Transcript for:
Life Philosophy and Practical Wisdom

we are back again Speed insighting our way through stuff about how hard life is The Queen of England died 18 months ago She ruled an entire nation and accumulated more wealth than 99.9% of humans And yet you haven't thought about her except for right now No matter how big your dreams you're going to die Everyone will move on Do what you want It sucks to not be liked but it sucks more to not be yourself Yeah It's really interesting when we think about what tactically happens when someone dies right like a lot of emotion exists in the vague but far less in the specific because you plan your funeral right and then you think that everyone's going to be standing there just forever changed because of the death and the impact that you had on their lives But the reality is there's going to be a caterer at the funeral Some people are going to like the food Some people are going to comment that it was too cheap you know the food that you had Um they're going to have comment on the venue like "Oh I don't really you know it's a little hot There's gonna be somebody who's gonna uh make a list of people and they're going to check them off Some people aren't going to be able to make it last minute because things came up and it got busy." And after the whole funeral's over everyone's going to go to a restaurant and just eat dinner and then move on with their lives And so not to say that you know the people who you know mean a lot to you uh won't remember you to a degree sure but on the macro scale when I think about somebody like the queen who accomplished so much in her life as like the the zenith of you know accomplishment and most people probably even thought about her today except for the fact that we just brought it up And so I think that just it um whenever I have um my harder times that's my my like reminder to self of um the absurdity of it all which is like someone's going to argue over what appetizer they're going to serve when I die This probably doesn't matter that much How does that change the way that you show up and operate in the moment i think it just decreases affect in in the in the acute moment So I you know I define resiliency as the amount of time after an aversive stimulus after a bad thing happens that you return back to baseline behavior And so um and then there's different one which is how long is your fuse which is toughness and that's a whole different thing right but resiliency is like okay I've been cracked You know I've hit the fuse the bomb's gone off But the size of the bomb is irrelevant Like you could be super resilient have a terrible day your father dies and then next day you're back People are like "Holy." It was like you like go to the depths of hell you touch the bottom of the pool and then you shoot back up And so I think about how many different tools can I have in my tool set to make the rebound from down to back up as V-shaped as possible What are those tools for you cosmic relevance is probably the biggest one when I think about like because it's so fast I feel like I do it almost automatically now which is like okay I'm on a planet spinning around a sun inside of a galaxy inside of a universe that will never reach the end of because it's it's expanding faster than the speed of light Okay the fact that you know there was a mistake in my book printing no one's gonna care No one it just doesn't matter right um so that's one of them Another one's the frame of the veteran which I use a lot which is um if this inconvenience happened a thousand times in a row on the thousandth time what would I think about it well I'd probably be like well this is just how life is And then if I could feel that way on the thousandth time then it means that I can feel that way on the first time right now because it's just choice because the actual circumstance is the same Um those are probably like my two most prevalent you know the ones that I like my default ones that I they're my back pocket There's a a cool insight that the more you complain the less accurate your model of reality So complaining is you saying the world isn't delivering to me that which I anticipated or expected or desired from it which is also you saying I don't understand how the world works until it comes and meets me in reality God I I haven't heard it phrased that way and I really like it Um I I think about um the the hate um that we all get whether it's from ourselves or other people or the hate that we spew towards the external conditions is simply boiled down to this person lives their wife life in a way that I would not prefer And so I have translated every single negative comment that comes to me um where someone complains about me So flipping the script um to Alex lives his life in a way that I would not prefer And so it's actually been this very weird like oh they said all this stuff and I was like does that mean that I live my life in a way they wouldn't prefer great because they live their life in a way that I wouldn't prefer and that's why it's their life and I live my life and it's just been this really wonderful reframe that like just almost comically make that but like completely minimizes most things But I think that complaints come down to that The universe exists in a way that I would not prefer right it's like why are you not bending to my will yeah And so um I think uh shoot I can't remember the psychologist I'm I'm going to butcher it but one of the big guys um talked I want to say Kinsey but I don't want to mess it up Um talked about there's three primary things that everyone uh casts all their pain and suffering to which is you have circumstances you have other people and you have self And