The Weird Mental Frameworks Of The Super Rich - Codie Sanchez

what's a contrarian to you I think I want to steal a quote for this one which is Christopher Hitchens and his quote was a contrarian is not one who always disagrees but one who questions everything and so my idea is in the world that we have right now it's probably pretty smart to question assumptions continuously and the humans who do that are the ones that win over time uh I don't think the goal is to just be orinary or to Counter Culture but to actually use your brain to come up with a formulation of thoughts that is unique to you is that not antithetical to moving quickly if you've got to question everything super effortful that means you can't make decisions quite as fast it's interesting you say that we were talking about a mutual friend of ours Bill Perkins and Bill told me uh he has two superpowers that have led to every single dollar he's made and he goes uh it is that I'm willing to take risk and I move faster than everybody else so by the time they've even pondered an idea I've already done it made five mistakes and learned Five Lessons and every time I meet with Bill I realize that's exactly right and that's why he's one of the most successful people that I've ever met and yet I think if you don't question things and you don't have a brilliant mind like he seems to you're just going to be on the wrong road path and if you don't actually know the goal that you want to hit if you don't actually know where you're going most people move forward towards things that they actually don't want in life and I've done it many many times and so in my mind if you don't question UPF front then you might not actually like the answer you get to when you find it yeah the intentionality point I think is so important and it comes up in dating it comes up in business it comes up in where you're going to live what sort of Lifestyle you're going to have how much success do you want o that's a [ __ ] big one so this really cool quote that I saw from uh Nassim talb the world is split between those who don't know how to start making money and those who don't know when to stop oh yeah that hits home huh how you feeling that one I'm feeling that one that's kind of deep yeah yeah well I think he's he's right but thank God there are some humans that don't stop like sometimes I think about you couldn't pay me enough money to switch places with Elon Musk there's not enough money out there I am so glad that he exists as a human in the world because we get to benefit from the Creations that he makes but I don't think he looks very happy and sometimes the person that I actually you know lust after from an exchange of Life perspective is the person who owns a couple of cash flowing businesses happily married couple of kids in good shape has tons of free time and is really close to their community and uh it's not the person who has built multiple billions of dollars because at the end of the day what are you going to do with it and so unfortunately I'm wired as one of those freakish humans that loves the game does not know when to stop and finds everything else pales by nature but I do think he's he's right don't you yeah I the idea of when is enough enough is such an interesting question and you've heard the parable of the Mexican fisherman oh such a good one yeah so for the people that don't know this sort of very interesting Parable that shows there is a quicker shortcut to the life that you want by reducing down complexity not overcooking how much you achieve and then just going for Simplicity in the first place right rather than having to build an elaborate life to then eventually be able to afford a simple one like the elaborate life is kind of unnecessary once especially once you cross a certain threshold of of income and wealth another cool quote about contrarianism a contrarian isn't one who always objects that's a conformist of a different sort a contrarian reasons independently from the ground up and resists pressure to conform hitet right Naval oh that was Naval good one okay yeah yeah yeah yeah that's nval I love the fact that when we're thinking about pushing back against Conformity like the average American is obese Divorced with less than onek in the bank right yep taking the normal route might feel safe in the moment but it's actually a really undesirable thing to do because you can see the the outcomes that you're going to get they're there in front of you yeah I mean I was reading statistics the other week about the if there's one out of 10 uh Americans that get to age 65 by that point only one of them will be independently wealthy uh and by the time they die uh only one of them will be independently wealthy we will have uh I think it's two people will have actually died by the time they go to retire so they won't even have made it there um the other two will actually be on government welfare or uh someone else's dime AK their family Etc and so what we have done systematically is not working if only 10% of the population actually dies with excess cash um because funerals are expensive and so I think you know was interesting what I really respected about Naval in many different ways but I remember when he was first building angelist um I interacted with him a few times on Twitter we're by no means friends but we interacted a few times after it had done you know been valued at a few billion dollars and uh and I was bothering him and his team I'm like I buy businesses all day long there's nothing like angelist for people who actually buy companies and want to own total majority majority shares as opposed to just small segments of companies like VC you guys have all the capability just build it and I remember I was kind of getting through to his I don't know if it was a CEO or a COO at the time and then Nal just came in was like it is not what we do we do and we are the best in the world at serving Venture Capital style businesses and small minority shares and he's like if we wanted to be everything to everybody we would have never hit our first billion and I was like all right sir you know and I tot I get his point um but to stand up when you have that much capacity and capital and see so many shiny objects everywhere and continue to say no to the ones that don't serve you is a real superpower too well don't forget that that is another type of non-conform ity right that is another type of contrarianism to not say yes to everything and it's I've been thinking about this so much the tools that you need when you begin a pursuit or when you begin a journey are sometimes even the opposite ones that you need as you begin to develop so uh let's say that it's growing a business in the beginning you need to be very detail oriented you need to be across everything you need to be completely obsessive about all of this stuff that's going on and then after a while you actually need to be able to learn to delegate and the skill which made you effective in the beginning and you have proof is good and you get dopamine from doing and you're habituated to continuing to do it is exactly the one that's going to hold you back if you can't let go later on uh if we were to talk about um status and the things that come to you explore in the beginning try lots of different things make as many connections as you can finally build up some sort of a reputation and then as the reputation Rises and Rises and Rises you actually need to no longer say yes to everything you need to say no to almost everything right so it again the skill that you develop in the beginning is often not the thing that is useful at the end and you've you're so inculcated into this rhythm of doing it and you're I'm trying to cast off this habit of me doing that thing it's very difficult oh yeah well especially if you think about uh dollar amounts so when you first make your first $100,000 there's a skill set that I think is quite normalized if you want to make $100,000 which is you need to learn as much as possible in order to increase your earnings predominantly working for somebody is the fastest way to get to your first 100K and that same skill set to get from 100K to a million is relatively similar so you can get to a million dollars pretty much using that same skill set but in order for you to become an employee that has a high level of learning and a high level of earning that is worth $10 million actually quite hard the difference between a million and 10 million is difficult and to go from 10 to 100 million is categorically different and to go from 100 million to a billion if you just look at the math between the two uh there is no possible way for you to do it it as an employee like it hasn't been done there is not a billionaire that was an employee of somebody else's company and so the the math just doesn't lie and so because of that I think it's really interesting to determine what is what is it that you actually want who has achieved it before what are the characteristics that are similar uh in those subset of humans that have done it and then can you actually find a road map or Ripple or rhyme between all of those humans to get to the next level and it's a it's a superpower to be able to see through the mat tricks like that to figure out the difference between 1 and 10 and 100 and a billion yeah what's your uh how do you ensure that you're remaining intentional like what's your framework for non-conformity a couple different things the the first thing that this is a friend of mine Alex and I um he's I sit on the board of his hedge fund he's one of the smartest men I know and he runs a a multi-billion dollar hedge fund portfolio and I remember you know we focus a lot on this idea of how do we think different differently than other people because if you invest just like everybody else as an investor on average you lose money over time to inflation that is just the truth most humans without a financial adviser in the market actually lose money over time in the stock market and what people say instead is no the stock market returns 10% a year on average yes the stock market as an entity that is not you individually you individually lose money over time in the stock market which is wild and so when I started thinking about it as a numbers game with him I realize the funnel to non-conformity is essentially this it is you have to continue to question the thoughts that you have inherently you have to uh be off from everybody else slightly and you have to figure out how to be right those two things are really really hard to be consistently have a different perspective and be right on those perspectives and that's the only way you can actually make money long term in the stock market or really in just about anything where you want to be worth over $100 million you can definitely be in consensus and make a million 2 million 10 million maybe even 25 or 50 it's interesting to think about the the fact that you can't signal off what everybody else is doing if you want to get outsides results right ultimately if you do end up signaling off everyone else you're going to end up with results that are at least comparable with what they're doing and I suppose that this kind of at least in part relates to you are the average of the five people that you spend the most time with I actually think that there's a better rule which is you are the average of the five podcasts you listen to the most um can't imagine why I think my ego knows no bounds um but the outsized influence of the people that you're around ultimately you're still going to inhabit encounter the same problem unless you and everybody else that your friends with is on this insane growth trajectory so all right so what's going to happen you you somehow when you are at this stage of your personal growth family growth wealth growth Journey going to find for other people all of whom are going to have the exact same trajectory that you do and I think this is why there's definitely a degree of loneliness that I have seen to a lot of people who achieve rapid success because it's very hard to find some people to come with you on that Journey because your growth is so rapidly accelerating like who what's the chance that you find somebody else that's able to come along with you or maybe the person that you're with is moving quicker than you are so I think what seems to happen is people kind of move through bubbles of friends so as they're going on their Journey okay I'm in this new bracket and then that kind of falls behind and then I'm in a new bracket and then that kind of falls behind at least I see that through Alex as a good example yeah no I think that's exactly right I mean the sad thing is and youi and Alex have talked about this before I think and he might have even been the one that said it which was other people want you to be just slightly less successful than they are on average and um and I think that is a grow gross generalization in that not everybody's like that but a preponderance of humans because we're scarcity mindset it's how we were wired um you know from learning how to survive on the planes uh we know that if there's a bunch of other people around us historically there weren't enough resources to go around you know we had to actually be protective of the things that we made now in today's world in which innovation continues to allow us to achieve more and more and there's actually it doesn't have to a zero sum game I don't think we have caught up here with what we know out here in the Innovation sphere that's interesting so if you say uh if you're the smartest person in the room you're in the wrong room but what it's also doing that sort of a rule is protecting you from being the person that's going to receive the A and the jealousy and the backbiting from the other people so endeavoring to be the poorest person in the room or the most stupid person in the room or the least accomplished person in the room ensures that you're going to receive less and less and less Envy or or or that's actually really true I mean we were thinking about it the other day and I was trying to imagine a person who is really really successful monetarily if we want to say who um actively trolls people and uh and is negative to others and I can think of a few right you could think of like Elon Musk does some trolling on the internet the Paul Brothers do but why do they do that they do that because it's actually a direct Revenue line to a thing that they care about right exact we are we want to have this atten ARR trade so because of that we are willing to tr but for the Aver successful person I have never met a successful human that doesn't have a monetary incentive to troll the trolls they just don't exist like if you want to figure out if somebody is going to be successful or not I think you should go and look in their Twitter replies and comments and if they have a bunch of negative ones you go not hiring them and also not investing in them because that type of human all they can do is they can take rocks and and they can throw them because they don't realize they should build with them and so it's it's one of the biggest signals in our companies actually we have a social media screen so for every single hire that we have across our companies we see do you have a negative perspective on reality and do you play the victim frequently and if you are either of those two things you're just not part of our ecosystem we do not believe that humans like you will be successful with an attitude like that wow okay you've got a lesson the controversy and Conformity conundrum there is a spectrum where controversies and conformity sit on two ends of the line more Conformity equals less controversial and yet most of the winds in life land on the edge of controversy choose your controversy wisely but choose it yeah well I think you can play this out most easily on social media right it's just very easy to tell uh once you have an eye towards Frameworks is this tweet going to do well is this tweet not going to do well depending on is it something that is slightly off from the norm and my Angela said you know people aren't going to remember what you said but they will remember the way you made them feel and that was this touchy feely thing that she said that I never really associated with until I saw Twitter and I said that is exactly right the second that you can make somebody feel something on one way or the other they are going to react to it and often we humans react really aggressively without thinking about it at all in fact I found myself doing it now I I sort of have to train myself not but when I see something on the Internet you know there's like that famous Tom Hardy little meme where is like that's clickbait have you ever seen that I know what