask like why would you do all this stuff if you're not happy that assumes that my goal in life is to be happy what is your goal in life to do epic [ __ ] genuinely to be useful and so why Place do epic [ __ ] over be happy because when I look back on my life in retrospect the things that bring me the most joy in the moment are the things that I was willing to sacrifice for for an extended period of time and those pay memory dividends far greater than the momentary cost that I had in the moment and so I think it's a a long-term short-term thing but a frame that continued to paralyze me for a long period of time was an obsession with happiness like it was truly an obsession it was an obsession of mine in college I almost I almost got into positive psychology because I thought that was really interesting that's what I that's what I my passion right I consumed all that stuff and I drove myself mad with it and I actually was more sad and depressed than anything which is probably why I was trying to find all this positive uh hippie dippy stuff and I just cracked one day and I was like [ __ ] happiness because it felt so Out Of Reach that I was like just [ __ ] it I'm just not I'm not even I'm not even going to shoot for it I'm just GNA do stuff and that's all I'm going to do I'm just going to do stuff and what happened was like a few years later dot dot dot a few days later um I looked up and I was like huh I'm not miserable and so I actually identified for a very long period of time as I'm not a happy person comma and that's okay I'm fine with that I accept that and there was this huge Conflict for such a long period of time where I was like you're supposed to be happy why aren't you happier like there's something wrong there's something wrong with you something needs to change rather than saying like maybe the level of happy that you are is fine who am I like what happy am I comparing myself to and also if whatever your current state is if you just say like happy which is really when people are like I want to be happy they're just saying I want to be happy than I am which means that you create this distance between where you are and where you want to be which is the recipe for being unhappy is saying that I want to be happy or so it doesn't matter how happy you are you want to be happyer and so by relinquishing the desire to be happy I ended up enjoying a lot more of the stuff that I was doing because I didn't make it a requisite for for my activities so then it became a pleasant surprise I was like oh this doesn't suck huh how nice two famous psychologists Daniel Gilbert and Daniel caraman have uh quite Divergent views on happiness is quite interesting so uh Daniel Gilbert talks about how if you spent every minute of the rest of your life on a floaty Lilo in a pool drinking cocktails in retrospect you might not have found much meaning but each individ ual moment of experience would have been enjoyable and he believes that constitutes to him a life that is well lived I disagree with this guy entirely Daniel caraman and this is my position too which is a well-lived life is one which in retrospect you are glad that you lived right uh so one is leaning toward hedonic pleasure and the other is leaning toward meaning so one you could say is happiness and the other is meaning it's my belief that your disposition largely influences where on that Spectrum from Lilo to do hard things you need to sit and you will have friends and I did for a very long time in The Nightlife industry have friends that just seem to be so [ __ ] happy not doing stuff like just they would float through life and they wouldn't ask themselves am I actualizing my [ __ ] virtue is this the highest Integrity that I can do with these things and all the rest of it and I was envious of those people you ever seen a dog you see a dog on the floor and it's just lying there and you think oh oh my God if only I could beat that do like it just wants to go for a walk and have food and and like go pee pee that's it that's all it wants to do and you think [ __ ] it would be great to be that dog but like guess what if your Constitution doesn't allow you to be that dog the only way out is through and this was something the first time that I went to go and see Peterson someone asked him a question and they said the depth of my Consciousness causes me to suffer is it a blessing or a curse to feel everything so deeply he thought for a little bit and he said take more of the thing that poisons you until you turn it into a tonic that girdles the world around you the only way out is through it's kind of like as soon as you realize that there are things that you do that give you satisfaction and there are things that other people do that give them happiness and you've tried that route the only way is to continue doing the thing that you know that works and I think that you are an example of someone who is optimizing heavily for meaning rather than for hiden is M and that's not to say that there are people and this is I said this on the last episode the fundamental thing that people don't understand as far as I can tell about your worldview is that the thing that you do for work and the thing that you do for fun are the same thing they can't imagine that because that's not the way that it is for them and it's not maybe the way it is for most people but if you are the sort of person that finds meaning more enjoyable than happiness you need to optimize for the thing that