#738 - Alex Hormozi - 21 Brutally Honest Lessons About Life
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Hello, everybody, welcome back to the show. My yesterday is alex hoosie. He's a founder, investor and an author. Alex and twitter continually seems to be one of my favorite sources of great insights over the last few years.

And today, we get to go through some of my favorite lessons from him about life, human behavior, psychology, business and resilience. I expect to learn why being called a control freak isn't an insult, how to stop making the same mistakes over and over again, why being at the top will always require becoming uncomfortable. Alex is guide to surviving cancellation, how to get more comfortable telling the truth, why it's goods.

Remember that all of your critics are going to die, and much more. I love these episodes, these lydy cal style episodes, where we move quickly through a bunch of different insights and ethics, ms, and riff on them and stuff. I really value them. The super, super dance.

And if you are you here or a long time listener, don't forget that you might be listening, but not subscribed the next few months has some of the most insane guest that i've ever had on the podcast, some huge returning guests and some massive longer requested on. So if you don't want to miss episode and when they go live, and if you want to make me very happy, and if you want to support the show, just press subscribe on apple podcasts, are spotify or whatever else you are listening. I thank you. But now, ladies and gentlemen, please welcome alex homos Y.

What did you call this the podcasting beauty coal? We come together for a very intense three hours. Don't see you the for six months until I takes you again and say what you do exactly that.

All right.

So I going to go through some of the best lessons i've learned from you over the last couple of months. First one, control freak is a word people with low standards used to describe people with high standards. You're not a control freak.

You just wanted done right the first time. You're not anxious. You care, do not expect media c people to support world class goals.

I think most people feel really lonely when you want something that doesn't currently exist and said, some people call their dreams s and people call that goals. Whatever IT is, you're trying to pull something from your mind into reality, and you want IT in a certain way. If it's not done that way, it's not what you imagined. And so people on the outside world throstles es and call you names that they think I will change your behavior and get you to stop.

And the more I have been the person trying to pull things in the reality, the more i've tried to weather and build kind of defenses against those things, so that when those stones get hold of you by being called a control freak, or by saying you micromanaged things, or that you have incredibly high standards, the answer is yes, because I want IT done right the first time. Because either way, we're going, if you have enough, will it's going to get done the way that I wanted to get done regardless. And IT will be less painful if we just do IT right the first time, because we will still have to do IT, and you may have to do IT three or four more times, but eventually you will just succumb to the fact that we're going to do in this way. And I think all of the great things that have happened for humanity have been from one man or woman who had an idea, just wouldn't let .

people shake IT from them. The standard of right isn't actually that insane when you think about IT is just right, is just done without error. And I guess that the margin that some people considered to be right and other people consider to be right just changes.

Trying to think of a really good example for this. But like the level of detail, I mean, it's it's the difference between it's the difference between a book that gets ten or a hundred five or reviews in a book is one hundred thousand five or reviews, and everyone wants a silver bullet. But most of the things that make great products is one hundred golden babies and such. One of the things we have there is no other boys, only hundreds of golden babies. There's just hundreds of tiny little improvements.

It's like how can we look at the can? How can we improve the way IT chips? What about the wait? What about the color scheme? How does IT sit in the shelves? How are people going na look at IT in this market? First is this market are like, how does this name appear on hats and on shirts and on and on sights? And what's the RGB, whatever the color scrip scope is here versus there.

And it's just a thousand details that someone who does not care will not put the work to look into because they're trying to check a box rather than to make something that people will love. Or I heard this from shot camera is from um but basically that the best art is art where the artist makes IT for themselves. And where you see commercial work is where a bunch of people are trying to make something for tn audience.

And so it's y're trying to like rinsing, recycle stuff that actually solves no one's problems because no one is actually the audience. Whether when you make IT for yourself, there's thousands of people just like you who will who will have the same death of understanding of IT. But I fear selfish in the moment to make something for yourself. But when you make IT for yourself.

you actually make IT for everyone. We can be reliably informed that there's some non insignificant minority of people who also think like you. You also have the same problems as you, who also have the same fears as you.

I'm going through two projects at the moment, one being a book and the other being uti ic, that is nicer and it's new yeah and that means that there's lots more of these small things. They're actually quite big things. But I was telling you before we started about the fact is a hyphen and there's a hyphen thing between one piece of copy and another piece of copy printed on a million cans.

X but. Being concerned about being seen as someone who has two high standards is something that for quite a while, I felt ashamed about because you feel like a bother, you feel like you're being unnecessarily. It's not even detail oriented, its picky conversion. Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, laborious. And I realized probably last year won't took me until last year to realize that not summing to stop doing that is probably one of the only reasons why you've had any success.

I mean, I think if so, anyone is listen, if you have that, I I would consider a gift. Um IT makes sense for the majority of people to be opposed to that because you do make more work for everyone else. But the product of that work is so much Better.

And so if you want the work that you have to last into, be meaningful and make an impact, IT comes from a hundred golden babies of a hundred particularities, of a hundred peculiarities that you are picky about because the whole thing needs to work. And what happens is, if you have a big project, lots of people have to get involved, but there still needs to be one vision, and otherwise that looks like a Frankenstein where everyone just checked the box of something. They didn't the past, they just copy and past, IT over.

And then IT doesn't resonate with anyone because, again, they just did IT for everyone rather than for the artist. And so using that as a frame has given me permission to be me in an unreasonable world. And so, like I told, I told this last time is on.

But when I did the book launch, I had, I practice that presentation three times a day. Every day for thirty days, I did a hundred run throws, full length run throws. First where I did IT out loud in recorded IT.

Second time where I would watch the recording and then edit in real time, and then do IT again. And I did that every single day. And so then when I came alive and had half a million people, whatever IT came out, I think, fleshly. But we were like, men, you're such a natural at this, like what I did IT one hundred times.

And so sometimes people even even hear hundred and just a big number but when you do one hundred repetitions of something, the first five times you're like, oh, i'm so much Better but then like the difference in five and the next ninety five times, which goes from being great to being a masterpiece. And like it's that next ninety five that I think is what makes people work class and that's where everyone falls off. And that's why most people are.

There is this poll, I think, from people who don't have high standards to people who do have high standards to drag them back. It's this like moving back toward the mean is killing the only competitive advantage that you had.

Couldn't agree more.

It's I mean it's it's .

conforming right is like the people want you to do what they find comfortable and most things that are alike. Most companies when the founder leaves because IT IT happens slowly because it's you good from one hundred golden babies to ninety nine golden babies. And IT doesn't look that different.

And then there's ninety eight cold babies and like I don't know. And then two years later, three years later, like I don't know, IT doesn't have the same like magic as to what is what I was. And that's because the art behind IT isn't there because it's not unified anymore. It's not concern anymore. It's one hundred departments making decisions with people copying paste things for ign audience that doesn't exist rather than one person is trying to be satisfied for an ideal that they are trying with other might to live up to.

I suppose this is one of the important reasons to have a singular figure, that is the urban, all of the spokesman, off IT, because that the only person that gets to see absolutely everything, typically that would be the founder in a podcast, that would be a host in any other in a um solar music band, that would be the lead singer or the song rider or whatever they get to see everything at.

For instance, we done some episodes before where it's been denied before, and i've been not happy with the colleague because the way that something displays on mobile is slightly different to the way that IT displays in premier pro and is slightly different to the way that IT displays in a six k photographer videographers curved screen. I gona guys that like it's not up to scratch, well, we're not gonna be able to get IT in time for the export. We're not going to be able to get IT in time to get IT upload and then the checks to go through on youtube that well.

But IT IT needs to happen like you just make find a way to make this happen. And yeah that that impulse of just actually saying that is something that you should lean into, okay. Well, it's not. And if you set the standard and if everybody else gets up to that standard, what IT shows is the people who continually push up against that and don't meet that standard, they're just not built for this particular company. They are built for someone else that makes a mediocre product ah, but they are not built for you making a world class problem.

And I I I really wanted jim down someone story right now the whole like don't be a perfectionist like your like it's just another word for procrastination actually think that's complete bullshit. I think that that's microbe is IT perfection .

is out to be crazy ation master .

ating as quality. Okay, yes. okay. So i'm i'm going to put a sub, a suba, a footnote on IT that I think will add context, which is that most people who claim to be perfectionists are not perfectionists. They are actually procrustes IT because they are not doing anything.

And so IT just is a socially acceptable label because the real perfectionist feel this this sickness where they like wanna each their skin off until the things done, but they are trying to get that done where as the perfectionist or the the procrastination uses that to say, like i'm not sure i'm just getting IT right, but like the person who is an actual perfectionist, one wants to finish and is working every hour of every day on the thing and seeing progress towards IT. Because if you don't know how your thing is getting Better, you're not a perfectionist. You just ignorant.

They're also moving toward the goal every single step of the way as opposed to just sitting back out this huge list of things that are not doing the thing. Planning to do the thing isn't doing the thing, thinking about the thing isn't doing the thing, getting angry at people on the internet that have already done the thing is doing the thing.

And there's also a people who are perfectionists within the thing that matters most are prepared to see things that are uncle ery to that. For instance, you're not absolutely a perfectionist. I'm going to guess with the short form content that goes out on your instagram like this is so dust, as you call IT, this is just it's extra, right? It's it's ebay stuff.

Luck if we have one in a hundred videos that got a type, the hyphen missing or something like that, all right. But if we're talking about the school announcement release, if is a fucking typo in that, or even the video one of the links is broken, or even if one of the links is slime picolet ted, that's something that I can have a problem with. So picking your battles as a perfection's ist, I think actually, or someone someone with high standards is super important because you can't have that degree of high standards that absolutely everything, if you don't pick your battles, you're not going to make sufficient movement at the city. You need to actually make progress. So find the areas that are highest contribution and don't compromise on those.

And it's fun. You say that because I the way that I immediately refrain that was that the perfect ism is around volume is like that is what we that is what we are optimizing towards. And then we because if we look at if we knew how people responded ahead of time to content, then we would make things differently than we do.

But I probably like you and often surprised pleasantly and sometimes unpleasant by the stuff that just grabs hold and then just goes viral as hell um in content. And so I think part of that is making up for our own ignorance by increasing volume. And and so that would be like if my reframe on the perfectionism, like we know that if we make ten pieces of content, IT is more likely that we will have more people see IT than if we try really hard at one. And so we make ten because the net benefit of the ten is greater. And so that's the ideal that we commit .

to tioga fault e has a fantastic take on this, where he talks about perfectionism, allows people to sit back and not produce work at a rate required to work out what actually that works.

Have you heard the story of the power class? Oh, I feel like that. All right. Well.

this feels like total modern. This where someone comes in behind and then holds the thing in front.

So there's two, two, there's a teacher. He got two classes that he teaches and one class, he says the only assignment for this whole semester is that you come with a, come back with the perfect a clay pot. That's that's the assignment. The other class, he says your objective is to make the most total quantity y of clay parts and you will be measured by how many parts you make.

And at the end of the quarter, the pots that came from the team that had to just make sheer volume, not only did they make more pots, but the quality of all of their pots was Better compared to the teams that only had to make one. And IT just underlines the the biggest lesson that i've learned in my life, which is that volume and gates lock, is that you can try to be lucky and pick the one perfect thing and try and make IT. But if you don't want na try and to be lucky, you can just do so much fucking work that you will you will root force your way to figure in IT out.

Like if you do a thousand podcasts, you'll be pretty fucking good at podcasts, right? But if you try to say, okay, your your room, your brand new and all you have to do is make one perfect podcast. The problem is, is that you don't have the prospect in which to make a judgment to say what is good because you have zero data to base anything off of.

And so you're basing your idea of a perfect protesting, something that you've literally never done before. And so doing the volume gives you put the perspective to then have the best podcast at number one thousand or one thousand and one. Anyways, I just thought .

you'd love the clay part. I D know that story, but I thought he was hotoke. Phy, no, so anyway, but again, I don't disagree.

And it's finding the thing that is to try and make this tactical. What is the thing that you don't need to focus on volume today? The goal is not to try and fit ten podcasts into one set is to make this one as good as possible.

But if it's short or real or tweet or something, it's lower average, is lower input. Just get that out there. All right.

Next one, here's how to get older without getting Better. Keep relearning the same lesson. If you keep making the same mistake over and over, the mistake isn't the problem. You are.

So I define learning by same condition, new behaviour. And so when you go to a video game and you battle through the level and you battle the boss, if you keep doing the same thing to the boss and you keep losing, then you have not learned because you have the same condition and the same behavior.

And so I often say that, like, for anyone is listening this podcast, if the goal is to get Better and you're like, man, I really want to learn something from this podcast. If you listen in this podcast, and then you're in the same exact condition as you were before, and then you do not change your behavior, you learned nothing. And so using that definition has at least allowed me to change my behaviour faster, which then goes into rate of learning, which I define his intelligence.

And so a lot of people, like men, he's so smart, but he just doesn't it's like, well, then if he doesn't change his behavior and he's in the same conditions, he is a dummy. He's not that smart. And so if you are trying to battle the same boss over and over again and you don't change what you're doing and the boss keeps beating you, then it's not the games problem. It's your problem. You are the problem.

And I think that um like if you if you continue, I I talk to about obviously, I talk a lot of lunch for nurse but I usually do this when I have a crowd would just like raise your hand if you work all the hours the day and not you know most the crowd raised their hand I said, okay, who here has been stuck at the same revenue level for six months more and then I said, keep the hands up and like honestly, most the time the same hands are raised, I say you're doing the wrong shit. Like if you put all your inputs and the outputs haven't changed, then you have the same condition and the same behavior and so you have learned nothing. And so that has always just been my reframe. And so over time, if if you're moving up in entrepreneurs, you're moving up in career, your behaviour should change because that means you've learned .

exposure to information, isn't learning .

great dealer.

it's true, true. And it's the same with memory. It's literally the way that memory works. The best way to work out how the human memory system works is repeated recall, not repeated exposure, right? You have to drag IT out of memory and use IT, not just see IT a million times.

And this is kind of the same thing with the lesson at, you can listen to any of the podcasts that exist on the internet, all the ones that we've done, all the ones that you love or whatever. And if you don't apply anything, it's a waste of time. And this is the best solution for this is tempting ruses the godhead sticks.

Look, what's the thing from the podcast of the book or the audio book or the the whatever the u red or listen to, you can't stop thinking about that. You go to bed, you think about IT that you took a screen shot or a screen recording incident in the group chat that you'd like text to your mom about the three in the morning. This really explains the way that I felt in school, or the way that I felt when such such broke up with me or whatever. That's the thing, that's the thing to focus on. But a lot of the time, the the problem with mental motivation is that the amount of information you can intake vers, the amount of change that you can deploy is a metric.

Yeah, when I was getting started, my um tremendious journey, I would say, is like, pro, this was an entrepreneur. I hadn't quit my job. A I started reading all these self hot books.

And I remember reading like I was probably like my tense book in a row w and I realized that the words and that contradicted, like the second self help that no one was like, it's all about goals, everyone like, it's all about taking, you know, steps that whatever IT was right and and I always said I was like, you know, my life is the same. I've been all these books about my, I, I still erly live in the exact same kind of involved for doing the same job. Like nothing has changed.

And so I just made the commitment that whatever the next book that I was going to read, I would just not read another book until I done everything in that book. Um and I that's when I put my job and I did how much of other things and i've actually more or less stuck with that in terms of like when I read books, even listen the podcast I usually do with an intention to get something out of IT and I usually have notes up and so that's so my intake on information because I because I I get asked a lot of sure you do like I actually don't read that much. Um I definitely read infection.

I read like vanity rising baby, right? But it's because usually I get overwhelming with the amount of things I would have to do. And so i'm like I don't need more information.

I'm like i'm like I could read a chapter and be like art. That said, I it'll take me two weeks to do this. And so then like the rest of the time is doing that.

And so how do you ensure that the things your reading are giving you good advice? Because if you didn't move on before, you took two weeks to go and do the thing, the thing was dog shit, you've spent two weeks going backward.

So I would probably I would make the argument that I wouldn't have gone backwards because I would have given the experience. And so I would have more context to know what the second thing was going to be. And that's just kind of like the trial by fire learning through derated. And I think I tended you more of that um sort .

of a wind lan philosophe yeah and I .

would say that like there are entrepreneurs were definite like super, super, super planners and their entremets are more like let's just move in breakthrough ed'll figure out. I tend to be really this on the micro in terms of like move shit and break like we'll figure IT out as we go. And I just tend to be a planner only in the big, like, very grand like what I really want to do in ten years.

But the majority the time is like, let's see and learn. I've learnt so much, like so much of the content that I have comes from just fucking up in business. And people like this is such origin. Inal council like this is just because that's what my life is. Just like, I made this mistake, I didn't work, but I said this one thing one time, and then all these people bought.

Or like, oh, how do I do that again? And so like I was always through iteration and I read all these books, but there's genessee knowing how are are so knowing that and knowing how like knowing that maybe this works. Maybe once you do IT, it's a different type of learning or at least for me, it's about then that way you can read you read a hundred book on sales. But when you take your first cold call, all that goes out the window because you actually have to.

you actually have to sell. This is related to something I wrote last week. Don't be so worried about people who imitate your work.

They only know the what, but not the why. If you stopped being creative, so would they. A photocopy isn't an artist, even if you can recreate the moneta.

I love that because they think, like you, you are source in that situation. And so everyone is therefore like a subset of you. And they require you to live.

