The Glory & Perils Of Becoming A Billionaire - Andrew Wilkinson

I'm indoors and some people may be noticing that I'm wearing sunglasses look at this uh this is not a ad for rayb Ban's metag glasses but my friend bought me these the other day and I can record you front on so no one will ever usually get to see what this looks like from the other side but this is my view this is what it's like this is what it's like to be me anyway you've got a quote that says most successful people are just a walking anxxiety disorder harnessed for productivity why do you say that so um all my life I've had this feeling that when I wake up I need to do something um I'm just constantly whipping myself I basically feel like if I don't achieve I'm a piece of [ __ ] I don't know where it comes from um but I am just obsessed with solving problems and I'm hyper aware of problems like at any given time my brain is five steps ahead of all the things that could go wrong and my my game if you will is to try and prevent all the terrible things from happening and I think that makes me a good entrepreneur but it makes me kind of a miserable person how have you learned to balance those two given that you want to maximize your Effectiveness entrepreneurially but presumably not do it at the price of your sanity well I think um you know understanding when you're in a Sprint and when to use that I think you know an elite athlete would understand that if they run it a full Sprint constantly they're going to get injured and I think in my 20s you know when it really mattered I embraced it and in my 30s I started realizing that I've achieved the goal I want I've made enough money that I'm happy and it's not that I want to Coast but I just want to turn the volume down on that stress a little bit because I've learned how to achieve leverage using delegation and other people and buying businesses and all those other things and so um I think one of the problems with the way people think is that they imagine that when a then I'll feel good right so you often hear people say you know I just want to leave it all behind and move to Bali forget it all the problem with moving to Bali is that your brain comes with you and your brain is anxious if you're programmed in the way that I am doesn't matter where in the world I am I'm just thinking about problems and so for me actually it's been chemical I started taking a SSRI about three years ago and I remember about a week after I started to take it I would hear the anxious voice and all the concerns to creep in and it was just a little bit quieter a little bit more distant so for me you know meditation exercise being in a healthy relationship all those those you know form the groundwork but actually it was a chemical problem to some degree what have been the positives and negatives of the ssris you often hear many nightmare stories and also success stories what's the The Real World review so I was terrified um first of all I never thought of myself as an anxious person um must be a difficult admission to make yeah I mean to realize that you are acting irrational you know you are obsessing over silly things so in my business life very functional in my personal life um I would become obsessed over okay I'm taking this vitamin what could this vitamin uh have a negative consequence oh my God is my tap water filled with PF do I need a new type of filter uh am I unintentionally exposing my kids to you know raid on gas in the basement whatever obsessive thoughts like that like OCD kind of stuff and um so I started realizing at a certain point that while I had everything I was miserable inside I was a dust bow farmer inside of my head and so I recognized that and I went to my doctor and I said hey what can I do about this and he prescribed me an SSRI and then I went on Reddit and on Reddit you only get the extremes you get the people who say this is amazing and then you get even more people that say this ruined my life five star reviews and one star reviews only exactly and so I was really scared to take it and it sat on my um sat on my you know nightstand for a year and finally I started digging into it more and I said okay how do I ensure that I don't have issues with this and I realized that a lot of people who take ssris have uh a meta they have a they basically metabolize drugs differently so if you look at your 23 and me data you can actually see if you are hyper metabolizer or not and I realized I was a hyper metabolizer and so if you think about it it's kind of like um you know you do a drug let's say you do a massive amount of psychedelics or something like that there's always that moment where it hits you and it's like oh my God this is I need to go to the ER this is crazy and then it kind of Mellows out and I think that same thing happens to a lot of people with ssris and so I found that I had that genetic polymorphism and I actually found a drug that was a newer class a different class that I could metabolize called viotin which not that many people know about I mean it's called trellex brintell and V oxine depends on where you are in the world um and it's been incredible for me the only downside that I've had is that my stomach sometimes gets a little nauseous Health gets impacted a little bit a little bit but honestly I mean it's there's such a stigma around I think admitting you have anxiety less and less over time um and then taking a drug not that many people come out and say hey I take a drug every day I take a pill and helps function and uh you know what's funny is they'll also take an allergy pill and not think twice and that's changing systems in your body and reducing histamine and histamine is in your brain I mean the Lord knows what it's doing but uh for some reason when it's serotonin and dopamine people panic I think there is a and rightly so a concern about overprescription around genz relying on these drugs to buttress their mental health when they're not eating well they're not getting eight outs of sleep at night they don't have a good social Circle they're not exercising they're not all of those things um but that that is very interesting to consider okay I've gone through these steps and this is something which genuinely had a net positive impact I was aware of what the potential externalities were and I just decided to go through it I um I done it all so I built a rigorous exercise regimen I had a 45 minute meditation every day I had you know I was eating a very strict diet and it was one of those things where if I did everything perfectly I'd feel fine but as soon as one thing broke down I would I would break down myself and so I realized you know that's not functional that's not how much of that do you think was the impact of the things that you were doing and how much of that do you think was the story that you told yourself about being the sort of person that did all of those things a lot of it was the story you know I think if somebody tells you um you know if if if somebody told you look every time you fly in a plane you increase your risk of getting brain cancer by x amount you're going to obsess over it and think about at least certain people that are tuned in an anxious way will and what's fascinating is now I will listen to the same podcast I was listening to before I'll listen to Ronda Patrick or Peter AA and they'll talk about some problem or you know medical issue or whatever and now my brain goes oh that's interesting okay maybe to I might have that I've probably got that exactly wow so going back to the uh successful people are walking anxiety disorders harness for productivity you have been around an awful lot of hyper successful people is this part of the course in your experience the upper echelons of the richest most successful people on the planet are they also on average driven by that same sort of compulsion well I think um this is a really annoying word right now but trauma right you know a parent who um mistreated you a teacher who told you couldn't do it everybody has a chip on their shoulder and the investor Josh Wolf has a great saying he says chips on shoulders put chips in Pockets right so often people who have a chip on their shoulder go to achieve great things because they're trying to prove something to the world and I think that some people have uppercase tea trauma and some people have lowercase tea trauma for me I have lowercase tea trauma you know my dad didn't make enough money growing up my parents fought about money my solution to that was make money and everything will be good well it it didn't work out that way but um I think that you know you have someone like Elon Musk who he's on the Spectrum and his dad you know was physically and emotionally abusive to him he's just way more successful than I am and so I think what I've found is that most people are a result of something complex inside of them and uh you know who who else but a complex person spends their entire life trying to launch rockets into space or you know Bezos trying to deliver a package slightly faster than every you yeah what did I what did I expect like what what would you expect of this but would you expect them to just be a simple happy go-lucky human they don't ever notice any concerns how many people have you found that have managed to achieve some degree of worldly success in the well balanced I'm driven by a desire to do well but not a sense of insufficiency there's no hypervigilance there's no underlying anxiety disorder how rare has it been to find people like that I think they exist but I think if you ask their kids they would tell you that they're crazy in some way I think a lot of people are very good at appearing that way and I think that one of the fascinating things about rich people is you see grandiosity and then you see grandio humility so what I mean by that is people who are grandiose they have the $500 million yacht the this you know 10 houses go to the Oscar parties whatever and then you see people who wear the Casio watch and they're humble and they you know live in house in Omaha or whatever it is and I think there are two different forms of uh you know they go e one way or the other right and I think even the people who go um you know grandiose humility they still make a point of everybody seeing look I'm wearing the Casio watch aren't I so humble right not to criticize I think it's you really only have two options you can either be extreme or you can be signal or counter signal exactly choose your direction Western man yeah what did you learn you've spent some time with Charlie Munga Warren Buffett uh what have you learned from being around guys that are so uh Lindy in the way that they've existed well I think that they have a singular Obsession you know Warren Buffett um his wife T you know talks about how he really had no nothing in his life outside of reading annual reports and running his business he's so incredibly obsessed with being the world's best businessman and investor um and I think that's great for him you know but I think that when I read about Warren Buffett I decided that I wanted to be like him um I I was running all these companies and I was super stressed out and miserable and dealing with people problems constantly and when I read about Buffett I was like oh my God this guy he's abstracted business away all he does is read all day and relax and then he buys a couple companies every year and I tried to do the same thing I got an office and I was away from everybody and I had CEOs running all my well I couldn't read an annual report for more than 30 minutes without losing my mind and wanting to go send a bunch of emails and talk to people and do stuff so I think that you want to make sure you're playing a game where you would naturally play it either way and in that instance you know that wasn't for me I have a different version of investing that I enjoy and it's much more people Centric and what about Charlie Charlie um he is truly somebody who did whatever he said said whatever he wanted he did whatever he wanted and he also just lived incredibly humbly like I remember going to his house um you know in La you know I've gone I've gone to lots of people's fancy houses in LA and usually somebody with his netw worth I think it was like six billion or something at the time they've got like helicopter pads and creepy statues and $ million pieces of art everywhere or whatever Munger lived like a wealthy dentist you know he lived in a normal neighborhood in a house that he designed in the 1950s and really I think what he loved was building machines that worked and figuring out uh what didn't work and avoiding it and he's just a learning machine I mean back to the point of building a life that you want all he did was read that's all he did every time I'd go to his house he's just sitting there with a stack of books uh and he's just devouring you know four or five hours a day of reading and not that many people can do that there's a reason why they're so wise and so successful for you must have seen that clip that got circulated about a month ago where Warren was doing part of the report and then turns to his left and says Charlie you see this so sad man that was sad I think it's uh I think it's really hard they had such a great Rapport those two you tweeted something out that I think is actually analogous to what we're talking about here uh quote here's the number I used to win the lottery sent by entrepreneurs giving advice what's that mean so I think that um you can't use somebody else's knowledge to achieve your own goals and I've i' I'd say that most of the bad choices I've made in life has have actually been a result of