that's it Those are the three those are the three big ones that everyone puts all of their all of their blame on And so the first two obviously don't serve you The third sometimes serves you depending on what you do as a result of it right and so um that actually those big three has just been a really easy filter is like oh am I blaming circumstances am I blaming other people am I blaming me and um obviously you want to skip to you cuz that's the only thing you can do anything about the idea that all of the things that you're working toward all of the dreams all of those things are going to stop There is going to be a day when you no longer answer your emails Like I think about this I think about how many even now right emails not been allowed for that around that long widespread what maybe 25 years something like that The most people have had an email address maybe 20 years uh all of the people that have died between then and now They just have email inboxes just accumulating stuff from uh you know lots of newsletters lots of online retailers But there will also be people expecting a reply right and saying why hasn't this guy replied to me it's like because he's dead Yeah There's um just thinking I I mean I think a lot about the end of my life Maybe it's a borderline obsession of mine but thinking about like what the last five years are going to look like and also thinking about my cognitive decline which is going to be inevitable on the back half of my you know life Um and it gets really tricky when you think about fluid intelligence which peaks when you're like between 25 and 35 and then like at our age right now it's just all going down right like we're beginning this slow decline And in thinking about that I was like I will actually never be sharper than I am today for the rest of my life And the idea that there will be young people who will replace me because humans are all replaceable Um we have proven that And so uh when when I think about that it it decreases the stakes of these huge dreams that if I don't accomplish them I will be upset or else Um and so it's like we have these big or elsees like we threat we want to threaten the universe like I can't stand it if this does not occur It's like and the universe remains unchanged and the universe is undefeated Correct Well that's why I was such my Twitter bio for a long time was locally reversing entropy I remember that Yeah Yeah And I just love that idea that you have the entire universe This force entropy which is going to inevitably destroy everything Not just everything you care about Everything that could have created anything that anything could have cared about and it's going to destroy it Yeah But for a brief period of time you know a few decades you locally stop the most powerful force in the universe I think that's so [ __ ] cool I don't know if you saw this but Basos has this one page that um was just brilliant And he basically um paraphrases Richard Dawkins talking about how over time all organisms revert to their environment literally like the temperature of your body once you die eventually just normalizes with the environment The acidity of what's going on like inside of your body normalizes and then eventually like you become one with your environment And so it's the exact same concept And so Basos was talking about that quote which was about biology but he said this is you know originally about biology but so much more so about um the way that we want to live which is that everything around you will try and force you to dilute yourself it will force you to try and merge in fit in with your surroundings And he said like this force is natural and it's inevitable and yet we have to fight it And the fact that it's hard does not make it less worth it And I thought that was like it was just I I mean I reposted cuz I thought it was so elegant It's like a cosmic regression to the mean Yeah it's exactly that's exactly what it is Um and yeah so I think if we all know that we're going to we the regression of the mean is inevitable like and like again I think about these things that are I want to say I don't know if humiliating is the word but like humilityinducing Um but like the idea that I'll die and then like worms will eat my body Just like a very simple thing like that or if I died like I was like what if I just died by an animal killing me i like sometimes I think about that and I'm like I would just be its lunch Like everything that I've done up to this point it's like my arm will feed its child and like my thigh will feed it and then like they'll leave some of it for the good meal It' be one one good meal and it just like it just it just takes the the stakes of like I'm so important right i'm all these goals matter to just like I could be lunch and that kind of you know gives me one large exhale The single greatest skill you can develop is the ability to stay in a good mood in the absence of things to be in a good mood about I think that tweet has been my theme for 2025 Um it's been it's it's funny because that was the most shared tweet I've ever had Um and it was it was like it's it was almost um not the opposite of iron It was fitting right it was completely fitting for the year And it's been because like this year I've had a just I would say a series of unfortunate events um that has occurred and it's really tested my tools right tools in the tool belt um for reframing reality so that I can make my experience less you know miserable And so I thought about that it's like if I were if I were to boil everything down um of all the skills that you can learn if everything that we do eventually becomes irrelevant then the single greatest skill that you can develop is being