You don't require them. And the equal opposite is, I think we should be more fearful of when everyone stops for copying you. Like the day that no one copies you is far, far more frightening that .

everyone is copying you. Jimmy refers to china as a cover band, you know, it's like that the cover band of the beetles. And he says, you know that the good and in many ways, they're able to produce things that more scale and so as so what, but they're not driving the innovation forward in that same way.

Yeah, the idea of getting upset about people copying is this ridiculous like, yes, that's understand painful.

right? If someone's gone through, okay, let's test and test and test and test and test, and then finally find a particular form that the formula that works and then ten people downstream to get the benefit of this hard labour ious effort for late night grind and declaration. And they just got to be like, oh, that thing do I so I think that .

like they they will be able to copy what they can see, but they want to be able to copy what they can see, which is understand why each of those pieces are in place and when something changes in the future, they won. Be able to iterate from there because they don't know why I was there in the first right.

And so like, I mean I obvious ly do this with in a business context, we're like world doors or it's k and so like in the gym world, you know gym lunch for those you don't know, I have big licensing company. We have had five thousand locations. And anyways, so we have basically business processes that we would iterate and figure out why this worked.

And so then I had I I used to keep a list of names and then I just got too long entirely them to keep the names of all the people who tried to take the stuff and then saw as there um I see I see their names every night but I got a bed. You think I don't I remember all of you. And so .

none .

of them, ten years later, still around and and none of them even came to a tenth of the size of charge and was because IT wasn't theirs. Like the person that I would be far more afraid of, someone who comes out with a significantly Better system than what we had to help James make more money in their client more. Um but like to this day, like still isn't one and I want to much stole the category king in in in that industry.

And so it's like just and that's because we put and we were talking about this earlier, everything is an R N D for us. And so we actually like we're the only last company that had an already department and we would test we can plays, but we test plays every every fourteen days. And so we'd spent fifty honor grand on just a test.

We'd like, let's test this new marking campaign or we d say, hey, let's test this new, uh, high ticket sales processor. Hey, what if we did? But if we try to sell members with via chat, let's just give me a shot, see what happens.

And and honestly, seventy percent that time I would was worse than the control, like I didn't work as well. And what we would do is we presented the license sees and say, hey guys, guess what? We just spend fifty grand on that. You don't have to spend money on look at the results of this sell. The thing is, is that most people actually really happy to know that IT didn't work, felt like they were scratching the nature like a great I don't have to do that one like someone did that test forming so on anyway um all that to say um unless you have that that troil of bodies behind you that let you to figure out this one thing when there is a pink in the system because some external condition changes, we should always well they then don't know which means you're always .

still gonna ahead yeah that's very interesting yeah because if you understand the physics of the system, if you understand the dynamics of why you're doing the things that you're doing in something changes, you can respond. But IT goes back to people with high standards. You have to presume that you .

win in the weeds.

You have to presume that you win in the weeds. And if you do, and if you're continuing to be this close to IT, as soon as things change, you go, um that's interesting. Why does that happened? And that then allows you to continue to which .

you see IT because you're in the weeds, right? Somebody who's all the way to me out, just like a copy, pays that there are like they're on there are late because they have to see that it's working. See this working consistently thirty three, six months behind, then they start trying to figure how to implement IT and then they start implementing IT.

And then what they don't see is the things that made the conditions that made IT work to begin with. And so like if you just assume that you're always in the lead, then IT means then sure, second through tenth place will always copy number one, but to the vicar go the spoils. And so you like no one gives a shit who was fourth place at the olympics.

Reminder that if you want to be exceptional, you are going to be different from everyone else. That's what makes you exceptional. You can't fit in and also be exceptional.

Both have discomfort. When you fit in, you have internal conflict because you're not being one hundred percent you when you're exceptional, you have external conflict because everyone sees you is different. Pick one when your friends start to say you've changed, remember IT because they don't know how to say you grow.

I define words a lot because IT helps me kind of like mate since of the world and like exceptional is like an obvious one right we use the word exceptional like you are not like everyone else um but even saying IT like that like you are not like everyone else and so if someone says you're not like everyone else, then you can just reframe that is like I am exceptional and that's not a bad thing um and most and I I don't and I actually think that most people had like this might be countered to most people's beliefs, but I think most people have the potential to be exceptional.

And if because most people are peculiar in their own way, they just stifle that because they want to be accepted by most people but into doing never accomplish what they want to do because they conform. Uh, and so like if there's probably a lot of things about the world, even your world around you, you're like this never made sense to me, but then you do IT anyways. And I I think that a lot of innovation and a lot of what makes people exceptional is feeling, you know, thinking that, thought of seeing that thing and being like, huh, I don't think i'm going to follow that rule anymore.

Like, why do I need to shower twice a day? huh? Like, I do not. Like, why do I need to wear different clothing? Hua, like there's just a lot of these social norms that people usually passed down to us. So there you read them to us in high school and college and things like that.

Um but it's like you see a guy who you know where's a cowboy hat and dress certain way and he basically wants to say I am this I am this archetype of person but if people not as comfortable for you as new baLances are and you know that you still wear kabba boots, I would call you a fraud because like that is like it's it's like a micro rebellion against yourself is like there is. And like, I look at old people a lot because usually they don't give a shit anymore. They're just like given up.

And there was a survey that they did, where the number one reason that old people like don't have as much drama and they're happier as they say, they decided they literally don't have time for IT, like literally they don't have type for D I found that so interesting as like, well, I would eventually be that way when i'm eighty. I always to starting that way now. And so they usually wear like really comfortable football are and like they they keep their surroundings like whenever weird peculiarities they have, they just accept them. And so I think a lot of like if if life is a long journey of self acceptance, I think that earlier you can accept your own peculiarities as just part of you rather than trying to justify them or mold to what you to the architecture that you think is acceptable within your social circle um at least for me like there's this period discomfort when you change anything is everyone around you wants you to fit within the label there are comfortable .

with but they also have the anchor of what .

you were but yeah exactly and so they try like people don't like that and so they like, no, no. I like you in this box, so just say I know you having a little thing right now. I just and they just want to shove you back into IT and there's there's a lot of uncomfortable conversations that you have to have where IT becomes really socially awkward. Um and so like I said on the other day about like going home for the holidays and the reason I don't like doing IT is because often I have to confront a lot of people that I haven't seen in a long time and they'll speak to me in a way that I don't like and before that I would roll IT off like whatever no big deal, but I don't accept that.

Didn't you top do a family holiday couple of years ago? Many yeah .

I .

but that's the when your friends start to say you've changed, it's because they don't know how to say you've growing and because .

they see so few people who have so that makes sense that they don't have that. So I see that is a lack of skill, not not mAlice like it's not there are bad people, they just don't even know IT because so fee people do change ah.

so few people do grow. Have you seen this image is a person whose heart and head are flowers. It's kind of a two d draw.

It's a bit of a sketch. And they say this person with the kind of smaller flower head and heart says, you've changed. And the person on the other side with this huge blooming thing says, I should hope so.

Yeah, I haven't seen IT, but I see .

to my head. Yes, it's one of my friends. George mac told me this five years ago.

I think i'm astounded by how many people want to be spectacular in life, but also want to be Normal. By being Normal. You are, by definition, aiming for average.

Normal people get Normal results. Exceptional people get exceptional results. You literally can't do what everyone else does and expect to not get everyone else has got by doing what everyone else does. You guarantee average results.

okay. So this comes down to everything that like business, I mean obviously come for the business in investing role. Um like if everyone is jumping on to crypt out, like by the time you have all the information to make a perfect decision, it's too late.

And by the time of consensus revenues, like that's a good investment. IT probably isn't because it's already been misPriced, because it's already like it's already inflated and it's above what it's instant insight value is. And so like good investors fundamentally can think for themselves.

And it's such an easy thing to say in such a hard thing to do. And so it's being able to say if I shut myself in a room and I did come up with a value for something and just use my own mind to come up with what I think this is worth. It's that that answer that you get in a room in isolation with no internet connection, that you believe in that number more than every single other persons.

And most people can't do that. But like that ability. And there happens though is if you really have to believe in that rather than everyone else, you double check your fucking math. Because if IT is different than everyone else.

you have the up you like.

That is what? Oh, right, it's and you have the potential a ship money or lose a time of money because you didn't check your math. And so the more i've been reinforced for thinking independently in the beginning, it's on small things. And then you just continue to reinforce that cycle of ha. I came to this conclusion on my own IT seems different than everyone else, but I think I think my thing makes sense.

Somebody to do that, how would you advise someone to overcome that's regression to the mean that poll to not make waves, to not be heterodox or non typical when IT comes to their decision making because it's hard. You're talking about this internal conflict. There is external conflict. How do you make the internal conflict more important than the .

external conflict? For me, I was more miserable, trying to make everyone else happy that I am now with everyone else unhappy with me. And so I think, like from the social group I had before, I quit my job, before going all the way, like crown zero to today, I talk to no one from that time my life compared to today.

And I was absolutely miserable and unhappy and unfulfilled. And I would say that the majority of people probably don't like me today because I changed. I didn't do what I was supposed to do. He thinks you're so fancy now it's at sea, and I think i'm just OK with that.

And so I think coming to terms with the idea that I could be absolutely rejected by everyone I know, but like me, I was moral, okay with that, because the alternative was I didn't want to live anymore. And so obviously, there's degrees, there's continues, there's stages of where people are out with that. But as that being the taken to its logical extreme, what I rather live for them and live for me, I would rather be headed by everyone to like myself.

This a degree of. Honesty is the right way. Bit is also too simple, like being completely one hundred century. Fill with yourself if that's the weight that this is why I told you about the a moto cross, the rally cross, a thing that mean my houseman love. okay.

So you know, column ray, these guys that drive four wheel does the dude in the the copilot seat and its five left bands that shit, these guys that go to go and watch this are in the middle of some fucking wood in asia, right in scotland, and it's pissing wet. And it's november and they've got a pon show on and they get to drive for however long to get to this. But you even see thinking about IT the hairs on my understand that this is how fuck dopa is.

So these guys are there and they see some dude in overcast rain, freezing cold, soaking wet, go. And then they turn to the turn to all of their boys. And they like watching someone who loves anything with that much purity fires me up IT fires me IT like, we love watching.

We don't watch IT for what the cars are doing. We watch IT for what IT does to the spectators. And that degree of like just an incumbent passion, not being apology gitic like they probably probably wear in country shit, not want to cow by book, you know.

I mean, no one they look like like a large condom in this punch. Do they care? They don't can. And that purity, well, that's truthfulness and honesty.

And really like what what are you hoping to be able to look back on your life for people to say after you're gone, if you don't do that? He was such a good guy. He never rocked about there.

He was such a good guy, and he always confirmed to our expectations. He was such a good guy, and he was so predictable. And I people think, and I did throw a lot of my twenties, I thought that what people wanted from me was someone that they could easily predict.

But I realised when I thought about the people that I loved in my life, I didn't love them because of how predictable they were. I love them because of how unapologetically themselves they were. I have a friend who nearly ended a relationship that he's still with his love of his life.

He is probably going to went up marrying because he refused to not sleep on the floor for six months as part of a alec bec is doing at the moment. Like he's like sleeping the floor seems to be like a pretty dial a she's like, i'm not sleeping on the floor well, I am so so they didn't sleep together for like like a long time there like that. Those are the people that you love and those are the people that you can because they pay such a high Price to do that. Yeah, you can be very reliable at presuming that they mean what they are saying. Because if they didn't really mean what they saying, they would confirm they would take taken easier path.

I love all of that. My I was trying kind of consolidated for for myself in the listeners, for me IT IT just IT comes down to truly valuing your pensions of yourself more than other people's opening of you. And it's it's just it's an easy thing to say and it's incredibly hard to do because that means that if you disagree with everyone else in the room, there's this mean that I love.

And if you've seen IT, there's a little cartoon of this one little guy and then there's like an ocean of people that way and he just says, yes, you're all wrong and I just like I feel like that me my dk kash my brother and editor in the books in the battle against nyalong m and and towards the um we send that me back in fourth another when we're like, yes, everyone is wrong about this word like we are right and I think it's just being willing to like but the only way you can believe in a thing or an idea, even yourself, is because you have the evidence behind you that supports that your belief is in full of shit t so that when you're in that room and you come up with that one number, you say, I think everyone's wrong. I think this is actually what it's worth. You're not just making IT up to to say you believe something different.

You actually have proof and evidence that you're not full of shit. And I think that's the work is like I did. I looked into a lot of the stuff on the on live for sleeping. I think IT checks out. I'm going to do IT like, I think .

everyone else is wrong.

I think everyone else is wrong and everyone is like you're at IT and you're like, I think you're wrong and that's okay. You know, it's just most people can't do that. Just the idea of being weird is too much like just like do you see did you ever this .

is quite old now. It's at least a decade old. I think it's called fifty days of rejection or hundred days of rejection.

I love IT already. So it's A A series of experiments that you do every day for one hundred days. Yeah, there's a different one each day.

And one of them is asked for a free coffee when you got a starbuck. So I love you. Just say, hey, can I have this for free? yeah.

And it's I don't know whether IT escalate over time, but this, like weird stuff, things educ to people in public thinks ba. And it's trying to overcome that. So it's in your throat, you know, when you feel that and you take cheeks, get flow, everything kind of get hot.

Barry around here is that embarrassment? Is that shame? It's that what if they think.

yeah, why? yeah?

What if they think? why? Yeah, so yeah, someone should redo that if I could decade old now, but someone should redo. I think I certain ly called a hundred days with youtube that be a great youtube about to do one hundred, one hundred days of rejection or whatever that is next one. Next.

as one like I promise you, if you can actually go through hundred days of projection, your lifetime change because you will realize that at the end of the hundred days you still arrive and nothing changed.

It's i'm going to die ah that's the fear. The fear is i'm going asked to the coffee and they're going to say no and then everyone is going to laugh at me and then i'm going to be alone and then i'm going to be unshelled and then i'll be dead. Yeah.

it's cats rifles to death. We all do IT. And so I mean, obviously come from the sales background. Getting people to say no to me is something that i'm now to drunken .

newcastle goals where they're going tonight, darling, for a decade and a half on the street trying to give out response for a free entry to A A club night no one wants to go to you get good at rejection. No, that's only to think that um everyone is always going to campaign for the thing that they did, right? You're always going to say something longer lines.

I think people can learn lot from sales and i'm always going to say I think people can learn a lot from being club. But like honestly, do the the insight that you get in human nature from doing that, from seeing what do people object to and why do they object in that way and what happens if someone like its physical with you because you have tried to do and you go, oh, well, I wasn't in the wrong. So the escalating this should actually be quite easy.

And I can have faith that everyone's gone to see me as the right guy, even if somebody else took objection with what I was doing. So yeah, long story shall become a little promote. There's a big difference between becoming known and becoming respected. Don't let an algorithm convince you all the wise.

I mean, I think this is probably superperson for for people in our position um but i'll go from the internet perspective when we can to circle back to I R well but I mean, a lot of people will make contents.

I've obviously makes stuff for me too like talk about artist making things for themselves, like I make most my twitter just like notes to um but like if I ever feel like I have to sacrifice who I am, are the values that I believe in, in order to like get more views or something like that. I see IT happened more times than not because the algorithm in the views and the likes become kind of a proxy for conforming in in their own weight. Like everyone likes this type of thing.

Do more of that and that makes me feel very like dance muckley dance. And I think there's there's few things that kill my soul more than that. And so I would rather, you know, i'd rather allow them shot me off tomorrow.

And I continue to make the stuff that I find interesting, that ten people find interesting, that is actually the same stuff. Me then just have these viral hits that I feel like i'm ona mcDonald in um and just feel like i've completely lost my soul. And I I do think as a side note that if you do the first one where your intention step, maybe help to find the ten people who are really interest in your thing, you probably will create more of the viral hits. But when you saw for the other way, I think you accomplish neither.

I have this theory that more creators fall out of favour because they become cringe than because they become irrelevant.

I love that. Yeah, I love that.

I think it's, I think it's true. I think if you think about the thing that you do, almost anything that anybody is creating is public facing. Because IT wasn't public facing.

IT would just be a hobby. Doing your painting, because you love painting is a hobby. Doing your painting to try and sell IT is something that you do as a business or a public project. The fly wheel is so vicious in the positive direction, and even more vicious in the negative direction.

If IT becomes cancers, or uncool, or untr dy, or catastrophic, or cringe, to be seen to be watching or listening to or consuming, the thing that you make IT is you are permanently going to be swiming up stream. And IT is only going to get worse, which is why you look at shangri las is a really great example of this at the moment. He's someone who is greatest craft.

Big platform moved to Austin, got all of the multipliers in place, but he isn't crack and because he's not cringe. If you've watched beautiful dogs, his network special, it's not uncool. It's like this. This idea in publishing, i've been doing my research ahead of the book.

Does this idea in publishing called the subway test? Would someone be prepared to have the full dust jacket version of your book out on the subway? And if your book is like stop direct out this .

function direction problem.

yes, yeah, yeah, yeah. Like Normal flatulence today or something like if that's if that's your book, it's going to be very difficult or if it's written by somebody was like, oh, really don't want to do that. So and this is the point where there are tons and tons and tons of people on the planet who have huge platforms that nobody respect. And i've seen, even within my seven career of doing this, the arc of people trade integrity for exposure and not be able to buy IT back yeah because there is no return policy on your integrity, on your reputation and those people would give anything to be back in the cool kids club.