taking advice from other people because defin definitionally let's say you talk to let's say you talk to a podcaster who started in the era of This American Life they're going to say oh you need to be on PRI and you need to do this and that and the other you're in a different world different competitive landscape and so I think that people will over index on what other people did and say if I just copy their cheat codes it'll work but as we all know if you were to play the lottery with the same numbers someone else used it's not going to work right and so I think that people um people need to ultimately make their own decisions they need to make their own mistakes and their life should be focused on making as many small errors as possible and then learning over time I have never been able to tell somebody that something isn't going to work out for them right people don't change they need to hit rock bottom first and only once they hit rock bottom do they change um one example you know I was an incredibly trusting person to the point where I would watch I thought I thought everyone was good so I remember watching um you know like Harry Potter movies and you see like Voldemort or die hard and there's the bad guy I would just think there's no such thing as bad people right there's misunderstood people there's complicated people but there's no such thing as like true bad guys and then I had a few business experiences where I got defrauded or worked with someone who had lied to me and was truly a bad actor and from that point on I was forever changed from that point on it was trust but verify I had been told over and over and over again you can't do a good deal with a bad person or don't work with someone with the following qualities but I really had to experience it in my body and I think it's a little bit like with kids you know when you have kids they're running around and they're you know my sons are running and fighting on the dock and I know one of them is going to get a splinter and I know one of them's going to fall in the water and cry and I've got to let them have that little flesh wound so they don't have a mortal wound in the future how much truth do you think there is in that equivalent uh don't try to use the strategy somebody else did because it's very particular to their time to their industry etc etc uh when it comes to LIF style designs so what you were talking about there um Charlie Monga Warren Buffett all that they want to do is be the best business person in the world or just spend five or six hours a day reading not everybody can do that therefore not only is that not necessarily a successful strategy that's going to lead to them profiting over time but it's also not even necessarily going to be a happy life like it's a life that is designed for those guys with their particular idiosyncrasies for what fulfills them and makes them feel like they're flourishing uh I think a lot of the time both in personal and professional life people are trying to okay what give me the blueprint of what I need to do in order to be able to be wealthy and be happy and both of those things are by design custom fit totally I mean look at lawyers right how many people do you know from school who said I want to be a lawyer because my parents taught me that it's a good job and I can make a lot of money and I watch Law and Order and I thought it was cool well if you actually sat you know think about what most lawyers do they're reviewing documents and it's doents for like a real estate transaction or like someone buying a company they're looking through little Clauses and then going to a legal reference that is not necessarily the job that most of these people set out to do and I think that ultimately people go for jobs that have external validation and they like the idea of but they don't actually like the reality of it I think that people when they're choosing jobs or directions for themselves instead of trying to imagine what's going to make them happy should instead have anti-g goals they should be thinking about what do I hate when am I maximum miserable right so I'm maximum miserable when I'm having to read all the time or I don't like doing paperwork or I really don't like having a lot of meetings I like a lot of time where I'm just quietly thinking and instead use those criteria to choose the life they want because I don't think humans are very good at predicting what makes them happy but they definitely know what makes them sad so you're saying that it is more important to stop doing what you hate than to focus on doing what you love 100% dig into that for me tell me a little bit more so um there was a time maybe five or six years ago where me and my business partner Chris were really unhappy at work uh we found that we were traveling constantly we're away from our kids our calendars looked like a game of Tetris um we were just not we we kind of had this moment of like do we really want to keep doing this we're just miserable and Charlie talks a lot about the idea of inversion he says invert always invert always try and twist something around instead of saying how could I help the homeless much or how how could I help the homeless the most you say what harms the homeless the most and then you design something accordingly and so we started writing out this list of all the things that make us miserable okay so we don't like being scheduled well we started saying you know we're not allowed to be booked on Tuesdays and Thursdays and on those days we have lunch uh we always want to sleep well okay well we're never agreeing to a morning meeting we don't like owing people things okay well when we raise money for these companies we're going to do it in a very specific way so that we don't have to answer to people um and we really just started designing our lives around that and we found pretty quickly we were much happier just focusing on those things whereas what we've been doing before was going well when we're rich then we'll be happy right when we have all these successful businesses or when we're more like Warren Buffett that'll be when we arrive and that has never um um frankly never delivered happiness for us we'll get back to talking to Andrew in one minute but 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your money back right now you can get a 20% discount by going to the link in the show notes below or heading to liv.com modern wisdom using the code modern wisdom that check out so that's l i v m o m n t s.com wisdom and modern wisdom a checkout I think it's true to say that when you ask someone what makes a person happy they will have maybe a vague idea about what's going on but if you were to say how would you make a happy person miserable that's pretty reliable that's very very easy one of my favorite questions that I ask on the show is what do most people get wrong about x what most most people get wrong about entrepreneurship what do most people get wrong when starting a company what do most people get wrong when designing a hypertrophy routine for the gym because that question is I think much higher Roi look here are all of the places that you can fall into a huge hole don't do those and you will expedite success way more quickly than actually trying to expedite success the same thing goes for happiness the same thing goes for business totally I wonder about the I wonder about how to make avoiding doing things that you hate more sexy you know because there's this degree of Puritan work ethic I know that I certainly have it a lot of the people that listen to this show have it as well you like a classic sort of workingclass mentality I grip my teeth and get through I've heard that hard work and discipline and resilience are traits that I should try and push for I value them in myself I think that if I work hard maybe I can cultivate them so I'll do that but it it's kind of like anti- lever in a way it blinds you to how could I make this more fun how could I make this more effective how could I magnify the outcomes that I'm getting from this particular thing I came up with this idea that I wrote about this week called the productivity rain dance so at the start of this year I asked myself a question what do I do that I think is productive but isn't and what are the things that I do that I don't think are productive but are and what I realized was i' basically made this weird sort of sacred ritual where I'd kind of like wave the sage around and do but it was sitting at my desk when I'm not working keeping slack notifications down to zero trying to sitting on email clearing off stuff that really doesn't matter uh being on calls where there's no actual objective on the other side of it they all felt like work but the actual outcome that you got on the other side was nothing the reverse what are some things that are productive but I don't realize are was uh always saying yes to a coffee if somebody's coming through town for a brief period of time organizing dinners with groups of multiple friends from different uh friend groups reading going for a walk without uh anything in my ears uh and long drives those things were super productive when I actually looked at how it made me feel and even if you forget about productive like what makes you feel good and what makes you feel terrible and those were two buckets of things that managed to do both both be productive and make me uh happier or be unproductive and make me feel miserable and yeah it was so uh very enlightening to see that and it's taken me six months to basically realize that I'd created this odd Detachment from inputs and outcomes and I'd Focus so much on inputs just I'm doing the I'm doing the meditation I'm doing the breath work I'm doing the whatever so yeah but what's the what are you trying to achieve here and is it actually achieving anything at all or are you just going through this sort of odd dance in the hopes that on the other side at some point in future good things will come what's that Buddhist thing of like all suffering comes from attachment and if you attach yourself to the idea that you have to have slack at zero you've definitionally definitionally ruined your life because it'll constant um one thing I think people miss about entrepreneurship in my opinion entrepreneurship is about laziness the initial laziness is about fixing a problem um I was just talking to somebody who's a mom and we were brainstorming a business idea and she was saying you know I hate packing my kids lunches in the morning it's so stressful and we were like oh it would be cool if there was a service that did that laziness right out of laziness out of seeing this problem where is someone's pain a business right so it's embracing laziness there and saying let's make this thing easier everything that a great entrepreneur does from that point on is about building a machine it's not about whipping themselves and pushing a boulder up a hill it's actually about getting the right people on the bus and building a machine that involves people and systems and process and you actually want to get to a point where you don't do anything your job is to fire yourself as an entrepreneur right Steve ell's from Chipotle is not on the line making B right he built a machine and then he scaled the machine um and I think that uh embracing that laziness is something that a lot of people really struggle with a lot of people think that they need to whip themselves and work harder and I know that was certainly true of me in the early days I used to think I'm not a good manager of people you know I always found that once I was managing about 15 people I hated it I hated giving speeches and writing big communic emails and building system and doing HR I just never like that stuff and I would just book I would read book after book after book trying to become a great manager of people and eventually I just realized oh my God there's people who love managing people I'll hire an HR person eventually I'll hire a CEO and I think that you ultimately if you want to be a great entrepreneur you want to be Teflon for tasks you want to let everything that you don't enjoy go away and when you do enjoy something and you're doing it you have to say am I the best person to do this and ultimately what you want to do is build a machine and then pour your buy whatever your contribution is you want to pour it into the machine and then have money come out the other side and then hopefully you want to take that money and you want to put it into another machine and so on and so forth that to me is what entrepreneurship is and if you think about what Warren Buffett does let's say that um let's say you wanted to sale from Seattle to Hawaii most people go down to the beach with their buddies they find a bunch of logs they tie them all together they build a little sale and they basically have a little raft and they hope that they drift to Hawaii well that doesn't work right starting a company usually fails it's really hard you don't know what you're doing in the beginning Warren Buffett gets on a cruise ship he finds a great cruise ship cruise ship with a great Captain he buys a ticket a stock certificate he boards and he just lies in the sun reading the entire time and when I saw that I was like oh my God this is the laziest most successful person in the world who has abstracted business away to the most incredible degree and that to me is the ultimate entrepreneurship right I think people think of Warren Buffett as an investor and it's like no no no he's an entrepreneur he's just delegated absolutely everything to the point where he has 500,000 employees and hundreds of companies we were