that is that's bait right and now we can tell why because if it's slightly off from the norm it is going to attract our attention because just like if there was where's Waldo and red and white stripes in a sea of people in green you're going to note this thing that looks slightly differently and I was talking to a room yesterday of a bunch of uh Builders and some of our our companies and um they were asking me how do you how do you build a personal brand and how do you tweet and know what what's going to work one way or the other and uh I don't know if I've ever told this story but I feel like your audience might appreciate it or think this is terrible but uh they I remember I I we have a newsletter right so in that newsletter I felt like our subject lines were getting really stale I didn't like them so I told the team I bet you $1 thousand doll no matter what you come up with on this newsletter I'm going to beat your subject uh line and my team was like yeah sure there's like three of us and you're not really that involved in this so let's go like great so it's about landscaping or tree trimming or something it's about tree trimming thrilling yeah so sexy right and so it's it's about making money with tree trimming and their titles were like this guy made X doing y this guy trimmed trees and had XYZ and there were a couple of them that were slightly more clever and I was like now we're going to AB test them and I go mine is I love guys with wood dot dot dot which do you think did better of course this one that's slightly offs Spectrum it's still true so it's not complete C clickbait but it makes you feel something when you see it is going to do better and so that's just marketing and sales 101 and that's also attention 101 like if you have a Tinder profile you're probably better off having something slightly controversial so I bet women would engage with that more like a KKK Hood probably not that far all right okay that's not I don't know if the Brits really know what was happening there but fair enough uh reading as a diet be careful what you read it becomes the way you think words are heard then internalized then repeated and then habituated curate what you let into your brain as you do with your body this got me onto an idea I had a while ago about the content diet so most people especially now especially in Austin Jesus are super super concerned is there seed oils in this what's the amount of glucose tell me if this has been responsibly sourced and like it better be from an organic farm are there any pesticides did somebody that had the vaccine live within 10 miles of where this cow was like you know getting milk drawn from it um and yet when you look at the YouTube suggested feed it's just limic race to the bottom of the brain stem Ben Shapiro destroys like panel of leftist like you know it's it's the stuff that the guilty pleasures that many people like to watch and yeah it got me thinking about if the cells in your body are made up from the food that you put in your mouth your brain is made up of the things that you watch and listen and read and given that your content diet should be Spirulina for the soul rather than fast food for your Milla it's a great line by the way spirina for the soul bookmark trademark yeah I love that um what I found about reading is I can immediately see the contagion of greatness when I read it and then I take action so if you go and you read Charles Bukowski's best pieces and then you go to write your writing will be uplifted by this contagious effect of greatness rubbing off I don't know what it is I don't know if there is a framework work or philosophy as to why but I found the same thing with looking at deals often when I go to invest in a company I look beforehand at what did Warren Buffett say in his last memo about how he analyzed a company and you can actually I think steal from the minds of others by figuring out what you allow into your brain and then applying that immediately to what you do so it's not just in The Ether all the time what are you listening to but right before you go take an action if you're going to go into the gym you know usually maybe you're taking some sort of pre-workout right and then when you're in the gym you're putting in some hardcore rap or whatever you listen to when you work out you buff dudes and then when you're done with the gym you might go SAA or whatever but the influence that you have right prior if you have a giant dut or steak immediately prior and you listen to Lana Del re is going to be a different experience than if you do the former why would we think it would be any different with any other aspect of our life and so I have now applied that pretty aggressively to the very few things that I know Drive most of My Success which is before I'm writing before I'm investing before I'm hiring who can I steal from to get some of their intelligent oh it's like an intellectual aphrodesiac yeah exactly yeah I think that's right I still like spirina for the soul better but I thought that was good too keep that keep that rolling yeah I um the content thing the priming yourself who do you want to be around I love you know I know that he's like an unspeakable guy because you promoted the [ __ ] lockdowns or whatever when I Ry holiday and I kind of get this it's much more pedestrian Pace yeah to kind of what's going on and I imagine as every man does that I'm in the Roman Empire uh I imagine that I'm walking through you know the Roman Forum or the sto poay below the uh pathon in Athens and you just get this much slower sort of pace of life and Pace I'm sure if I looked at my HRV and my resting heart rate it would come down you know I'm just thinking about ideas and I'm it's couched in this much slower slower sort of existence and um I really really enjoy that and you know if I was to then go in and try and have a a difficult conversation I think I'd feel more resilient if the alternative is watching a whatever podcast like we kicked these only fans thoughts out like can you believe what Candice Owens said to this like such and such a person it's like well guess like what dreams I'm having tonight like I want dreams here's a good metric uh me and George Mac have been talking about the difference between hidden and observable metrics and we're trying to come up with some of the greatest hidden metrics that tell you whether your life is going well or not one of his that was pretty contrarian was the number of hours per year that you spend in a hammock is like a really [ __ ] great hidden metric of how well your life's going that like if you spend a good few hours in a hammock per year it's like it's probably pretty good I would say the number of hours that you have having dreams about the Roman Empire would probably be a a strong uh a strong but yeah um hidden and observable metrics [ __ ] obsessed with this idea at the moment I like it well we even on our fridge Chris and I have my Chris is my husband not you Chris other Chris and um he one of his favorite quotes is from Marcus aelius that is the something along the lines of um throughout your day assume that the people that you meet will be miserable Wicked uh selfish Etc and do right anyway something that and I always chuckle with it because you know my husband is so he's a very int dude and he has incredibly high expectations former military Navy SEAL um and expects humans to be honorable and to do the right thing and to be thoughtful and uh turns out most humans are not like that and so I bought it for him as a reminder coming back into the civilian world that unfortunately this Warrior culture that he has been in is not normalized and thus if you can start your day every day with really low expectations it turns out that often the days surprise you and so that has been helpful for us too ideas strongly stated and loosely held having a strong opinion is the mark of intellect but having the ability to change it is the mark of true intelligence only politicians hold one stance forever for fear of flip-flopping we Mortals do better to constantly experiment yeah I um I've recently spent some time with Vivic ramaswami uh the presidential candidate um and also spent a lot of time with uh other political candidates who are high up named or won't name and um and what I've been impressed by with uh let's say two of the candidates on one on each side of the aisle has been that they played in the realm of business where numbers mattered and outcomes were obvious and so you either win or lose in business there is a scorecard every single day and every single year and you only stay in business if you continue to win in the scorecard and um and what I like about vivi's perspective I don't agree with him on everything but he has changed his mind on many things and what sort of business leader or human would you be if you couldn't change your mind once you had increased inputs that would be absolutely wild you find out X and you say nope already made up my mind on this and yet that is what we expect of our politicians often and our leaders like well this guy changed his mind think [ __ ] god thank God there is a human out here who continues to think not just in sound bites but in full Nuance so I've got this idea about the unreliable Ally and basically somebody who's a mono thinker that uh is sticks rigorously to the party line that's ideologically pure they are very predictable for the future which means that they make a really great Ally because you know that no matter how much new information comes to them they're not changing their mind y so yeah I I can totally see why that would be uh a good signal that you want in a friend but a totally terrible one that you want in a political Ally right because you don't know what if the what if things change a lot over the next couple years and they switch parties oh my God you know yeah I think you're right yeah we we kind of talk about um choosing sides I do think it's really important to have humans who will choose difficult sides but not have strong opinions once they learn new information and so my husband and I always talk about the fact that um you can really I think what you what people want but they don't know how to look for it is most humans what you want is somebody who will stand by you even when the mob won't when things are irrational somebody will stand by you because they know who you are as a human being that is what we want in our lovers that is what we want in our friends and in our colleagues and instead of looking for somebody who has overtime taken courageous stances you look for somebody who has continued to follow set Norms in order to put them in a box and I think that's the mismatch If instead we looked for people who no they took a really difficult stance on this even though that was detrimental actually to their wellbeing I would rather side with that person then well this person has done the party line continuously and so I could assume the outcome here two really good models for this when was the last time in fact more when was the last time that you heard this person change their mind like can you recall when they said I was wrong about X and especially if they they're front and center about it secondly how often did there opinions surprise you right I think about so many of the creators online that are big and I know tell me something's going to happen Russell Bran's being accused with a a me too thing there you go I know every single person in this lineup's opinion right I can predict it with 100% accuracy interesting the most as far as I can tell good faith genuinely intellectually virtuous people are the ones who every so often are going to do something you go really you think that WR I don't agree or that might be wrong or whatever say what you want about Sam Harris I know he's like the least cool guy on the internet at the moment and everyone wants to keep dunking on him despite the fact he's not on Twitter he continually Trends on Twitter um but I have good faith that he believes what he says that counts for a lot but the problem is unreliable really unreliable Ally right third thing final thing is how many different problems does this person explain with the same solution so if all of the issues of the world if all of the problems are because of climate change or all of the problems are because of racism or all of the problems are because of capitalism like oh your demand for answers outstrips your supply and because you only have this much worldview and perspective you just retrofit the one answer you have to all of the problems that are in front of you yeah one of the things that I found most interesting is when we're analyzing companies the best companies and their Founders they do this one thing they say here's the action I want to take and here's our company I'd love you to poke holes in it and tell me the things you think I'm missing and they are actively looking for disagreement because they don't want to be right they want to win and most people who want to win all we care about is we want to information gather we want to always be connecting dots and we can only connect dots if we see more of them and so the winners are usually the ones that will ask you tell me what I'm doing wrong tell me what I'm missing here I think this but I I am open to persuasion one way or the other and it was funny because we actually did a a little mini podcast the other day and I was so irritated because I had this person on because they had an incredible tweet that I was like oo spiky point of view I want to talk about that then they came on and they just soft softened it and they waffled it and they didn't at all stick by what they had said and and I I was I was poking I'm like did you change your mind on this like do you think something differently and they're like no what I meant to say was like no what you meant to say is that you got kind of called out for this and your strengths and beliefs were overcome by other people's opinions and likes and those type of people once that happens to me once with somebody I realize hey those can be an acquaintance but they'll never be in the Inner Circle I had an interesting lesson that I learned which relates to something that you had here the the gift of descent sick aants yes men will kill you faster than descent surround yourself with unruly individuals who make you stand your ground or berate you for not that's exactly the same as what you were just talking about yeah we um you know one of our job one of my favorite job descriptions of all time is the uh Shackleford job description which is um Shackleford went to the went to Antarctica right and wrote this little tiny job description that now has been used all over the Internet about you know High likely Hood to die looking for adventurous Souls um you know who who want the ability to fail greatly basically and one of the things I talk about with our team and the people that we hire continuously is you want to look for the people who get off on the heart like you want to look for the people who when there is a potential to fail and when something is difficult is when they get interested and if it's not that interesting they're probably not going to to participate and those F humans are relatively rare because in today world we want to succeed so badly uh and it seems like we have repercussions that if we do fail there's something wrong with us and yet most of the most successful people I know have just failed prolifically continuously and yet iterated and learned on it um and so you know on our team one of the other things that that we do and you know Tanner's here so he could tell you if I'm lying or not but uh like I find that if you are a manager of humans if you are a leader of humans and your humans don't disagree with you often then you probably are not a leader of humans you're a director you're somebody who they work for because they have to but you haven't actually inspired somebody enough to tell you their true thoughts one way or the other and that's usually what kills companies faster than anything is a series of Yes Men surrounding somebody who should have been told no the problem as well is if you don't have people who will tell you what reality is showing you your own obfuscation and biases and blindness will never get corrected and presuming that you start to continue to make progress over time the impact of your decisions continues to get bigger and bigger and bigger yeah and that means that at the time when your impact and the magnitude of what you choose to do is at its greatest your ability to see what reality's feedback to you is is at its lowest and you've had this Emperor has like Emperor's New Clothes [ __ ] scenario right yeah for God knows how long and it means that you you're