I I think this is like, I love this entire train. um. I was seeing like, what what create? Like what? What's timelessly not crack, right though? So like, if crinkles the ultimate, like what we don't want, then like, what is forever, not cranch.

And the only thing that I like really think of this is just true authenticity, which is an overused word. But again, easy to say, hard to do. I think what is what is forever crunch on the equal opposite IDE is is pandering.

Like whenever you're seen as someone who's only doing stuff for other people's opinion, approval likes whatever, especially double crank, when is for your own personal gain and so if the equal opposite of that is uh something that is to my personal detriment um that is truly something that I believe in IT honestly doesn't matter what IT is because there are some people that probably believe things that I don't believe but I genuinely think based on I see that they generally believe IT and it's and they don't really stand again much for believing IT there's no cringe there. It's like that men fucking believes that and I think that um some some of the characters are current politicians AR and things like that. Like many people, you know you say the word tromps and you have half you know people pay you on the other hand that love you.

It's like I think most people agree that he believes what he says now whether you believe the content of what he saying is a different story. But like, I don't think many people have called him as somebody who's like, I think he's he doesn't really think that about himself like I think I think he really does. And even i'm going to push the edges because as we have to like explore the fringe, look at someone like cya who's been boring, cancelled for having multiple types, right? But like why is cani quite uncancelled? Because he hasn't been right.

Not really. Like if he came out tomorrow with the his a hit album, I bet you would fuck sell because I think that he looks for me from what I say. I think he does what he believes and people might be like he's mentally unstable. There's only like no one thinks she's being fake. And I think that like if that becomes the north star of, like, I just never want to become crich, then I just never be fake.

I think that avoiding craning and aligning authenticity as best you can in its a permanent battle because you are not inside of a vacuum and you see other people doing things in, there is temptation. And you need to respond to the audiences feedback in summer gard, or also you're just going to be making something that nobody fucking cares about. But you also need to not compromise too much.

One of your old ones were related to this. People are attracted to authenticity, but it's hard to define for me. He is my best attempt, true alignment ment of what you think, what you say and what you do. The hardest part is realizing that our thoughts are fucked and that we have to fix them instead of faking the next two.

How hardly great.

He said .

that men, yeah, that's that one.

I've i've got a really cool idea. Herostratic theme. Many people would rather be hated than unknown. In national greece, harrods, atas burnt down the temple of artists as purely so that he would be remembered. Nowadays, we have nuisance influences who streamed themselves committing crimes and harassing people purely for cloud arastra tic thing.

Yeah, that's like the you gain the world, but you lose your soul kind of I mean, I am also the last person, the judge a and so like, if that's what you want, then by all means.

I don't think it's what people want. I think that they they think it's what they want. I've been playing with this idea on this name, one of the concepts that the book will be focused on, intentionalism and essentialism, by grammy humans.

One of my favorite of box. And I figured that would be a nice like had not. Doing what you mean to do and wanting what you want to want. Is so fucking hard to do and so rare because we built to conform.

I think one of the my life goals, and I can summize IT in a question, but is to be fearless and it's, I mean, equal opposite courage is another word. But I love this question, which is, what would you do if you, we're afraid and I just I love thinking about that what i'm talking about, big life decisions like what would I do if I were afraid and it's usually like the big one the the bigger thing that I really wanna do but i'm afraid to do IT, it's like that's what I should do um into your point about you have the five things that you told your team.

The one that we have is um originally IT was something that we called one of one which is make only things that we can make like you'll never see a coca cola business breakdown from all of this because anyone can do a coal cola business breakdown. That's not one of one content. But if I say I double the sales that this company by influence these four things, no one else can say that could no one said that right? Is one of one. And so as the book matcher will not came, we took one of one, and IT became this big, massive thing. And IT wasn't stop being about like what can only do things that only we can do.

IT was about doing things that we didn't even know we could do yet, which we can one of zero and that's why that became the brain that i'm gonna continue to work for the next few years um and feel Better association but I think that that kind of captain dates my personal life goal which is like, what would I do if I were afraid and what would I do if I didn't, if I knew I couldn't fail? And the idea that I will never wish for fewer epic stories at the end of my life and i've never regret failures, have always read the things that I didn't try. And so just along those lines of trying to create more bias internally towards action rather than in action and Normalizing consequences of failure as as we said earlier, winner learn.

And I think that that little frame, believe or not, for anyone who's like on the teetering edge of like what should I do that thing when I was debating creating my job, which is still the hardest decision i've made to this tag, still of the many that i've made um was I figured that if I didn't make the entrepreneurship thing work, I would have a health of a story for business school. And that was actually like the the reasoned argument that I gave myself for being willing to quit, was that I think that with my experience, are still be able to get a job and i'll have a really cool story of tremendous ship that I could use to apply to get into business school and eventually get a job later. And so most times we could assist y any failure to death, right, which is like i'm i'm going to fail on my money to e right? But like if you if you played out two natural steps, like, okay, I lose everything, what do I do? I would probably have a ck, ouch or floor that someone would land me because at least socially, I haven't been, haven't fucked everyone I know.

And so I have that. It's like, okay, so I would have some capacity to do that. okay.

Is there anything that I could do in the meantime in order to make money? Or sure, I could drive uber and strip? And i've ready have done the story before, but for me, that was genuinely my plane, because because I knew that I could probably make seventy two Green and driving over.

I never make one hundred and fifty stripping, maybe two hundred stripe the gay bars. The guys play Better. A and then, and you know, boom, i've got two or thousand years, I could live on the floor and then I could restart again.

And so that's because I don't have a lot of shame with that kind of stuff that's that like that doesn't matter to me. But I think playing out the fear blade less is this. And I love IT, but that fear is a small, wide inch deep.

And so IT looks like this ocean that you gonna p into and drown. But as soon as you step into that, you realized he was not that deep at all. And you can keep walking through IT. And I just love that visual because a lot times when it's like we have this exercise on this big decision we to make, if you actually take the step and realized that it's not death, you're gonna drown immediately. There's plenty of other steps you can take from there, even if you get a little .

that tell me my story about a friend who went through a cancellation .

and was worried as a coward. Oh, like like a public cancellation. yes. okay.

So I went for dinner quite a wild go now with this guy that I was pretty interested in and he knew what I did. And we want sort bumped into each other and what you doing, let's go for dinner. And I knew about the situation that he's been through, but he didn't know that I knew.

So I like tell me like there's no pressure and he was able to be on incubating and basically went through like a tough cancellation, where kind of the whole world came down to born him. And he would tell me the story. I was in very interesting time as like being very reflective.

And he said, my whole life i'd been worried as a coward. Terrified that was a coward. But i'd never been through a situation where i'd had to bring absolutely everything to bear on my life.

I'm a hard man, and I like to hang around with hard man and like to shoot guns and do jji zoo and be around navy seals and stuff like that. I always had this fear in the back of my mind that I might secretly be a coward. And then he said the cancellation thing happened, and IT wasn't a very difficult one.

Red max IT wasn't a really hard ross fit workout. IT was something outside of his control you use this term I love and he said I could always hear my Better self clearing his throat in the room next door. No, is wondered what would happen if I had to really, really rangle everything, if the whole world came crashing down.

My, I never wanted to work out whether now I can. T, he said, thankfully, kick the door and he came through. But I just love that I could always hear my Better self clearing his throat in the room next door. But he had never been fully tested and lots of hard things, lot of a claim.

Very successful ba ba, but we all know that's your thing, right? Like, but i'll know about whether or not you've left something on the table and yeah he there was always just five percent still in the tank when he was doing things but how he felt about how invested he was, he always had to get out of jail free card in one way or another. Yeah, I love that. I fucking I could always hear my Better self clearing his throat in the room next door.

Two things on that. So I think if we're consulting some of the points were making earlier, but i'll know refrain, I think that a lot of the personal excEllence comes down to making the but i'll know more important than the but every what will everyone else think? Because I think the true test of whether you're quote perfections st or not is if everyone else in the room says its exceptional and then you say, but i'll know it's not because I don't think it's exceptionally yet.

If you still break what everyone else believes is beautiful so that you can make the thing that you make IT the way you wanted to make, or make IT the way you wanted to be, I think that is probably like the the truest test of whether or not you really do value your own opinion over those of other peoples. And if you really want to be true to the quote, the art, whatever your art is, are amusing. As a generic term, IT could be the career or the even like the the the financial projection that you proposed to do with your company, like there is a way you could do IT and do IT absolutely fucking excEllent.

And there's we could do IT, they could phone IT in and probably not. But the things that you'd know, and then you'd be the type of person who always phones IT in, and that to me is disgusting, and that would make me disgusted with me. And that is the thing that would make me want to peel my skin off because I would heat.

And I think that's why so many people do hate them, because they do that all they do make these things, and they do now and still ignore IT. And so they ignore the man in the other room who's cleaner throat, and they shut the door and they lock in and they never let that guy in. And so they look like everyone else. They act like every else, and they get what everyone else gets.

AmErica was built on the backs of men who smoke cigarettes, rove without seat belts and had bacon for breakfast. If you miss your biohacking routine this morning, you're going to be OK. There's a time for leverage, but there's also a time for violence, which is just brook force.

People get really obsessed with optimal, which is getting the most bang for your book, is also maxims ing, which is just getting the most books. You lose more life trying to optimize everything than just living IT. The stress of trying to be perfect is killing you more quickly than your imperfections.

I think that's an ode to being being willing to take huge amounts of imperfect action towards one goal and being willing to sacrifice other things forever.

Extent appear to time .

despite the fact that of the people say they're making a sacrifice like we interest seasons. I could you know the season of no, which is where you have a extend duration. I say no about most everything and most people say that unbaLanced and they heard that as though it's a bad thing the like that so unbaLanced, you know like, yes, that's the point because if I had a baLanced outcome, then I won't have the outsides return on this one thing.

And so again, like there are so many these little insults that people will throw out you like you're a baLanced, you changed you that they intend as insults. But if you actually don't take your society programme response and say, oh, they mean to insult me, but if you actually think about what they're saying, they're saying something that's true. And then we just need to be OK with that truth because that was the choice we made to begin with. And so I think about that, a White, which is like how many things to people tell me that they intend to insult me. With that, I can take of the comment.

Didn't someone bump until labor walking down the street?

I was have been so recently so you were walking the street, someone bumps into I like we don't always walk like side by side is there's lots of people. So we like spt up sometimes and he comes back to me and he was like, guess what this guy to said, I was like, what? And he was like, he called me a skinny bit and I was like, what? And but you seem so happy.

I like and I like, like, I just kind of shook my head. Like, would tell me more like, explain he was like, I mean, he said I was skinny. And I was like, this is the this is the perfect example of him hurting an insult and heard choosing not to be insulted.

Thank you. Yes, thanks really. yeah. Do you really mean that?

Like like, I wonder how many times we've been insulted even in like in my Younger days where someone said something to me that like, if I had my current brain.

I could have been like, you really .

mean that thanks, mam. And yeah. Like, so unbaLanced, I remember I never took that as such an insult for such a long period time. Now part of that I was because when I I was being brought up, baLance was like one of the big frames of my household was like you have to be baLanced, which really just meant you have to be asked at everything but baLance that was the words of being unbaLanced, which was a term that was used as an insult and so um for so many years I wanted to be baLanced but then I was so like, well, nothing great was ever achieved by people who try to be great at all things and so as like, okay, i'm just not onna. I might not have a great relationship for a long create time.

I mean, there was like boat people another, but in the early days of early of our relationship, even when we were married, I told late for the first three years um I said the business comes for our marriage slot. People don't know that um and I was like, well to me that made sense was like most people break up over money. The business makes money, so the business feeds us and then we will be OK.

Now was kind of my thinking around IT um and we eventually flip that is like if were good, the business will be fine. Took three years to get there. But all that to say, like I think having periods of imbaLance and maybe to be fair, if we if I had at that priority at that time, maybe jim, what IT became. And so I can't look back and say like I should have done a different because it's really easy to say that now. But like, I might not be here to say that if I had been that way.

all of the burke's got this great framework. Ry talks about choose in advance what you're going to suck at. Oh yeah, it's in four thousand weeks.

And if you are a type a, go get a person who has what I called because of competence, your options in life are restricted mobile, what you choose than what you can do. You will feel this quiet when something that you used to be great up begins to slip because you've focused attention. You used to be in really great shape.

You said that one of your goals this year was to get a raise or to be able about your first house, or to find a partner or to do whatever. Hey, guess what if you're spending four or five nights a week going to places where you can may be date or going out on date or doing whatever, you're probably not going na have as much time to dedicate to the gym. If you want to get that rays or be able to save you your first house or whatever, you're gonna have to work later, which maybe means your friends are gna drop off.

If you pick whatever the thing is, there is a Price that you begin to pay. And this cycle began for me so frequently toward the backend of my twenties, where I would dedicate myself to a thing, then something else would begin to slip. So I would then go, oh, i'll just give a little bit, i'll just give a little bit to that.

And it's not an additive system. It's multiplicity. It's not two plus like three. It's two times three.

And that means that the more that you attend to the thing that you say that you're going to do, the more the games are crew to you, and then you can still pip IT back, but you need to periodic things. And this is, this is a frame that I wish. Even now it's it's still something that I struggled realizing that now isn't forever.

The thing that you're doing right now doesn't need to be forever if you are coming out the back of the searching for the partner thing and you like, hey, guess what? I gained fifteen pounds. So I will dedicate yourself for the next six months to go to the gym, but this isn't the rest of your life for and once that things done, oh, well, guess what i'm back to, you know, twelve person, about five. I feel great about myself. What's next is up forever .

yeah I just for now, yes, we have a frame that we actually use a lot. I always think about these things from a context, but they end up retroactively applying to life. Um but when we're making big strategic decisions, we say like which problems would you prefer? And so rather than talking about like the gains in what's the upside, if we have like you, we're going to make a big investment in software for this company.

We're going to make a big you know huge a new service line or we're going to decided to all the physical product, right? I mean, I know you you literally the just backhand f of of a big decision like this yourself. It's like, okay, let's imagine what the problems are gonna be. If if we decided to this new service category, well, some people going to complain that they are not getting results from this thing and we're going to but time like we might have some negative reviews in the short term that we're going have to deal with.

Like let's look at what IT happens when in one of our favorite customers talks to fuck off, like glitch, really sit in what each these problems is, and then when we when we spell out all of the problems and we don't even think about the upsides, so which are these problems we prefer and which are we more equipped to deal with? Sometimes we have really amazing innovation and in my opinion, like really solid decision making that comes affords that minimizes of the post decision regret because we also know what negatives would have come with the path unchosen. Because most, most times, like our regrets from come from the path and chosen because we imagine IT only with the upside, we only think about, I think there's a um there's a there's a book that where a girl lives many different versions of our life and midnight library, yes.

And the thing is that there's these pieces of her life that SHE imagine are going to be amazing, but then he realizes her best friends dead, or always shouting, she's pregnant and wow, what happened? And so we don't take into account on the paths not taken, the things that we would have lost along the way. And so I think really good decision making IT also regret minimization is that when you make the decision, you think about the downsides too and you've remember what those downsides are. And for me that has been one of my strongest frames for like I didn't decide to do that were all that oh ah those were a lot. I'm glad to those are problems i'm very happy I have to do with.

Now thinking about the perils of over optimization is something I brought with huberman last year. And you know I think a lot of people, every friend is very well on DJ that told me he was falling out of love with djing because he knew that he was damaging his sleep and because he knew how important sleeper was to performance, that he kind of got the bus school had been turned upside down a little bit. And the thing that he was trying to do was being sacrificed for the thing which is supposed to facilitate, and that's where the you lose more life. Trying to optimize everything than just living in the stress of trying to be perfect is killing you more quickly than .

your imperfections. All right? So I am glad we came back to optimization because um there's obviously the extreme there's guys like Brown Johnson with a blue print for china like live to two hundred and forever. And I I I respect that I respect dedication to anything always um and interestingly, around i've always been a maxims er so i've actually not really been an optimization in my life.

And it's like as soon as I have an input, output equation was like n equals x and it's like if I want ten X I do ten n am I great than can we do a thousand and like I just wanted do as much as that as a human possible. Um but when we like, I love competitors who like optimi zing because I always see you as a weakness because it's so easy to exploit. It's like all you need your eight hours of sleep or you need your morning routine or if you don't have your supplements, you're just totally fota like I didn't have my coffee this morning so I can't function like I love to compete against people like that because .

there's so easy to break.

fragile yeah and so what happens is the optimization become superstition, correct? And so my fear around and and maybe I take a more extreme stance on this, but like i've always wanted to be able to, with an internet connection, in a laptop, in a photo, out chair, go make money and always have, that is my north star, that anything else is extra.

And I feel like I lose more quickly when I get into this optimization cycle around cause I member years ago, I I bought one of those rings, that tractor sleep, and I kept trying like set sleep. P, S, and you can only get so high anyways. And then I started stressing more about not hitting sleepy ard that I was sleeping worse than when I wasn't tracking IT. And so then I was like, i'll fuck this and I SAT fine the next night.

And so um obviously, microcosm, i'm a big believer in tracking progress in general, but just the idea that we become so overly romantic around these things that sometimes you just have to brake shit and sometimes you have to be violent and sometimes when you're on your journey you're not onna sleep much and you're going to you're gna like there was two year period where I did turn once for gyms. I flew around the nation every month out doing a gym. I eat out of gas stations and I ate gas station food.