talking before we got started about something I think a lot of people feel the pain of which is this transition from operator to executive and you know you may even be able to say it's when you get around about eight people in the team or whatever it might be um but you know I I ran businesses for my entire life 18 years old I sat next to my then would be business partner for the next decade and a half in my first ever seminar at University and if you have grown up maybe not without money uh or in an environment that Praises hard work and a sort of Puritan workout e uh or if there's an expectation that you kind of need to Signal being busy which is also um kind of like a a proof of work that you put in front of both the subordinates to say I'm here with you I remember I ran nightclubs and um one of the things that we used to have to do which was kind of hilarious was if it was the middle of November in the northeast of the UK freezing cold you know it's wet it's it's awful uh but the venue manager of the nightclub that you were running your event at they'd expect you to be stood there on on the front door with them because they are they're freezing their tits off on a quiet wedding day in November in Newcastle upone stand next to me prove that you're invested in this thing uh and that um mentality that my suffering is somehow in accordance with how hard I've worked which is and how hard I work is going to Bear fruits eventually you can quite quickly actually buy bypass the how hard I work thing and just do Straight suffering equals outcome on the other side so what is there to say for someone who feels like okay the uh thing that I am doing or even the situation I'm hoping to get myself into at some point in the not too distant future I can start to see the murmurings of feeling overworked feeling a little bit burned out calendar being too busy I feel like I'm doing task that I shouldn't be doing I need to maybe upgrade from operator ground floor to Executive how do people psychologically structurally professionally how do they go through that so um I started a web design agency about 20 years ago and originally it was me and my underwear in my apartment and then I had a client asked me for um a CO to do some coding that I didn't know how to do and so I went oh my God I panicked and ran around like a chicken with my head cut off and tried to learn it and it was too confusing and I finally realized that my girlfriend's uh best friend's boyfriend n how a code and so I went to him and I said hey how much would you charge to do this and he said 500 bucks and so I went to the client and I said a th000 bucks cuz I wasn't sure if I was going to get negotiated down and they just said yes and in that magic moment I was like oh my god I've just made money and I didn't do the work myself right so that's the most basic form of Delegation and then you get into the next phase which I call Higher One to higher 10 so you could go and say I want to build a marketing department I'm going to go hire an affiliate marketer a PPC marketer an email marketer blah blah blah blah or you can hire one person a VP of marketing and that vp's job is to go and build the org and hire them and manage them and that's the next level of Delegation where you now have this leverage where you hired this one person and they own an entire part of your business and um and then you know the Final Phase is really firing yourself fully to say to dare to say um I think someone else can do my job better as CEO and that for me was one of the hard things to let go because you know my ego was tied up in it and IID always you know my identity was that I was an entrepreneur and like you I had this kind of work ethic of I'm being lazy and I shouldn't do this but it was one of the best things I've ever done because it allowed me to achieve crazy amounts of Leverage by 40 different companies and you know do all the stuff that I've done since then um but it's a really hard sad thing and I don't know that it's necessarily something I recommend for everybody I think that some people should be in their underwear in their apartment freelancing I think that's great I think if you can make good money and you're happy and you like being an individual contributor that's awesome other people want a company with three people other people have grand Ambitions and they want a single track and just Dominate and do an amazing job in one industry and one company and then there's other people like me who are an inch deep and a mile wide and they want to be all over the map and I I think like if you look at your personal life if you're somebody who buys way too many books you know more books than you can ever read in a lifetime you have a overwhelmed Netflix CU your letter box is you know crazy um you probably want to consider having a life where you have a lot of variety and you're doing a lot of different things and you have to embrace that and say you know what I'm doing a focused job being a CEO of one company and yet I'm a distractable person who likes a lot of uh Variety in their life and so I think embracing that when logical and other people not I I always talk about um do you know the movie Juro Dreams of Sushi no so there's this guy who's a he's a master sushi sushi sh oh my God that's so hard to say master sushi chef he has a tiny little restaurant in the bottom of a Subway uh station in Japan very unassuming and he's considered um the best in the world he's got I think three Michelin stars people wait sometimes up to a year to go there and in this documentary there's a movie called Juro Dreams of Sushi that's amazing in the documentary you see he's so obsessed with making sushi that he doesn't allow anyone to cook the rice but him and people are not even allowed to touch the eggs until they've worked there for like 10 years he's very very rigorous and strict and I think he is a Craftsman now on the flip side going back to I mentioned Steve Ellis from Chipotle well he came up with an idea he built a machine he scaled it to thousands of locations he need to wait 10 before touch the eggs exactly but his life is probably Excel spreadsheets you know it's it's management it's board meetings jro he's a Craftsman he spends all his time making sushi that's what he loves he's the best in the world and I think this is the challenge of Entrepreneurship is often you start in a place where you love it you know you're doing a thing you love and when you start delegating you stop doing the thing you love and sometimes you can end up somewhere that you didn't necessarily expect to end up um it's it's a it's a really you know it's like one of those be careful what you wish for things I know you mentioned that most lessons most important lessons in business and life kind of can't be learned through somebody else they have to be learned through your own pain have there been any books or which are the books when you look back you go okay that really did sort of expedite my insight or at least it gave me a different sort of view uh Michael Gerbers the emth Revisited for instance makes me think when you're talking aboutt about that is there anything else that comes to mind the eth was huge for me um I would say most of my most valuable reading hasn't been business it's actually been psychology I read a book called influence by Robert seini which kind of it's kind of a broad overview of all of the most common um causes of human misjudgment and it talks a lot about how human psychology is wielded against us in sales and marketing and so that was an incredibly Valu valuable book in terms of just understanding like how do people work and why you know why do I keep seeing these uh odd behaviors from the people I work with that kind of stuff one of the most impactful books that I recommend to every entrepreneur is a book called How to get rich It Is by a guy named Felix Dennis who was a magazine publishing Mogul uh British guy and the cover and the title are extremely douchi so uh it's called how to get rich and it's him looking like wearing some very Posh clothing and he's in this big Throne uh and he's laughing maniacally and so you look at this book and you go [ __ ] this guy don't want to read this um but it's fascinating because he is a guy who really came from nothing and started selling Bruce Lee posters at the time Bruce Lee was really popular I think in the 60s or 70s and somehow stumbled his incompetent way into owning this massive publishing Empire and making hundreds of millions of dollars and he starts the book by saying look I'm going to teach you how to get rich I'm going to tell you what I did and tell you my cheat codes but you actually don't want to get rich I'm actually miserable I'm old and miserable and I wish that I'd become a poet when I was 35 because I had enough money to do so so I find that is one of the most fascinating books because it really drives home the fact that you don't necessarily want the thing you crave you know most people think they want to get rich when really they just want to make 500 Grand a year or a million dollars a year uh they don't need to go be a billionaire to achieve that and in fact being a billionaire has tons of weird downsides that nobody thinks about and so his book was yeah really helpful at inverting for me and I didn't listen to any of the advice cuz he I went what do you what do you know old man yeah payback for you in other news this episode is brought to you by nomatic I just got back from Nashville this 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it's a phenomenon that I see in everything um you know if you think about um when you talk to people and you say do you have enough money I started asking people this maybe 10 years ago do you have enough money and I found that people with $500,000 always said well I'd like a million and then you'd see people with 10 million they'd say I want 20 you see 100 and they want 250 and so on and so forth and as I continued to meet more and more successful people until I got into this really upper echelon of business people where I'm meeting people that are worth you know 2520 billion do I noticed that they were still striving and I remember I was having this conversation with a billionaire and they said um oh man uh Jeff Bezos he's so rich and I said well what can Jeff Bezos do that you can't you know this person was worth 2 billion or something and Bezos at the time was maybe worth 40 and he just goes he can buy a super yacht and I was just like what a bizarre world right that you're still striving you can buy a crazy yacht and you just can't buy like an extra big yacht with like four helip pads in a tennis court and you're feeling hard done by and I realized that the reason that he felt hard done by because is because human nature is comparison and he was existing in this weird world where he's the poorest guy in the room sometimes right if you live in the Hamptons being a billionaire is kind of run-of-the-mill you really want to be more like Bezos um and I just found that profoundly depressing as I observed it and I observed it in myself I could see in these people and I could judge them but then when I actually looked inside I was the exact same way um and so the book is really me trying to Grapple with that and ask the question of like okay well when is it enough and then not only that but what do you do with it you know you build all these money machines and you have this byproduct of money well what do you supposed to do what's the ethical thing to do with the money is it is it okay to buy a super yacht or is it better to you know give it to children in Africa can you buy a super yacht and give it to children in Africa like what do you what do you do here uh and so it's yeah it's my journey going through that crazy experience what does it feel like to become a billionaire um well well I remember the moment that I did the mental math I was sitting reading Captain Underpants with my kids and my phone dinged and I saw you know it was my business partner telling me that we had received an unsolicited offer on one of our businesses and it was a pretty big number and I I did the math in my head because at the time we're private there's no stock price and uh and I went oh my God that means I'm a billionaire and then I felt exactly the same and I went on reading the book with my kids um and I had the same weird moment where you know I took my company public about a year ago and I was standing in line uh in a coffee shop and I saw the ticker pop up and saw this huge number in my trading account and I realized you know to my point earlier about Bali you know brain chemistry is the same still going through the day uh you know I'll never forget I had a Irish client this guy Jerry Kennelly lovely Irish gu great Irish name awesome strong Irish name and he is from the south of Ireland in county Cary and he invited me there for a meeting and so I went down to to this tiny little Irish town and everybody knows each other and he's like the capitalist mayor right he's pointing out he's like I own that building and that building and that building and everybody I could just see um Accords him so much respect uh everyone's saying hi to him and stuff and at this point m career this is probably 15 years ago um I wanted to be him I was just like oh my God this guy has it made and I asked him we sat down in a pub we ordered some beer and uh I said what does it feel like what does it feel like to have all that money and all that success and he just goes well I'm drinking the same pint you are and I was like oh my God like this is you know he I didn't want to hear it it's like the sad truth