completely out of touch yeah it's true well I even joke with my husband that uh you you should tell me when I look fat please do because I don't want to hear that from somebody else first of all second of all it's not healthy for me to be that way so in fact I would want nothing more than the humans that are closest to me to tell me the hard thing first before I go out and people tell me I have no clothes or I look awful in this and where is it okay in society where we say oh it's just a little white lie yeah they didn't look great but I lied to them why would you want to be lied to by somebody that you know loves you you you certainly won't get lied to by people who don't and so let's front you know let's front run the pain so that we could have some short-term pain maybe even in private instead of of suffering over the long term um well actually we were talking about our mutual friend horos before and I'm a I'm like many people a super people pleaser like actually I'm really bad at my core which is probably why we're semi- good at media we can have empathy and understanding which leads to uh Association and um and so I'm really bad at that which means that sometimes I'm too agreeable and later I'll be like ah I didn't agree with that why did I why did I say that thing and why did I say yes to this when I shouldn't have been saying yes to this and so you know he jokingly has become my captain no and I'll just say I don't feel like saying no to this I'm going to screenshot to you anytime I don't and you just tell me no because I already know I should say no and then I'm going to start screenshotting you when I actually do and so we trade back and forth knows because the more successful you get the more questions and requests you're going to have and you don't learn to say no you won't be successful there's like a kind of cringey V video of Elon musk's first wife uh did you see that where she she basically says it's just cringey in that in how it's displayed but the message is incredible and the message she basically says is I had a very successful husband I watched him for a long period of time the number one reason he was the most successful is he had an amazing amount of requests paced upon him and he learned to say no better faster and more frequently than anybody else and I was like if Elon Musk says no a lot that probably means there's something good happening there how have you overcome your felt sense to want to be a people pleaser um practice practice saying no as often as possible uh with kindness every single time and brevity every single time so somebody asked me the other day um they wanted to to to style me or something can I you know pick out your clothes and uh and normally I would say oh you know I'm okay right now but thank you so much you know I'm I actually don't need that or I just bought new clothes or I'd have some excuse and now it is no thank you I hope you're well no period end of story the second that you allow one other sentence behind the word you have allowed an optin so if instead I say no I don't really need it right now what's the optin well what about later you know if I say no I'm I already bought some clothes it's like well what about uh I give you some clothes and so what I found is we allow our concern for hurting other people's feelings to open a door that just means we sound like more of a dick later because oh yeah we could have said no fast up front but we should have said it later yeah then the other truth is you will people will be pissed at you about this people will be upset I'm sure it happens to you all the time I'm almost thankful I don't have a podcast because I could only imagine the amount of times interesting people that you really like ask to be on this podcast C and you have to say no thank you and no matter how you do it and no matter how you phrase it that is always going to feel a certain way to a person one of the problems that you encounter if you don't end up learning to be able to say no fully is that you have a kind of like a wave swell underneath the surface of these first you kick a can down the road and then you kick a couple more cans down the road and then before you know it you have this overlapping number of cans that turned into a [ __ ] tornado and you're all you spend your time doing is kicking cans uh and that is born out of a fear of disappointing people uh I sat next to a mutual friend of ours uh and he referred me to a therapist that worked with him and I was like I've tried therapy before a couple of times and like mixed mixed uh results out the other side of it but if she can deal with this guy's [ __ ] she can definitely deal with mine cuz he's a [ __ ] so I uh I've I've started I've started um going back into therapy and and spending some time with her which is really really fascinating to be on the receiving end of questions for once to supposed to be the person giving them and uh the people pleasing thing is just such a a huge huge block for me it's such a difficult thing for me to get past and I was starting to see it in a lot of other people because a lot of the time you see people's uh politeness or the way that they move through the world as an accurate portrayal of their valtion or their intention it's what they actually meant to do and you go no it's not think about all of the things all of the ways that their desire has been perturbed right I thought this was what you actually meant to do but what you meant to do was the opposite but you were so shy or tired or nervous or hung over or you didn't want to upset this person or you'd had an argument with your boyfriend that or whatever it was so the other thing happened from the outside what you see is oh that's what they meant to happen from the side it's this you know game of tennis and pingpong between two choices 10,000 times in a minute and then they go oh yeah we'll do that thing you go wow so yeah that's kind of opened my eyes to the world of people I I was like a secret member of the people pleaser club and I never knew well I bet people on the internet would be surprised that you would say you were a people pleaser and that I would say I was a people pleaser because we have some rough edges on the internet we'll take some difficult stances but I've almost found that people who take difficult stances have learned to do it because we too often didn't in spite yeah and so it's you're scared and you don't want to take the difficult stance but you do it anyway I think there's very few humans you know maybe Donald Trump has learned to like you know the pain of to be the heel right but I actually I've never met a person even who was quite abrasive who said that they didn't have some discomfort with controversy pushing back have you ever met one Michael mes okay I don't know who that is uh he is a cultural commentator professional troll on the internet he's like the lowkey of politics and he likes it oh he [ __ ] lives for it yeah he absolutely lives for it another interesting one Warren Buffett doesn't optimize wake up at 5:00 a.m. meditate work out drink 72 ounces of chloride water and stand upside down okay or do none of those things and instead focus on thinking clearly intently and strategically before you pull any triggers this relates to an absolute monster from Alex which was uh your fears about perfection will kill you more quickly than your imperfections yeah yeah this was an OG one of mine often I think if you want success you should look at those who have had the thing that you already want and so I was getting caught up in this series of noise surrounding all the shs that are in my life that are actually not needs and um and so I went to one of the people that I admire the most which is at least from a business perspective Warren Buffett and I looked at what his day was and you know the [ __ ] drinks Coke every day uh you know he's eating McDonald's uh cheeseburgers he's uh not working out and hasn't for a while and he largely sits and thinks and reads a newspaper every single day and when I looked at that I thought well he has basically realized that there's a 10 to 20% that drives the 80% and so now I'm in a thing right now where I'm trying to be healthier and work out more and try to get a sixpack and whatever the cool kids do and uh and I have this trainer right now that I really like but he has me you know tracking my steps every day tracking my macros uh inputting a workout where like check the box and how much am I lifting and what I finally said to him is what are the two things we could do where if we did those two things everything else gets easier and my team gets tired of hearing me say this but I'm like you have a list 400 lines long of to-do list items just like everybody else does and yet you spend your time ticking them off as opposed to thinking is there one snowball in which if I pushed it everything else became easy and you know for for working out for instance there's one snowball which is if I just pre-order a set number of meals each week from the same provider I don't have to track my macros because I've had the guy track it already and I know what it is and you could do that even if you just ordered Chipotle every single day and so there's no monetary reason why you wouldn't have to do it and uh this tracking in the app every single day ridiculously doesn't have to happen and it's the same thing for a workout well what if I just do the same workout every single day uh or three rotations of it for one month and then I rotate again for you know uh to have diversity in my training and instead of that we layer all this complexity which makes absolutely no sense to me and so um I like cold plunging I like you know some lemon in my water but I think we'll be fine if we skip it every now and then yeah and the concern about the over optimization often gets in the way so much and makes you fret I'm worried what if I what if I don't show up sufficiently effectively I had uh ran Doris on the show do you know him from flow research Collective neuroscientist researcher in flow and um he's brilliant he taught me that if you're bothered about flow the best thing that you can do as a morning routine is work within 90 seconds of waking oh that makes me feel better about what I actually do yeah yeah it depends I I don't think that what he meant by work was frantically answer emails with lots of capital letters um but I don't actually do my own email so i' better that that's good um but my point being his thing is get up with within 90 seconds of waking right not of getting out of bed of waking be at your desk interesting working especially if you need to do deep work writing creative stuff uh and I've done this on weekends um with my newsletter which I do on a Monday I release on a Monday so I'll be writing away and it seems to work pretty quickly the reason the argument is that uh Delta and Theta uh sleep and uh flow brain wave states are right next to each other so it's actually easier to slip from sleep into flow than it is typically from daily I've just walked the dog and got caught in traffic into flow even though you might think God I'm I'm only just awake this is stupid it seems to be the case at least the Neuroscience backs it up yeah I mean there's a great book that I can't remember the name that talks about um all the varied habits of the greats and their morning and evening routines 5:00 a.m. Club Robin sha right and then there was a a New York um author as well that tried all of them and then also did a YouTube series series on them which was hysterical you know because it was like some of the great writers you know basically like got up at 3:00 a.m. snorted a light of cocaine started writing until they got so hungry they needed a drink and then they kept writing I mean ridiculous right um but what I've realized is um you know I think the Muse loves habits whatever those habits are for you the Muse really likes when you continue to show up in the same way day after day and whatever that way is you can decide by and large but the Common Thread I've seen for Successful People is they have a process they have a flow and to try to project that on another person is like to try to say that you should eat this when I know nothing about your genome and how you work and so for me I get up early I do a cold plunge because I like I'm groggy in the morning I do it for like way less than I probably should or any scientific benefit I grab a coffee and I get to work and that works for me right now but see in a year the only thing that I know will be consistently true is I will have a process I follow every single morning because I do not believe that you wait for for the Muse for whatever you do I think you go and you grab it and you tell them to show up at 8: a.m. just like you will very Steven press Fieldy boredom as a superpower the best ideas need Breathing Room they're a flower stretching for the sun clutter them with meetings and watch them die instead he clears his schedule every morning with no calls prior to 10:00 a.m. I do the same paired with two no call days a week yeah I'm pretty religious about this um my team knows that I only take calls or meetings on Monday Wednesday Friday I will substitute something like a podcast for a Tuesday Thursday or a speech but nothing continuous um because what I've realized is you know as you get more successful you really have one job and that is to find that 10 to 20% that drives the 80% and it takes digging it's needle in the Hast stack work it's not stacking up Hast stacks and what most people do all day is they stack Hast Stacks they do the same thing continuously every single day but what do we know about normal normal equals results we don't actually want and so um I find that if I do not allow my ideas room to breathe I'm anxious frustrated kind of uncreative and probably come up with more problems and solutions hidden metric how many hours per year are you spending being bored I bet that that would be correlated with the quality of your life and you're flourishing as well more time being bored would be good I think they say that there that is true I wonder though it depends what type of bordedom of course by by the definition of what we're talking Club yeah yeah not bored with someone giving you a rubbish speech a presentation at work but like walking through nature allowing your mind to flow as it wishes right pretty good hidden metric very much so and so what would we call that instead it it's it's not really boredom it's like it's not quite rumination I guess imagination time yeah it's it's basically when are you when are you in a non action taking State how often can you be in something where you're not entertaining and you're not taking action I had this conversation with with John LEL from the warrior Poet Society okay big uh like military guy Pro Patriot guy uh also big Christian guy and he was episode 666 and I got a [ __ ] ton of uh Kickback in the comments because people like I can't believe that you put like John on episode 66 we needed a man like John to battle the devil's number and I was like I did I it was just a Saturday right to me it was just a Saturday I didn't think but anyway cool um and he taught me this term which I [ __ ] love I think he'll enjoy as it's called the tyranny of the Urgent oh yes oh so good the tyranny of the Urgent and there's this like a quote or something that either he has or somebody else has about that oh okay it's not his I didn't know he well I'll have to find it you are the you have the memory for quotes but something to the degree of um if you let the tyranny of the Urgent overwhelm the important uh you'll never achieve something like that we can have the internet tell me I'm wrong and say the right words um but I think that's that's very very true I also find the most like if you're particularly frazzled it's probably because you are focused on urgent and not important and those who focus on important not urgent kind of Coast their way through life I mean to go back to Bill Perkins because I adore the guy I remember when I showed up at his house the first time I was late so I was frazzled I'm Latina I'm basically always late and I'm an over Schuler so I was doing way too many things and as I got there he was he was so calm while making more money than I do and having more businesses than I do and I was you know I was kind of like Bill what do you got going on today he's like this is the day I'm like what's what's this he's like you this conversation with you is the day it's the most important thing that I have to do today and I just thought that's fascinating and even when I talk to his wife she's like yes he's quite he will move very quickly between activities he'll get out of bed he will immediately get on a phone call