And I gained weight during that period of time, and IT was for them and not forever. And i'm in shape now. And so whatever, who cares? And so like, I used to tell this when I was selling weight loss of people, i'd say, like, who cares if you get in shape for six weeks out of eighty years? And like, right, is their petition for membership just like you wanted say that this is how we to set longer memberships. But like it's also true, like you, anna, sign up for the six weeks.

But like Susan, like who who cares if you lose twenty pounds and your still liver weight six weeks now, and then you gain IT back the next six weeks and you're still the exactly weight for the rest of your life? And so I I think the absolute dedication of maximization, so that becomes a part of your identity in your character that has been one of the outsides returns that i've gotten in my life and just being absolutely willing to act like I am pretty violent about this. But like, list all the things that you aren't willing to give up for the dreams that you have. And that is what the person who will be you is willing to give up.

There's a phenomenal blog post that talks about why guys aren't getting girlfriends and this is premodern mating crisis. So it's not it's not to do with like imbaLance on tender and all girl problem and or or letter. It's a guy who thinks that the bad minimum acceptable.

So he talks about how i'm always on time and and you know I hold the door open and I say, please and thank you and i'm nice to my mom and the dude i'll never forget that is this line in the blog post guy. He's like having this pretend dialogue. This imaginary person goes so fucking what? There's a guy who does all of those things and he plays the guitar.

Well, it's like the song, like baby, you the whole package and you pay your taxes. Um yeah I mean I think also to the same grief I me like I am no meeting whatever expert like no idea I got married early, did all the things that no 不要 and yet。 If you like, if you are truly you like, what's the most uncracked thing, right? Is you being you? I'm pretty sure that I turned away. Plenty of girls were like, this guy is successful. He's in shape, uh, you know, decent looking, strikingly handsome um but they'd meet me and they be like, what a fucking weird but the thing is is like that like and I remember I had um there were so many girls that I was like, you're pretty and I I just don't care at all.

So I like I just I wanted someone who got my peculiarities ah who was like not only like accepting of them but just like down for IT. And so I walked through most of my to be fair, as a sign of for anybody who like wants to quote, exceptional, you're going to be different and people going to think you're weird and like you might not get second dates, but real, real, you're not gonna want the second date too, because they're not like you.

Like when you get on plug, you're like, oh wow, everyone's sheep. This is weird and you just go on a zilia first states to be like you had another one. You had another one in every once a while you see a glimmer and someone who you're like how you think for yourself, like you can make your own conclusions.

I remember when later, and I want on our first date, we went at at a frozen neuro store. And so, of course, unlike. So you know how they make their money here, right? I like, so these things way this, they charged this proud. And I was like breaking the whole thing and SHE was like, oh ah and they do this in this and I was like, wait, you see this too like you IT wasn't like, just like alex was talking about the fuck.

So I was so excited because .

IT Normally I would just have to like talk, I will talk about the that at least I like to talk about because then we passed IT not good dating strategy.

and maybe when the time myself.

yeah. But then he also like talk about this stuff. And I was like, whole.

you should. And what's the alternative? The alternative is to find someone who falls in love with a role that you're plane, right?

That's the best that you can hope for, right? And then lock yourself in to a future of having to perform in a way that this person has become accustomed to. And there's nothing makes .

me more lonely that I can possibly match then pretending every single hour of every day that you're someone you're not.

Do you know who doctor Robert glover is? He wrote, no more, mister nice guy. no.

But I added the table.

had him on the podcast last week. This guy is a fucking boss. So cool, like mid sixties are something now huge goat, probably probably rip starts that this this office, by the way, is completely, it's like smoking enable to vegas. And he had three essences .

of an .

attractive man. And I think it's a really lovely frame, the essence of an attractive man. He's comfortable in his own skin.

He knows where he's going. He has fun while he's going there. Nail nail, so good, so good, but like that if .

you think about that is okay. So if if you're in like even like an attractive men, where if you're married or not, like I mean, on the flip side is like do you want to be married than choose become unattractive? No, of course not.

And so it's like if those are three ideals, it's like you have you have direction in your life. You're internally comfortable. And the fun part is what makes you I mean partially attractive. And I mind you if you just have one of the three you can you will find a way who's attracted like if you just no, with all you're fucking soil, you're going somewhere people won't really behind you even if you're not having fun and even if you're not kids and even if you're not comfort table in your own skin. But you're like that I like, no matter what, he's gonna fucking get there.

On the flip side, if you don't know where you're going and you don't know how much you're like, that guy, he is comfortable like, say what you want, but that guy is good with him. That's in a like that look like if you just have one and if you just have a shit lot of funny, don't know where you're going and you're not that comfortless like you'll still have people. I probably prefer the first to the third, but no, but like as ideals like fuck very strong.

The only insults that hurt are the ones we believe. Next time someone insults you, remember they're going to die. Everyone will forget about them. And if no one will remember them, then you might as well forget about them. Now they are relevant, your dream, your actions, your outcomes.

So now you know what the inside of my head looks like. Um I mean I I put almost everything immediately to death um and that's like maybe the coping mechanism, maybe it's perspective mechanism um but like here I I was really strongly considering have an parity um tweet profile of my own that I also run that no one would know that I run that is just like all my very, very controversial beliefs but throw a taste out now murder is just .

picking .

when someone dies. so. It's like if you hate someone, it's like you can just look at them, be like, oh, you're gonna die eventually like. And so like, the idea is like in your mind, you could murder every enemy you have. You just just don't IT to pick the time but I just find that so such as like murder only changes when not that someone's going to die. And so if you think about like retribution on something like this person said this thing to me, ah I want to kill him and so no, you don't have to die.

They're going to die already like you know you don't worry about they're and so it's hang so stilly but just connecting those two dots else like ow that's incredibly peaceful ving so like why have have been data when life will take care of them for me uh and so I just like you know as as a as a totally different frame. I was talking to somebody who has cancer uh, in my life and they were like really concern they're like this has as a ninety five percent mortality rate over the next five years and you know me being me, I was like, well, you know seventy rules probably have a sixty percent mortality rate the next five years anyways as like in life has one hundred percent orta rate so you know worse yes but like how much worse and so like, they didn't think I was funny, but. But just as as well, he was intended to be confident. I didn't sucessful, but all that to say, these things that people cast on us IT just whispers .

in the wind.

right? Like if we think that our whole meaning is, is so in fantastic, the idea that someone else can influence our trajectory when they themselves will disappear and become relevant.

seem so silly, and they don't have our best interest heart. Now they have the opposite of our best.

They are really trying .

to destroy you. What about the only insults that hurt are the ones we believe? What about that?

Oh yeah um well, I because I, like other people, get defended with things and then i've also had times where someone says something with the intention to insult and IT doesn't and I was like, how can I get that to happen every time and so it's the classic example of, you know, Chris, you have Green hair and then you would say, okay, whatever, sure but you don't believe IT IT doesn't really matter.

And so I think there's there's of a dollar de like lesson, at least for me in this, is that when we are insulted, I try to pay attention to IT because I think, okay, either there's something here that they're right about and that I don't like about myself, in which case the response is too great and that was so frightening into it's like if someone to recently had someone someone made something blessing me about, um I don't go home for the holidays I mean I mean this video about IT um and in the first five seconds of the video of course I like if you love your family, fucking go home this is not this is everybody else right? But of course not actually watches that who makes that peace a concept and so they just went went on this tired about me and I just said, god, I suck, period as my comment and because there's no the stock response to hate is to agree and one up so level one is agree. So someone says, alex are fucking IT and you're like, believe me, if you knew half of IT, if you think more than that, because is the only way you can respond.

And so my mental judeo for these things, and I just, I tried to put out the good news for your eyes that we get lots of practice right every day. We have people hating on us. And so I get to pray.

I people, people meet you in real life and in the trying to and so you like, do I have so many reps on this like OK? And so is this like, can I want up their install? Like if someone insults me, like, do let me, do you think that's good? Let me tell you how to really get me right. And so just a frame of agreement evaporates .

conflict yeah, that's your thing about most people are more interested in winning than being right yeah so you just say, sure.

you're right. Yeah, alex, you're an idiot. All of your business device is terrible.

I like, you're right. Now where do we go from here? right? Win that fun. And so we target like, like, like I like a human behavior lot, but it's like it's got it's a extinguishing of that.

So you when you pull a smart machine, when when no is the outcome IT knowledge es agreement is the ultimate of fire for insults. And I I think that like if the fast I I read programme, that it's like if you ever fuel insulted either, like first is IT is IT true. Like if you aren't solved to, do you believe them? Okay, but do I believe them because there's an omen of truth. If there's an omen of truth, why I mind som, I should agree with them. It's just because we have some ego behind you like I will only .

be perceived a certain way oh, maybe because it's poking a hole, it's wedging into the inauthenticity that someone has brought the light, something which we thought we were able to keep in private.

One of my other life calls is to die with the secrets. What should be because if we think about at least for me, if I think about authority to be seen as I truly am, then I would have no secrets and I know I tried really hard to not hold anything back content or otherwise um so that I don't need to have I don't want to have a hundred faces because if you always have something in the back room, that that means that to these people, are you this person, and this is in the backroom, these people, this person, the backroom.

But the fewer backrooms I have, the more everyone is in one room and I can be just me and that means that some people will hate me um and some people will like me, but they will actually like or hate me. Not the idea or some facet like we were saying earlier. But when you're in a relationship putting on the act and putting in the performer, they're not hating the idea of me. They actually hate me. And at least there's some weird about like at least that's true.

There's a lesson island from rob herman, which is like an interesting addition to what we're talking about here. And he asked the question, why do we feel insulted or why do our cheeks flush when somebody accuses us of something that we know that we haven't done? And the issue here is that we don't exist in a vacuum, and we care about other people's interpretations of us.

And the disinformation campaign, even if IT grounded in falsehood, can still negatively impact our status. So even if you know that this isn't true and all of the rest of IT functionally to everybody that isn't you or maybe many people are on you, or maybe some people who are infantile that aren't you, this can have the same impact as if IT was trip there. So that the man being in island, and I have faith in my own word there, as soon as you start to build this out it's does a reason the trapeze ation that I .

think so I trying to think about like the account examples. So like if someone attacks your character, right? So let's say ah someone comes out and says alex did some sort of sexual allegation or something like that that I know isn't true, whatever, but they say that now that's going to discharge my reputation right now can be like you're right and if you really knew right right? So I can.

If you knew the half of the um so like so like those are the situations, right? So like if someone just like you know you're full share your business, this is bad whatever, then that's one thing. Um but in those situations um the only counter that I have seen is too be louder. And so if someone increases the volume on something, I don't believe that you draw attention to that person. I actually i've more or less not been in the i'm going to address someone directly, but I may counter what this person says without addressing them and be ten times bigger and louder about IT as a way to counteract that.

And so like I had a bad reputation in college, which I i've showed some of that my story before um and the reputation was that I was a flatter and was you know all about girls, whatever and so I wanted to not have the reputation and so wasn't like I was going to go to talk to those girls like I needed to recall your story. Um I had to make my actions so much louder that I was no one gonna be that way for an extended period of time to counteract that thing. And so if we're thinking about like how to respond to people being cited to you, if you believe what they say and it's true, agree.

And one up if what they say is something that isn't true, but does the martial reputation, then you can only be respond by being louder with the truth. And I think that, like I I think about these things obviously were in position. We have to do with this all the time as like almost play books for dealing with shots.

Well, this is one of the things that people got wrong about. Dave porter, noise cancellation.

So dave had .

sex with maybe two, two or three goals that sold the story, no, separately or so, the story to the atlantic, I think pushing them. So saw the story to someone and they were they were looking right. I think they're still going and pretty sure that only a couple of months ago, they tried to notify some pizer event that he was doing.

Do you know that we're investigating him about that? Then he called me, so what's happened is there's been million me too, allegation. Things have come across.

People saw the way that dave porter, I responded. He came out of the fences, absolutely swing like swinging so hard, said, this is fucking bolic. It's baseless. I think you maybe even somehow had video evidence or or audio evidence or some kind maybe internal C C, T V cameras. Basically all of this stuff is dog shit.

People tuck dave point now, he didn't take any shit and he didn't back down and he didn't do an apology and he didn't do the rest like, yeah, guess why? Because he didn't do IT right? Because he wasn't in the wrong.

Yeah if you are the guy that did do the thing, yeah, you don't have that. That's a firm foundation. What you're doing there is just creating this like cathedral .

of lies and dog shit on t of a scam.

That's the thing. So learning, okay, why did he do this particular tactic? Well, he run that play because the basis of where he was at allowed him to allow .

to shit about the truth. One, one thing we talk about earlier with cancelling and I have so relatively contrary views on celling. Um I genuinely believe that you cannot be cancelled. You only you can only be cancelled in two ways.

You can be cancelled if you choose to stop making content, stop being public or all means and methods and channels of communication that you do not control, remove you from IT. So like for example, uh, there's state, right? And he had his like he's not allowed to be in the platform, but they allow who is constant in the platform. So has he been cancelled? No.

I would argue not still other .

plant and he continues to make so you only so to me, this is actually really um um on a heartland a security feeling and I get warm around that reassuring. Thank you. Um because that means that cancellation is you have to agree to be cancelled no matter how bad, like if you miss the plata yeah the part if they had A I face recognizing him and have limited different platform key would be cancelled.

Like there is no method of communication outside of a person who you'd have been no leverage agreed. But boring that if you continue to make content, no matter what you did, people will find out about you, more people will know about you, and your message will get disseminated. And whether you choose to like recant something that you did, you know like right or wrong, apologize or what David did and say, like this is complete bulk in milo UK term and just be even louder, you choose to be cancelled. And I I like that because I I like have of many things under my control again.

Yeah, I i've been like thinking about the streisand effect because everyone's always said, you know, cancellation makes people bigger. I think that is cope I think is a massive cope. I don't think that cancellation makes people bigger.

Alex Jones, for instance, when he got, he got about is close to one person. I think as you can get, very, very difficult. Wasn't seeing for the last one of a five years, eight years, whenever he got taken off twitter.

I wasn't seeing him on youtube unless I was on somebody else show. A, I wasn't seeing him on instagram. I wasn't seeing him on twitter. Steve will do IT as a good example as well that he can't even be in the background of other people's youtube videos and he's got shares and rumble in is doing all this other stuff. But still that's a pretty big unpersuaded.

And I think it's kind of cope to say, oh, but so many more people are searching them, like the entire internet is built on convenience. If you think that making IT more inconvenient for someone to access someone makes them bigger, you are fundamentally forgetting human nature. Now, maybe in this you know beautifully util italian rational view of the world, the person that wants to see the thing, they might go and get the thing, but it's like, hey, guess what? Like tiktok got an unlimited scrawl there and they're just gna keep going. And if they don't appear, they don't appear .

to draw this into I R L forever is like, okay, well, that might be convenient for alexia, ones who are not like he can't cancelled whatever. I think that, at least for me, the throw light on this is like, if you do some embarrassing thing, which happens, were human, the only way I compounds into being like a much bigger problem is, if you become a recluse, you choose to not go, not you to disaster. There were else like, you choose to agree the terms that the people around you are telling you, you have to go to. And that's why I think .

you can say no destinies got this idea. Tell me the story. I think he was like, vd, conor vd, summer twenty twelve, and that needs spread around a bit in his career.

And he was at this huge youtube r convention, and his x girlfriend or something got access to his twitter account and leaked his dick pix on his twitter while he's at this big summer things surrounded by his peers. So he's trending. So it's not only, oh my god, look what was happening on the internet.

Oh my god, the internet has now become real life and it's in front of me in the thousands and thousands of people and they all know what's going. And you know, finding nemo just keep swiming, just keep swiming from dorry. This is just keep streaming.

He says, everybody on your, remember the last four streams? Yeah, so sure. And if he went on first stream, just the chat is later taking the piece out of him.

And like here IT second second one, still lots and lots and lots of jokes. Third one, like a few less. Then fourth one, pretty gone.

Yeah, after four ve heard so true jodie got um like a british U K uh youtube a big guy and a few years ago his dams got leaked from his verified instagram account saying some like pretty duty sex stuff two ago. And shoes of age, shoes of age. Yes there was no I was like, I was kind of I guess I was intimate IT was intimate and like embracing.

I would have a friend. He was silent, pretty much silent for five days and then got probably the best roast comedian in the U. K. To come on. And anna ate him ah for twenty minutes in a video and put IT out on his own youtube channel and it's that be rabbit thing.

Tell these people something that they don't already know about me like, what joke are you going to make that Stephen tries like literally the most vicious, funny sonic U. K. Rose person hasn't already said, and IT showed that he could ugh at himself .

do this is the, so this is the take what they say one of them, right? And so like i'm they say.

find a person yeah is professional at one using them and then bring them in and then published to a million percent youtube channel yes.

like, so we actually teach this from a customer serve. I am going totally crossed pollination here, but we caught this. There can only be one person, the angry boat.

And so cosme comes in third shouting and I learned this from my like one of my earliest businessman, tors. I worked at a fur coat dealer, uh so like brushing you know, first at a glorious job. Um I was eighteen.

I was the summer and so this lady walks in and I was at the retail shop of charming house in the warehouse where the peasants were. And and so this lady comes in and she's making a whole mess, noise. And the guy walked towards mix at the owner.