of like people who have a lot of money still fight with their spouse they still make awkward small talk with the Barista they're still anxious they're still dealing with you know issues at home and their kids and the end of the day like the money doesn't actually do anything in fact it magnifies the misery in many ways why well I think that when you have a large amount of money it becomes a burden right I think that um I'll never forget there was a client uh what my my agency metalab had a client who is a very very wealthy person and they were doing a lot of philanthropy and I had breakfast with this person and on the day that I had breakfast with them uh there had been a school shooting and I'd read the news about the school shooting and I thought it was really really sad and terrible but I was able to move on with my day because you know it was a far away problem and they were profoundly affected by this problem they were um really really shook up and I started asking like oh you you know this is really upsetting like what what's going on for you and they said I've been working on gun rights for the last five years um I was trying to pass a bill to ban the weapon that was used in that shooting and I think that is the part of the burden I think if you're a good person and you have a lot of money you see problems in the world and you sometimes foolishly sometimes realistically believe that you could have actually solved that or made that go away think that someone like Bill Gates hears about climate change and goes oh my God like I got to figure this out whereas you and I we hear about that we go H you know nothing I can do about it right so I think that's one piece and then the other piece is um the management of it you know it's this big thing that you have to have people to manage and and people are constantly trying to get it from you and manipulate you in various ways to get access to it um and then it also perverts relationships uh in the book I talk about how you know when I first made money I I was always um I was always kind of a mooch in high school um you know I'd be the kid who's like hey can I borrow two bucks I need to go buy a Pepsi or something like that and so when I started making money I really wanted to pay it forward and be generous and I found that if I went out for dinner with a friend and his girlfriend for example and I didn't pay for the bill I was being a dick because I'm rich I should pay the bill but if I did pay the bill I was showing off and I was trying to put him down and so I find that there's many of these catch 22s around wealth where if you do philanthropy and you talk about it you're a douche because you should just be humble and not talk about it and if you don't talk about it you're criticized for not doing philanthropy there's just so many of these weird issues like that around money and it really is a perverting force uh in your day-to-day life and then even as you have kids and family I think it can really cause Strife within the family I mean we've all seen succession uh that's an extreme case but I think that a lot of wealthy families are torn apart by money why what's happening there I think that um the kids can't individuate they are living based on who who is in the good graces of the parents and who's going to inherit the money and I think that there's a lot of it becomes like a court you know it's like a royal family or something like that who's going to who's going to be the King and who's going to take over the business and who's going to inherit what and even something as simple um I was talking to a wealthy friend and I have this beautiful lake house that is like my special place where I escape to with the family and I said I'm so excited that when my kids are older they're going to have this for their kids and he said well are you sure you want to give it to your kids because typically what happens with these vacation houses is you give it to your kids but then they have the grandkids and then the grandkids can't agree on what to do and who gets the house and then they all start fighting and he had told me a story of another family that actually had this huge Feud over their vacation property so I just think that there's a lot of these odd second order consequences that people don't think about you're sewing the seeds of future Strife by doing something that in the moment feels good totally yeah I mean it's so fascinating to me to hear these stories and the internet really has a problem with it which kind of makes me a bit um makes me feel uh annoyed it frustrates me that uh hearing stories about people who seemingly have it all together financially and say and I'm still miserable and my son killed himself and I am on a ton of drugs or I'm dependent in this way or my relationships are breaking down or whatever the response to another human saying I am suffering is not I'm really sorry that that's happening to you it's look at all of the things that you've got this isn't true you know how what chattering class luxury belief [ __ ] is this that you know do they not know there's people that are starving and so on and so forth uh I have come to believe that this is a lesson the money and success won't make you fulfilled the external validation won't fix the internal void uh that that is a lesson which is in the category that we talked about earlier on which is one that cannot be learned without experiencing it well I would assume it's a lot like Fame right you know you probably have people that are stalkers or you've had you know I'm sure lots of weird experiences and then you get recognized all over the place and I bet sometimes you're sitting in a cafe and you just want to have a quiet moment to yourself but three or four people walk up and say hey I like your podcast and in a way that's a privilege and that's wonderful but it also is a double-edged sword it comes with how grateful how ungrateful to to say that this is something that I don't you you you [ __ ] did this I I wrote this a little while ago and it's a strange inflection point and it has been the last probably 18 months for me personally that that has been the period that I've gone from like absolute sort of nobody nobody to now degenerate Niche Micro Niche influence of fame or whatever it is uh and if I'm outting about walking maybe every 15 minutes or so someone will say something nice dude love the like a Amazon driver will lean out of the window Chris love the podcast it's really lovely it's really cool but it is getting just the the last week was the first time it ever felt like it was a tiny bit much like it was just almost everybody and you know again this is what a luxury problem to have all the rest of it but almost everybody on the planet has less money and less Fame than they would like they want to be richer and better known and therefore all of the sympathy flows down to the people that have less the total addressable market for sympathy is basically zero also the total addressable market for advice is basically zero there's an unlimited amount of content on the internet about how to become rich and basically none about how to be rich unlimited amount of content about how to become famous and nonone about how to be famous and quite rightly the people who don't have the thing don't have the thing and they not worthy of more sympathy it's like well yeah but there's still suffering that happens up there so in your again you have managed to I guess straddle groups of people who are rich people who are famous and people who are rich and famous how does what what's the reality Distortion of money compared with Fame status and what about when you throw those two together how do you think about that well um Morgan howel has this great um it's like I think it was just a podcast that he did where he talks about what you really want is to be rich and Anonymous there's a great Bill Murray quote where he says something like if you think you want to be famous try being rich first and see if that covers it um and I think there's a lot of Truth to that and I'm experiencing that in a much smaller way than you are I have you know 250,000 Twitter followers now and I get recognized from podcasts here and there and at first it was this really lovely thing where I made new friends you know I'd be sitting in a cafe and someone would turn over and say hey I'm an entrepreneur I heard you on the podcast and it was very positive and then you know I just you naturally just meet interesting people now about a year and a half ago two years ago I walked out onto my back patio and my house and I live in a very secluded part of um the city I live on the waterfront it's very very hard to access and there's a man in my backyard and he's staring at me and he tells me that he really needs to tell me about his business idea and I am [ __ ] terrified I you know give him my email really quickly and say hey I'd really prefer if you email me and I go back inside my house and about an hour later I get an email from him and it's not completely deranged and I'm like okay few this is just an entrepreneur who's taken hustle a little bit too far um so the next day uh I dro dve out my gate and my gate opens and at the end of the driveway same guy fist bared Furious that I didn't respond to his email yet and I just sped away and called the police like I was totally freaked out and that's me barely being famous right I can't even imagine what legitimately famous people are dealing with um you know you mentioned that thing of like you need to always be in those moments too you always need to be grateful and recogniz that you know to this person this is an exciting thing or whatever Jennifer um what's her name from Hunger Games Jennifer Lawrence Jennifer Lawrence told a story where she goes I can be a princess to 99 people but I'm a [ __ ] once because I'm in the middle of a fight with my boyfriend and I'm a [ __ ] forever and everyone's talking about it on Reddit I do not envy people who are famous and ultimately I think being famous in a niche like I think um being famous but Anonymous like imagine the Cen Brothers you know the name you know like Joel Cohen if you met him you'd be like oh my God he's so incredible and if he goes to a film conference he's amazing but if you walk by him on the street you wouldn't recognize him to me I think that's actually the optimal amount of Fame in other news this episode is brought to you by Maui Nei venison Maui Nei venison brings the healthiest red meat on the planet directly to your da these venison sticks make it so much easier to hit your protein goals no one stumbles into hitting their protein goals and this has made it so much more simple every single day if you're on the road if you don't have time to get a protein shake in this is perfect not only did they provide the most nutrient-dense and protein-dense red meat available they are the only stress-free 100% wild harvested red meat on the market look you probably care about the quality of your meat your food your protein sources and this is as good as it gets right now you can get the healthiest red meat on the planet delivered directly to your door and get a 20% discount on your first order by going to the link in the show notes below or heading to Maui NE venison docomond wisdom using the code modern wisdom checkout that's mui Nui venison docomond wisdom and modern wisdom a checkout uh my housemate's a big musician and he said LCD sound system uh as a good example I think they headlined some huge fast was Coachella or something like that you know they played some obscene a country's worth of people and that dude could have easily got off stage and walked through and no one would have known who the [ __ ] he was looking dude um do you think about that with yourself cuz your face is everywhere on YouTube and with YouTube especially you can go down rabbit holes right so you know if you talk about one top let's say you mention the Deep State randomly it's like you could go down the algorithm and suddenly you have deep State people you know it's like you just have you experienced that yeah it's uh it's it's an interesting challenge like this transition has been interesting and I think I have quite a naturally anxious disposition as well um very hypervigilant around sorts of things so great at problem solving uh great at coming up with designs for products and making sure that all of the grammar and stuff is is perfect uh not so good for relinquishing this ambient sense of surveillance that you kind of just feel is following you around and uh you know I've really tried to be as open as possible with the audience without triggering the must be nice sort of response but I I feel like if that's the first thing that you come to when people a few steps down the path that you're trying to get along tell you about Thorns that they've encountered if your primary responses must be nice as opposed to must be interesting I think that I I just don't think that you belong here like this isn't the show for you this isn't the audience for you this isn't the podcaster for you but it has been very interesting um to make that change and to sort of reflect on what do I actually want what makes me happy um because I think we look at you know Jordan Peterson's a good example right of somebody that was kind of plucked from obscurity this sort of Dusty academic working in Canada and then you know from 201516 through to 2019 just has this obscene amount of growth probably quicker than anybody else of that ilk and people are very passionate it's not just like I don't know being a pop star or something which has it the kind of obsession about it but