you enjoy the most and I'll toss in and meaning lasts longer and so I I'll be super upfront if that those friends of yours in in the night life I there's nothing wrong with that in my in my way like as I see the world like if that's you and you're like I [ __ ] love everything I do then like you won like just just keep doing that you know what I mean um but I think a lot of the message that Chris and I are saying here is that if you've tried that path and it hasn't worked for you then you have this dark door that's in the corner that you've been trying all the other ones that have nice gold edges and really shiny things but there's that door that you keep looking at and it's the other side of you that's clearing his throat in the other room and it's like you just have to bust through the door and I think that the like giving yourself permission to be unhappy or at least for me giving myself permission to be unhappy for an extended period of time in order to get what I wanted gave me so much relief from honestly I don't like using the word nowadays because it has so many associations but just from like the depression or the funk that I was in for a few years yeah I just I just didn't like my life and I'd achieved by most measur because I I I don't have the um I you know School failed me I was whatever like I wasn't that I finished in three years and I did really well in school and I had a really good job um but it was empty for me and so my like my goal is things we talked about earlier but my my personal goal is to squeeze every ounce of potential out of whatever I have and I think that if you feel like you have potential left over then it will eat you alive until you do something about it not to piss off the positive Poes in the room but if you haven't gotten what you want then you're not worthy of it period and that's okay now you can admit that you suck and improve better to know you're bad for a season than pretend you're good for a lifetime you're not making as much money as you want because you're not as good as you think you are you're not struggling from impostor syndrome you're a student and pretending to be a teacher no students say they feel like frauds for trying to learn you're a fraud when you get up to teach the class and you've never done it deep I think it's just giving yourself permission to suck it's giving yourself permission to be unhappy it's giving yourself permission to not achieve while you do for a long period of time it's giving yourself permission to lose friends it's giving yourself permission to do things that's different than people in your Social Circle or your age group are doing it's giving you permission giving yourself permission to be an exception so that you can become exceptional and a lot of that the whole positive poly Mantra of like the I saw that I saw a post a girl made and she was like you are worthy and that's what made that tweet all my tweets are just responses to [ __ ] I say and so this girl was like you like I say this to myself in the morning like you are worthy you are amazing you are a goddess and I was like you're not a goddess cuz you don't control me um and you don't have the things that you want keep thinking that you saying that you're worthy is going to somehow make it true but like the way that you know you're worthy is that you have it that's it like that is the litus test are you worthy of a billion dollars well are you a billionaire no then you're not worthy and so just like I think we have these things it's just like uh you're unbalanced it's like you're not worthy there's these things that we're programmed to say oh that's bad you have to tell everyone they're worthy you're everyone's beautiful no if everyone are beautiful then no one's beautiful and yet again we're back at square one and so it's it's I guess drinking the tonic it's it's going through the [ __ ] which is honestly the boring stuff that no one wants to do for an extended period of time and uh accepting that you suck and that it is okay because the first step is accepting that you stuck you suck so that you can do the Second Step which is doing something about it it what about you're not making as much money as you want because you're not as good as you think you are that's I mean I'm obviously in the business space and that follows up with the other one with the Imposter syndrome like people are like man um how do you not suffer from impostor syndrome I was like because I've done what I said I've done and the people who get up on stage and try and teach a class on [ __ ] they haven't done it's like that like you feel like an impostor when you're an impostor like don't try and kill that voice listen to that voice and get the evidence to make that voice shut the [ __ ] up like if like if I get on stage and I say I can bench 315 is there like do I feel like an imposter when I say that no I stay fact but presumably if you're if you're pioneering and breaking new ground you know you're you just put the biggest investment that you ever did into this new thing yeah that is a new level that you get to and that's one that's to do with Finance but there could be the one that's to do with capacity or competence you could be sitting down in a room doing a deal which is time Bound in a way that it's never been before or is in an industry only tangential to one that you've been in before each time that you do something new by definition you're an imposter because you haven't done it before now