And I seem like role as eyes. And then he he turns, turns the corner to go where he can see him. He, like his face, turns into a smile.

And then he like, he's like mr. Robinson and he just goes into rage mode. And I like what's happening and he was like, wait, there is a button missing on your jackets.

Like, give me that jacket. Like, post that I like, who sold this to you? Who let you walk? Did anyone see you in this? And and he was like, tell me their names.

Right now, i'm going to get they're going to be out of here. Like we're going to we're going to get terminate their employment. We're going to make sure that they never eat again.

All the stuff what and SHE of a sudden SHE but she's like, no, no, no, you know if no one saw me in IT, I just got I just saw when I got home if you guys could just of course we're going to fix IT like, no question what's and so of course he he takes the ticket. SHE leaves. He comes in the back and he just looked at when he was like, only one person can be in the angry boat.

And I he was a lesson that I stuck with me in like, and so in this, in this instance, everyone is angry at you. And so the only thing you, because people are contrary by nature, all you can do is be angrier than them at whatever IT is and so like getting the comedian to like, oh, you think he insulted me like, here's a picture of my cold travel dick after a nice coat after my polar plant you wants to see like, so it's like, can you do that? And it's just leaning into what feels unnatural, uncomfortable, but it's the only way to respond.

You cannot wish for a strong character and the nazi life. Each is the Price of the other. What if what you're going through isn't hard? What if you're just sensitive?

I think that most of us can look back on our lives two, ten years ago and think about the problems that we were dealing with them, and think about how much of the pistons in how small those problems were compared. The problems that we do today, at least at how I probably feel, maybe you feel the same way.

And so I then think, okay, well, if I feel that way about the problems that I had ten years ago, then ten years from now, alex will look back at the problems that i'm dealing with today and feel the same way. And so if he feels that way then about the problems that I have now, the the only difference is the perspective that he has that I don't have. And so I might just be a sensitive little panzi and maybe these aren't problems at all.

Maybe these are just facts of life and I need to habituates to them because i'm um my first lawsuit right is is like any business long enough you make enough money urge going to get that is what IT is and I was listening to elon must talk about this. And at any given time, tesla has hundreds of lawsuits at any like just they they have they have massive departments of legal just for all the different things that are going on. And IT was thinking that a requisite for success is a problem like you cannot become the wealthiest man in the world and not get suit.

Like getting suit is a is a indicator that you're actually is a is a rec visit for being there. There's no no person has been there without this. And so reframing what I used to consider a problem as a, as a point of evidence that I am on the path that I originally chose.

I remember the first time that I ever tried to incline chest press twenty key los. And as I got IT up this in the center of a sporting excEllence and newcastle gym, and as I got IT up there, I didn't have the try, some strange to be able to keep IT. And I watch this thing slowly come down, and they just landed on my nose.

And I like to be bailed out of my nose. It's not even, it's not even the warm up to the warm up to the warm upset. So the problem is that we don't have very good memory.

We don't have theory of mind for ourselves. For a previous version of ourselves, I always thought that there would be such an amazing tour, maybe neuroengineering at some point in future. You know, people want to go back in time.

They want to see a different place. I would love to go back in time in my own mind, and remember the texture of my own existence. And what were the things that I thought about? I've told this story before IT pretty illustrative.

Day one is a journal that you can use for your phone is pretty. And for me it's big shit, big thing to happening if I open day one some some fucking and shit going down um and break up and illnesses and being worried about people dying whatever. I once opened IT to write down that the M C.

In room too the RMB room of a saturday night club night had told me that he was leaving to go to a competitor event fifteen miles away. And I remember thinking that I was so silent to me that he deserves to go in along with break ups. And and do I go in this reality T. V.

show? Or do I know, because I was added, that that would be the beginning at the end, because the only reason that asian sock, the asian society, came down was because they like this particular emc y. And if he went, an asian stocks would stop coming.

And if asian stop, stop coming, then that would mean this. And then then the whole business would go, and i'd be dead, but I don't think that anymore. And there was one, there was one time where I hadn't worked our events for quite a while.

And A D, J, I used to work first came through, and he thought that he'd wind me up. I saying three minutes before we opened that something was up with one of the C. D jays, up with one of the C D jays, a couple of minutes before you open.

Things are bad because there's usually not a spare and IT means that the nights going to be delayed or whatever. And there was lots of people outside waiting to come in or whatever IT might be. And he was expecting a response from a previous version of me, which would have been the one that would have gone into day one and typed about the fact of the C.

D. J. Hasn't worked and I just said, oh, okay, I don't know. I'll fix IT and he called out, broke the fourth wall and said, I like, it's not broken at all like I just thought that I wind you up but didn't play the game all right? It's the like you've grown or you've chinese .

thing he was duke the don't punk the game? Yes don't punk the game yeah I think the the point to always punk the game as many times to be possible, especially for you, the one getting the game played on you by yourself.

What's your framework for quitting? Things are moving on to something new. How do you know when you're quitting because you're being a bitch? And how do you know that you're moving on from something that's no longer worthwhile.

man? So there's there's a handful of questions that I think everyone faces that um you never know the right answer to. And so it's like how much is the right amount to invest versus consume is one of those answers like if you have if you consume nothing and you invest everything into you tomorrow, you end up with a life for you enjoyed nothing and then you have a big pilot.

H delayed gratification in the extreme.

results in no gratification. And so like these are, these are rather than either or their continuous and to be managed more than a problems to be solved.

And so I think just from a decision making framework that number one um number two is a with regards to this one, which is do you push do you think that which is how I I frame this question pushing like to I push through whatever this hardness is and there's like something that's insight that I think I can go to or their fundamental things that have changed that make my original hypotheses wrong. And so i'm i'm telling the secret right now, but for me, I won't quit if no new information has come to light. And so if I say i'm going to do this based on these assumptions, if those assumptions have have still held, then it's a push situation. If there's new data that's come to light that changes the nature of why i'm pushing or the outcome for what i'm going to get from pushing or the way that pushing is incorrect, then I would quit. But quitting has a lot of heavy terminology in that's a personal motivation mastor ation have.

It's much softer.

alright, because I think that everything is a pivot except for stopping. And so I think even reframe IT like language matters a lot and I care a lot of our language. And so like nothing is cooling unless you stop and if you continue to pivot and you continue to push either of those or activity.

And so you will stumble upon something that does work, in which case do more of IT. Um and so that has always been my friend, but it's I have an initial assumption or series of assumptions for a desired thanks. So let's say I want I want to build my social media brand.

I say, okay, I believe that if I makes you know content about things that no, no one else can make content about, that is more higher level business stuff that is out there because most of youtube is youtube is on business people. There will be an audience for that. And in the beginning, I will have fewer people who follow IT.

But if I make really good stuff over time, eventually people will tell people and I will get Better making content and that we will grow. So if I met you two and and it's and the thing is, is like, do I have leading indicators? And so even in business stuff would like we D I don't need the outcome, but are the lead leading indicators that are telling me that i'm on the right path.

And so identifying and had a time just like we have a problems that we identify, like, okay, if we succeed, like people in restricted in the street not able to go out as much, like all these, those, these are problems I have to do cool, i'm willing to pay for. But what are the what are the things along the way that will tell me that even though I haven't achieved mr. Beast m, that i'm on the right path.

So I think having those little indicators allow to keep taking steps towards the ultimate and continue to push, I mean even a different um tweet, which is that the world belonging to those who can continue to work without seeing the result of their work continue to do without seeing the result of their doing. And it's really the person who can do that for the long as period time. And that's usually because they're still getting leading indicators.

It's just that it's a mounting to a much bigger mountain. And so like if you want to do big shit takes a way longer period of time because the easy shit, the little hills, everyone caucus really quickly. I'm on time. I say please and thank you.

It's like, so fucking what? And so like if you wanted do something that most people can do literally to extend the time arizon on the things that most people can't weather, like there is so much opportunity on the other side of being willing to persist for extended period of time on the correct path without getting positive reinforcement. Formal environment in the longer you can stick with something without that positive feedback loop in terms of the big extra nal thing, the easier the opportunities are because so few people can pursue.

In James gray atomic habits, I think he interviews maybe the chinese weight lifting teams head coach, and he asked, what is the difference between the absolute elite world champions and the ones that simply qualify? And the coach said, the absolutely to the ones who can continue to come in every single day without getting bored. That was IT.

And my phrase had talked about IT as well where he says that doing an hour and a half of mono structural work on the rower you've got ta do zone too hey, guess what? You don't even get the benefit of feeling like you worked that harder. You just get to .

yeah whatever like twenty four .

strokes are many or something like slow zone to whatever whatever the thing is. Um but no one fired up for that, he said. People make a mistake in believing that i'm fired up to go and do that session.

I'm not fired up to go into that session. I just going to do that session. We've saying um .

so there's a lot of people they like do the work. And in the margin, it's continued into our stuff today. But do the boring work is what we caught and boring is will make you rich boring the boring activities.

It's the it's the double checking the emails. It's writing the follow up sequence that you really don't feel like writing. And onest ly just getting IT done will make you significantly more money than not getting IT done.

And so it's like it's it's it's falling with a lead from a month ago and just been like, hey, by the way, he stancher than that thing. It's the stuff that you don't want to do. Like no one's like I can't wait to fall with these needs that haven't responded the last two text messages I sent. But if you respond, if you follow up to everybody, you will make more selves assuming .

that it's an effective strategy because there are ways that you can continue to check away and do a thing with no positive enforcement. But hey, guess what? That's the direction that you've supposed to be going in and you're walking over there.

That's a pushing and pot, right? Like if if if no one response that I would say I have zero leading indicators, but if you're have enough response rates, then it's worth the toil. Um but I I I so mean Michael phelps talks about this too with with swimmer like just lapse after lapse after like he is you have the Ariely of like different moves.

There are different like it's just labs, just share volume of work and um. I call the rocky cuisine. And almost every successful person that I have ever encountered has gone through not a month or a year, but many years of doing work without reward, where they have to do things that other people find oring, and they have to sacrifice things that everyone finds interesting that most people want to do during the entire season of their life. And they basically sacrifice a season of other things that they would prefer to do, to do stuff that they would not prefer to do because of the one thing they want most. And that's .

the rocky cuts in.

And instead of lasting five minutes, just usually last five or ten years.

you're going to lose sleep. You will doubt whether in will work. You'll stress to make ends meet.

You won't finish you to do list. You'll wonder whether you made the right call and have no way to know for years. This is what hard feels like, and that's okay.

Everything worth doing is hard, and the more worth doing IT is the harder IT is the great to the payoff, the great to the hardship. If it's hard, good IT means no one else will do IT more for you. I think a lot of .

entrepreneurship, even personal growth, is training yourself on how you respond to hard.

Because in the early days.

hard was who stop. This isn't good. I should I, this is a warning sign. This is a red flag. I should slow down, I should stop and I should pip IT. But the more I think about IT as a competitive landscape, as i'm clear on what this path, this post, look like in these rocks and these dragons are things that i'm going to have to slay along the way to get the princess's, get the treasure. I get happier about the harder IT is because I know that no one else .

will follow with a selection effect.

And I think if you can, if you can shift from this is hard to no one else will be able to do this and it's a flips from being the thing that you're like o poor me to o poor everyone else who's going to have to fucking try yeah and I think that is so much more motivating as a frame for the .

exact same circumstances. Ah that's awesome. I was thinking a lot about the lonely chapter that we talk about the last time. That was the best, most powful idea, I think, that we came up with. And if you see, they're basically being no shortcuts toward getting the thing that you want, there are ways to be more and less efficient. There are ways to do things with more and less of a positive disposition, which can actually make the journey fail and off for a lot easier. But ultimately, if you assume that largely everyone needs to go through the same chAllenges that you're going through, every single diff ult thing that you do is kind of like a massive wall that you need to get over and you go, well, fuck, i'm so glad that i've got over that wall and think about how many people are going to be selected out is like the hunger games, you know, think about how many other people are going .

to follow that wall that people only rule for people who don't need IT. Like the amount of times when I was on my lonely path where I was too different from the friends that I had, but not successful enough to be friends with the people that I wanted to be friends with. That's when that's when you want people to root for you.

That's when you want people to support you once you've already won. People like he's amazing, he's so good, but like that the time when you need at the least. And so you always .

have to be the person .

who routes for you before I only asked us. And it's usually a single lap in the auditorium for a very long period of time. IT is a slow cap that's just you rooting for you in that visual, I think, is one that you can kind of take because IT is. People struck to do things alone, and the path of the exceptional person is one of an exception, which means that you are not with other people. And rather than fighting that or bemoin IT, see IT as an indicator that you're on the right path because if everyone else were cheering you on, then that means you're not in the right place because that means you're just like everyone else and that's not really want to be.

It's an interesting paradox that. The energy requires to start doing something is way more than the energy required to continue doing the thing. And that the beginning of doing anything results in the lowest amount of reward called internal index tunnel, then when you've been doing IT for ages. So I think about this a lot with the show that there is this, that that spotify told us, eighty five percent of the listeners of the show found this in two thousand twenty three.

right?

And I thought at the end of twenty twenty two, remembering at that point i'd been on rogan, we were like six hundred and fifty k we've got, you know, we've been doing five hundred, fifty, six hundred episode 的 deep like i've got IT。 I've done the thing like this is this is me doing, if this isn't cking doing the thing, i've moved to astern, texas. I've gone one VISA. I've got like to all the rest this stuff john Peterson been on twice. You've been on and yet the what everything up until that point is two months .

of growth. yeah.

I mean, we made we made more money for just from a revenue perspective, we made more money and more subs in one month, december of last year than we did in the entire first three and half yards of the show. So it's this odd paradox. And one of the things that you need to ensure i've had this idea about protect your passionate all costs, because if you, if you begin to hate the thing that you do, you negatively change your trajectory.

And that means that at the time when you can benefit the most by every single unit of work, which is the later that you go, presuming that you continue to hit, that emerge ject ory. If you've completely killed any passionate desire to do the work in the early stages, because you've you've not protected IT appropriately. That can be by focusing on the wrong things, by not rewarding yourself, by not building IT with people that care about you, by, you know, not celebrating when you hit milestones, all of the things that actually helped to keep you going, doing your character, by the time you get to the stage where each unit of effort allows you to gain a thousand or a million of each of the things that you would have.

On the very beginning, you've inverted the like, the passion equation takes way more energy to start a thing than to continue doing a thing. And yet in the beginning, the rewards away lower than they are at the end. But if you don't protect your passion, your motivation is at its lowest when you are at your highest amount of efficiency. In sense of returning a time put in.

I think a hopeful message that anyone can think about is about who's in that hard period or in that start period is that IT won't get harder. Like this is the hardest part. And so if you can just make IT through this, everything else is downhill.

It's not that the things that you're the drugs are going to slow are gonna bigger. They are. But you becomes so much more quipped to slay them back.

And you have so many more allies. You have people in the stands cheering ing for. You have the audience, you have all of these other things that are behind you. But at the beginning, it's just due with a stick against a bear. And arguably that fight is a harder fight to win, then beating a dragon when you have a nuclear bomb and six nations behind you.

And so it's not even like the the size of the hardship is just also the resources and how few of them you have and how so much of the beginning is literally burning. The one thing you have, which is time, because you have no leverage, you don't have the money to pay other people to help you. You don't have the resources to go like get someone to to do you.

No one can learn IT for you. It's like there's a lot of the things that that we care about, a lot like no one can work out for you, doesn't matter how much money you have, no one can to learn skills for you. And so in the early days, like IT feels so painful because you're like, you look around to see who can help you and they're like, fuck, it's me again.

And I think getting comfortable with the idea that each of these things kind of like slum dog millionaire. You ve seen that movie where he, i'll give you the T O D R. He goes to his entire life of randomness, and he gets on who wants to be a millionaire version in india.

And IT has twelve questions to make a million dollars. And from only twelve rym m experiences in his life, that seemed meaningless at the time, was able to answer all of the questions, and then ultimately win the skills that you develop along the way. Like Steve jobs learning calligraphy that then became apple thoughts that, you know, transform how we type those early days, that little trench winning in the weeds often times gives you these huge advantages later on, because you've more context than anyone else.

And so rather than lament them and hate the fact that you're going through IT, remembering that these will be arrows that you put in the quiver that you're going to be using to slay the future bigger dragons. And so. Expecting IT to be easy, as what makes IT much harder than ever .

is I always loved owning my strikes with the things that i've done, whether IT was with nightdresses running the podcast or doing whatever. And I think that I could degree in ability to IT, but functionally, that's kind of that's just like it's nothing like nobility.

But I think the reason that you can feel noble about IT and the reason that IT gives you a positive reward is you know that you understand every single inch of the things and that if you want to hold a conversation, we went out for dinner with our new CFO and and accounts people on saturday and they said, you ask a lot of questions. Most people don't ask so many questions. And I also don't care at all about accounts really like i'm not doing this the money, but they said you ask other questions as I will.

I don't ever really want to walk into a room and not be able to hold my own, at least just competitor if it's to do with something that I care about. The same thing goes for this, like I I started you to learn about focal length and frame rates and negative fill, reverse contrast lighting. And then, sure enough, two years after we started doing IT a bunny of different, I sent the instagram thing, like this really awesome film, instagram, that i've been following for ages, picked us up for what we were doing and gave us props, independent of the turkey thing, which is fundamentally what we're here for.