in a great mood in the absence of things to be in a great mood about And so one of the other frames on this is most people don't question someone who's in a bad mood Like I'm just in a bad mood So it's like well if you can be in a bad mood for no reason it's like you might as well be in a good mood for no reason because that one at least serves you And so I've been trying to exercise like because there's on one degree there's like let's count things to be grateful for On the other side it's like why do I have to have things to be grateful for in order to be in a good mood like why is trying to find things a requirement of being in that mood like can I not find things and still choose to be in a good mood because I've certainly not had things to be in a bad mood about and been in a bad mood And so I've been trying to flex that which is like sure we can find things to be grateful for and when those things pop up yes and of course it's a you know it's a practice you get better at it but like what if I can just be in a good mood and so I've just tried to try to break that that relationship between the two because then it makes it contingent on something that I can find How successful have you been at that mediocre Well look I think it's a it's a a lovely idea in isolation Sure uh in theory but I'm not convinced about how effective it is in practice for the reason that humans have a negativity bias You know it's our psychological entropy% and your ability to detect things that are a risk to you significantly better than your ability to detect things that are just pleasant Like this morning I texted you and I was like "Hey man like I really love the feeling I have of anticipation on a morning before we do a podcast That's a normal boring mundane source of pleasure to me." Yeah If I'm not really really training myself to notice that I just it just [ __ ] falls away with the fact that huh I asked for almond milk and I bet this would have been better with like whole milk That's the thing that that ruins the day And the thing is you do notice it though right you do notice that Um so I've had um one of my themes this year has been focusing on moments and on both the positive and the negative And so like when we think back on if I think back on the last year right I don't remember probably 95% of the year like I you know I did the same things and so it's like it just didn't get recorded like nothing notable happened Um and so really like when we think about a year we really just recall a handful of moments and that's it And those moments in time are usually very short And so I've been trying to think about um the bad you know seasons as well maybe it wasn't a bad season Maybe I had five bad days or really five bad moments that I then thought about for the entire season and turned what would have otherwise been 5 minutes times five into an entirely bad year And so it's like okay well if we can do that in the negative can we do in the positive which is you know obviously the thing to to exercise But to the point that you said earlier about our our ability to detect threat and risk at such a such better accuracy than our ability to detect good things it's so interesting because if you use that side of your brain um not to derail us but like I think that has been one of the things that's helped me a tremendous amount in business because when I think about a business and I want to grow it for example I would think okay what are all the things that can destroy this business and this is Charlie Munger this isn't me Um but basically he says invert always invert And Einstein said that too And it's because like you get to use this this way stronger horsepower engine of like how do I grow my business that's a you could obviously think that way but the alternative would be like how would I absolutely destroy this business in the fewest possible moves And then when you list out those moves you're like cool now let's do the opposite of that And that has been um honestly a lot of the some of the sources of my greatest kind of creative moments have come from these apparently obvious things that would kill us Well what if we did the even more obvious thing and did the the opposite of what would destroy us Um and it's worked It's worked um better than I deserve So this is a problem Yeah Uh you can be re rewarded professionally for focusing on things that you do not want to focus on personally And Ryan Long taught me this He was talking about how he comedian Canadian comedian really funny guy Spends all of this time you know dialing in these bits and obsessing over how it could be better And then he says to himself "Yeah but I don't want you to do that in your relationships." No Can you let that go when it comes to the way that you show up for your partner or your friends or your body image or whatever you don't get to compartmentalize stuff like that And it is a very unfortunate irony of the world that the skill set you often need to become successful in business is the one you need to get rid of to be happy in your life Yes So I was I was thinking about what you were saying earlier with regards to risk and our ability to detect it So the other part of that that's been really interesting is we also not only do we detect more threats we also overemphasize how catastrophic they could be And the converse of that is we rarely identify the upside and when we do we typically underestimate the upside And I think this is something that a lot of people don't talk about as much Um obviously I always have a business you know hat on literally Uh and but I think about this because I think this is where like you said it at the very beginning that people complain because they cannot