but the things that are important he will allow a ton of space on either side yeah he's not swamped by the Urgent yeah he seems to have a lot of uh an awful lot of time here's another hidden metric I'm just throwing this out out at you uh the average speed that you walk at I bet that if it's bet if it's reduced down the average speed you walk at per year is like a really lovely metric of I'm just [ __ ] I got time man except if you're at the airport can we have you know if you're at the airport because you should always spend as little time as possible at the airport yeah and you should just get out of people's way it's like number actually you know what there's two things I think I agree with you on when necessary walking with conviction but uh not franticness is an interesting one I think the counter opposite is show me how long it takes you to order at a counter and I will show you your bank account I think the longer people take in I this had me happened to me the other day and I about lost my mind but I was at a counter like one does a coffee shop or something and there was a there's always a lady in front of you right and the lady in front of you takes four centuries to order order a coffee and a muffin and what I realize very quickly is you know if you want to get something done you give it to a busy person is the saying and I think often that's why they say you should take somebody to dinner before you hire them or take them out to lunch see how they treat the staff but I also think see how quickly they make decisions because people who take forever to order when they stand in line one are really comfortable inconvenience in somebody else around them which means they have limited self-awareness maybe borderline narcissism and then simultaneously they're not very efficient at the things that don't really matter that coffee order does not really matter and so if we know we are here for fin out amount of time why spend so much time on that as opposed to a walk a sunset Etc low tolerance for uncertainty as well oh yes you really didn't like this lady did you uh speaking of that the Toleration challenge what if your intellect is measured by how much truth you can tolerate can you be told you're wrong and that dress makes you look fat and you're getting older and he's smarter than you and take them all in stride yeah um my husband and I basically have a thing where something annoyed me yesterday actually and instead of typically what do we want from our partners when something annoys us we typically want the other person to just go yeah [ __ ] that guy yep agree you were right he was wrong and instead we make it sort of a purpose of saying all right what are we going to learn from this um and so he gave me some feedback that I didn't really like I was like who's whose side are you on and yet that practice helps us us because if we don't associate with you know to get woo woo because we're located here in Austin we know that you know we're not our body because we can have thoughts that change as our body changes you know we know we're not our job because our jobs can change we know we're not the way that we look because if something terrible happens to us we're still there so if we know we're not all of these things why would you let it control so much of your brain for you to be seen one way or the other about them and it's something I think about a lot because we're on the the internet which means our reflection is thrown in our face constantly and often other people's reflection of themselves is thrown in our face constantly and because of that I don't think you can have thin skin and be on the internet that's actually kind of a beautiful thing because you learn none of it really matters we will all die eventually and every one of us will be forgotten and there's such Liberty there the way that that gets uh perverted is people go from it doesn't matter I can have unbounded dreams to it doesn't matter nothing that I do makes any difference right it's the uh nihilism or cynicism versus optimism helicopter thinking seesaw and it seems to be bit of a knife edge between the two um but I also agree that if you have a if you have a partner or a friend or somebody who regularly will compromise what's true in order to tell you what's convenient or comfortable that are actually like really rubbish should why bother asking them anything because every single question that they hear is not what is the truth about this thing it's what do you think I want to hear from you that's every single question is is the same question what do you think that I want to hear from you and then that you say that and again that's the the people pleaser thing what else have you learned from Bill Perkins he was instrumental in bringing you down to earth in a pretty big way I think yeah well he was funny um I think our first interaction uh I consider myself relatively successful and uh and so when I went to meet with him and I told him about some of the things we were working on he had this line that stuck with me that I wish I could just like put on a bumper sticker somewhere um which was I was explaining all these things we're working on we're buying these companies here and here we're growing and he kind of looked at me and paused like he does and he's like uh Cody do you think that you have been investing in small businesses for so long small has it infected your thinking I was like and an immediate reaction could have been like who are you [ __ ] you I don't know uh and instead I took a pause and I was like God there's so much freedom in that line what if I am thinking too small and somebody else who has had a past history of positive performance says that then what might might I be capable of and so I almost wish all of us a friend that pushes us harder as opposed to is the shoulder to cry on and says like you know what I'd like you to do next time is something else in fact we have another mutual friend that I was talking to that did something really big and really successful and uh and they came to me because they're a high performer and they were like what what should I have done different what should we have done different and I was like I think one and I want you to hear this everything you did was incredible I'm so impressed by you and and I think you should keep going and then I said secondly there's this one thing that you did that was a mimic of somebody else and what if that would have been been a totally Unique Style to you and that's what I want to see from you next time I think you are capable of coming up with your own style that is totally copiable and she was like God thanks because what everybody else said was positives positives positives and very few people will tell you yeah but what if you could do this one thing not that you're shitty but like what if you could do this one thing better wouldn't that be cool two stories that come to mind first one Lex fredman uh was at some party neurod Divergent degenerates at Michael malice's house and and I was talking to him about I think he was I think he was saying that he had a lot of work on at the moment and he was doing his robotic stuff and he's doing the podcast and maybe the Ukraine conflict was was going on too and he was just feeling it feel all of this stuff's going on blah blah blah I was like oh interesting and then he like took a pause and he said I wish that my friends would stop comforting me when I say that I work hard yeah because some of his friends say you already work so hard Lex you know you should go easier on yourself like this is you're doing a lot as it is he said that he really really values the friends that say yeah this is tough but you're tougher 100% you know even my mother she had an incredible line to me she basically said and it's so simple but we don't hear it enough you just continue every single day to do the best that you can and only you know what the word best is defined as and most people put some subjective best hard good bad on you as opposed to saying I believe in you so much that you know what you are capable of and only you can answer if you are actually living up to that on a daily basis and I love that because I actually think most humans are very capable should they apply themselves continuously and work past a point that is comfortable or even rational and if you can do that you can achieve very many things pending you don't want to be a basketball player and you're you know 5-1 like pending those things you can achieve much and that's part of the reason I'm so prevalent on the internet now is you know I made a lot of my money already in in finance and doing the things that I did previously and then I realized ah I want to make more money because it's fun I really like every dollar I make but I think it's more interesting if I could figure out could I help other people actually achieve the same thing and not because I'm nice I'm really not that nice but just to see like is that Poss because that seems like a more interesting and bigger Legacy actually than just can I apply this one thing continuously and so um lots of people who are on the internet I think people say one thing or the other about humans like us that talk about things publicly and yet thank God that there are humans like you who talk about things like neurod Divergent being normal because I thought that just used to mean well you know I have a little bit of ADHD which means I'm defunct in some way um and so yeah I think most humans can work harder and they just don't want to hear that you're getting perilously close to chat's man in the arena tweet which is going to get you destroyed on I actually have actually used that before I do think you know what [ __ ] that I think if you own a small business and you are a business owner now maybe not chamath in the sweaters and jets at this point maybe you have a lot of buffer there but I actually don't know his life so I don't know um but I think if you are a small business owner and you are working really hard out there you're in the arena yeah and and I think my husband who went to war multiple times would say the same thing counts as it definitely counts as an arena yeah some sort of difficult and we should we should actually praise people for that a little bit more you remember when Elon took over Twitter and um he said he gets rid of 95% of the coding team wild Dev team whatever and I think he puts out a job application web page and says something like if you want to work harder than you've ever worked in your entire life come to Twitter and people criticized him on the internet and said this is a return to you know early 1900 sweat shop labor what is this are we going to be going down chimney sweeping and I understand that in a world where we can have much more luxurious uh working conditions and everybody can have their mindful Mondays and they can have their latte Wednesdays stuff like that and that's not just to mock it like I do think it's a in some regards a much more balanced holistic culture but what it fails to understand is that there is a cohort of people out there who just want to put their nose on the grindstone and see how fast they can make it spin like all they want to do is work they love and are fired up and take so much more pleasure from the idea of achieving something completely unreal with their time and it is a failure of theory of mind for you person on the internet to look at that job post from Elon maybe it is exploitative maybe it's uh fortunately um like a coincidence that he can both use the people's drive to be able to achieve whatever they want and also like get them basically a cut down price to work 24 hours a day perhaps but it is a failure of theory of mind to understand that there are people out there who just want to do that and it would f him up way more to be told here's an obscenely unrealistic goal in a ridiculously short time span and I want you to do it here's as much Aderall as you need and a comfortable standing desk let's see what you can manifest yeah yeah I mean I was uh so my husband was a a Navy SEAL and I was at the it's like the 40th uh year anniversary of his team Seal Team 3 and uh I thought it was fascinating on a couple different fronts one you looked around the group of 600 people uh all gathered and you could immediately pick out uh all of the seals right out out of uniform because it's become so rare to be fit and healthy and have you know 200 people who are like that all in one space 200 Warriors was really rare thought that was interesting what I also thought was interesting is I spoke to them about it and I spoke to those who had come out and those who are still in is those who had come out had said do you know what we miss more than anything and I'm like the adrenaline you know the operations kicking down it was doing extremely difficult things with other people who want to do extremely difficult things well and that level of of human who wants to excel is just rare and so when you're around them you feel it you know you feel a difference between you have an energy that is positively accelerated when you're around another doer they just they don't drain from meal because they're too busy doing and pushing out and with with the SEAL Teams I was never in them I can't speak to any of it myself but what I've seen is that these guys miss that more than anything else when they get out it's not just like camaraderie it's we were excellent at what we did and we held each other to an incredibly high standard and we had a joint purpose and I mean there was a study done during the blitz right during during the World War that everybody talks about with humans were conceivably happier as defined by uh lower suicide rates during the blitz than uh afterwards because there was the shared purpose and meaning and so I think if you compare your shared purpose and meaning with a group of excellent humans let go of all of those uh who do not want to be excellent because cancer spreads then you can create somewhere where people want to spend 24 hours working because Society at large looks nothing like that and you can feel the difference once did you learn looking around a room of 200 seals 300 seals what did you learn from looking at their spouses well that's interesting um well the spouses probably fit in a lot of ways two categories uh one category would be more traditionall looking sundresses you know cute kids running around happy looking American family and the other were just as jacked as they you know just as as as like uh strong and tat uh as their men and so um I actually thought that was an interesting dichotomy and you see that like Gabrielle Lion's a friend of mine and she's a badass doctor and also just like one of the strongest fittest women I've ever met in my life is her husband a seal her husband's a seal right and a surgeon and uh and then uh Emily forcella Andy Fella's wife also just jacked in great shape um her husband isn't a seal but like I do think that it seems like really strong driven men that our team guys either want sort of the traditional spouse um you know sundress Etc or like a very strong similar person to them and when I've gotten to know a lot of these guys and I have a lot of respect for them and their spouses there's two types of strengths there I mean the the physically strong thing is really important but you will not last I mean the divorce rate among Team guys and special operators in general is incredibly high is it really oh yeah it's the highest of any military um one because they're gone all the time both training and deployment um and two because I've been you know through a deployment with my husband and it's emotionally taxing in a way that we are not habitualized too and so um you have to be strong enough to do that I I think I would have struggled to do it with kids like I have nothing but respect for the women who have kids with men who go into line of duty every day where they could potentially die that's incredibly difficult to live through what's the reality of being married as a power couple h um you know what's so funny is everybody says it's really hard and Chris and I kind of look at each other every day and we're like best part of my day right now like we wake up in the morning you know what I actually do in the morning I don't get in the cold plunge first Chris and I snuggle like little nerds for like five or 20 minutes we're just like snuggling talking to each other the dog gets into the bed the dog's a little tiny thing not even a cool looking team Guy dog and uh and he's you know my person who's somebody that I can just trust and rely on and I think I'm that for him too we loved the quote I remember in the beginning when we were first dating didn't age well because I think it was