if you're teaching that's different but if you're entering if you're growing sufficiently quickly most of the time it's fresh snow so I like this is a f a topic I love but I think the difference between doing something new and being an impostor is one is pretending to be something that they're not so like I made the biggest investment school I'm making a bet that I think communities are going to be huge and I think that there's a ton of people who want to you know teach skills they have in communities Etc and school.com can help but like it would only be an impostor if I said this is like I guarantee it no matter what this is going to be the biggest thing ever and one of the big things that I repeat and from the marketing front I said all the time I say State the facts and tell the truth like the best Marketing in the entire world is truth now if the truth isn't compelling it doesn't mean you lie it means you change the world to make the facts compelling as in if I say man I want to be like I you see this one all the time uh 18-year-olds who are like I want to be a motivational speaker right you say okay well what are your facts you've done nothing great so they then lie so that they can try and claim success that they don't deserve so they can get Authority that they can't back up and eventually are called out and are flat and to be fair they only impress people who don't know anything anyways so if they're honest about it they look at their fact sheet and say what would what would a motivational speaker have to have in order for them to have authority and then that becomes your action list of what you need to do and then once those facts are the truth then you can State the facts and tell the truth and then people will be like wow that's so motivational but all you did was tell the truth and so like that is why I've so wholeheartedly rejected one like you are worthy you are not worthy if you had it then you wouldn't even need to say you were worthy because you'd already [ __ ] haveit and if you were in like I struggle with impostor syndrome why you only struggle because you're [ __ ] lying like that's why you feel like an imposter and now they're like well I didn't the thing is is you can fudge the truth like you can you cannot lie is very different than telling the truth like I can make something seem a certain way without deliberately breaking the law but I'll know and that's why you feel like an imposter because you [ __ ] know and there's the guy in the other room who's clearing his thr be like that's not [ __ ] true and then that Discord but if you just say what you have done or you say what you are doing I'm making this big investment it's a big bet for me the reason I'm making this bet is because I see this trend and I think it's a good idea I could be [ __ ] wrong but I'm not going to feel like an impostor because of it because that's the truth thinking about the community thing I had a conversation a little while ago I don't I don't think that you're that you're far off wrong especially in an age of automation this guy made a really great point which you probably thought of which is one of the very few things that you can't automate is community can't AI community no what you're going to have I mean maybe Bots yeah exactly one guy one guy and a thousand Bots that are all doing it maybe GPT 10 can do that or whatever but the next this inter quartile period whatever we're coming up to yeah is the easiest way to to hedge against automation I think is to focus on community all right next one if you can be in a bad mood for no reason you might as well be in a good mood for no reason if it's not going to change your life it shouldn't change your mood if the cost is peace of mind don't buy it yeah if you can be in a bad mood for no reason then you can be in a good mood for no reason which means that if you can do something that's amazing and still have a [ __ ] day it means you can do something that sucks and have a good day which means the entire excuse around I don't want to do all these hard things because as a proxy it makes my mood sad is ridiculous because it means that we are ultimately in control of how we want to perceive the work that we do and so I think that is ultimately the most freeing thing that you can do in terms of how you can equip yourself to get through those harder periods why do you think there's so much cynicism at the moment especially on the Internet it's easier you can always defend no like we we actually de with this a lot at acquisition. comom from an investment perspective and um we actually have to check ourselves which is it's always easy to find a reason not to do an investment so we have a no bias and you should have I mean you should overall have a no bias like you should say okay here's all the things that could go wrong and you have to kind of think that way because you have to manage risk but if you say no to everything you're always right in the short term but you're but if you never make an investment you're wrong in the one way that matters which is you get no return and so like you always miss the short-term losses but you lose the big long-term gain and so it's me again this is a a Continuum to be managed more than a problem to be solved but cynicism is short-term it's like every so when you so okay this is so when you go home right and you want to start a new business or you have a girl that you're bringing back and your friends and your family are like she's