And we created this entire new industry of, like, cinematic podcasting, which was recognized by, as far as i'm a, well, like the best cinematic, it's called film light. At film light, people can go to see an instagram like the best decoder and analysis of cinematography. And two years ago, when we saw, I remember thinking, fuck like, I love the way that they have broken down.

What happens in ad astra? Oh my god, the whole thing was shot on thirty five million each. Different scenes, got two pairs of colors and stuff like that. And then, but the reason that we were able to get there, at least in some part, is I can have a conversation with people. So each of the things that you do when you not only win in the weeds, but live in the weeds, then allows you downstream from that to see the things that are the people are seeing.

There's a quote that I love from doctor cash. I probably butch IT, but experts have more ways to win than beginners to. And so if an expert goes into any setting that their expert in, they have so many faster feedback loops that reward them in the moment before the old man outcomes.

If you're a master video editor, there are so many things you can do that while editing. You make one change and then IT looks right, you a positive e book loop. And so I think when you're on the start path, you can't look at the outcome is the only positive because you will never make IT.

And so the positive thing that i've always use is sure you can have the external ones of, like, I like thinking about my first videos s had like thirteen views. And I like, well, if I had an audience of thirteen people used to spend years pitching in weight loss stuff to room of, that was fine. And so thinking about that way was helpful.

But the the most helpful frame was thinking about who I was becoming as the asset that I was building. So in real time, whenever I finished a long day's work, I was becoming more like the type of person who could work for five years without reward. And that would be part of the story I would somebody tell.

And so some of the biggest reinforces i've had in my life has been future casting the story that I would tell about the city period that I was in, like, I remember when I was sweeping on the floor, my gym had enough enough money for two rents, and I was like, I was fucking tell this story. And when I lost everything for the first time, I like, I have the screen shot of the big shot. Like when I show up, people like I look, there's that thing, but they forget that there was a person whose screen shot IT to be like this won't fucking happen again.

And I think having a larger narrative of where you're ultimately going, one gives you the vision of where you're like the room not like knows where he's going. But IT allows the dragons that you have to slay along the way, the hard things that you have to overcome to feed into the larger narrative of of the story that you'll sunday tell, until, like, no one ever tells stories of about the hero who made IT all happen immediately and had no hardships, no one cares really like, okay, you were born to a billionaire. E, is there a story there? Not really.

But everyone loves the story, because we can see ourselves in the character and how much we hope to be like them. And it's the being like them, not the having what they have that we usually like. And so reframing ourselves as the hero of that narrative in my harder times was what really got me through that in thinking I will tell the story someday if you heard rogan .

talk about the be the hero of your own story thing. Um do this is old now I think this is maybe maybe ten years old, ten years old. And he's in one of his old. He's in the L A podcast studio and he says, imagine that you're in a movie and imagine the movie begins now and you're the hero of the movie. What would that guy do?

Yeah, what would that .

guy do right now? Because you are.

I just got in a business um so actually just made the investment in school um and I was talking to sam, the founder and I said.

what sim sim sim what's sim sim that's why he says is no yeah um and I was .

and I was talking to him I said I wanna give you the single easiest raiser to predict my behavior and I said, whatever will be the most epic story is the thing that I will most likely do and so often times the most public story is not the shortest st outcome to Victory its the long saga that results in this big thing later, eventually and as like if you never want to know if you're like, i'm not sure what he's going to do in this situation.

Just wonder what the most epic story to tell would be and that's usually what I would do and I enough that self grandison but that's that's genuinely my raiser for even making that is like the big decisions about, okay, i'm in a sell gim watch. I'm A i'm a mAriella. I'm a slump and live at the gym. I'm going to fly around to turnaround.

I'm going to start this whole idea of a media company that just gives exclusively like how how do I put all this together? It's like what would be the most epic story? And I thought of this idea, just like when I think about who that story I wanted tell us, is this billionaire that documented the entire thing the whole way and just gave, because I always thought, like, I wish that you, on musk and and warm buffer and all these guys would have, like in jeff basis, like would have just like I would love to have ve seen one hundred and ninety seven amazon content and a lot of the content in terms of like it's getting five views.

It's like it's o because when we make IT, they're onna come back and to watch this so I don't need them to watch IT today. I want them to know that it's here when I do and I think that had got me out of the the loop of IT. I have to win right now. And then every one of them is just dropping a corneal or a bread. Come for future me to refer back .

to until you win. If IT always goes unnoticed, get used to IT. No one roots for you until everyone roots for you. That's just how IT works.

yeah. People only root for those who don't need to be rooted for.

it's. Strange to think about how memetic and fallible everyone mean you. Everybody is listening to this is.

Does stuff that i've said on this podcast for like six years since the first time that I ever said seven years, and it's only been within the last eighteen months that gone viral. It's the same sentence, the exact same sentence said into the same microphone, slightly nice lighting. And in some ways it's reassuring because you got a fuckyou knew that was right.

I knew that thing that was saying was right. And I kept saying IT until people realized that I was right. Another part of IT is the media matters more than the message. In many ways, the frame matters more than the picture.

I would say that the medium, the medium in the message are inextricably linked. Like if elon musquets ts, i'm taking a shit, IT will get zealand shares. No, because he's the rigorous man on earth and has done more auto pretrial endeavors that have pushed humanity, I think, more than anyone else at this point.

Like you can't separate the message from the messenger member. When I was in middle school, I learned this lesson where I was in spanish class. And there is is the class clown or whatever.

And I was like, I want people to laugh at my jokes. And so I made a joke that was a joke that that I probably would have made. And IT was a sf application joke.

But the thing is, just like that guy was kind of a bomb, and like him, making self application jokes made sense because of the contacts who he was. But I was a straighter student who was really good at sports, and no one thought I was funny. In fast forward, you know, ten years there is a joke that had in our for tourney, which is there's nothing funny about IT in shape, body.

And so like the I agree with you that the the medium of the message matters and so people won't root for you because we use the the delivery mechanism usually as a filter for whether we should even trust the source and so I tell the story of the the teacher who's talking about dollar cost averaging into the S M. P in giving investing advice like they might be like, man, like I give Better investing vice than warm buffer does like he saying, the same thing is me. It's like, and you know what, you're probably right.

The only problem is you didn't build bircher health way, and so no one gives a ship into. The thing is, is that we use someone's evidence in authority as a filter for how little we need to process the information. Because if you're listen to a teacher, you have to then think, okay, can I separate the message from the person? Can I independently analyze this and say, is a good as a bad?

If form buffett says you should buy this, you don't need to analyze, you figure he knows more than me, he is more perspective, and I will just take IT as fact. And so it's actually lazy consumption on behalf of everyone else that gives authority so much resonance and so much share ability because they're also protected. Because if you share something, elon says you're protected by elon in his brand. And so the hard work is getting to the point where you have the evidence that people are willing to feel safe agreeing with you. And the only way for them to feel safe agreeing with you is for you to disagree with them for a very long period of time until you prove that you're right.

Roy sutherland s got an I, D, A where he says no one gets fired for hiring K, P, M G. yeah. And its three people would sooner fail by following a blueprint that's been done before, then risks succeeding by trying something new.

Because if you try the new thing, any failure is on your shoulders. If you follow the b blueprint, even if it's being total dog shit. The last ten times you tried that, but we follow the blueprint.

We did the thing that was the same before. Michael mAlice, like post literal professional internet ural, told me when we were one of the first time that we met. I wouldn't able to say one tenth of the shit that I can if I was told of them.

Five for seven he's like a small guy but he can get away with being kind of like the low key of politics on twitter because if he's in six of five and built like Allan Richard her, it's gonna m like he's bullied but it's something funny about him like, you know, dipped, dip in away. There's also something the leg until you win effort always goes unnoticed. I realize this with, and any, made me like a little desperate, how falling people are around success.

So you remember Billy much fAllen guide that did fire festival, that festival at public rescue as ireland, and then everyone got surrounded and early died. If he'd been able to pull off and even remotely possible event, people would have hailed him as a marketing genius, though, regardless of the fact that he was continually flying back to new york to raise money in an unethical way for a project that I didn't know if he was going to work in all arrest this stuff. So literally, the line between. Charleton grafter, who's out of his depth and visionary pioneer, who makes things work when no one else believes that they can, is just outcome.

Everything's crazy to l works. And so I mean, if if if you think of of the outcome as the trump card, then all of the pain and suffering that you lead up to that point, if you're just I not think of a an appropriate saying, I say balls deep, certain that no matter what you will die or you will get there, then the likelihood that all of the things that you've done up to that point will then be justified in retrospect is super high. And I actually see that .

is super .

um compelling as as a thing to watch onto in harder times.

Yes, but the end justifying the means it's a .

slippery slope. I'm a monkey in guys. so.

Have you seen speaking of that, you mentioned Robert Green. And earlier on, you should buy the twenty fifth anniversary edition of four diet laws of power to came out last year LED about golden boss. Have you got IT? And you've seen the thing that is.

yeah, this face .

is very good.

super printing.

And so with the people that don't know, you remember you would get those things in packets ts of cereal when you were a kid, and you could sort of move over a little bit of plastic from that, right? You would look like a football play was running on something like that, basically the same. But on the edge of a book, if it's flat, it's just gold foil.

If you open IT one way so that the pages splay out its robot Greens face. And if you open this to the pages, spay out the other way, it's mackey values face the fucking coolest book just and i've seen a lot of influence of gifting of book is a big deal at the moment. You send the back out and maybe they will post that help sales.

And there's some very elaborate ways. I'm sure that you've received some of these. I know that you're on the same mAiling less that the some of these that a super, super elaborate.

And I remember being like that was like, I know cool or whatever, but that Robert Green book as soon as I saw that I did that, i'm sending a fucking video of this to anyone that I can. This is like, magic. So yeah, what is that? You're doing sales because you sucked up marketing. You doing marketing because you sucked a product .

that's a great of olives. M he had so funny because um like with the the book much, I I idm do any of that. I just always I wanted people I want people read the book because like if someone posts about the book before the books out them, like I wanted no one to have read the book until the day was out you know um the logger i've been in at least the business game and we were talking about legal foods.

Um it's just product like I had a romi way back in the day who is now really successful entrepreneurs were both like early day's poor shit we haven't live together and he read this book, he just told me the title I just like stuck with me. He said too good to fail and I just love that as a frame is like if I open a sandwich shop, how can I make the sandwiches? Too good like, just if someone takes a bite, they're like, fuck, this is the best sandwich i've ever had like, if you just get that, then the rest of IT doesn't matter.

And so when you're like, I mean, I think about this some business decision, the probably also in life decisions is I think ten fairs talks about this. The one big domino is like, what is the one thing that if I just get this one thing right, everything else drinks into irrelevance? And I think about that from, like the hero story, what you say with joe rug, which I love that frame it's like, okay, boom, now you're present in your movie.

What would that I do? It's like, well, what one big thing that guy accomplished that would make all of the all of the mediocrities of your life up to this point or relevant? And why are you're not putting every single outs of your effort to prove that one point so that you could then justify everything at that point? So IT wouldn't have been mediocrity. IT would would have been the path together exactly you. That would have been the journey.

People want to find that passion, but you don't find that you created. And you created by getting good at something. And to get good at stuff, you start by doing something you sucker. Then you get good, then you like IT. Then people ask how you found your passion, answer by starting when you suck and not giving up.

I hate the passion mantra I really do. I mean, part of IT was because i've even I even played out. So I I read all the same self hot books early on when I was in my watch burial days. And then I was trying to find my passion, and I was into fitness.

And so I was deciding between fittings test because I was good to test, and frozen yogurt because I like desert, right? So I like, these are my three, quote, passions, which lets just translate that into things you're interested in. And so as soon as I started the gym, my passion disappeared.

IT became work, and I had a different tour later in my life. I had never create work around your passion because they never become work. And he was a guy, a very successful business guy.

And I think about that actually more than I than I share because it's just complete an other bullshit because IT assumes that what you're going to be doing everyday is the thing that you're currently really interested, which also doesn't make you money. And so your behavior has to change. And whenever you're doing these new things, one they'll be new, which means you will sucked at them, which means you'll probably not like them, but it's also part of IT.

And so like I would prefer to take the extreme opposite position of everything will suck and eventually you will get good at the things that you suck at and then you'll enjoy being competent at that thing, which will then probably give you status, and you'll enjoy the fruits of status more than the pain of doing things. And so doing create a positive feedback loop that you'll actually keep sticking with IT. And so i'd rather set the expected that everything is terrible all the time forever.

Now lets see if we can make up. Now lets see if we can become the person you can still do IT anyways. Um and start that is the baseline rather than trying to assume that I need perfect conditions in order to start because I mean, starting is the perfect condition like whatever condition that you're in that you start was the perfect condition.

There is such a thing as intrinsic motivation though, as well as extrinsic. You can do something that there's a whole marrid of things that you could be potentially good at and many of them could give you running and a money and social cloud that feedback loop. But there are some that you will enjoy doing for the sake of doing them more.

I don't disagree. I was remember a note that I wrote to myself when I first started the podcast. I decided to turn over, which is one way to turn something you love into a labour is to monitise.

Because as soon as you decide that you're going to really, really go for this, if you want to turn, prove something. I use this example in in my life show of a pickle. So this guy love playing pickle. And he gets to turn up on the saturday and play with his friends.

You know, if it's cold outside, he doesn't need to go and play and if he's tidy, doesn't need to go play and if he really didn't need to go and play and then he decides to turn pro and he thinks i'm turning pro, this thing that I love, I can't wait to make what I love into my career, but he doesn't realize that, hey, guess what? If you are on gover, you need to go on train. I actually, no, you don't get to be hangover anymore because the guy that isn't hungover is the guy is training Better.

So you now need to stop going out with your friends, and you need to train on its cold, and you need to work on game tape and mindset and hydration and nutrition. You need to do S, N. C, and you need to have physio, and you need to not see a family as much.

All of these things came along for the right as you decided to turn pro. Is that a Price the prepared to pay? And that's an interesting question to ask. Am I prepared to sacrifice my pure, unencumbered, elleswhere love for this thing in order to try and become the best at this thing?

I think it's really tough. And i'm shoot to shoot my own advice right now in the, in the head, or at least my positioning right now, which is that it's very easy for someone in my position or in your position to say this is kind of what IT takes and or rather this is like you should find your passion because like transparently what I do now every day actually really do of um I live more less the same day, seven days a week, and like outside what IT is to so we can have context.

But I wake up and then I go to my office here and I worked for six hours writing my next book. And then I take two hours ish of calls, typically. And then after that, I lived in the gym that I custom designed with all the pieces that I love.

And then I go and eat with my wife. And then I go to my condo and I sit in my recliner that overlooks the entire city, and I read, and then I go to bed, and I do that every day. And I love every aspect of the day, with the exception of maybe the two hours of calls that I have to take.

But I see those is a necessary sary thing for everything else that I have there. Now could I stop doing that? maybe. But for me to say that that's what your day needs to look like in order to get into the top floor with the view that looks over these things and so that you can not make money for two years while you read a book that eventually makes money or whatever is is not true and so is the difference between, like, oh, I should fly private because that's what rich people do.

I should play basketball because I want to be tall and modeling the top, the behavior at the top of amount, rather than the climb. And so they are completely different. And so this whole idea, unfortunately, and I don't blame the people who do this as they see their current life, like I would see mine and say, well, what do I do now? I do everything that I love, okay, but I didn't get here doing everything that I love. I did a fuck leader I hate, and I did IT a very long period of time, and I did not have anyone to wrote me on. And in fact, that many people who were actively trying to destroy my path .

and tell me why was a terrible idea. I had this idea about um why you should stop taking advice from successful people because most of their advice is not about what they did when they were at your stage. It's about what they do now or and it's the same thing around pushing work life baLance.

Know what i've found after fifty years of disney? Is that really the most important thing? Is what are right? Well, how did you get to this stage? What did you do when you were two years in? Because that's what I am.

Yeah, what did you do when you were broken living on the gym floor? Because that's why I am. Don't tell me about the complicated routine or the the the baLance of the flying private the bus stop upside down in your you're mixing up the ends for the means.

everything on my ride up. So this is, I mean, I remember in a lot of excitation these sale what IT took me to get here. But I will say that I had a ruthless focus on dollars per hour.

And so and i'm just giving taxi advice right now, but everything that I could trade away for more time, doing the thing that made me money was what I did. And so I remember the first time I made a five hundred dollars sale. And IT took me thirty minutes, and I was like, every hour of every day, this is what I am going to do.

And anything that is not talking to someone in exchange for them, giving me a credit card so that I can charge IT and make five hundred dollars. Anything that makes me less than two hundred and fifty dollars per hour or per per thirty minutes i'm giving to somebody else. And so after that first sales, like i'm never cooking again, i'm never going grocery shopping again, i'm not cleaning again because I knew that in one sale I could pay for that person for the month.

And so like, like the ruthless focus on what can I do that create an input to output being money equation. And me, at least for me, IT was pouring everything I possibly put into the input and eliminating everything else. I mean, this video on facebook before I was, quote, almost I years ago, when I still had six ships, before I even did the turnaround, and I I made this video, was this documentation.

But I said, so I wanna open up my seventh, eighth knife intended location. And I have the spots picked out, and i'm already working all of the hours that i'm awake and i've already given up saturdays. So the only thing that I have left is like sunday's end evenings.

And so I am no longer going to be watching any football and i'm no longer going to have netflix at all. And that is what i'm giving up for seven, eight, nine and ten. And I am just making this video of like that's what i'm sacrificing.