accurately view reality And so if we tie that to this concept then it means that people will disproportionately blame the universe and then perceive significantly greater risk for them asking Google out starting a business taking a loan uh you know asking a stranger to buy something making a podcast and for fear of what other people on the internet will say or people who know them right right so we we catastrophize this side but the flip side is and you hear this a lot when people you know do make it and what not They're like I never dreamed it would be this big Now some people are obsessive and like absolutely have thought through everything I fall more on that side Uh but uh on on the other hand though a lot of people do get there and they're like I never thought it was going to be this big And it's because we typically just underemphasize the upside which is where from the business perspective it's like that's where the alpha is That's where the outperformance exists where most people think hey this bet uh it could go to zero And you're like h I don't think it's going to go to zero But even if it did go to zero I have a 10x here And so if I have a 50% shot at a 10x and the other 50 is zero I should take that shot every single time knowing that I'm going to be wrong half the time It still makes sense to take And so I think um people are not good at making those riskadjusted return bets um obviously financially but even in the very micro aspect of our lives And so the we talked earlier about uh you know the cosmic irrelevance and the frame of the veteran but there's a third frame that I think about a lot which is I call it play it out And so it's like let's no let's let's sit in there because again fear exists in the vague not in the specific and in the resistance Yes And so like when we have these um these spec specificities of like okay I'm going to start a p I can't start a podcast like okay it's this big vague thing but no like let's play it out like let's see what actually would happen So I'm going to upload something and then people don't listen to it Okay Well they didn't listen to it Okay Well then that's not a problem Okay Let's say people Let's see tons of people listen to it which I don't know how that magically happens but let's say tons of people listen to it and they all hate it Okay Immediately you have this anxiety that No no but but let's play it out Like what's happens next it's like okay is it going to change what I eat is it going to change where I sleep okay let's say let's say I all of a sudden I lose all the money that I have It's like okay well I probably have a bunch of people that if I really needed to sleep on their couch or in a spare bedroom I could do that Okay so I'm not really going to be homeless And if I really didn't have enough money for food I can go to a homeless shelter and get food right so it's like wait so my worst case scenario is like I have shelter and I have food and I'm still breathing air So that's the downside And so there's this catastrophizing that we cuz we our brains are meant to are meant to keep us alive We literally think if we fail we die Like everyone will will ostracize us from the group and we will be alone and die And so just actually playing it out not one step but like two more steps after that you're like "Okay so my actual downside risk is nothing but my upside is everything I've wanted And even if I even if I'm at 50% off on that it's still worth the shot." 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description below or heading to live momentous.com/modernwisdom and using the code modernwisdom at checkout That's l i v o m nt o us.com/modernwisdom and modern wisdom at checkout Have you heard Ferrris's idea the world rewards the specific ask and punishes the vague wish I like it Very ferris And it's it's getting it's getting to this point here which is fear exists in the vague and it exists in the resistance Going back to the single greatest skill you can develop is the ability to stay in a great mood in the absence of things to be in a great mood about There's again I think it's fantastic in theory I wonder how much it works in practice Both of us everybody would love to be in a great mood for no reason Um so I guess you can perhaps try and cultivate I can try and be positive when there's nothing to be positive about I would say that the other neurobiologically informed solution to this is to find increasingly small things to be increasingly happy about M So huh that was a really good training session Yeah look you know it was annoying because half of the gym's under construction and I got some dust on my shoes Yeah But huh that was a good session I really enjoyed that Um Rick Hansen who wrote hardwiring happiness is 20 25 years old Um hardcore uh neuroscience guy dharma teacher meditation expert life person [ __ ] awesome intersection all And um he has this wonderful acronym of heal have a positive experience Mhm Enrich it And by enrich it he means sort of sit with it So you allow it to you actually notice it Absorb which is uh imagine that sinking down and becoming a part of you Uh and then the L is optional which is link So you can link it to a bad experience And you can oscillate between the two to help bring down the the um volume of a a bad experience So right now there's nothing else I want to be doing right now than having this conversation having a good experience Huh but that just washes by you and then you think in retrospect oh wasn't that that was like a good thing at the time but you don't ever actually arrive at having a good experience So the enriched bit's important So I'm like huh this is cool Like I'm enjoying having this conversation absorb