not going to last or like this isn't going to this isn't going to be forever they are right literally every single time except for the one time you bring your wife home and in that time they're all wrong and it's the one time that [ __ ] matters and so the idea like but the thing is is because of the false positives or the true positives they might have been right literally 19 out of 20 times and if they were right the first time and the second time and the third time and the fourth time why would they bet against no on the fifth time or the 50th time but you only need one yes or one positive to change your entire life and so there's this habit and that's where cynicism comes from where we get so many positive reinforcers for saying no and being right but it's only short-term being right because you have to make big bets to win big and that also means that you're wrong plenty of times and people aren't willing to look stupid for being wrong this school bet could go wrong I'm betting it's not but everything has risk and I've been public about it right and so like if anything but like I've played this out so like I like I'll tell you how I played this out I was like if it goes wrong I'll document the things that I that I learned and that I'll apply next time and I'll do what I've always done State the facts and tell the truth it is strange to think about how being cynical or skeptical or kind of sardonic or cutting or aloof it's used as a proxy for being smart oh yeah the worst thing that anybody could be accused of is naive that's what they're trying to optimize against they don't want to be seen as naive oh you [ __ ] you hope that everything was going to be good oh that's I mean that's cute like you know the world will teach you it'll don't worry don't worry it's like it'll it you'll learn you'll Lear yeah people don't want to be naive and they'll be right and that's what's that's what's painful is that it takes more effort to start in the beginning and more people are right about the fact they're like hey you're not going to hit it big and guess what a month in you're not but they're only measuring on months and at six months you're also not going to hit it big yet and they're going to be like I'm still [ __ ] right and at a year you're still not going to hit it big and they'll still be [ __ ] right and every day that you haven't hit it they're going to feel like they were right but they're wrong because they're measuring in days and you're measuring in decades there's this idea from gnda called the cynical genius illusion cynical people are seen to be smarter but sizable research suggests they actually tend to be Dumber cynicism is not a sign of intelligence but a substitute for it a way to Shield oneself from betray and disappointment without having to actually think there was a there's a tweet on um a doomsday Money Twitter guy and he said uh yeah he's predicted uh 16 out of the last three recessions and the thing is is that no one no one recalls the other 13 times that guy was wrong yeah and they don't recall all of the gains that probably were made in the marketplace by people who didn't sell during that time period there was this uh broad you you know people forwards [ __ ] on WhatsApp and if it's been forward lots of times it even says at the top forwarded many times it's like a little warning and this happened I think around uh covid there was an image of one guy one squaddy wearing like army gear walking through the Streets of London and this was forwarded on WhatsApp as evidence that the Army was going to come and hold people in the house at gunpoint and if you left it was going to be martial law was going to be deployed on the Streets of London and this went [ __ ] nuclear completely Interstellar absolutely everywhere what happened with that right what happened with what happened with that thing not a single person who decided to spout this half [ __ ] baked opinion that never turned out to be true ever got held to account for that and I must have received that message like five times yeah I'm like hey you you don't get to just make these like ridiculous like actually stupid [ __ ] claims about the world and then no one call you to account I'm going to hit on the cynicism Point um the world belongs to optimists because if you're going to do anything big you have to believe that it can happen otherwise it never will that's Shan Puri thing the cynics get to be right and the optimists get to be rich yeah that like if you look at it from a percentage of success rate I've been wrong more times than I've been right I have failed more times than I've succeeded but you always succeed more and are right more in the big ways than the people who've been right all along and are wrong Trevor says this my my editor he says uh 99% right and 100% wrong so like they're they're right 99% of the time but they're wrong 100% because the only thing that matters is the big one at the end like your family and friends will say that every girl that you ever date is not good enough except for the one time you find the girl that you're actually going to marry and then it doesn't matter or like this won't last or like this business idea it's not going to work and you might have nine failures i f my first nine businesses didn't really amount to anything nine nine as in the first one spent time [ __ ] failed second one this one will be different [ __ ] failed third one this one this is the one and then seven six more after