not maybe the emotional connection they don't feel philosophically connected to you know some dj's music or something like Testo walks through a club would it be cool to get footo with Testo yeah but like do I actually have an opinion on Tiesto as a person probably not and um I I really do think and I assume this as well that at some point on the journey toward becoming either as rich or as famous or as powerful or whatever as you want that someone stepped in and gave you some sort of training course that there was like a guy that came to your door and knocked and said hello sir I'm here to explain to you how to deal with all of those things you go you're just the same person that you've always been you've got all of the same concerns and idiosyncrasies and fears and and the other side is you see yourself the same you see yourself like the same person but the world sees you as something different I the uh documentary that was done I really really enjoyed sort of famous famous Scottish singer in this documentary was done on Netflix and you know he's trying to write the second album and he's really really struggling and uh you know Universal Studios are stepping on his shoulders and saying you really need to get this sorted we need we need this to be good and uh he develops a nervous tick and he's got this it's Lou Capal and he's got this huge huge increase in Fame and uh he turns to the camera halfway through and he says Fame doesn't change you just changes everybody around you and in my experience based on what I've seen that it it's probably not strictly true because I've I know some people who've become famous and become more sort of assholish than they were previously but for the most part it's this huge sort of discordance between who am I how do I see me the exact same who am I to the world how does that see me totally different it's one of the scariest things I think about um wealth or fame is that people will behave differently than they would otherwise I always think back to um when I was in high school I had a really rich friend and I noticed he was a nerd him and I the reason we got along is cuz we're both into computers and I found that the way that he was treated by the Cool Kids versus the way I was treated was very different and I always found that weird and then I realized I was like oh my God it's cuz he's rich and like they want to go to his house and he's got Nintendo and a pool and all this great stuff and um I think my fear inside is that I'm going to be treated differently like I noticed that people who were kind of dicks in high school now will suck up to me or try to sell me realis state or you know a car or something like that and so that is the weirdest part I think is and there's you know what's that what's the Drake song or whatever it is no new friends right I think there's a lot of Truth in that that's the sad part about it it is and I you know I asked someone I've asked a lot of people this question because again the total addressable market for advice on how to deal with things like this is basically zero uh and the total number of people that you can learn from is also basically zero um I asked a couple of people about okay what's the solution given the fact that you have this reality Distortion field that follows you around what do you do well then you end up hanging out with only other hyp successful wealthy people or famous people because they understand your problems and the fear there is you end up in a bubble and you have no sense of what reality is yes so it's like this sad reality that as people become more successful or wealthier they just only hang out with people in that world compare themselves to those people feel sorry for themselves and want the treadmill which keeps it going keeps it going keeps it going yeah yeah I mean am I right in saying therefore in your experience that the honic treadmill just runs all the way up even the not Point not not 1% of people still don't feel like they've got enough still going yeah and even even though I wrote the book you know I know it all I've been through it I know what I should do but I still have the dust bow farmer in my head saying what's next how are you going to achieve today um how could you lose it all what could go wrong and I've noticed that you know if you have anxiety it's like a a homing Beacon looking for problems and if the financial side is solved let's say that you've gotten Super Rich well then you go to health right I mentioned before I started obsessing over Health um sometimes you become a prepper or sometimes you get obsessed with politics or whatever toxic garbage you like to consume and so um yeah that energy is going to go somewhere what else have you found as a prophylactic against the honic treadmill Beyond ssris make sure that you train make sure that you eat well and get ate out of sleep at night the biggest thing is awareness I've noticed that um people are stressed out only by problems they're aware of so if you think about the human brain 500 years ago if you were in a tribe or not a tribe if 500 years ago if you're living in a village um you'd be a aware of your neighbor problems and you'd be aware of the problems that affect your village and at any any given time there'd be a couple problems and I think the problem with the Internet is that our brains are not designed to be aware of all problems globally at all times because I think it can create a narrative that things are terrible when in reality the it's not that things are terrible it's that things are always terrible somewhere some at some point in the in time and so the way that I cope is actually by not looking at news not allowing myself very much social media um and being very very cautious about how I work and when I work so I actually treat myself like a drug addict I say um you know if you were trying to get off alcohol you wouldn't keep a bunch of alcohol in your house so for example I have my phone locked down and limited and my girlfriend has the password to screen time uh I can't do email on my phone I can't look at news the screen just goes blank when I do what app are you using to control that screen time and opal so for example like Twitter has been a wonderful thing for my life and I really benefit a lot from it but left to my own devices I'll go on it endless endlessly and so I allow myself five sessions a day and then it's over and after a certain time of day I'm just not allowed to use it and so by drawing those boundary boxes around myself I find that my mental health is better and that I'm less stressed and I think that ultimately one of the most challenging things about being public so for example having a public company is that your stock goes up and down like yesterday I lost $50 million on paper right and it's like you know I didn't to to reassure you I didn't feel anything right it's a number it's a number and I was talking to a friend about this the other day and you know if you own a house your house is probably your biggest investment for most people your house goes up and down in value every day you just don't see it you're not aware of it you're not getting it revalued every day there's no stock ticker and so I think ultimately my goal is to have as few tickers in my life as possible and what I mean by that is like news social media anything that can go red or green things are good or things are bad I just don't want that I want to be as present as possible and only think about what I want to think about in the moment not allow those things to hijack my brain it's interesting sort of thinking about the the brain of a hypervigilant person that you can worry about things that you don't yet know about you're you're able to invent worries quite well but if you artificially inject a bunch by exposing yourself to news or by having a lot of different things that you're tracking in one form or another uh that is a it's like oh this fire is burning might as well throw some kerosene on it as well uh it's very interesting to sort of purposefully restrict what you're exposed to especially if you're a curious person as well if you want to learn things you go okay well how can I sift through the [ __ ] that makes me feel bad but look at all of the like these little slivers of gold that I keep on getting or you know it's good for connecting with people able to grow my business and maybe I'll get to speak to somebody that I really respect and that'll be fun uh but yeah finding that balance I think is is very very important there's a great book called dopamine Nation by ANM show awesome and I love this idea that the way the dopamine system works is is that you can get addicted to anything whether it's chocolate cake or heroin or the example she gives in the book is vampire novels and I think if you're a anxious person it's very easy to go down the rabbit hole and get hooked into anything and for me it's like Health podcasts if I don't restrict my Access to Health podcasts I will start beating myself up every single day that I'm not doing my V2 Max training and I'm not taking S I did my Norwegian 4x4 this morning exactly right there's always something and and yeah I think that you really have to be very careful about what goes in think of Andrew huan's RPM like you are negatively impacting how much money money he makes from his AdSense account so maybe you do need to start watching again you just leave it on in the background and make sure that you keep on he keep on paying him that sweet cash but yeah man I uh I I really do think this this sort of insight that we are hopelessly outgunned by the amount of information that we're getting in we are hopelessly mismatched mentally psychologically our predisposition our source code as humans is not built to observe the entire world's news and catastrophes 24 hours a day fed directly into our brains and then for us to actually be able to respond and that's when you see people that blow up because you just have this frictionless brain to fingertip to World filter where people toilet tweet things that is observed by the rest of the planet as some indication of exactly who they are oh you know this is a synthesis it's like dude he he slept 4 hours last night and was you know taking a dump in between two flights in in Barbara Jordan Airport terminal or whatever like it's not that at all but just leverage Works in both ways and I think that you need to be very cautious about what your sort of leveraging into yourself as well as how you're spending your efforts I wonder when it comes to we we talked before about kind of how programming changes the way that you look at the world uh Puritan work ethic coming from particular backgrounds what's your Insight on how childhood experiences impact your view of money of uh wealth information of the way that you relate to to wealth and making money and stuff like that well I can only speak to my own experience but what I've seen is that whatever whatever is put on a pedestal or whatever is a problem when you're a kid I think it's hard-coded to you and money was a four-letter word in my house I mean my dad was um an entrepreneur and struggling and he was optimistic and chaotic and you know he's the kind of guy who would say you know what like let's just buy a family computer for $2,000 and we'll put it on credit and my mom is like a total hardcore budgeter spend Thrift we looking at our finances and saying we can't do that and so those two things they created this like you know vinegar and baking soda explosion and all I knew that would make my parents happy and make them stop fighting and to be clear they weren't you know they're not screaming at each other they're just fighting there's friction in the household um I felt that okay I'll just pour money on this and that'll resolve it um and so that was I don't know that's somewhere deep inside me this idea that money is the solution to problems and obviously I have a very different perspective but even as we speak today when I think about protecting myself or when I think about problems I always am thinking about how can I use money to stack you know to stack up a wall of money around myself so nobody can make me do things I don't want to do or how can I ensure that I have money tucked away if I ever need it for this emergency or that emergency or whatever it is so um yeah I do and and I am I'm very grateful that you know it wasn't that my parents were alcoholics or hitting each other or whatever it is because something different would be hardcoded for me then and you know maybe I'd be more like Elon or or maybe I'd be dysfunctional in doing drugs I don't know yeah um that's that's what I find so fascinating about you think about capitalism and we talked about machines earlier right well capitalism is a machine that takes crazy people and greed and builds benefit for all of us right I find it so funny like the same people that hate Jeff Bezos to be clear Jeff Bezos I believe he was an orphan or he was uh I believe his uh his dad walked out on him when he's very young like so many of these complex billionaire types have very difficult stories very traumatic childhoods and they'll criticize someone like Bezos or Elon and then at the same time they're still using they're driving a Tesla and their love Amazon Prime and they don't seem to make that disconnect of like okay that crazy person that went and blew their brains out that we all hate on created all these wonderful innovations that we all appreciate today and I think that's kind of what's wonderful about capitalism and that people Miss it's this engine for human greed and suffering that you know does great things we'll get back to