And I think a lot of people create these to do lists when, in my experience, it's been so much more useful to write down all the things that are willing to sacrifice. Because if you sacrifice everything, there is nothing left than to do the one thing that matters. And I think Jerry sine fell talks about this from a writing perspective.

He says that every day, no matter what he sits down, any rights for two hours now he doesn't have to write, but he's not about to do anything else. And so we can sit there, but there's nothing else to do except write jokes. And so I think a lot about that from the climb perspective, which is like most of everyone who is listening this, who isn't achieving what they want, is fucked with their time.

They think that they are spending other time working. But your output, like you don't even know how to work. I'm really real with you like you think you know how to work, you know how to work. Like the amount of output like and I will measure this by like what is your output? It's probably not as as you think. And so rather than trying to learn all these productivity hacks, the ultimate productivity hacks is no and oh, as you stop doing shit and then you create space, then you can fill IT with the thing that matters. But trying to add on more to your schedule of all the things that you're not willing to sacrifice is the very reason that you're not doing what you need to do.

A lot of people would look at that life of, i'm going to sacrifice evenings and i'm gna watch football anymore, and say, well, what's the point if you make yourself miserable on route to achieving the goal, if most of your life is journey a destination, and IT makes you miserable on route to IT.

why do that? So that was the thing I was mentioning earlier, where it's like, let's take the absolute extreme of it's going to suck and it's going to last forever. How can I be OK in that circumstance? And I do have the fundamental belief that circumstances nothing to do with how what your subjective of all being is. And so if monks can be super chill in whether monks do munk things and have nothing and have higher subjective well being ratings than anyone else in in the western world, IT clearly isn't external. And so then if i'm going to be just as miserable being mediocre as I am doing this shit that's going to amount of something, then I might as well do the shit that's going to amount of something and be miserable there .

and at least have something to show for does this story I learned about victo hug o famous writer from history, you know this about we did with the servant so um vict uga needed to make himself right. So he paid his servant each night during the end of the night to come into his bedroom and remove the bed clothes from him, turn the heating off, and then rocked his bedroom door from the outside.

And he wasn't allowed to leave until Victor slid six pages of handwritten work underneath. So, you know, you look at ople, which is this APP for iphone, which stops you from using APP or frozen turkey, cold turkey, which is the same thing for desktop. And that's just the digital equivalent of victims. You go being locked in his bedroom with no letting and just a quil and a few piece of paper, and then having a slide to underneath the door.

And I want to push back on something that you said dry before a Victor. Hugo o, which is nobody, somebody might ask, like, why would you do all the stuff if you're not happy? That assumes that my own life is to be happy.

What is your go in .

life to do?

Epic IT generally .

to be useful. And so why please .

do epic shit over be happy?

Because when I look back on my life, in retrospect, the things that bring me the most drawing the moment are the things that I was going to sacrifice for, for an extended period time. And those pay memory dividends far were greater than the momentary costs that ahead at the moment. And so I think it's a long term, short term thing, but a frame that.

Continued to paralyzed me for a long create of time, was in a session with happiness that he was truly an obsession. IT was an obsession of mining college. I almost almost got into a positive psychology because I thought that was really interesting, and that I was I my passion, I consumed all that stuff, and I drove myself mad with IT.

And I actually was more sad and depressed than anything, which is probably why I was trying to find all this positive, happy to be stuff. And I just cracked one day. And I was like, fuck happiness because I felt so out of reach that I was like, just fuck IT.

I'm just not i'm not even to shoot for IT. I'm just gonna do stuff and that's all i'm gna do. I'm just going to do stuff. And what happened was like a few years later, a few days later, um I looked up and I was like.

um i'm not miserable .

and so I actually identified for a very long period of time as i'm not a happy person coma and that's OK. I'm fine with that. I accept that.

And there was this huge conflict for such a long period of time where I was like, you're supposed to be happy. Aren't you happier? Like there's something wrong. There's something wrong with you. Something needs change rather than saying like maybe the level of happy that you are is fine. Who might like what happy am I comparing myself to? And also, if whatever your current status, if you just say like happy or which is really when people like I want to be happy, they're just saying I want to be happy or than I am, which means you create this distance tween where you are and where you want to be, which is the recipe for being unhappy. Saying that I want to be happy or so does not matter how happy you are, you want to be happy or and so by for linux ing, the desire to be happy, I ended up enjoying a lot more of the stuff that I was doing because I didn't make IT a request for for my activities. So then I became a pleasant surprise as I got, this doesn't suck, huh?

How nice to famous psychologist, stunning Albert and Daniel cannon n have quite divergent views on happiness is quite interesting so Daniel gilbert talks about how if you spend every minute of the rest of your life on a float lio in a pool drinking cocktails, in retrospect, you might not have found much meaning, but each individual moment of experience would have been enjoyable. And he believed that constitutes to him a life that is well lived.

I disagree with this kind entirely. Danny y, and this is my position too, which is a well lived life is one which, in retrospect, you are glad that you lived, right? So one is leaning toward hyden ic pleasure, and the others leaning toward meaning.

So one, you could say happiness, and the other is meaning, is my belief that your disposition, largely influences were on that spectrum from lio. To do hard things, you need to sit, and you will have friends. And I did, for a very long time in the nightlife industry, have friends that just seem to be so fucking happy, not doing stuff like just, they would flow through life and they wouldn't ask themselves.

And I actualizing my fucking in virtue. E, is this the highest integrity that I can do with these things and all the rest of IT? And I was envious of those people ever seen a dog.

You see a dog on the floor and it's just lying. anything? Oh my god, if only I could be like, IT just wants to go for walk and have food and like, go B, B. That's IT that all he wants to do and you think fuck IT would be great to be that dog but like, guess what, if your constitution doesn't allow you to be that dog, the only way out is through this was something the first time that I went to go see Peterson, someone asked to my question. They said, the depth of my consciousness causes me to suffer.

Is IT a blessing or a curse to feel everything so deeply? We thought for a little bit, you said, take more of the thing that poisons you until you turn IT into a attuned that goodall the world around you. The only way out is through it's kind of like as soon as you realize that there are things that you do that give you satisfaction and there are things that other people do that give them happiness and you've tried that route, the only way is to continue doing the thing that you know that works.

And I think that you an example of someone who is optimising heavily for meaning rather than for hedonism. And that's not to say that there are people. And this is, I said this on last episode, the fundamental thing that people don't understand, as far as I can tell about your world view, is that the thing that you do for work and the thing that you do for fun of the same thing. They can't imagine that because that's not the way that IT is for them, and it's not maybe the way that is for most people. But if you are the sort of person that finds meaning more enjoyable than happiness, you need to optimize for the thing that you enjoy the most.

In all towson and meaning last longer. And so albee super upfront if that those friends of using in the nightlife, there's nothing wrong with that in my, in my like as I see the world, like if that's you and you're like, I ve can love everything I do than like you want like just keep doing that in order to mean um but I think a lot of the message that Christina is saying here is IT if you've tried that path and IT hasn't worked for you then you have this dark door that's in the corner. They've been trying all the other ones that have nice gold edges and really shiny things, but there's that door that you keep looking at and it's the other side of you that's clearing us through in the other room.

It's like you just have to bus through the door and I think that the like giving yourself permission to be unhappy, at least for me, giving myself permission to be unhappy for an extended period of time in order to get what I wanted, give me so much relief from honestly, I don't like using the word nowadays because have so many associations but just from like the depression of the funk that I was in for a yeah I just I just didn't like my life and I achieved by most measure because I I did I don't have the our school failed me. I was whatever like, I wasn't that I finished in three years. I did really well in school and I A really good job.

嗯， but IT was empty for me. And so my like my goal is things to talk about earlier, but my my personal goal is to squeak every ounce of potential out of whatever I have. And I think that if you feel like you have potential left over, then you will eat you alive until you do something about IT.

Not to pissed after positive parties in the room. But if you haven't gotten what you want and you're not worthy audit period, and that's okay. Now you can admit that you suck and improve Better to know you're bad for a season, then pretend you're good for a lifetime.

You're not making as much money as you want because you're not as good as you think you are. You're not struggling from imposing drome. You are student and pretending to be a teacher.

No students say they feel like fraud. D are trying to learn. You're fraud when you get up to teach the class and you've never done IT.

deep. I think it's just giving yourself permission to suck. It's giving yourself permission to be unhappy. It's giving yourself permission to not achieve while you do for a long period of time. It's giving yourself permission to lose friends.

It's giving yourself permission to do things that's different than people in your social circle or your age group are doing is giving you permission giving yourself permission to be an exception so that you can become exceptional. And a lot of that, the whole positive, Polly monta, of like the I saw that I saw opposed to grow mid and he was like, you are worthy and that would make that tweet. All my tweet are just responses to, should I say and so this girls like you, like, I say this myself the morning, like, you are worthy, you are amazing. You are a got this and I like you're not a gottest because you control um and you don't have the things that you want you keep taking that you saying that you're worthy is going to somehow make IT true but like the way that you know your word .

is that you .

have IT that's IT like that is the limit test. Are you worthy of a billion dollars or are you a billion? Ae, no, then you're not worthy.

And so just like I think we have these things is just like you're unbaLanced, like you're not worthy. There's these things that were programmed to say, oh, that's bad. You have to tell everyone they're worthy.

You're everyone's beautiful. No, if everyone are beautiful, then no one's beautiful. And yet again, we're back at square one. And so it's it's August drinking the tonic. It's going through the shit, which is honestly the boring stuff that no one wants to do for an extended period of time and A. Accepting that you stuck .

and that IT is okay because .

the first step is accepting that you stuck, you suck so that you can do the second step, which is doing something about IT.

What about you're not making as much money as you want because you're not as good .

as if you think you that I mean, i'm obviously in the business space and that follows up with the other one with the imposed into my people are like me. How do you not suffer in posture center? I like because i've done what I said i've done.

And the people who get up on stage and trying teach classroom, should they haven't done it's like that like you feel like an imposter when you're an imposter like don't try and kill that voice, listen to that voice and gets the evidence to make that voice shot the fuck up. Like if if, like if I get on stage and I say I convention through fifteen, is there like do I feel like going to poster when I say that? No, I see fact.

And presumably if you if you're pioneering and breaking new ground, you know you you just put the biggest investments that you ever did into this new thing. 对， that is a new level that you get to, and that's one that's to do with finance. But there could be another one that's to do with capacity or competence.

You could be sitting down in a room doing a deal which is time bound in a way that it's never been before or is in an industry only tangential to one you've been in before. There are each time that you do something new, by definition, you're and impossible because you haven't done IT before. Now if you're teaching that's different. But if you're entering if you're growing sufficiently quickly, most of the time it's fresh snow.

So I would think this is a fat a topic I love. But I think the difference between doing something new and being an imposter is one is pretending to be something that they're not. So like I made the biggest investment school, i'm making a bet that I think communities are going to be huge.

And I think that there's a ton of people who want to, you know, teach girls they have in communities is that are in school. I can help, but like. You would only be an impostor. I said. This is like, I guarantee that no matter what, this is going to be the biggest thing ever.

And one of the big things that I repeat from the marketing front, I said all the time, I say, state the facts until the truth, like the best marketing in the entire world, is truth. Now, if the truth isn't compelling, IT doesn't mean you lie IT means you change the world to make the facts compelling. As in, if I say, man, I wanna be like I did you see this one of time, a eighteen year old like, I want to be a motivational al speaker, right? Is that okay? Well, what are your facts? You've done nothing great.

So they then live so that they can try and claim success that they don't deserve, so they can get authority that they can't back up and eventually are called out or flat. And to be fair, they only impressed people who don't know anything anyway. So if they're honest about IT, they look at their fact.

You can say, what would what would a motivational speaker have to have in order for them to have authority? And then that becomes your action list of what you need to do. And then once those facts are the truth, then you can stay the facts until the truth.

And then people will be like, wow, that's so motivated. But all you did was tell the truth. And so like, that is why I so how hardly rejected one.

Like, you are worthy. You are not worthy. If you had IT, then you wouldn't even need to say you are worthy because you'd already fucking habit.

And if you were and like I strugling with posters um why you only struggle? Posters um because you're fucking lying. Like that's why you feel like going to poster another. Like why didn't the thing is you can fudge the truth like you can you can not lie is very different than telling the truth like I can make something seem certain way without deliberately breaking the law. But oh, no.

And that's why you feel like an imposition because you fucking know and there's the guy in the other room is clearing a started like that's not fucking true and then that discord. But if you just say what you have done or you say what you are doing, i'm making this big investment is a big bet for me. The reason of making this bt, because I see this trend and I think it's a good idea. I could be fucking wrong, but am I going feel like going to post because because that's the truth?

Thinking about the community thing, I had a conversation a little while ago. I I don't think you you're far off wrong, especially the age of automation. This guy made a really great point, which you probably thought of, which is one of the very few things that you can't automate .

his community AI community no.

what you're going to have I mean.

yeah so yeah yes.

exactly one guy, one guy in a thousand bots that doing IT maybe GPT and can do that or whatever. But the next this into a quartile period, whatever were coming up to is the easiest way to to head against automation, I think, is to focus on community right next one. If you can be in a bad mood for no reason, you might as well be in a good mood for no reason if it's not going to change your life, IT shouldn't change your mood. If the cost is piece of mind, don't buy IT. yeah.

If you can be in a bad mood for no reason, then you can be in a good mood for no reason, which means that if you can do something that's amazing and still have a shit day, IT means you can do something that sucks and have a good day, which means the entire excuse around, I don't, anna, do all these hard things, because as a proxy, IT makes my mood sad. He's ridiculous, because that means that we are ultimately control of how we want to perceive the work that we do. And so I think that is ultimately the most firing thing that you can do in terms of how you can equi p yourself to get through those harder periods.

Why do you think the summer cynicism at the moment, it's especially .

on the internet, easier you can always defend. Now like we we actually do with this a lot. I was a dog come from an investment perspective, and we actually have to check ourselves, which is it's always easy to find a reason not to do in investment.

So we have a no bias and you should ever I mean, you should overall have a no bias like you should say, okay, here's all the things that could go wrong and you have to kinder think that would have to manage risk. But if you say note to everything, you're always right in the short term, but you but if you have never make an investment, you're wrong in the one way that matters, which is you get no return. And so like you always miss the short term losses, but you lose the big long term gain.

And so it's MIT again, this is continuing to be managed more than a problem to be solved. But cynisca short term, it's like every so when you so okay, this is so when you go home, right and you want to to start a new business or you have a girl that you're bringing back and your friends in your family are like she's not going to last or like this isn't this is isn't going to be forever. They are right literally every single time, except for the one time you bring your wife home.

And in that time they're all wrong. And is the one time that fucking matters. And so the idea that but the thing is, is because of the false positives or the true positives, they might have been right literally nineteen out of twenty times.

And if they are right, the first time in the second time in the third time in the fourth, why would they bet against no on the fifth time or the fifty eighth time? But you only need one yes or one positive to change your entire life. And so there's this habit that's where cynicism comes from, where we get so many positive reinforces for saying no and being right.

But it's only short term being right because you have to make big bets to win big. And that also means that you're wrong plenty of times and people aren't willing to look stupid for being wrong. This school bet could go wrong.

I'm Betty. It's not, but everything has risk. And i've been public about IT, right? And so like, if anything, but like, I played this out. Like, I like, I tell you, I play this that was like, if IT goes wrong, i'll document the things that I, that I learned and then i'll apply next time and i'll do what i've always done, state facts into the truth.

IT is strange. Think about how being cynical or skeptical or kind of sonic or cutting or a leaf. It's used as a proxy for being smart.

oh. The worst thing that anybody could be accused of, his naive, that's what they're trying to optimize against. They don't want to be seen his nave.

H, you hope that everything gonna good. Oh, that, I mean, that's cute. Like, you know, the world will teach you. You don't you don't worry, it's like you you people don't want to be nive .

and we'll be right. And that's that's what's painful is that IT takes more effort to start in the beginning and more people are right about the fact they're like, hi, you're not going to hit a big and guess what, a month in, you're not but they're only measured on months. And at six months, you're also not connected, ted by you and they are going to be like, i'm still fucking right. And at a year, you're still not going to have hit big and we'll still be fucking right. And every day that you haven't hit, they're going to feel like they were right, but they're wrong because they're measuring in days and you're measuring ing in decades.

Does this idea from going to called the cynical gene solution, cynical people are seen to be smarter, but sizable research suggests they actually tend to be dummer cynics is not a sign of intelligence, but a substitute for IT a way to shield oneself from betrayal and and disappointment without .

having to actually think there's there's a tweet on um a doomsday money twitter guy and he said, yeah he's predicted a sixteen out out of the last three recessions 哈哈哈 哈哈哈。 In the thing is, is that no one, no one were calls the other thirteen times like I was wrong. And they don't recall all of the gains that probably were made in the marketplace by people who didn't sell during that time period.

There was this broad deal. People forwards shit on whats up. And if it's been forward lots of times, IT even says that the top forward did many times like a little warning.

And this happened, I think, around, uh, covered. There was an image of one guy, one squad. I wearing the army gear, walking through the streets of london.

And this was folded on WhatsApp as evidence that the army was going to come and whole people in their house at gunpoint. And if you left, IT was going to be martial law, was gonna deployed on the streets of london. And this went fucking nuclear completely, and the style absolutely everywhere.