Jeff Bezos who said uh I married my wife because I wanted somebody who could get me out of a third world prison at any point uh but uh we always kind of associated with that you know our thing is it's us against the world and so um I think that's the one truth of being a power couple I I don't know any different because I've always worked so I've never been and my my you know husband he's always worked and most of my significant others were powerful and successful in a traditional sense um but one of the most incredible things I think when you find another human who is striving for something is you really can track on what's going on in your lives and there's a lot you can share whereas at least from my perspective if I was with a man who wasn't working very hard uh in a job in some way shape or form it's harder for for us to be on the same page and I end up having to talk with a lot of other people about the thing I'm obsessing on all day long and I never really understood how people could be with like the trophy wife thing never really made sense to me a trophy girlfriend makes a lot of sense trophy boyfriend makes a lot of sense a wife or husband doesn't to me because what would you talk about do you guys just look at each other all day like what's happening there and so I actually think that's really shallow and we should all strive to be the best versions of ourselves not to mention do you remember that um there was a blog post a million years ago where the guy was like really brutally said why would I ever have a trophy wife or a trophy husband he was talking about a trophy wife um and he's like and and marry that person for just their looks when your looks are definitely going to depreciate over time and my assets will appreciate over time and at the time I remember being like yeah [ __ ] that guy and then I was like well also kind of true makes a lot of sense if all we're talking about is the way you look that's pretty shallow and so I don't have a lot of complaints and I think I wouldn't last very long with somebody who wasn't striving right alongside me what there's a lot of talk and narrative on the internet about the sort of alpha polarity the you know super masculine guy with the very feminine woman there must be a leader there must be a follower what is the dynamic like given that you are two leaders yeah uh I sort of have this Theory we'll see if it plays out you had the girl boss me too movement right women power [ __ ] guys we don't need you then you had the Alpha Man movement you know get behind me I'm the protector I'm in charge you know women stay home in your Gardens and I think in the future what we're going to come back to which is what we do every time we have massive pendulum pendulum swings is like uh yeah why don't we both kind of chill out in the middle like that seems like typically where we go and I think there will be not an alpha power couple but what if we both just realized that we're nuanced humans and we look for somebody who could actually support us continuously a bunch of the guys that had that Alpha woman movement saying got divorced like one of the main guys who was like you must protect your family you know do whatever and had a a woman that was sort of this other thing gets a divorce the other guy who's a big proponent of it like Andrew Tate not [ __ ] married so like the people who are talking about this Alpha Man movement let's scoreboard it let's see over time does this this work out for you and I'm a big proponent of you should do whatever you want but I think I'm good friends with the hosis because I watch them have each other's back through time and that seems to me more sustainable than the other way around what do you think uh so I think that there is a significant cohort of women who are like you attracted to guys who have Excellence but don't have that same drive themselves don't think that the reverse is quite as true for men I don't think you're going to find a normal dude who chugs away at a perfectly acceptable job but it's like you know I really get turned on by like Boss [ __ ] women that are like you know like high powerered lawyers and stuff because the socioeconomic status of a woman doesn't matter as much to a man on average as it does in Reverse so I think that ultimately being competent as a man and this is is you to cut through three and a half years of learning evolutionary psychology whether it be status whether it be resources whether it be looks whether it be height whether it be being funny whether it be being Charming or whatever like just portraying competence right but competence comes on both sides of the equation and the polarity can be changed with quite nicely because you know if you see as a husband if you see your wife just like a [ __ ] wizard with the kids you know and the the all three of them are ready for school five minutes early and the breakfast's done and there's a kiss on the cheek and she's out the door you're like yeah you're a [ __ ] boss like sure you're not going off to the the office or whatever but you've got this [ __ ] unlocked that's attractive a grade players look for aade players right regardless of sector correct regardless of what the subgenre of game is that they're playing yeah right that's right and this is why you know very rarely do you see in I've been watching that uh quarterback on Netflix it's about three different NFL quarterbacks and Patrick Mahomes is one of them and you look at all three of the wives of these guys all three of them pretty well spoken they're not you know super PR like uh I think at least maybe two of them have been together since before they were even in college right so it's not like they've picked up some like hot totty girl and like moved her into the house or whatever um long-standing relationships but they all all of the girls are like competent with what they do like they they're able to talk and they're able to explain and they have insight about themselves and they have insight about their partner you're like H yeah that's like that's hot that's cool right like it's attractive competence is attractive and incompetence is almost always going to be unattractive that's absolutely true yeah I mean I do think one one thing I've found for women that I think women really need to watch out for and I've noticed this just among my friends cuz I'm I'm a little bit older now and so I have a lot of my friends who have had kids and been married for a period of time and a lot of them are highly competent like you said we're incredible mothers are incredible mothers have gone through child birth multiple times which still intimidates me and I find incredibly impressive um and then I found there's this there's this lull period after your kids don't need you as much anymore and you know your husband has continued to progress in this linear career progression and you poured yourself with competence into your your your kids and I think we will see in the future a rising usage of uh prescription pills sleeping aids Aderall um to this subset of women because they start to realize ah where do I go now and Society doesn't really have this fit for me any longer well what that typically or traditionally would have been if we roll back over 200 years we would have been in pan generational houses right so it would have been been assisting with my sister's daughters or assisting with my daughter's daughters assisting with my niece assisting with my whatever right you know there would be so much to do it's called aloe parenting not many animals do it but humans do where multiple related and unrelated women share the child rearing burden together right because rearing a human child is an effortful much better effortful task so you share it between your friends and your family and there's an idea do you know why the evolutionary psychology explanation for why menopause exists no this is cool so it's called the grandmother hypothesis grandmother hypothesis says that why would you have an animal female animal that exists beyond their reproductive window right if our goal is to survive and reproduce as soon as you stop reproducing surely kicking the bucket makes a t of sense because get out of the way let the calories go to the ones that are going to be able to survive if you can no longer make kids but that doesn't account for the fact that the very effortful rearing that's required for human children so if you imagine that you have a particular fertility window after that point you as grandmother can no longer produce children that sap calories but can contribute to the rearing of children not only yours but your daughters and your sisters and so on and so forth so this is the grandmother hypothesis you uh age out of your reproductive role and move into a new kind of role so you are still a net positive from a caloric perspective to the whole tribe I thought that was really interesting that's fascinating it actually makes a lot of sense um but I don't know what the solution is for the modern day modern day woman rough you know you've got Adam Lan Smith tweeted this thing where he said uh don't forget that moving out of home at 18 is a scop by the real estate industry uh like and in some regards it's true right we would have always lived in big pan generational houses Farms commun type things um I I think that you're right I think that as Financial Independence becomes more available to women its lack will be more tightly felt right if you have sacrificed a career that you already on or never got into a career uh to be able to raise the kids because you wanted to be the greatest mother that you could when that role is now gone it's like being an NBA star you're 37 years old right Jonathan come in sit down there's your retirement check you've done really great okay all I've known my entire life or all that I can remember that I've known for the last 15 years has been ball or children yeah what where do you take your sense of meaning from uh and you know you see this I think uh uh the Peterson talks about the greatest sacrifice that a mother can make is to allow their child to go out into the world knowing that they're fragile and he says uh if you go out there you might lose yourself but if you stay with me you'll lose your soul and it's this Michelangelo's P this uh beautiful um marble sculpture that's in the Vatican uh it's the mother with Christ sort of draped across her arms like this and he says that you know this it's the Fe crucifixion it's not about you it's about your child and uh it's rough I I think that you're right I think that we will see some some challenges there uh that being said women have got really really great performance in the workplace at the moment and I don't think that a 52-year-old uh mother of two who is still conscientious as hell and and super competent is going to struggle to reintegrate back into a an office working environment especially if you've got all of the emotional intelligence and all of the people skills that have been developed over the last two decades of raising a bunch of tiny screaming kids like that's a skill set I certainly know within my operation that having like a mothering role someone to just lubricate the wheels socially I think that would be a really cool like a like literally like a a surrogate mother CU there's a lot of like Lads I guess that work for me you know 25 to 35 dudes and like just someone to come in and be like boys can we stop doing X Y and Z or someone's forgot the this thing professional mother I think would be culprit mother yeah I think we got a new coin there um yeah well there's a couple things one is uh I've never really understood agism in the workplace because if you actually employ older people of both sexes um both people you know let's say 50 60 and above the immediate reaction is usually that they have a deficit with technology which is true as we will when we get to that age but the flip side of that is actually that their exper their lived experience is so strong that when you hire somebody like this they just have more rep they have more reps on this planet and so I saw the other day we were in a team meeting and I have this one uh person on my team shout out Kimberly and she's great she's a mother of three and uh and you know I saw one of our our individuals in the team getting a little flustered a gent and I was pretty aggressive and direct which not usually the best way to be when somebody is that way and she as she probably does with her three kids was amazing she was like really calm she's like you know how are you feeling about that like what do you think and I would never ask a question like how are you feeling about that I need to work on my EQ and she did and I do find that that aspect I hope to bring back more Goldman actually had a great program which was bringing women re-entering back into the the workforce I'm not sure re-entering back into Goldman sounds great after I had been a mom for a while um but I'm curious to see what happens for that generation of women and I think it'll be it'll be really really cool and I also think my husband and I work together in a lot of capacities and he still has his he he does work for the Department of Defense um but that's another thing that people say you should never do and I find extreme joy in it um and I'd be curious what would happen for more individuals if Partners allowed their significant other more into their sphere doesn't mean you have to overlap entirely we have very different Pursuits but when you can watch your significant other excel in something that you really understand dayto day I don't think there's anything sexier on both sides of the equation it's competence plus understanding right you're able to interpret you watched someone be really good at Brazilian jiu-jitsu or pickle ball or drawing or something and you're like honey you did great right you I'm so proud of that thing you just did which I don't largely understand and actually if you were to look at some of the most sought-after Pursuits for uh guys because again the increasing status that you get by being competent at something seems to be beneficial uh to men a little bit more what they're actually looking at doing I wonder if this is right what men are looking at doing is trying to find Pursuits that are the most easy to interpret by the widest number of women interesting music everybody can tell is that good music or bad music but you know how many people are like I'm going to make uh like cyber Punk Drummond bass I'm going to be the best cyberpunk it's like yeah sure but it's not going to be as broad uh comedy right movies everybody watches movies everybody watches comedy everybody watches listens to music yep yeah exactly like I'm going to be in shape I can see that I don't kind of understand what's going on but like I I know that's good or at least other people think that that's good um and that's another one signaling right so you've got not only is it obviously competent but do other people hold that competence in high esteem again cyber Punk drum and bass who who who even knows if that exists but if you're in a cohort of people who very much value this thing you I remember when we were doing Club promo so many times some of the boys would use the term like she's Instagram hot right which is like what does that mean so she's she looks fit on Instagram but in real life isn't quite as hot but part of the hotness of the girl on Instagram was impacting how highly they regarded them in real life interesting because you've got kind of pre-selection right if this girl's got more followers than everybody else and everyone else is like looking at what she's doing and everyone thinks that she's really really fit online even if she kind of isn't that in the real world it's almost like a degree of competence right beautification the ability to beautify yourself and having a a style a visual uh heal even if that doesn't translate very much at all to the real world is still a a thing right yeah Well's true you know I was talking to to a couple of entrepreneurs the other day about um they delivered something and I the end product was okay but the way that they delivered it was poor and so I call this the Tiffany's box Theory and basically you know if you look at two diamond rings that look identical to them but one is from ziles and one is from tiffy's this one from TI will have a price tag of 50,000 and this one will have a price tag of five it is the same exact product there's literally no difference except the name on one versus the other and what is the real difference between the two well if I was to give you either one of those rings and I like stuck in a paper bag and I crumpled it up and I threw the paper bag at you and then you got that ring you're already