talking to Andrew in one minute but first I need to tell you about Shopify Shopify Powers 10% of all e-commerce in the United States they are the global force behind gym shock old birds and new tonic Shopify is the e-commerce plat form that helps you sell at every stage of your business if any of your friends have tried to start a business online they will know the nightmare that is building a website and learning to code and where does my hosting go and how do I do inventory management Shopify gets all of that out of the way so that you can focus on the thing that matters most which is designing and advertising an awesome product just bring your best ideas and Shopify will help you open up shop plus Shopify has got awardwinning help there to support your success every single step of the way they are your no excuses business partner and it just makes selling things on the internet way easier best of all right now you can sign up for a $1 per month trial period at shopify.com mowis or lowercase that's shopify.com mowis now to grow your business no matter what stage you're in yeah that is very interesting it's like Alchemy in a way you know you take this thing that left to its own devices without capitalism would disrupt the local tribe or would cause some sort of catastrophe would just be misery for for that one person but now that person's misery can be mutated into benefit for many for many other people Downstream yeah well even like think about um narcissists and Psychopaths right because I I've had a few run-ins with various challenging personalities dark Triad types and um you know they're really scary but they may have a there may be a reason they're here right you know it might be beneficial to have somebody do a crazy thing like that because who else is going to do it but for a psychopath or a narcissist and I do think some of these people who are hyper successful do follow that pattern as well I don't I don't want to say everyone's anxious what I've seen is people are either anxious and anxious planners they're narcissistic or they're Psychopathic those are kind of the the AR the three most kind of common traits of successful people the hyper hyper successful people to be clear I've met a lot of very success uccessful wealthy people in my experience most of them have been lovely you know I read about in the book this experience of going on a trip down the west coast and meeting progressively wealthier and wealthier people they were all really nice in different ways and they all have great businesses but in the book I talk about how they're all still just miserable and frustrated and adding zeros who's got it right the most right of the people that you've met to say this is someone that I think has achieved a degree of success but also they've just you know they're there their mind rests where their feet are they've found presence to me um well so I was in New Zealand and prepping no kind of kind of actually kind of I I the only reason billionaires go to New Zealand yeah I actually was in New Zealand for a it was a conference relating to getting citizenship so yes guilty as charge impr preing I do love New Zealand though um but anyway I was I was thinking about who do I know in Wellington where I was staying and I remember this guy that I'd met named Derrick cers are you familiar with Derek he's been on the show yeah he's amazing and uh I had met him and he had been so kind to me when I was a I was a brand new I was a young pup I just started my company and I met him at a conference and he was just so kind and engaged with me and uh hadn't seen him in almost 20 years so I looked him up and we went over for coffee and I didn't actually know that much about him um I knew that he had sold his company but I didn't really really know how he' structured his life and stuff and he basically I I was opining about everything I was dealing with and all my stress and running the businesses and all the complexities of money and he said well when I sold my company CD bab for $20 million I put it in a trust and the trust pays me 5% a year but I can't access it so I don't have the burden of the money I just get the 5% a year from index funds and municipal bonds or whatever it is but it's not his money and he can never get it back and he said I didn't want to play the same game again I had gone and I had done entrepreneurship I'd started a company I had won Gold and my brain was telling me you got to win gold again you know and it's like one of these things where it's like if you win gold you win gold like you made it you don't need to prove to everyone you can win it again but I think a lot of us go they they want to keep playing the same game and winning over and over again fluke no exactly and so Derek said you know what I'm just going to write I really love writing and I'm going to Tinker and start new businesses but none of it's going to be about money I'm post economic and he the way he put it to me was I burned the boats you know I really drew a demarcation in the sand where I said I'm done with money it's tucked away it's not my money anymore and I just get enough I get I think it's a million dollars a year or something which is a hell of a lot of money it's awesome um so I admire I admired Derek a lot because he spends his time thinking and reading and meeting and trusting people and writing about his thoughts and he still Tinkers but he's taken away money from the picture which I really admire and I can think of a few people um like that and I think that the people I admire the most are actually people who prioritize relationships that are friend billionaires not billionaires they have a huge broad collection of interesting people that love them and that they love and they have great families you know those are the people ultimately which is such a Cheesy answer but those are the people ultimately that I admire I think so interesting man I really wonder what whether or not it's ever going to be possible to preclude a war everybody you know myself included under you uh about chasing down something which is like running toward the Horizon that each step that you get toward it is it gets one step further away Morgan howel says that the only way to win the game is to stop moving the goal posts it's like okay the first thing that you need to do is okay where am I going to get to and at that point stop but how many people get there and go well you know if I've managed to make whatever this number is or I've got my first house or I've got the H the dream house I want to get it's like yeah but it could be a little bit bigger yeah there could be a second car in the driveway what about a holiday home I wonder and I I've been thinking about this a bit recently as well to do with capitalism it's such a [ __ ] good game man oh my God is it a good game so many people have been turned from the ancient Greek word for work was translated as not at leisure so the ancient Greeks are workers an aberation and Leisure as the set point and now in the modern world we've sort of done the opposite we have uh this productivity Purgatory where even the walk that you do on a morning isn't to enjoy being in nature it's because Andrew hubman told you that you're 10% more productive if you get sunlight in your eyes for the first 15 minutes of the day or whatever and uh yeah I just wonder I wonder about all of the different ways that we can shortcut that realization to get to maybe you should stop working so hard there is absolutely a group of people out there who are uh type B personalities that don't have a leverage problem they have a work ethic problem and they need to just step their foot on the gas but there's an awful lot of people most of whom will be listening to this podcast who are type people who don't have a work ethic problem they have a leverage problem or they just have a chill the [ __ ] out problem and trying to get them to some sort of a stage I I don't know what it is if we could inject something into the water I wonder whether um this sort of new generation of uh glp1 agonists Downstream uh will maybe have an impact on this they definitely seem to be able to uh change a lot of obsessive Behavior social media addiction gambling addiction uh marijuana addiction uh and a couple of friends mutual friends of ours are using sort of Second Generation and third generation versions of these and a couple of them have said to me that stuff that they didn't think at all would be associated with this the amount of time that they spend scrolling Twitter has gone down one of them said it turns out that willpower is a drug and the dosage is around about 25 micrograms per day or something like that uh so maybe that'll step in you know maybe we're going to be pharmacologically sort of nuted away from this but I don't know I I I really do hope that there is a way selfishly for myself to be able to see okay and where's enough and what does that where does that where does that end because it is a bottomless game like yeah I think with money um not enough people think about what the number they want in terms of income should be every year and I think if you you know Derek was like look okay I make a million dollars a year and that's more than I ever could spend and that's a great amount of money but if people worked backwards from there instead I think they could aim a lot lower and probably have much happier lives and say I don't need to go and start the next great billion dollar business I'm not damaged enough for that I don't have enough trauma and instead I'm going to go out and you know start a pipe fitting business or I'm going to own a bunch of chain restaurants or something like that um I don't believe that people um have any awareness of what's going to make them happy in the end and with money I think that they they really are just moving the goalpost that um they they don't think about what is actually going to to derive real lasting benefit they think about adding the cars and the boats and all that stuff and you know I've explored all that stuff I've bought silly cars and I've chartered yachts and all that and you know really it's all empty because you adapt to it just like anything else I love the idea of the glp1 inhibitor to my point of you know if you if you are unhappy sitting alone in a room you know why would that be different if you're in another part of the world whatever and you know for me taking the SSRI has been helpful on the anxiety point but I do wonder about taking a gp1 inhibitor now you got me thinking maybe I will yeah I think it's when we look at people that are diabetics we don't say why can't you just work harder to process insulin but because everything else has some degree of willpower depending on how determin is imped you are some degree of willpower and and agency that we have over that so we just assume that anything that's a shortcut is bad and you I'm big into agency I'm big into people doing things for themselves and not relying on external buttresses and stuff like that but the way that everybody should look at the richest people in the world or the most successful people in the world is as this bizarre manifestation of a pathology it's like wow I wonder what's broken inside of them that caused them to do that thing you can't you can't hope for Extraordinary outcomes without having extraordinary inputs but this is this is not only true in in wealth and business but think about artists think about you know Amy wiin housee was bipolar Kanye West is bipolar Salvador do you know Salvador do all these amazing artists and really really [ __ ] up people create amazing things it's just that Thomas Edison didn't have Twitter right he wasn't posting from the toilet at 3 in the morning he was probably just as insane as Elon Musk and you just didn't have access to him he was a black and white photo in the newspaper and for all we know people did think he was crazy back then who knows and for all we know he may have been miserable tot he went to bed on a nighttime totally yeah it's uh you said before about uh people don't change um dig into that a little bit for me sort of what have you what have you learned about that given that you are trying to change yourself you want to become better yourself but what have you learned about the human capacity to make changes so um this is mostly been in a business context but I found that the path to misery is trying to change those around you um and I've found I've hired a lot of people and I've realized that ultimately when you work with somebody you are ultimately the rider on an elephant the elephant is really big and it's going to go wherever the hell it wants and you can maybe put some peanuts down and hope that they go in the direction that you want but no amount of you know hitting it or doing whatever is going to affect that the elephant is going to go where the elephant is going to go and so I have just accepted that um you know generally when you like like let me let me tell a story so um we had a CEO and they said uh you know I want to go and I want to pursue this strategy to grow the business and I said well we've tried this before we've you know we've already done XYZ here's all my Logic for why it wouldn't work now psychologically when you challenge someone directly they double down so often if you let's say you said you're a trump supporter and I said well Trump's stupid and he's a criminal and all this stuff you actually are going to double down on your belief and Hammer it in and so you know what I used to do is I would go back and argue with this person and try and change them they would say no they'd double down and then I would wait