What happened with that? What happened? What happened with that thing? Not a single person who decided to spend this half fucking bake opinion that never turned out to be true ever got held to account for that. And i'm to receive that message you like five times like, hey, you don't get to just make these like ridiculous, like actually stupid fucking claims about the world and then no one called you to account.

I'm in a hit on the sinister point. The world belongs the optimists, because if you're going to do anything big, you have to believe that I can happen. Oh, wise and never will.

That shown poorly thing. The cynics get to be right. The optimists get to be rich. Yeah.

that's like if you look at from a percentage of success rate, i've been wrong more. The times that i've been right, I ve failed more times than i've succeeded. But you always succeed more and are right more in the big ways than the people who have been right all along and are wrong.

Travel says this, my my editor, he says ninety nine percent right in one hundred percent wrong. So like there are right ninety nine percent of the time, but they're wrong one hundred percent because the only thing that matters is the big one at the end. Like your family and friends will say that every girl that you ever date is not good enough, except for the one time you find the girl that you're actually you going to marry and then IT doesn't matter.

Or like this one last, or like this business idea, it's not going to work and you might have nine failures. I thought my first nine businesses didn't really a mount anything. Nine, nine is in the first one, spent time fucking failed.

Second one, this will not be different, fucking failed. Third one, this one, this is the one. And then seven, six more after that, right? I'm just painting this picture because like it's painful a shit because the whole time everyone is telling you, I told you so and they're right today but .

not forever if the cost, this pace of mind, don't buy IT why?

I use the piece mind as a, as an indicator for bridge in values, so that the I want to become known, rather than and sacrifice my reputation in order to do so. And so for me, I would lose piece of my eth like, right on the edge like I don't know this is a little bit edgy. I had a guy who shared A A bash clip of me and it's a bash clip. I would like somebody like took my clip and then was like this is wrong right and um and so I looked at the guy's profile I saw he was A V C. I was like, ha okay.

I know who this is ah .

and so I dm them and I was like, do you disagree with this and he said something and then I just advisory him any was like, you're right, I overstepped because I wanted to try and do a virgin. P, you are fundamental right and I was wrong. And so like that is what I would never want to be like. That is disgusting to me. And so the cost of making a viral clip to try trend jump, when I know that fundamental the thing isn't right, is not worth the Price.

Does this shows up in in othe ways? So I had IT. What the fact did I do? I.

I think I.

Try to throw a used splendid packet in a bin in a restaurant, right? Yeah did that but I was leaving and I like it's next to depend someone .

to get IT and I .

walk ah yeah thirty yards away you fuck turn my back. Put IT in the bit. No, you know that the piece of mind yeah and this is another one of those interesting reframes.

This is really, really interesting to me. If the cost is piece of mind, don't buy IT. You can see, and I did for a long time, might inability to move in as ruthless of way as I, as other people do, as a weakness, as a vulnerability.

And I realised in retrospect CT, that it's just a highest standard that i'm holding myself to and that can be that that will result in many times me doing things and having things that I need to overcome and working on my people pleasing tendencies as hard as I can at the moment to not not yeah I I end up um I don't like to disappoint people. I don't like to do things that causes of the people to feel bad or feel hurt or to tell them things that ah they don't hear. That's why that um doctor Robert love the no mm nice guy is just so fucking like very, very, very incisive ah but I realized even with that, I had to add a conversation with a friend and it's to do with this book.

There's a bunch of ideas that everybody's been working on in my friend group for quite a while and I was like, I really wants to write about this thing and send him a long, overly arduous voice note explaining about how conflicted I was because it's not my idea that no one knows the truth. That's one of the brilliant things about working through quotes. And things like this is no one knowns IT right? Like if it's accurate, nobody gets to own the truth. It's just an insight about the way that reality exists. So I sent him a big, long voice note and he replied to me and said, and I in IT, i'm over patent matching a lot of the things i'm doing as people pleased ing I can the I think I sent you that tweet about, I just learned about the recently bias and of all of them, I have to say it's my favorite, right? So that you see this new thing is the hot new toy that you're playing with the other like shiny new toy.

And he responded, he said, I wanted to say how grateful I am that you in amongst all of the stuff, in the barking, the show, when all of the different people pulling on your attention, that the first place that he would go to when thinking about this idea is how I would feel rather than how you can like with that so that you get the outcome that you want to whatever ah I would be very hesitant in you saying are you calling that people pleasing? When is one of the reasons I love you a friend as huh that's interesting. That's a reframe that I hadn't anticipated. And that is again the piece of mind thing. Now your level for piece of mind may be different to somebody else is, but I don't think that that's something that you should be ashamed of.

IT was a fun chAllenge for anyone is listening. Try telling the truth in social settings. So when someone invites you to a party, instead of coming up with a fake excuse that you both them as a fake excess to say, I don't want to go. Really fuck with you um and if someone like says, hey, can you you know help me move but like I don't want to it's very .

freeing .

because the thing is as I like their response is on them and if I just I try and anchor myself the truth. If I just tell the truth, instate the facts, i'm good with me and if someone I I asked because I had up exchange recently where I said that um I say IT often and now people who are around me are custom to the fact that I will just stay the facts until the truth um I said, would you have preferred that I like to you and the guy just good I like so you would prefer that I lie. I will not be associated with someone who would prefer that I lied at them because that makes my life difficult because then i'd have to lie with to them and breach one of my my values so in the future you know I I had someone who um reason was like, hey um hey if you need anything you know let me know how I can help. I like you don't mean that because if I actually mean .

something you will not help.

And so it's it's really comfortable for a lot of people because IT IT breaks a lot of social norms. But I think that learn it's kind of like the hundred nose is like being formed, like it's just being comfortable with the truth. And the truth is one of the the scarious ugly est things, you know, like, why don't you want to go another day with me? I don't like you.

You're not worthy. But like people are so comfortable with that, I think that the i've just tried to shed bullshit as much as I good for my life. And it's just made thinking a lot easier and also dealing with relationships a lot here because you also by shein social insight, when you do also state the truth, when I said, I think you fucking kill that, people know if fucking Carries weight because you don't just say that.

And so I would say most of my team, for example, if I pay a compliment, they know that I mean that and I don't have to say like, hey, like if i'm being honest, I really feel like I don't have I don't like and IT makes your words mean what you say. And I think that is like I, I, I aspire to be a man who when I say things, people know that I mean them. And I think a way to do that is to stop saying things that I don't mean.

And i'm trying to cut as much of the words that are niceties and things that I don't mean in a nonsensical and busher that i've been taught to say in this social situation, when someone says that makes sense, I say, no, he does not make any sense. People like, oh, because when someone says makes sense of the end of sentence, we are trained to just not and say, yeah, yeah even though if you didn't even process IT but if I don't think that make sense, I say no, I don't think that makes sense or no, I don't understand and again, you don't anna look stupid, but. Looking stupid in the moment so that you can Better understand something makes you not look stupid for rest of your life when you actually understand. And so i've just that has been a huge effort of mine is too make make words great again. And words mean what they mean again.

Yeah and and I really .

I Sparked that in my writing and I and especially in my social relationship, time is so viable and we have so so little of IT and I don't anna space e any of IT pretending to be someone or say things .

that I don't mean it's Normal to not know what you're doing. If you did, IT wouldn't be called growth high five, your fear, uncertainty and doubt and Carry on. Do you get tired, stressed, sad, hungry, frustrated, unfocused?

Do you feel misunderstood? great. Your human. You don't need medication.

I have A A huge vhe mate distaste for a mental medication. And I think one is visits overprescribed. Two, because people over will end themselves, and fundamentally, people find a problem with being humid.

D and I think a lot of that is because of the social norm that we should be never hungry, never sad, never angry, never frustrated, never feel like I misunderstood. And those are the, are the troughs and peaks of humanity. And we can only wish for Sunny days, because otherwise we have drought, unknown what everyone would die.

And so it's wishing for something that isn't true and will never happen. It's wanting a lie, which is why I am so against that. Now other people who they can test their neurology and whatever maybe, but like honestly, a hundred years ago, this should didn't exist and people just doubt with life.

And I think people are happier than than they are now. And so clearly, this solution, has there been much of a solution at all. And so I if I I do know, i'd I have I don't have that many extreme stances. Well, maybe do.

But one of my extreme stances is that there is nothing wrong with you, because even if there is something wrong with you, how do you benefit by saying there is something wrong with you and then accepting that label into yourself? Because the alternative for that is accepting your current existences. Maybe this is Better than everyone else.

And i'm just choosing to believe that it's wrong. And all this is around some big, mighty should that we think and that we worship that is that we should be a certain way that we're not. And I think that describes that word. I ve tried to limit as much as hume's possible for my vocabulary because, like, I shouldn't. What I should.

Nothing according to whom? Why should I be happier? Why should I be? Have less exist? Ty, why should I feel more understood? And so, like pretty much the begin of every ad for like lavra, or whenever you know whatever the new third tone sets, S S R I thing is just like they describe humanity.

They just say, like, are you hungry? Are you tired? Are you honey? Are you like? Are you dissatisfied in any way? Well, the cure of that is a pill, which I hardly decry anything that gives IT, if then, statement for happiness.

So like, you will owe nothing and be happy. Like you want to say that you going to change my external condition, to change how I feel. I I just reject IT as as any kind of if, then I will be happy. But like the pill, the overmedication part, i'm i've had too many people too close to me ruin their lives, topping from accessory accessory and getting on cocktail of pills. And they've got a sleep mid, we've got a wake up mid and there just a walking pharmacy.

It's crazy for people who aunt american to look at the way that amErica deals with this, I remember. So in the U. K, just for context, you can't get prescribed military and you can't buy IT over the counter.

You can't buy on amazon. My video guy, when he flies over here, takes IT back like some, like he fucked and smuggled like poo ecb, a ba with military tablets instead, like going into C, V S, allowed to get this. That the degree of difficulty that IT is to get prescribed anything. And in america, the first place that people turn when they have a problem is the pillow bottle.

I mean, I have two physician parents. So like, and I would say western, you know, for the most part, western medicine through they just believe in all pharmacology and all that kind of stuff. And so i've I grew up really close to IT, my grandfather's physician.

So like just lots of medicine, medicine in the family in general. And I am I just hate that. I really do.

I don't hate a lot of things, but I really, I really, I hate, I hate what IT does to people and more. The underlying thing is that they reject being human, and they think there's something wrong with them. So many people waste all of their time trying to solve a problem, that is, life rather than living.

IT and IT drives me not like they, they, they, they search for the medication rather than confronting the problem. Like you don't have an anxious problem, you need to deal with whatever the thing you worried about is. Like, I mean, you and I have too many of controversial beliefs.

I'm getting into too much of IT. I like you drink a lot because you're stressed if you deal with the thing that stresses you, that's the trigger for you drinking. So yes, there's addictive properties to drinking.

I'm not not denying that. But the thing that leads to drinking, the condition that creates that, that's something that you can attack. And so I think so little attention is given to accepting reality rather than saying they're something wrong, that people wait their entire lives searching for answer that doesn't exist.

What about it's Normal to not know what you're doing. If you did, IT wouldn't called growth high. Five, your fear and certainty and doubt and Carry on.

If you knew what you were doing, then you would be stagnating because you be doing nothing. no. And if you're going to do something new than that is what would be the catalyst for growth. And so you can't want to grow and also want to know everything you're doing at the same time is like the two beliefs contradict one another.

And so I think that's a lot .

of a lot of the discontent that people suffer from is they want two things that are polar opposite. They want the really strong character. They want the easy life, like one is the Price of the other.

You have a hard life to have great character, have an easy life. If should the character, everything came easy. You wants to grow.

You don't want hardship. Hardship creates growth. And so they want both.

And you can't like it's it's wanting the Jordan without paying the Price there. In the Price is in bad. It's just the Price is what IT is.

And so IT just do you want the Jordans or not? And if you do, do not lament the Price tag, pay the Price tag and be half you have the Jordans. And if you don't want the Jordans, they don't buy them.

There's something in here is around comparing the lessons the people who have achieved success tell you about how to also achieve success when they are using that pattern, which is what they look like. They know what they doing. I should look like.

I know what I do. I should feel like I know what i'm doing. You don't know what you're doing. You're a White belt, that person's a third degree black belt. And whatever is that are trying to pursue.

state the facts until the truth. I mean my I mean the amount of you know nine hundred follower instagram accounts that all I see is people espousing advice on hot gather social media following.

You're never gona win like you don't get IT like to eat like i've been following like you don't get IT because the content of what you're putting out, sorry, the evidence that enable letes your message disproves literally everything you say before you open your mouth. And the thing is, is that people are obsessing about the algorithm and this type of thought. And I should do vertical format.

I should do who is on a format. And I use this as an analogy er that you can draw anything, but everyone has that friend who is a train rec on relationships, who gives relationship advice. IT is like, IT does even matter the advice good.

You're a train rock. It's the fat friend who gives advice on how to be fit. It's just like they're like exciting all these studies and you should try these supplements is like you're a fat fuck to shut up, stop like there's don't waste your breath, no one is listening.

And so it's just it's missing the big obvious thing. And so again, it's like that big domino like I want to get in the fitness like there is a friend of my actually um who in the fitness space and he's like I really want to grow my punish business. And obviously like I have books on IT, my video did that for a whole past life and as like due you're not in shape.

So but I know all this is like, you don't look like someone that anyone wants to look like. And so the thing is, like, for whatever you're doing, the big one thing is like if you were looked like a shit god, you could say eat fried chicken and everyday and people would buy your shit because like, what's the one big domino that if I just did that, everything else would take care of itself? Do that in every once of effort you're putting into. Not doing that is a waste.

Basically, the v shed model that's really .

nice guys. Yeah and there was like public .

enemy number one .

for the fittings Price.

Yeah what was your definition of trauma that you taught me on the phone? Oh so um .

because this word is thrown around on social media, my god um as I okay I have to define this so that I can try and like understand IT um so I believe rama is when you have a punishing event that permanent changes behavior that's IT. So if you .

you know .

our kid and you touch the stove and you burn your hand and you never touch Steve again, you are promoted zed, now the thing is that that's a positive consequence. So it's trummer bad, I don't know, was the consequence, but in that its situation? no.

And so a lot of people use the, this person traumatized to me as the, as the, the transgression, where, as the question is, what was the result of that? Could trauma. Because trauma is just accelerated learning.

And so if you have P, T, S, D, for example, if you were abroad and had lots of bombs going off, then you had rapid learning. So you have trauma that permanent changes your behavior around loud noises. And so you generalize oud noises from this environment to know when someone hacks, you know, freak out and you think about those situations, right? And so just defining .

the world around me has .

helped me navigated a lot Better so that I can understand what we're talking about because there are so many, you know, people like trauma is a feeling in your body that you have to you have to release the truth. Like what fuck are you talking about in a release? Trauma, you change behavior, do do a stimulus that's IT.

And so if you want to change your behavior back, you create a new condition that reinforces the new behavior you want, period. Because otherwise we appeal a mister ism, and we just say a lots of like, nonsense school bullshit that the whole world world is all about. I just spoke a with event.

which was really funny.

How did that go? A surprisingly well, I just started by being like, you will all disagree with most of the things I said, but they kind of mister sized my my analisa. So I worked out fine.

How do you do that?

Uh, well, because I just describe actions. And so they describe these actions as attraction for what whatever, and I was like, attracted for pal, whatever. If you make hundred calls, you will have more people who know who you are.

If that's the same as putting out an energetic .

frequency to the quantum ROM, it's that you want money. I have no idea what any .

of that means do. There was podcast that I got linked to from a girl in Austin who got inducted into some weird cult that was sacrificing period blood at the full moon so that they could get broken bags.

Yeah, I sent to wait place .

so you would that for a while. I was, yeah, well, to return you. Well, alex, I appreciate you, man. Thank you for coming on. What's next to what can people expect from you next few months?

Um well, all my effort is in the school games. So well, I mean, I can talk about I can not talk about him yeah um so I I just made the big best my life. Not coin or of school outcome um it's a from where you can build which you won to build learn you want to learn and schools i'll give you the tools community, the education to help you.

And so we've actually created a whole thing where people can start all this stuff for free um because I just I believe my whole platform in education, that's what I believe in. I think the education systems broken and teachers don't get paid or given the resources to actually teach students and you know the supposed to teach tests that they know don't help students. Students get educated on stuff that doesn't matter in the real world and they own amount of debt for piece of paper that doesn't make them anything to pay off the death they're in for the rest of their lives.

And I I hate all of that, which is why we started making the content we do. And so um this is one big investment that i'm doing to try and make my small det towards helping fix that. And I don't like I obvious ly talk about business. That's what I know.

okay? But one person can can do that like I can change, I mean, I can try, you know but like I don't I don't think one one person is going to change the world. And so um I wanted to invest in a platform that would help other people do that for one another. And so whether it's like you know how to paint and you want to teach people to paint you to fix handers and you want to teach you able to do that, like there are so many more useful skills that we can trade with one another and I think benjani l said there is no more hard. There is no more novel indeed that to help another.

no more to educate .

and I I who hardly believe that and so um I mean, that was investing my my dollars in my time into and so um yeah that's like my home next year. In terms what am investing, I V C accuses not how we continue with our family office. And you have a business that you want to sell or up scale, you can give up you.

I'm going to enjoy watching IT happen, man.

Preciate you. Thanks for your mean.

Thank you.