pre-selected you already have a bias to say what is this this is like a fake ring this is whatever it wouldn't actually matter that this was the Tiffany's ring but if I gave you the $5,000 ring and I put it in the Tiffany's box box and I tied it up and I presented it to you in this way you would now value that ring at a $50,000 amount even though the difference between a paper bag 25 cents and the Tiffany's box I don't know $150 doesn't actually equate at all to the value that's changed between the two but if we wrap something properly we will consider it to be more valuable and that is like rule number one in success business probably sex love the way you present the medium is the message that's exactly right yeah think I I learned this from Steven bartler a couple of weeks ago really good example uh think about how much space every Apple Store loses in terms of real estate by not packing more technology onto each table right go into in the UK I don't know them over here Target maybe I guess but like PC World or curries in the UK like big electronics stores uh go into there and it's just a [ __ ] chaos of cables everywhere and screens are touching each other because the most amount of products that we can can put out means that customers are able to find exactly what they want you go into an Apple store and there's just Barren Wasteland in between each product all right so couple of couple couple of interesting questions for the guys who like the idea of having a highly competent driven smart girl what what are the dos and don'ts what should those guys think about what are they getting right and getting wrong in your and your friend's experience that's such an interesting question um well a couple different things the easiest the easiest way I think to attract a we need to we should come up with a term for this is there a term for like high value woman oh God I don't want to use that I know the origination also could you imagine if I called myself a high value woman or somebody calls themselves a high value man I immediately there's rule number one don't [ __ ] call yourself that good rule number two is um I think a couple things people underestimate if we're talking about the rapping the rapping does not have to be sixpack and hot to get a high value woman it really needs to be confidence I always joked with my husband he's like he jokes because he's shorter so he's like you know nobody's looking at this and if you met him which have you met him yeah you did meet him yeah yeah he just takes up a room just the way that he is his presence he's really not afraid he's uh rather direct um he looks you in the eye he walks up to you specifically like he's supposed to be there and so are you and he's actually quite calculated on the method in which he would communicate with you and so because of that he could be not the 6' five you know guy who's going to naturally have uh an unfair advantage in finding a partner um but he would have this like un this satellite around him that you just this magnet that you get draw drawn towards and I found that with a lot of the women I know who are let's say tradition Ally goodlook successful competent in some way shape or form often their partners are people who have an IT factor in some way and the cool thing about an IT factor is you can create it you could actually learn to be the type of person who just shakes hands with a little bit of strength and look somebody in the eye and you can actually learn to be the type of person that listens and repeats back the thing that the person just said to them and that's a little bit curious and that chooses not just to be nice but to be kind um the other thing that I think people who are uh competent on either side of it is they want they want you to be courageous in one shap way shape or form and it doesn't have to be because you're a man but they don't really care if you're the um you know nice to oh yes of course thank you um you know we don't really want that overly nice thing what we actually do want is that you notice the guy on the side of the road who's having a flat tire and needs a little bit of help and you decide to pull over and see what you can do to help the guy you don't even have to know how to fix it just call up and make something happen and so I think this world of like humans who make things happen end up running into more humans who make things happen because we're just busy doing the doing and so um the cool thing I think about if you want to find a woman who is a strong you know partner in many Pursuits is they really just want a woman or a man who is also kind of strong in their own Pursuits and some of my best friends who have long-term marriages you know 10 years plus um to men who even aren't as monetarily successful as them and some of them are is that actually the way that the man looks has very little to do with it which I don't always find to be true on the other side of the equation um but they might have like some incredible personality trait um and I think that's just really attractive to women what about the other side of the fence what advice would you have for your female Brethren who think I like the idea of getting a competent partner what are the ways the pitfalls that you see those women fall into or what are the things that they should be prepared for or what are the ways that that can go Ary if if they're looking for the the competent man yeah um have you ever proactively looked for a partner like been looking and thinking a lot about finding a partner uh no not particularly no it's always kind of just upon me yeah that's a common trait I found typically I think people who are competent and looking for that same thing in a partner they focus on bettering themselves before they focus on looking for another I think the biggest red flag is typically a a human who's like I really just want to be with somebody I want to be with somebody I'm ready how do I find my person get that energy out of your life as both a woman which I can speak more to and a man and instead become somebody worth finding and that's really hard to hear I I think on either side of the coin but when you start working out which doesn't mean you have to be perfectly fit but you have more energy when you start pursuing something that you're uniquely interested in when you have real Pursuits that are obsessions for you in some way shape or form form you're more interesting and thus you will attract more interesting people and I think the biggest thing that we have done wrong as a disservice to society and you might have told me about this or we might have talked about this before is assume that finding the right person is simply a game of swiping ref left swiping right continuously I think one of the worst things we've ever done is allow dating apps to enter into our dating equation because we have thought that it is a numbers game of finding the right person as opposed to a daily activities game of becoming the right person when you become the right person you will attract people continuously no matter what and I've seen this from both myself and my friends who are varying levels of attractive varying levels of rich but working really hard on a few things that make them very interesting to humans yeah I think lots of people ask the question where are all of the good partners at right very few people ask the question why am I not attracting the kind of partners that I want to be attracted to that's the question and there's a a line from artificial intelligence to zombies rationality from a to zed by eled yuk outski and he writes this book about rationality which cognitive biases and the ways that our thinking goes AR and stuff and at the start part of it he says people take the piss out of rationalists not because being in love with rationality is strange but because it's so love it's so rare to love anything in the modern world and this death of passion that people have like if you ask someone what do you really love doing like tell me what gets you fired up if you had an appointment at 7 in the morning to do this thing you would be out of bed at 6 because you couldn't wait to go and do it right and me and Zach my housemate we always used the same example uh rally cross so it's like the drivers in the four-wheel drive cars and they're going through wooded things and everyone dies everybody dies all the time um and but Do's these dudes that go in the [ __ ] pissing rain to Perth Scotland right in November right at 300 p.m. on a Wednesday afternoon with an anarak and a a umbrella over the top of their head some of them have got cameras some of them haven't and they stand there to watch a rally car go like that and then they turn and look at their boys and they're like and we love watching those videos because watching anybody else get fired up at something that they love fires you up right to see someone love anything is so rare it's like an oasis right in a desert of bland indifference oh yeah I remember I knew I was going to get divorced when um I'm divorced and remarried I knew I was going to get divorced when uh I remember him saying there's nothing in the world that makes me happy anymore and I remember that's a daming indictment of what of life isn't it it was and I thought that's not the world's problem that's yours and we can work on that but if you are not willing to see that is not cool to think nothing is cool then you will never love anything again including me and thus I cannot love you and so um I find that that spark of obsession doesn't even have to be greatness but obsession is so contagious uh that it's like a little bit of oxygen in a Vegas casino it makes you want to stay up all night yeah you know anybody that loves anything is cool the guys on the side of the road watching Colin McCrae go past at 120 M hour it's a flash of this one person that they know about like I went to uh Cameron Haynes took me to the bow rack in Eugene Oregon and he tuned up this bow i' never shot a bow before since I was like 13 on a holiday doing like some lame kids club thing and uh I'm there with the dude that owns the shop family run shop since the god of decades and decades and decades and you know you can tell that it's a well-worn in shop because there's loads of stuff that's only there because it's been accumulated there like it's not precise it's not neat it's accumul stuff it's the opposite of an Apple store right there's like someone brought that cap in seven years ago and you haven't moved it yet and it's just been on this window sill for ages or whatever it's that that but everywhere and there's all of the bows and all of the arrows and all of the different types of arrowe heads and and all this stuff anyway he's tuning me up on this bow tuning me up on this bow tuning me up making sure that everything's right dials it in he's like oh that's cool and then I go over to the kind of like a workman's desk there an entire workman's area I don't whe you've ever seen bones bows getting tuned up yeah yeah yeah so he's like tuning in the site and he's making sure and then he does this special thing with uh a lighter to just make sure that I think if you heat the thread it binds a little bit more tightly and he's like oh this is a little trick that I learned with whatever whatever like not supposed to set shock horror bow 101 don't set the string on fire but like he found that if he did it a little bit it like tightened and locked everything in or some other bits and pieces I was enthralled cuz I was just around people that were [ __ ] in love with what they did they were fired up they were passionate about their thing I love as well one other thing that I really really love seeing is people that have how do you say very innocuous Mastery right so uh for instance one of the things that I have which no one will ever see when I sit down at my desk stand at my desk to do the uh episode remotely I can be thinking about the episode that I've got coming up whilst doing vocal warm-ups but the way that all of the studio comes together of like Mike's in everything's checked Master is on uh monitoring is coming through my ears every like just bu bum and I've seen it with so many friends a friend that was a doctor and went to University for basically a decade to do three degrees worked at Black Rock became a doctor became a surgeon and if he has a pen in his hand he'll just sit there and he'll do the most insane pen tricks and he's not even thinking just cuz for familiarity right like if I saw you uh prepare in fact I did see you preparing for a talk or something like that there'll just be something that people do oh here's a perfect example I saw a I saw a guy um playing guitar on Sixth Street and he's playing away playing away playing away and this pick like like just that it's in the crowd or something like that and without even thinking he's just like still singing away pick goes and he doesn't even think about it he just keeps on playing with one hand reaches behind himself unnecessarily Twirls this pick from the top knuckle all the way down to the bottom to catch it off and keep going because he's just done it a million times so like uh yeah like very normal Mastery of stuff and that's kind of the same as take the person that you're going to date or employee to a restaurant to see how they treat the staff yeah it's what do people do in the beats in between yeah right it's not the big per performance because that's dialed it's what's the way that they put their jacket on before they walk out of the dressing room yeah what are the small winds that compound yeah you know I was thinking about it I think the the 2.0 level to being a person uh that finds another high value one is not just being the one in the stands watching with that wild enthusiasm but finding the thing that you can actually play in the game as opposed to be a Voyer in and so to your point um even if you're not the champion bow hunter that Cameron Haynes is being that person who sells and tweaks and prepares the bow for the champion is incredible to watch now Cameron probably makes quite a bit more money and perhaps is more physically fit than this other guy and yet both things are enthralling the necessary right 100% you know I watched my father for many years he's a longtime Hunter and he was the same he'd get up every single weekend that he could at 3: in the morning pack a bunch of stuff in order to drive three or four hours hike a couple more hours to try to find an elk and it was like a joke amongst my mom's friends like yeah you're going to go look for a you know another elk for days on end and then eventually one day shoot one and uh and I remember when my father and I became like really close and I was a young girl with with some cognition about it we would go hunting together and now my husband will say that I have quite good eyes so if there's game around and we're hunting I'm usually the one that can spot it first because I have these reps with my father of watching mov movement across a landscape and in the way like an animal has a different shape that you'll never really find in nature because there's often smooth lines on animals and on nature you find much more Jagged uh as the norm and so um watching him for so many years do a thing that made no money whatsoever but him Master it in a way where he could spot an elk that nobody else in the entire like uh group could spot even when he was trying to show them and he would have to shoot it and down it before anybody else knew where it was was so incredible to me from a young age and so joyful with no um there's nothing like he he doesn't post on Instagram you wouldn't be able to find my father anywhere he's not a showman and yet he did this thing to the best that he possibly could every single time because he had that Obsession and love for it and I think that's part of why you know him and my mother have been together for so many years and I see the same thing with with my husband you know when you find a partner who has that wild Obsession and pursuit it is contagious and you know Chris is a a purple belt and we'll get off a flight and you know I'll go work because I'm obsessed with working it's my favorite thing to do and he will go get in the gym immediately change his clothes and go off to Jiu-Jitsu because he wants a pursuit of a black belt and that is really really cool to watch and you know a bunch of we have a bunch of friends we both know who are famous humans they're not always attracted to like the other famous humans in their exact same crowd you know Joe Rogan is attracted to Cameron Haynes yes because they both shoot um but also cuz he's like wow this is a Pursuit that's just so fascinating and Joe's also interested in somebody like you who's just obsessed with human