that right I'm just painting this picture because like it's painful as [ __ ] because the whole time everyone is telling you I told you so and they're right today but not forever if the cost is peace of mind don't buy it why I use the Peace of Mind as a as a indicator for breach and values so that's the I want to become known rather than and sacrifice my reputation in order to do so and so for me I would lose piece of my like right on the edge I'm like I don't know this is a little bit edgy I had a guy um who shared a A bash clip of me and what's a bash clip oh like somebody like took my clip and then was like this is wrong whatever and um and so I looked at the guy's profile and I saw he was a VC and I was like huh okay I know who this is oh and so I dm'd him and I was like um do you disagree with this and uh he said something and then I just aerated him uh and he was like you're right I overstepped because I wanted to try and do a viral clip you are fundamentally right and I was wrong and so like that is what I would never want to be like that is disgusting to me and so the cost of making a viral clip to try and Trend jump when I know that fundamentally the thing isn't right is not worth the price there's a this shows up in in other ways so I had to what the [ __ ] did I do I I think I tried to throw a used Splendor packet in a bin in a restaurant you know like yeah did that but I was leaving and I was like it's next to the bin someone will get it and I walked oh yeah 30 yards away yeah [ __ ] yeah turned around went back put it in the bin yeah you'd know that's the peace of mind yeah and this is another one of those interesting reframes this is really really interesting to me if the cost is peace of mind don't buy it you can see and I did for a long time my inability to move in as ruthless of a way as I as other people do as a weakness as a vulnerability and I realized in retrospect that it's just a higher standard that I'm holding myself to and that can be that that will result in many times me doing things that and and and having things that I need to overcome and working on my people pleasing Tendencies as hard as I can at the moment to not to not yeah I I end up um I don't like to disappoint people true I don't like to do things that causes other people to feel bad or uh feel hurt or to tell them things that uh they don't want to hear that's why that um Dr Robert Glover the no Mr Nice Guy was just so [ __ ] like very very very incisive uh but I realized even with that I had I had a conversation with a friend and it's to do with this book and there's a bunch of ideas that everybody's been working on in my friend group for quite a while and I was like I really want to write about this thing and send him a long overly arduous voice note explaining about how conflicted I was because it's not my idea now no one owns the truth that's one of the brilliant things about working through quotes and things like this is no one owns it right like if it's accurate nobody gets to own the truth it's just an insight about the way that reality exists so I sent him this big long voice note and he replied to me and said and I in it I'm over patent matching a lot of the things I'm doing as people pleasing like it's the I think I sent you that tweet about um I just learned about the recency bias and of all of them I have to say it's my favorite one right it's like you see this new thing and it's the hot new toy that you're playing with or whatever the like shiny new toy and uh he responded and he said uh I wanted to say how grateful I am that you in amongst all of the stuff and the book and the show and all of the different people pulling on your attention that the first place that you would go to when thinking about this idea is how I would feel rather than how you can like Weedle it so that you get the outcome that you want or whatever uh I would be be very hesitant in you saying or you calling that people pleasing when it's one of the reasons that I love you as a friend I was like huh that's interesting that's a reframe that I hadn't anticipated and that is again the Peace of Mind thing at now your level for Peace of Mind may be different to somebody else's but I don't think that that's something that you should be ashamed of you know as a fun challenge for anyone who's listening try telling the truth in Social settings so when someone invites you to a party instead of coming up with a fake excuse that you both know is a fake excuse just say I don't want to go really [ __ ] with you um and if someone like says hey can you uh you know help me move you're like I don't want to it's very freeing because the thing is is that like their response is on them and if I just I try and anchor myself to truth if I just tell the truth and state the facts I'm good with me and if someone and I I ask because I had a exchange recently where I said that um I say often and now people who are around me are accustomed to the fact that I will just State the facts and tell the truth um I said would you have preferred that I've lied to you and the guy just I was like so you would prefer that I lie I will not be associated with someone who would prefer that I lie to them because it makes my life difficult because then I'd have to lie which then would breach one of my my values so in the future you know I I had someone who um recently was like hey um hey if you need anything you know let me know how I can help i' be like you don't mean that because