a year and they would try the strategy and it would fail and then I would try not to say I told you so and I would except that the person had to learn the lesson on my watch on my clock and it was going to cost me a bit of money but ultimately they had to hit rock bottom they had to get to that point where they realized that it didn't work and then if I intervened they would just be like oh my God Andrew swooped in and he took away my agency and it would have worked and I hate him so I've seen that in business and then I've also seen it in my personal life I found that very rarely can you go to somebody and say Here's a big list of all the ways you need to change and just have them go and do it I think ultimately you need to watch them fail like the kid falling off the dock they have to go and hit a Breaking Point or get called out by a friend or have something bad happen and then maybe if you're really lucky and their self-reflective they'll change a bit I was going to say even after failure how much change have you found well even then I think um it's rare that people will blame themselves I do this myself right I I will always have a narrative at as to why something I did didn't work and how it's other people's fault and I always need to check that in myself I think that um generally uh you always have a charitable picture of yourself you know you know what your intentions were and you went in and you know you were trying to help this person and then there's a misunderstanding and a bad thing happened or whatever it is and we all build Chari of narratives because that's how we function you know people can't function going through life thinking that they've upset everybody or been a bad person it's not fun to have your nose rubbed in your [ __ ] um and so I think that challenging that protection um that kind of innate desire to protect yourself is a hard thing and a lot of people struggle with that it's a lot easier to say well the world was unfair to me and therefore I don't need to change you tell me that story about when you lost $10 million yeah um so I was running my digital agency and digital agencies are wonderful businesses sometimes and really really hard at others so you're always in this position where you have too much demand you've got tons of clients wanting you but you don't have enough um Staffing in capacity or you staff up and then the demand goes down so you're writing this roller coaster constantly and I heard about all these people starting SAS software companies and when you own a SAS software company you have thousands of people paying you every single month and it's very very steady Edy and just kind of goes up into the right over time and I went okay that's the business that I want to own and so I started a project management software company called flow and we started basically what was what so basically we started Asana before Asana came out and it was very welld designed and very cool and I funded it all myself I put you know by this point I put $2 million into it and it was quite successful in the beginning you know within six months I think we were making $2 million a year or something and then the founder of Facebook left Facebook and started a company called the sauna and I looked at their product and I said we we're better than them you know we're designers uh we have more Soul we're we're going to out compete these guys will be the Scrappy upstart and um very quickly he raised $100 million and he built an incredible team of marketers and salespeople and product people and they outgunned us very quickly within two years they had more features than us a better product overall and and we were like a fart in the wind you know nobody nobody knew about us everyone knew about Asana because they were buying ads and I was really pigheaded and I kept saying no we're going to win we're going to we're going to bootstrap our way to this and in retrospect I was like Fiji trying to invade the United States there was never a chance but because I didn't know what I was doing I had this conviction around it and I ended up losing $10 million of my own money which you know if I had just invested it this was probably 10 years ago if I just invested it I'd have $30 million more or something like that uh instead I have zero what was the lessons that you took away from that um well I think in business you want to Charlie Munger and Warren Buffett talk about jumping over one foot hurdles or Munger has this great line where he says my idea of shooting fish in a Barrel is draining the barrel first right so finding businesses that are high certainty where you have a very good chance of success um and then Munger has another quote which is fish where the fish are and the idea there is he talks about there's all these big fishing ponds with tons of incredible fish in them but those fishing ponds attract thousands of other fishermen and they all have amazing lures and you're all elbowing each other he recommends wandering into the forest and finding a tiny little pond with great fish but only a few other fishermen because you have much higher chances of success and I think what I was doing there was fishing uh fishing in the overfished pond I had too much competition it was like I own a pizzeria and uh Venture Capital decided to open 10 pizzerias all around me and sell pizza for free how do you compete with that so you mentioned before about the difficulty in getting people to change presumably that means that hiring well is the most important thing in a business okay talk me through the process that you use how do you think about hires how do you assess candidates how do you ensure that the people that you hire do the thing that you want them to under a good fit so generally the only hires I make these days are CEOs um the way that I do it is I try and find somebody who's run a same or similar business um and they've done it at two times the scale so I'm not looking for somebody who um let's say that you know I've got a let's say I have a pizzeria and I want to franchise it I don't go and hire the guy from Pizza Hut who runs Pizza Hut today that's too big I go and I find the guy who's got he's currently working at another Pizzeria franchise that's five locations or something and then I talk to them and if I'm nodding along with what they say they would do do at the business with no suggestion from me that is a very good sign because going back to the idea of an elephant the elephant is going to go where they go to a man with a hammer everything looks like a nail and so if they come in and they say I'm going to grow this business by franchising it and I'm going to go to Five locations and here's where I'm thinking and I'm nodding along and thinking this is what I would do that's awesome and I will rowing in the same direction totally so the number one thing is are they rowing in the same direction and I've learned this lesson over and over and if someone comes in and they say actually I don't think franchising is the way to do it I think you should own all the locations and I don't agree with that even if I hire them and I try and convince them that's not the case they will sabotage they won't do that presumably even if that person's very well credential and super competent and all the rest of it doesn't matter they always do what they whatever their program to do whatever their thing is and this is true I think you know everyone has their Hammer um and from that point on I will make an offer uh I try and incentivize them so that they have skin in the game they have downside um and ultimately if I win they win and if I lose they lose alongside me and I think a lot of people miss that they'll often pay someone a flat salary or something like that where they wonder why this person doesn't care as much as them and often it's about alignment um that's something that I didn't understand in the early days I used to pay somebody I'll never forget I had a designer who worked for me and I told him great news we just closed a $20,000 contract and it's we've got all this great design work and he was kind of nonplused and I was like why isn't he excited and then I realized he doesn't make any more money whether or not we achieve this it's just more work for him and so from that point on I started trying to align people with whatever the output was what's a typical way that you structure the remuneration package uh well it's usually it depends on the person some people are simple and they just want cash and so say something like if we make $2 million of profit you get a $250,000 bonus or you get 5% of profit whatever that profit number is other people say I need ownership I'm long-term and those people I will often say Okay um do you have cash let's buy in you know you can buy into the business and I'll buy you out if you ever leave or sometimes I'll say I'll loan you the money and then you can invest but I like people to have this sense that they have actually sacrificed something I find people don't value things unless they have to dig into their own pocket um and then the final stage you know going back to having bad experiences with people um now I do a really really deep background check um and we have a group of guys who's actually former CIA that you get private investigators deep they go really well it's not really piis but what they do is they go really far back in people's history you know did they graduate from the school they said did they work at all the places they said they call the references that aren't given the you know oh it you know looks like Chris was at uh Acme Corp but he didn't include that in his resume let's make sure we call those people um and you know most of the time people check out but occasionally you find out that someone's sketchy and you avoid them go back for me where are you finding smart people what are your favorite uh Pathways to to find them and then uh what does the assessment period look like so when I was starting out I was doing it and I would just go on LinkedIn and I would say what are five companies that I admire that are similar to this business and then I would look at LinkedIn and say who's the CEO president coo and I would just cold Outreach to those people um over time I've actually started using recruiters and I hated recruiters I hated the idea of paying a whole bunch of money for someone else to go on LinkedIn but now I look at it as a leverage point because the recruiter will go and interview people and I get them to record the zoom call and then I watch the zoom recording and I think we both know like you know within a minute and then you're thinking oh my God I'm wasting 30 minutes with this Dingus um if you don't like the person uh so it's a great hack to kind of accelerate that process and what about the uh you bring them in and getting them to work alongside somebody is there any sort of no there's no thr in the pool sink or swim and I don't mean that in some sort of like harsh way it's literally just I want to hire people who are fully formed don't get me wrong I take chances on people all the time and when I start small businesses I will take chances on some random kid and you know I'll again I'll throw them in or I might Mentor them a little bit but when it comes to CEOs it really is just here's you know here let's get us aligned um that's like a magnet and you know let's uh let's make sure that you are a you know doing hiring a new CEO is like a brain transplant for a company you want to make sure that the brain will not be rejected naturally the brain is rejected and so you really have to carefully to ensure you're a DNA match um but you know those things being right and then you know here's what we care about let's go we just throw them in and don't talk to them Ben Francis the founder of jimm shock now currently CEO of gym shock again after he left and then came back we were walking through Manchester a few years ago and I was asking him about his approach especially for sort of seite type things and I think his his idea was uh High well incentivize appropriately and then crush them with with work load and he has it's almost like a wartime General approach to a lot of what he does that people are close to the best paid that you would be for this level in your industry at this time Etc uh but then the amount of work that is thrown on you and it's it's as you said sink or swim it's uh there's a dude called Bournemouth barbell in the UK he's a powerlifting coach he only works with people for free works with people for completely free but he has created some of the strongest people in the United Kingdom for a very long time he's in his sort of 70s and he does it because he loves it and presumably he's got enough money to sort of keep things taking over but he works with people for free and one of my friends started working with him and I like dude that's really impressive you know you've been selected kind of thing to invite only sort of underground hero type guy uh and then I realized over time why this particular guy had such great outcomes and it's that he basically doubled the training volume of every athlete that worked with him so in the space of a year you'd made two years worth of progress now what you didn't get to see through survivorship bias was the attrition rate you didn't get to see all of the people who were burned out or injured or gave up on the sport because this crazy guy from the south coast of the UK was [ __ ] crushing them with double workouts uh but what you did see was who were the victories that came out on the other side now in a world where the externality of bringing someone in and crushing them with a