psychology and Frameworks and so um maybe the the goal to finding an incredible partner who's top tier in some way shape or form is just becoming top tier obsessed with something yourself that might be enough what was your Insight about why you should get into rooms where your average Tuesday is your best day oh yeah well uh I think the easiest way to change behavior is to get around other people who already have the behavior you want normalized right and so I would always joke with my trainer like is your is your six-pack contagious like can I just like can it rub off on me and I remember one day he was like yes I'm like can we explain how that works he's like because if you hung out with me all the time I don't drink I'm up early I work out every day I work out really hard if you saw my intensity level paired with the normal person's intensity level AKA yours at the gym you would probably uh up yours and it would just be natural it's actually why I think group fitness is so important especially for women who weren't a lot of us you know I was an athlete in college uh I'm sorry in high school I didn't I wasn't an athlete in college but a lot of women we didn't have that intensity ingrained in US you didn't find women fighting and wrestling with kids until you know we we won some sort of outcome that wasn't normalized and so when it comes to really intense workout Sports I tend to think women are better off doing group class classes because you see a bunch of other competitive people right next to you and you can uplevel whereas my husband and maybe you you know if he's in the gym he's just an animal he nobody could be in there for weeks and he would act that way and so that's why I believe get around other people who what you want just is their Tuesday yeah what other advice have you got from billionaires you spent a good bit of time around wealthy people what you know lots and lots of net worth combined in rooms that you've sat in front of like what are the biggest takeaways that you've had yeah um well sort of a Funny Story uh one of the guys that uh is a billionaire but also spent some time with Warren Buffett had a story about how he went to dinner with Warren and uh I'm a little bit of a Warren junkie that would be like the guy that if I got to meet almost anybody else don't care about him F Girling hard yeah maybe I could be his third wife because I hear uh anyway so um he goes to dinner with Warren and uh he's like I have 400 questions for Warren because I'm worth this and he's worth with this and I'm all excited so I fly there and I go and sit down for dinner and he's like I couldn't ask him a question because he just kept asking me questions all he did the whole time was pick my brain on what I thought here what I thought there and he's like I didn't even realize that until I left that he had basically gotten all this information from me and I had gotten nothing from yeah and he's like and so he's met a couple other people that know him too and he's like the the smartest richest people I know ask the most questions and try to prove their intelligence the least because they know that the ones who collect the most knowledge have the biggest unfair advantage and so I found that almost across the board that's interesting what about the there's a lot of talk about um ethics or lack thereof in the billionaire class yeah what's been your experience of that obviously we have real knowledge that there are billionaires that have done horrible things and we've seen that in the news of of late I do imagine a bit like the science fiction movies where once you have a certain level of money it all becomes a power game and you lose a sense of reality for what is actually good bad or otherwise because you have an ability to actually control your entire environment and bend it to your will and the more money you have the more you can bend your environment to your will it's just true um one thing's interesting we have a friend of ours that runs a family office and was a of staff for two billionaires and uh and I remember last time we saw him like what's going on with you what are we doing we're explaining what we're building and you know what our goals were and kind of what our companies were worth and he was like I wish you not $1 more than $299 million and I was like that is such a weird number arbitary yeah like why 299 and he's like I've run a family office for multiple billionaires and I see right about that amount is when they start losing touch with reality and when you lose touch with reality you don't feel like you're a part of society and when you don't feel like a part of society you start to become unhappy and you start to have really negative decision making and I thought that was really interesting now I'm willing to try to be worth over 299 million we can see what it works uh like for me but I thought that was really really intriguing Kevin Kelly's got this piece of advice you must try as hard as you can under no circumstances to become a billionaire yeah like his that's that's his I like Kevin Kelly Kevin Kevin's I really really enjoyed my conversation that I had with him I love his thousand true fans I think that's true but one thing I would say to get back to ethics and morals of billionaires just for one second I have found that the more people have and have created the nicer and more giving they are it's actually those who haven't created a ton who are still living in scarcity that are gnarly humans and so what I find interesting is maybe there's some level where that changes there's a goldilock Zone in the middle perhaps and then can shoot it I mean I told you today the reason I've got this mark on my arm here is I had Co last week and it butt [ __ ] me uh and I was whining to Rogan the other day about the fact that I did it and then his nurse showed up at my house today with an IV bag filled with unpronouncable NAD vitamin B phosphate or some other [ __ ] uh and she sat there for 2 hours while this thing slowly went into my body and I was like oh yeah I feel I feel really good and uh that was you know a very nice gesture from someone who didn't need to help not and and I find that's really really normal you know I actually asked uh one of my my friends who's more private as a billionaire about it and uh and you know I think a lot of it is learned behavior right after a while you realize that to give to people who are givers in return just multiplies back to you and oddly the most selfish thing that you can do somehow somehow and so and then you learn that it benefits you and then you get ingrained into your your action um which I find to be the same thing like it brings me an obscene amount of joy to be able to help people except there's a little twinge if they don't appreciate it over the long term or if I don't feel them giving or paying it forward and so um you know the other thing I guess with billionaires is they just think different and everybody at varying levels of income I mean haven't you felt that like your first when you first made your first 30k you're like I'm so rich I'm not sure what I'm going to buy then you make a 100K you're like I feel pretty good I'm like doing pretty well then you make 250k you're like this is pretty good I think around 500k uh is where the the real happiness to increase past that tapers um and then about you know a million 10 million there's not that much difference between the two and so as you get worth more and more the only thing that really changes is that your worldview is so much bigger and so instead of spending a bunch of time on $1,000 problems or $100,000 problems you just naturally gravitate to problems that will hit the level that you're at and so it's a huge unlock to be around more people who have more in fact there was a great study you would love this I'll I'll find it so I can send it to you afterwards but basically showing that kids in a excuse me if this is incorrect Minneapolis neighborhood let's say so same socio demographics of both groupings of kids but in one segment in a neighborhood where uh there were only people of that socio demographic so lots of people that make below $660,000 a year and then one segment where they had a lot of uh interaction between those with wealth and those without wealth now the kids grow up in the same types of environments their parents make the same amount of monies but this group interacts with more rich people this group interacts with less rich people this group on average makes 33% more over their lifetime which is astounding all else being equal if you are around people that make more money you have the ability I think to see what options really are and so I think getting in rooms with people with big dollar amounts is actually really really important you had a contrarian idea about whether or not you need to sleep on your couch in order to be successful what was that yeah Alex and I disagree on this one because he definitely did uh I think technically the gym floor for him yeah he he dreamed of a couch yeah and other friend Andy fella is the same you know he has the best culture that I've ever seen is Andy fella he he his company first form is is incredible to me um but he has this huge flag in his warehouse and the flag was representative of the exact size of his very first store that they opened that they almost lost and went bankrupt on and the uh in the corner is a representative of the place that he used to sleep on the floor on this huge flag that's located in in their warehouse house and so he also slept on the floor to become successful and I commend the [ __ ] out of people who have had those sleepless nights without mattresses I think there are few humans that can actually persevere through that I think it breaks a lot of people on the same vein I think we don't have to have this hustle porn culture where we think that is what you have to be willing to do and in fact what if we gave people the allotment and the allowance that you could stay in your relatively comfortable 9 to5 and build up a business simultaneously or because I'm biased buy a business simultaneously and go from your relatively comfortable 9 to-5 to a slightly harder but more lucrative XYZ whether it's a side hustle a startup or a business it's not going to be easy but I do not think you have to sleep on Floors to get success and the reason I say that is because I worry about people taking a massive amount of risk um you know studies show if you're if you're bankrupt once it's incredibly hard for you to reach Financial Freedom again you want to almost avoid bankruptcy at all costs most people never recover from it and so if we know that to be true do we play to the edges to the excellent humans like Andy and Alex and tell everybody to be like them look at the size of those [ __ ] calves look at the size of Andy's guns most people are never going to be those two people and so we should allow them the ability to have massive success without the massive risk and that's sort of my nuanced point there that's interesting you you don't hear it's kind of survivorship right that you just exact right you just don't hear about how many people slept on the gym floor and then ended up having to sleep outside on the floor right you know how many people end up going bankrupt end up going into insolvency or Administration for their business yeah I uh did you ever have to sleep on a floor no I didn't have to do it I mean the worst that I ever got I haven't told this story before the worst that I ever got was my placement Year from University and I was living in Scotland so we ran a we had the franchise when I was 19 I picked up my first franchise for uh night club Bar Crawl called Carnage and this was you wore a T-shirt and on the T-shirt were the list of bars that you were going to go through and there were tasks on the back uh like pulled a pig uh down three drinks did a blah this is a different era when we could you could do this sort of stuff um and we would it was a like to print money I it's a liced to print like very normal amounts of money but it was it was very reliable in terms of how it's sold out and the goal was to expand this into new cities so we put it in Newcastle me and my business partner dominate um and were very very good at this then I was from Middlesboro Town 50 miles away I knew that that was a [ __ ] hole I thought that that would work well sure enough it did it's full of Larry degenerates that that loved it and we had a great time it was really fun our placement your was coming up from University from my business degree and the owner of the franchise big dog like look why don't you come and work for me you guys are already more Fed Up about work than you are about your business degrees so why not just like go full-time in the thing that you're almost full-time and with this part-time degree on the side and then go back to UNI once you're done we like yeah yeah that works so we move up to Edinburgh we move into this apartment and we're in Edinburgh for all of the summer I'm going to the University of Edinburgh gym I'm walking down uh the Royal Mile in Edinburgh every single day getting annoyed by French children who are off to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival um and we're driving around Scotland we had Sterling Dundee Glasgow and Edinburgh as four cities Plus Newcastle and Middlesboro so it's like a pretty big net you know from Dundee down to Newcastle is probably 300 350 miles maybe it's a good distance anyway so we're doing this little Loop and we're going to different places and dropping off flyers and making sure that the guest list staff and the selling Stu all of these things are occurring and the problem with events is that you only get paid once they've happened and we were building up to this big big big chunk of events but we had no income coming in in the interim and I needed to keep on getting our boss to send me money to be later deducted from our cut so that I could have petrol to drive to the places and there was a period where it was like okay I I actually don't have money to eat here and I had a guy that came and stayed with me who was going to help and he come from a little bit more of a uh like nasty background than mine he was like dude I'll just go and steal some food from the store and I'm like bro if I descend to the point where I have to steal [ __ ] food like the I the guy that owns the company earns easily enough money I can just get him to wire us some cash but that was that was a period I remember I once went to go and see Underoath like a metal band I went to go and see them I went from Edinburgh to Glasgow to go and see Underoath play and it was I knew that by doing that I couldn't drive my car like it was the amount of fuel I had to get there and come back and I was like supposed to drive to work or whatever the next day and I was like eat [ __ ] I'm going to go watch this band so I drove there on my own watched the band drove back on my own got home and I was like okay I've got like 15 miles of fuel in the tank and that was it but it wasn't destitute that was a very short space of time uh and largely you know I I straddled you know three or four different IND Ries am I going to be a DJ am I going to go full-time with commercial modeling am I going to go continue to build the nightlife business then the podcast comes along and it just permitted me to kind of weather the storm very nicely and I realized I didn't want to do late night stuff being a DJ is is fun from the outside but kind of painful from the inside the modeling stuff was depreciating asset as you said earlier on uh I was like okay podcast there it is but yeah by tinkering around it gave me the options I remember when when we first met I didn't know your background or who you were and so I was Googling you because I have two Brits on my team you remember those two and one of them's a crazy kid and they were so excited to meet you and I was like who is this guy like what is you know Chris what what's his deal and uh and so I was Googling you and like the first pictures come up and they're like like you shirtless you know like this from your which I didn't even know what love Island was um sheltered sheltered life you've beening apparently um and I remember sort of laughing because I heard you speak and I was like well it's not the same guy because we've got this really well spoken gent who has like ABS all over the Internet what's going on here um and then uh and then like seeing your background I think it's really interesting to see the cobbled together history that equates to something rather Frankenstein's monster yeah but that's how most people I mean I was I thought that you went to University and you knew what you wanted and then you went to your first job