if I actually need something you will not help and so it's it's really uncomfortable for a lot of people because it it breaks a lot of social norms but I think that learn it's kind of like the hundred NOS is like being comfortable like it's just being comfortable with the truth and the truth is one of the the scariest ugliest things you know like why don't you want to go on another date with me I don't like you you're not worthy but like people are so uncomfortable with that and I think that the the I've just tried to shed [ __ ] as much as I could for my life and it's just made thinking a lot easier and also dealing with relationships a lot easier because you also by shedding social niceties when you do also State the truth when I say I think you [ __ ] killed that people know it [ __ ] carries weight because you don't just say that and so I would say most of my team for example if I pay a compliment they know that I mean it and I don't have to say like hey like if I'm being honest I really you like I don't have to I don't like and it makes your words mean what you say and I think that is like I I I aspire to be a man who when I say things people know that I mean them and I think a way to do that is to stop saying things that I don't mean and so I'm trying to cut as much of the words that are niceties and things that I don't mean and are nonsensical and [ __ ] that I've been taught to say in this social situation when someone says that Mak sense I say no it doesn't make any sense people are like oh um because when when someone says make sense at the end of a sentence we are trained to just notd and say yeah yeah yeah even though if you didn't even process it but if I don't think it makes sense I say no I don't think it makes sense or no I don't understand and again you don't want to look stupid but looking stupid in the moment so that you can better understand understand something makes you not look stupid for the rest of your life when you actually understand it and so I've just that has been a huge effort of mine is to make make words great again um make words mean what they mean again yeah and I and I and I really I I Spire to do that with my writing and I and especially in my social relationship because time is so valuable and we have so so little of it and I don't want to waste any of it pretending to be someone or say things that I don't mean it's normal to not know what you're doing yeah if you did it wouldn't be called growth high five your fear uncertainty and doubt and carry on do you get tired stressed sad hungry frustrated unfocused do you feel misunderstood great you're human you don't need medication I have a a huge vehement distaste for uh mental medication and I think one is because it's overprescribed too because people over WebMD themselves and fundamentally people find a problem with being human and I think a lot of that is because of the social Norm that we should be never hungry never sad never angry never frustrated never feel like we're misunderstood and those are the those are the troughs and peaks of humanity and we can't only wish for sunny days cuz otherwise we'd have droughts and no one everyone would die and so it's wishing for something that isn't true and will never happen it's wanting a lie which is why I'm so against it now are there people who they can test their neurology and whatever maybe but like honestly a hundred years ago this [ __ ] didn't exist and people just dealt with life and I think people were happier then than they are now and so clearly this solution hasn't been much of a solution at all and so I if I I you know I try to have I don't have that many extreme stance well maybe I do but one of my extreme stances is that there is nothing wrong with you because even if there is something wrong with you how do you benefit by saying there is something wrong with you and then accepting that label unto yourself because the alternative to that is accepting your current existence as maybe this is better than everyone else's and I'm just choosing to believe that it's wrong and all of this is around some big Mighty should that we think and that we worship that should that we should be a certain way that we're not and I think that discrepancy that word I've tried to eliminate as much as humanly possible from my vocabulary CU like I shouldn't what I should nothing according to whom why should I be happier why should I be have less anxiety why should I feel more understood and so like pretty much the beginning of every ad for like Levitra or whatever you know whatever the new serotone you know s SSRI thing is is like they describe Humanity they just say like are you hungry are you tired are you horny are you like are you dissatisfied in any way well the Cure of that is a pill which I wholeheartedly decry anything that gives an if than statement for happiness so like you will owe nothing and be happy like you want to say that you're going to change my external condition to change how I feel I just I just reject it as a as any kind of if then I will be happy but like the pill the over medication part I'm I've had too many people too close to me ruin their lives hopping from SSRI SSRI and getting on cocktails of pills and un and they've got a sleep Med and they've got a wakeup Med and they're just they're just a walking Pharmacy it's crazy for people who aren't American to look at the way that America deals with this I remember so in the UK just for context you can't get