high amount of workload isn't injury or you know like the end of their career it's just that this isn't the right fit for you you actually can continue to cycle through until you go okay I found an athlete or a CEO whose work capacity is so great that they are going to be able to make us move at twice the speed or three times the speed as we would have done previously it kind of made me think about that well I think um yes but only through leverage of other people like I do want to hire to the point before about um putting yourself out of a job I the thing I hate to see actually is when the CEO works really hard I want a CEO who's lazy and has built the company into a machine and don't get me wrong I want the CEO to be a you know wartime CEO and run into battle if they need to if things are looking bad but at the end of the day I actually really love seeing a CEO taking vacations working normal hours because to me that tells me that their company is actually humming and they're running it well it's the ones that are driving maniacally where I go not using leverage approach they're not using leverage exactly by definition what about um what are your thoughts on using your entrepreneurial gut this is something that people talk about an awful lot I think that your gut is only as good as your experiences I think my entrepreneurial gut would tell me to start every business Under the Sun going back to I was talking to my friend uh about the um lunch business right oh why don't I make kids why don't you know start a company doing kids lunches well 20 years ago I would have started that business and been excited about it now I know how complex it would be how low margin it would be because I've been in Food Service businesses and I've seen similar companies I can go into my mental models in my head and just go immediate no right and I think that uh ultimately your gut is built only from experience and you know even like reading like I I'm a big reader I think reading is probably the number one recommendation I give to entrepreneurs if you just read all the time you'll be fine um but even when you read about stuff it's not the same as experiencing it there's been numerous things where I've read about entrepreneurs who have done stuff that they've made mistakes that I I you know go on to make would go on to make and I still had to learn from that from actually having the pain right is that a uh is that a sad realization you know so much of what we've spoken about today is just this kind of endless inability for humans to learn from the mistakes of others no matter how cool that quote is well I think um without the pain you don't have the motivation so um you know when I read the emth I was in pain I was in acute pain I remember specifically reading a passage and it said uh it was giving an example of somebody who ran a bakery and they were staying up all night baking and then they're running covered in flour and trying to Peck into the cash register you know try and serve customers and it was just such a perfect picture of where I was at in that moment that I was just trying to do everything I was trying to hold up the world um and so pain plus reading equals success right you need the pain and you know my son I um I I play guitar very badly and I really love the idea of playing guitar with my son and so I got him guitar lessons and he just was checked out he didn't really care he said Daddy this is boring and I was a little bit disappointed so we he stopped doing the guitar lessons and then the other night we watched School of Rock and in School of Rock you see these kids and they're you know they're Mohawks and they're playing lead Zeppelin and and suddenly my son is super excited to learn guitar and I think like you have to find that moment where you have this passion and excitement or a problem and motivation to learn and often the most successful is the Pain part right because it's impossible to hide away from there's a lot of things that uce you all the time that thing could be cool that thing could be interesting but there's far fewer things that are actually very painful that occur in your life I mean imagine it's like the way we teach math today I find it insane you teach kids math and you don't explain why they would ever use it right it's like why would I I'm in finance now and I got 48% in math 11 I I passed because I begged my teacher to give me 2% and I ended up passing uh and therefore I could graduate high school and today I know all the math that I was learning in math 11 and I'm really good at it but I didn't know it at the time because I was going why would I learn this it's like teaching somebody to going back to guitar it's teaching someone guitar when they've never heard Leed Zeppelin you they don't know that you can have a mohawk you got to hear lead Zeppelin or you got to be rejected by the girl who likes guys who play guitar that's the best motivation so moving forward for you you know having spent an awful lot of time thinking about you know the honic treadmill tuned all the way up to multiple billions of dollars what what do you sort of Hope for yourself over the next few years what are you working on to sort of presumably you you've kind of set yourself a a bar that you need to be reminded of like you've written the book like you can't it's there's an obligation right that you have to yourself now having spent so much time thinking about what do I actually want what makes people happy how much can I keep on trying to uh use the same solution to fix a problem that doesn't seem to go away what are you hoping to do over the next few years well one of the we talked about learning about psychology and one of the most powerful psychological effects is um consistency and commitment bias so that would be I tell you um I'm really into rock climbing or I'm going to get fit this year I'm far more likely to achieve it if I go and I tell all my friends and so I think writing the book was a way for me to muddle through my own feelings synthesize it into a book which you know there's a nice benefit other people can read the book and hopefully benefit a little bit from it or they'll be in acute pain and maybe learn from it um but then there's also a level of consistency and commitment in the book I talk about burning the boats giving it all away signing the giving pledge you know and I've made that intention really clear that I'm going to give away all my money and you know my kids are not going to inherit large amounts of money um you know and I've really made a commitment publicly so I think part of it um part of it is that and then also um working through what to do with the byproduct right going back to that thing of you have this it's like having a farm and the farm creates vegetables and then they're all just sitting in a warehouse or something no don't get me wrong they compound and you know there's all the um waren Buffett stuff but really trying to think about what's the maximum good you can do with this byproduct of money what about from a personal standpoint a values a drive what are you looking to achieve there I would love to get to a point where I do not ask myself what's next um and I don't know if that's possible maybe if I inject enough glp1 maybe I can get there but I would love to deprogram myself you know I think that I have this very very loud voice that screams at me every day what are you doing where how are you being productive uh what's coming next and I it really does not enable me to appreciate what I have in the moment um I don't know if that's achievable you know I'm pretty to be honest I'm quite happy with where I've landed now and I feel like I'm in a good place but I don't know if I will ever have enough mentally you know I me in the end of the book I kind of say like I'm still going like I'm still building my business and doing all these things but hopefully because I've created more meaning out of it in that I'm not doing it for myself anymore because I have enough myself and now the the you know if I was to write a second book it would be well what do you do with it how do you give it away effectively right and that's what I'm investigating right now that's what I'm fascinated by is how do you do effective philanthropy what is the most s magman freed he was the guy he was your your savior and you know wrongly as I think incarcerated get him out free salon then he can look after your money you do great interestingly I uh I read the Michael Lewis book and I went here's a guy who is just really odd and uh who you know it's it's so interesting like it's so easy to twist Sam bankman freed and say you know he's this horrible guy and all this stuff but like so much of what he was doing was like giving huge amounts of money away to charity like who does that if they're like a true psychopath that wants to do bad things and defraud people again I mean he broke the law he maybe he should be in jail I don't know I you know I don't necessar I don't know him and I don't have any um major opinions there but it is an odd thing like to hear somebody was committing fraud to give money to charity that's kind of a bizarre you know that's like the I can't criticize that you know as much as I can someone who's running a Ponzi scheme to go buy 100 Ferraris yeah William mccal the guy that came up with effective altruism uh you know it was only maybe six months after that that I I saw him and I thought you know this is a a philosophy that you championed that even if you weren't the original originator of you kind of would at least the face from a philosophy perspective I think William was the youngest ever philosophy tenard philosophy professor in history uh this kid Scottish guy really lovely guy and uh you have this guy that comes in effective altruism good branding good name sort of does what it says on the tin and I wonder how long it's going to I wonder if that if EA will ever get back to where it was or whether the sort of FTX s bankman freed debacle has been so cancerous from a brand perspective that EA now needs to be it needs to be something new it needs to be effective philanthropy needs to be EP or something like that what a weird world though where one bad egg ruins something that's so simple and pure which is simply the idea of maximizing every dollar to do as much good as you possibly can I mean I don't know specifically what s bankman freed was funding but most effective alterists are paying for malarial bed netting and vaccines or things like that that benefit people so massively I think it's kind of crazy to criticize something like that I think the problem or at least one of the reasons there was fertile ground for criticism is that a lot of people in EA it's sort of it from the outside it seemed almost purposefully uh obusca it was kind of a holier than thou speaking down from on high there was sort of in lingo it was you know it was a high IQ uh [ __ ] movement well any movement that says how dare you buy those shoes you know let's say you have a $1,000 shoes how dare you buy those shoes how many malaran could have saved could have saved a life right I think it's gonna be judgy yeah yeah interesting man I you know it will be a shame if there is no uh better version of of Charity that is done uh you know Warren Buffett Charlie Monga yourself eventually these big chunks of cash are going to get passed down to somewhere uh and if we don't have a better vehicle to pass them down to it's I mean you know this is the big this was the big criticism the EA came out of which is look at where your dollars go when they go to normal Charities I think the last time that I checked maybe effective altruism had eight or 10 charitable organizations that met its criteria of does what it says on the tin actually does the thing give the money is used in an appropriate and responsible way and there's not an exec island where all of the guys are just business expensing their way around the world and you know being sort of super frivolous with things and you go oh that's kind of sad in the United States um you know you might you might have experienced this contrast between England and the United States but my friends in England and say when you tell someone about an idea in England they say why would you do that right why would you take that risk and in the US they say that's incredible right there's a a culture of excitement and failure is okay and I find it so interesting that in entrepreneurship failure is okay but in philanthropy no amount of failure is okay they point to that one example where there was a fraud you know there was a fraud and people donated money or they over spent on marketing or whatever they the gacha moment is and then they cast that net across everything and that same thing is true with EA with bankman freed where it's like look there's I know people who are big in EA and they're lovely people doing incredible work and saving a lot of lives and I can't criticize them and just because somebody who is a bad egg potentially you know gave money there it doesn't doesn't ruin the whole bunch it's ridiculous very interesting Andrew Wilkinson ladies and gentlemen where should people go they want to keep up to date with the things you doing well they can follow me on on X or Twitter I don't know what we're calling it these days uh a Wilkinson or they can go check out my book it's never enough.com um and yeah I would love to hear what people think hell yeah appreciate you man thank you thanks dude thank you very much for tuning in if you enjoyed that episode you will love my ful length three-hour long conversation with Alex hosi right here go on what else you got to do