and then you climbed the ladder and then you continued up the corporate sphere and I'm probably one of the very very few corporate people I mean I was corporate for 12 years at Big financial institutions and and finally had the balls but didn't have it before to step out and and do things on my own that's really rare uh actually in entrepreneurship and so I'm trying to speak to anybody in your audience who is in that corporate position that they really hate that right now you're sitting there thinking I am watching this clock tick from 452 to 459 and it feels like it's 12 years of my life and I'm actively sitting here thinking I want to be closer to death just so that I can get up from this job and I want to reach that person and say you don't have to have a wild origin story in order to be really successful it's really wonderful if you have the David goggin incredible background where you have overcome such Strife to achieve success but it is actually not necessary and you can create just as much of a hero story for yourself having come from monotony as you can having come from travesty and most humans today aren't getting that story because we want to idealize which is actually great for the big big victims out there if you've had huge difficulty it's actually a superpower you just don't realize it yet but you don't need it you can still be wildly successful and interesting by just applying it but maybe the only thing I would ask your opinion on you know there's another guy that we know who has a podcast and I remember he was asking me like how to grow this how do I grow this podcast you know how do I get it bigger and and my I kind of thought about it for a second I was like there's a bunch of itics I could tell you right now but I think the most important tactic would be go and do something really interesting instead of just trying to go interview a bunch of people who are interesting and use their clout to grow your podcast go do something wild go do something interesting yourself build something yourself create some stories and then enter the chamat arena um and I think a lot of people these days are missing that and that's why there's push back to gurus on social media and that's why most podcasts only last seven episodes is because because they think to do the thing they just mimic the big interviewing of humans but there's a reason why you get really interesting podcast guest it's because you are uniquely interesting too it's because you have crazy pictures of ABS on the internet you're on a reality TV show you've been in the grind of building businesses you also have this weird sort of modern-day stoicism philosopher aspect and all of that together is packaged a human that is unique Chris Williamson and so how can you allow yourself a little Adventure that actually equals your success but it doesn't have to be tragedy I don't think no I don't think so either I you are right trying to growth hack being in interesting not not cool is rough and you're right as well I think it's the reason why there is skepticism around gurus on the internet because it it seems like the story is fragile and if I hit it with a strong enough Hammer it'll shatter and the hope is almost in some regards that I can shatter it you know um this is why people I think are going after Logan Paul's relationship amongst a whole host of other reasons one of them being that there's a skepticism around both his and his partner's Fidelity Logan Paul's kind of portrayed as the king of the Bros and his mes has got a history as well and all right like let's keep hitting this thing I'm pretty sure that there's nothing there let's keep hitting it going to keep hitting it and then maybe working working on the other side there's podcasters who've got huge huge platforms online and there's as many haters as there are like and critics and Skeptics and stuff and all that they do is spend their time trying to find holes and I think a big chunk of that is that they think maybe maybe there is something hollow inside of that and if I keep whacking it enough then it it won't work it'll break so yeah I think we should be cautious of portraying like an infallible front yeah one of the ways that you can kind of protect yourself quite nicely against that just as a normal person you know nobody likes someone who doesn't seem to have any vulnerabilities doesn't seem to have any problems yeah exactly like we bond with people over their flaws as much as we Bond bond with them over their successes but the flaws humanize them if you've got someone and you're like oh this guy a girl doesn't seem to struggle with anything so what what am I going to bond with you over like what are you are you just a [ __ ] are you an equation who are you uh and you can by wearing your weaknesses on your sleeve not running with a victim mentality and not exposing them unnecessarily but you know if someone ask today the this people pleaser thing is like a revelation I've learned within literally the last two weeks right so I'm like all right I guess I'm part of the people pleaser club and this is kind of a new thing for me to realize and learn about myself and now I don't know like there's other people out there that are people Pleasers and they think [ __ ] like that's maybe that's me too so yeah giving that gift of like self-insight I think is it's true well I also I think people really don't like seeing Perfect People for whatever reason I think that's a flaw we should work on that we should be thrilled if somebody seems to have all the things together that to me I'd rather air on the side of optimism that somebody else could have those things and that means maybe I could too you know maybe I don't have everything right now but maybe I could if this other human does but I think for instance you know there's a reason that characters are created when people have personas and those characters are very thoughtfully you know made I I always like talking about or thinking about the rock because I think he seems like a good guy and I also think he's much more crafted than people give him credit for agree I think so too the way he dresses you know so as to not look too intimidating and also sort of like the people's champ which is what he calls himself even the way he humanizes what he talks about calling himself the people's champ right um I think these these characters are created because we realize that nobody likes a glass house we want to see if we can break it and for for I'm a little embarrassed because I couldn't stop watching the whole Dylan danis Logan Paul thing on Twitter I mean I was like when some my husband cuz he's a Jiu-Jitsu guy you know could watch the fights and whatever so when some of his like degenerate friends sent me sort of the stuff they were doing back and forth you know I fell in I'm like oh my god did she really say that what happened compelling oh very great content premium content and yet as I was watching it all I'm like at the end of this I have a feeling they're both kind of losing correct and I think they both they took it like a little too far they could have actually stopped at some point and um and then it just gets gnarly and and at the core of it I don't think think humans are as bad as we make them out to be I think we like a little drama we want to tear people down slightly but it gets too far and we go ah this is gross I'm out of here by and large and I think that's what happened with both of them you know and um and yet like for me I'm both sides I just find it so funny like who cares who cares what these two humans that none of us know are doing on the internet and why do we get so fixated on somebody else's life and projecting what we think should be right on them one of the things that you don't see and you can't do it if you're about to punch somebody else in the face because it makes you seem like a coward it makes you seem like you have limits and the whole game of this is I have no limits right that's fundamentally I think what's happening I'm prepared to go further than you I'm prepared to be more ruthless than you this is this great story of Tyson Fury and I think it was Vladimir Klitschko and him this is way before they were going to fight maybe even years before they were going to fight and they were both in a sauna together and Tyson Fury just silently made a promise to himself he's like I'm dying or he's leaving first I'm going to die or he's going and they're in there for like 30 minutes 40 minutes 50 minutes forever however long it is Klitschko gets up and goes and he's like I knew I'd beat him I knew I'd beat him as soon as that had happened and oh yeah interesting yeah yeah yeah so so who do you think wins the Logan Paul Dyan danis really important question for this in terms of the actual fight yeah and does it matter anymore does it matter anymore well I mean they've both lost and we've all won so far uh I really don't know Dylan danis has been fighting for a long time I've seen some footage of him hitting pads it doesn't look good Logan Paul looks great at the moment physical condition is fantastic uh and he looks good hitting pads too but he's also I think never won a fight I don't think he he's ever actually won uh and Dylan definitely does seem quite calm uh let's say uh Dylan by decision wow goes the goes the distance both but it's a ugly fight it's both very bumbling nobody looks particularly slick uh I would say Logan by knockout or Dylan by decision I don't think Dylan's going to knock Logan out because of the size difference um but one of the other things that you see right the talking about who's going to go further and that story of Klitschko and uh Tyson Fury there is a an amount of how far you go that actually becomes a counter signal after a while and what it teaches the world is oh you you kind of don't have any morals there's nothing left there's no sacred ground left and this can be done from the receiver as well as the accuser right and this is what I meant on Twitter you never see anybody on Twitter which is crazy because of how many insults get thrown around on Twitter and DMS and sub tweets and all that [ __ ] you never see anyone on Twitter say reply and go yo that's out of order and you don't get to [ __ ] say that don't talk to me like that no one has ever replied with that on Twitter but you do that in person someone like you and your partner and your partner actually decides to bring up that thing that they know hurts you and you they promised that they wouldn't or it's just beyond the payLo whatever and you go yo you don't get to talk about that okay yeah like no one does that on twit it's always a a sardonic satirical reworking of what they actually said or it's a screenshot of what their wife did the other day or what it's some [ __ ] [ __ ] like what would have been an interesting strategy and again it doesn't work quite so well because it's like oh you're bowing out this is like uh complicity and and cowardice and and weakness or whatever but what would have been an interesting strategy for Logan at least to have done in this particular exchange would have been to gone you're a piece of [ __ ] you don't get to talk about someone's fiance that way I'll see the [ __ ] fight yeah age and you go oh that's [ __ ] interesting right and it makes you look like the bigger man problem being all of these tweets are like Logan is financially invested in like he's very very incentivized in ticking this over uh but yeah had you have not had that on the other side had there have just been some you know like meaningless beef W with no face punching at the end of it I would been interested to see if he could have played it in a more noble way I agree yeah I also thought about it from the woman's perspective of [ __ ] rough is mostly what I think rough and also what would you want your man to do if that was you in that situation very rough for them as as a couple I think on either side I cannot imagine I actually asked my husband I was like what if that was me he was like oh God you know just like a visceral reaction and we're very close and married for a long time but that is like a primal Instinct I think in men that we just have to be honest about so that had to make for fun conversation between the two of them I don't wish anything on that and on the other side you know there's part of me that I think would have said [ __ ] the purse like why why are we continuing to engage with a person that's done this and despite it making you a ton of money you know is it worth it because her reputation has been severely beaten up and she'll have to come up with something really creative to turn that around if she cares yeah the Rebrand of Nina is going to be an interesting one I don't know I mean we we pray at the altar of status and Prestige and money and we will do an awful lot to kind of get there and it's part of that brand as well it's part of that like turbo alpha male machismo nothing can [ __ ] with me dude I'm untouchable uh but again you know if if I think he'd said something like uh like she doesn't care about you uh this isn't going to be a big deal uh she thinks that you're like scum and and that you're despicable but like she doesn't care about you I'm like again I maybe that's the case maybe the the whole relationship is like that but if you'd said like she's really been [ __ ] hurt by this like You' really hurt her like that's a that's a headline like Dylan danis is emotionally abusive to a that he's never spoken to 100% especially some of the stuff just pictures of her with men I'm like God I mean [ __ ] funny though well that is the problem I was on all of my my you know gents friends text messages and just don't pretend that you weren't following it yourself oh I I I I admitted it I was I was admittingly embarrassingly following it for a period but then I had to turn it off because it got I thought it would Peter out well remember what I said content diet right amydala the fast food for the all over again like what does it make you here's another good way right when you watch your current content feed or Creator not necessarily of choice but like the algorithm's creator of choice that it's feeding you how do you feel I call it post content Clarity um how do you feel the opposite it's like fog well it's just like are you do you want to ring your mom and tell her that you miss her do you want to go outside and go for a nice walk and be calm and look at the sky or do you feel like the world's out to get you and everything's pointless and it's zero some Doggy Dog scarcity World mentality and when I think about some of the most popular channels and how they make me feel they make me feel rubbish afterward I don't I don't like the person that I am and I almost need to like acutely rehabilitate myself back into being the person I am after watching this content well especially something like that you know I was I was talking to one of my friends and immediately you know what I think about I imagine it like if my attention span or if my attention and focus is an apartment let's say I consider a penthouse like this space in here is actually quite nice and it's very expensive and everything that I allow into that apartment is me Airbnb in it out I'm renting my mind out to these people and I have just given these two dudes you know this apartment for a week free you know they've gotten this Penthouse level attention which has some cost and it's not been a net benefit to me so I've rented it out to them for nothing and uh and every time I rephrase it that way I'm like oh yeah I would I wouldn't do that I wouldn't allow these type of people to steal my attention for a week if my attention was an actual house in which I lived and by the way my brain your brain is much more valuable than some Airbnb Penthouse you could have and so um my mind always goes back to the numerical calculus of what is it costing you so you can feel it in your energy you can certainly feel it in in your output which I guess could be monetarily driven but yeah at the end of it I was just thinking God these two OTS are living rentree in my mind for much too long it's totally my fault big hidden metric again uh I love contrarian thinking I love your uh newsletter where should people go if they want to sign up to that thank you it's contrarian thinking. Co fantastic and where else should they go if they want to follow the things that you do on all the socials uh we do a lot on YouTube we do a lot lot on Instagram and uh yeah I hope they tell me if they end up uh buying a business which is what we talk about the most hell yeah I appreciate you thank you for having me if you enjoyed that episode then press here for a selection of the best clips from the podcast over the last few weeks and don't forget to subscribe