prescribed melatonin you can't buy it over the counter you can't buy it on on my video guy when he flies over here takes it back like some like he [ __ ] smuggle like he's Pablo Escobar but with melatonin tablets instead like going into CVS am am I allowed to get this uh that's the degree of difficulty that it is to get prescribed anything and in America the first place that people turn when they have a problem is the pill bottle I mean I have two physician parents so like and I would say Western you know for the most part Western medicine through the just belief in all Pharmaceuticals and all that kind of stuff and so i' I grew up really close to it my grandfather is a physician so like just lots of medic medicine in the family in general and I um I just hate it I really do I don't hate a lot of things but I really I really I hate I hate what it does to people and more the underlying thing is that they reject being human and they think there's something wrong with them and so many people wa all of their time trying to solve a problem that is life rather than living it and it drives me nuts like they they they they search for the medication rather than confronting the problem like you don't have an anxiety problem you need to deal with whatever the thing you're worried about is like I I mean man I have too many controversial beliefs I'm getting into too much of it like you drink lot because you're stressed if you do with the thing that stresses you that's the trigger for you drinking so yes there's addictive properties to drinking I'm not going to I'm not denying that but the thing that leads to the drinking the condition that creates that that's something that you can attack and so I think so little attention is given to accepting reality rather than saying there's something wrong that people waste their entire lives searching for an answer that doesn't exist what about it's normal to not know what you're doing if you did it wouldn't be called growth high- five your fear uncertainty and doubt and carry on if you knew what you were doing then you would be stagnating because you'd be doing nothing new and so if you're going to do something new then that is what would be the catalyst for growth and so you can't want to grow and also want to know everything you're doing at the same time it's like the two beliefs contradict one another and so I think that's a lot of a lot of the discontent that people suffer from is they want two things that are Polar Opposites they want the really strong character they want the easy life like one is the price of the other you have a hard life to have great character you have an easy life you have you have shitty character everything came easy you want to grow you don't want hardship hardship creates growth and so they want both and you can't like it's it's wanting the Jordans without paying the price there and the price isn't bad it just the price is what it is and so it's just do you want the Jordans or not and if you do then don't lament the price tag pay the price tag and be happy you have the Jordans and if you don't want the Jordans then don't buy them there's something in here is around comparing the lessons that people who have achieved success tell you about how to also achieve success when they're using that pattern which is well they look like they know what they're doing I should look like I know what I doing I should feel like I know what I'm doing but you don't know what you're doing right you're you're a white belt and that person's a third degree black belt and whatever it is that you're trying to pursue State the facts and tell the truth I mean my I mean the amount of you know 900 follower Instagram accounts that all I see is people espousing advice on how to grow their social media following you're never going to win like you don't get it like you like i' I've been following like you don't get it because the content of what you're putting out sorry the evidence that encapsulates your message disproves literally everything you say before you open your mouth and the thing is is that people are obsessing about the algorithm and this type of font and I should do vertical format and I should do horizontal format and I use this as an analogy that you can draw to anything but everyone has that friend who is a train wreck on relationships who gives relationship advice it's just like it doesn't even matter if the advice is good you're a train wreck it's the fat friend who gives advice on how to be fit it's just like and they're like citing all these studies and you should try these supplements it's like you're a fat [ __ ] just shut up stop like there's don't waste your breath no one is listening and so it's just it's missing the big obvious thing and so again it's like that big Domino you're like I want to get into fitness like there was a friend of mine actually um who's in the fitness space and he's like I really want to grow my Fitness business and obviously like I have books on it and I have videos and did that for a whole past life and um I was like dude you're not in shape he like but I know all these I was like you don't look like someone that anyone wants to look like and so the thing is like for whatever you're doing the big one thing is like if you were look like a shredded God you could say eat fried chicken every day and people would buy your [ __ ] cuz like what's the one big Domino that if I just did that everything else would take care of itself do that and every ounce of effort you're putting into not doing that is a waste basically the vshred model actually really nice guys yeah they're here in Vegas well he's like Public Enemy Number One for the fitness Bros yeah what was your definition of trauma that you taught me on the phone oh yeah so um because this word is so thrown around on social media my god um I was like okay I have to Define this so that I can try and like understand it um so I believe trauma is when you have a punishing event that permanently changes Behavior that's it so if you uh you know are a kid and you touch the stove and you burn your hand and you never touch the stove again you were traumatized now the thing is is that that's a positive consequence so is trauma bad I don't know was the consequence bad in that situation no and so a lot of people use the this person traumatized me as the as the the transgression whereas the question is what was the result of that quote trauma because trauma is just accelerated learning and so if you have PTSD for example if you were abroad and had lots of bombs going off then you had rapid learning so you have trauma that permanently changes your behavior around loud noises and so you generalize loud noises from this environment to now when someone honks you you know freak out and you think about those situations right and so just defining the world around me has helped me navigate it a lot better so that I can understand what we're talking about because there are so many you know people like trauma is a feeling in your body that you have to you have to release the trauma like what the [ __ ] are you talking about you know release trauma you changed Behavior due to a stimulus that's it and so if you want to change your behavior back you create a new condition that reinfor forces the new Behavior you want period cuz otherwise we appeal to mysticism and we just say lots of like nonsensical [ __ ] that the whole woooo world is all about I actually spoke a woooo event which was really funny how did that go uh surprisingly well I just started by being like you will all disagree with most of the things I say but they uh they kind of mystici vised my my nihilism so it worked out fine how do you do that uh well because I just describe actions and so they describe those actions as a TR ction for what whatever and I was like attract repel whatever if you you know make 100 calls you'll have more people who know who you are than if you don't that's the same is putting out an energetic frequency to the quantum realm it's that saying you want money I have no idea what any of that means dude there was a podcast that I got linked to from a girl in Austin who got inducted into some weird cult that was sacrificing period blood at the full moon so that they could get birken back yeah Austin's a weird place so you you were there for a while I was yeah well too weird for me spat you up Alex I appreciate you man thank you for coming on what's next what can people expect from you next few months um well all my effort is in the the school games so we're uh I mean I can talk about them I cannot talk about them yeah um so yeah so I I just made the biggest invest in my life I'm not co-owner of school.com um it's a platform where you can build what you want to build learn what you want to learn and uh schools will give you the tools the community and the education to help you and so we've actually created a whole thing where people can start all this stuff for free um because I just I believe my whole platform has been education that's what I believe in um I think the education system is broken and um teachers don't get paid or given the resources to actually teach students and they you know they're supposed to teach tests that they know don't help students students get educated on stuff that does matter in the real world and they own into amounts of debt for a piece of paper that doesn't make them anything to pay off the debt that they're in for the rest of their lives and I just I hate all of it which is why we started making the content that we do and so um this is one big investment that I'm doing to try and make my small dent towards helping fix that and I don't like I obviously talk about business that's what I know okay um but one person can't can't do that like I can't change I mean I can try you know but like I I don't I don't think one one person is going to change the world and so um I wanted to invest in a platform that would help other people do that for one another and so whether it's like you know how to paint and you want to teach be a to paint you know how to fix Hondas and you want to teach people able to do that like there are so many more useful skills that we can trade with one another and I think Ben Franklin said there's no more High there's no more noble a deed than to help another no more to educate and I I wholeheartedly believe that and so um I mean that's what I'm investing my my dollars and my time into and so um yeah that's that's the that's like my whole next year in terms of what I'm investing obviously acquisition. we continue to invest we're family office and so if you have a business that you want to sell or scale you can hit us up hell yeah I'm going to enjoy watching it happen man appreciate you thanks for having me on thank you thank you very much for tuning in if you enjoyed that episode with Alex you will love my 2hour conversation with David Goggins which you can watch right here go on stop it