Imagining it sinking down and becoming a part of you which is basically spending 30 seconds to a minute letting it letting that emotion sort of fill you out as opposed to noticing it cognitively like allowing it to go below the neck would be a good way to put it Okay this is going to go below the neck This sensation go huh mhm I'm actually like people are going to watch this and and it's going to make them happy It's going to give them insights about their life And isn't that lovely it's the most obvious thing which is I mean this is a pretty grand thing as things go It's certainly more grand than like I had a [ __ ] nice coffee or something like that Um so I wonder whether one of the skills that you can develop in the pursuit of becoming a person that's in a great mood in the absence of things to be in a great mood about is to become increasingly proficient at finding things to be in a great mood about And I'm aware that in your frame that still makes it contingent on external which is going to be an issue I'm still happy to be in a good mood when there is things to be a good mood about For sure if you can become increasingly skilled at finding things to be in a good mood about I get the sense especially if life's kicking you in the dick which it's done to both of us for the last while Um and I also think that it's a an interesting comment realization from you uh given that you've been kicked in the dick because you think huh this is an insight that you will only learn when things aren't ostensibly going well Yeah because it's the sort of realization that you get when inertia and momentum and bravado and confidence and and uh uh upward trajectory are all taken away from you and you go ah I'm like I'm having to do the budgeting equivalent like the the mental equivalent of living on pennies from a well-being perspective I want to say we talked about this four podcasts ago this specific thing which was that I have this maybe it's sadistic is probably is the right word but like I do take some sadistic pleasure in or masochist I don't remember the word is but when you when you enjoy your own pain um whenever I have these prolonged moments of suffering that kind of break past what I would consider the normal variance of life right it's like no this broke through the barrier of shitty um I do have this history of having significantly larger improvements that happen post dip right so it's like we kind of get the opportunity to buy the dip uh for our own negative consequences and I've I've bought the dip at almost every time and it's rewarded me disproportionately And so I I hate to make make a make a parallel between like the economy or the stock market and and your own internal happiness but I think I think that's what's happening right now Um but that that that thought process has has shortened some of the the the shittiness that happens because then it's like okay well it has to it has to be worth it right i have to make this worth it right because I'm this this sucks So what what can I learn from this what can I be better from this as a result and so like obviously there's things that I've been working on in order in order to improve But um beyond that uh I because gratitude has been so difficult for me which I've I've talked about before like I never I've never once said I am the the champion of happiness but in an effort to try and make it easier for me I was like well how do you how do you how do you operationalize gratitude right and so the simplest way that I have is imagine something terrible and then remember that that has not happened like it's like I I've yet to find like that has been the the simplest way like be grateful It's like what do I do to be grateful yeah Like no no no like that more And it's like that that it's like it's been difficult So it's like okay um and the on the flip side imagine something that you love Imagine it's gone and then remember that it's back again And so that's I think the operationalizing of those moments which is I have this coffee moment man if I never had another coffee moment like this again This would mean more to me Okay And by doing that and by remembering what it would be like to not have this then this thing now in the moment becomes worth more And so it's basically creating a wider discrepancy between the moment we're trying to find gratitude with and something else in order to basically manufacture a delta because I think that that to to your point like we're so much more sensitive to the negative delta than we are on the positive delta that we have to make the positive delta massive And so how do you make moments massive it's like well then we just have to drop the floor out and then remember that now all of a sudden we went from the bottom of the pool back to the surface even though we're not above the water It's like playing uh pretend So I'm 100% playing pretend All gratitude is is playing pretend I mean sure I think if something happens and you're grateful for it that's you enriching something that exists But what we're doing what is enriching mate uh really noticing it because things that you should be grateful for will often pass you by without you noticing them So we notice them originally and then we notice them Do you notice them oh I know I have to remember to be grateful and then I have to go look for [ __ ] Yeah But even as it happens right and this is the point as it happens I'm here We I went to Rufus Doul at um uh Q2 Stadium in Austin which is where the the football club plays And Rufus Doul great music real cool and with a ton of my best friends Um it's finishing at a time that's not insane You know it the weather was lovely by 6 Yeah Yeah I was in I was in bed by 7:30 Um but it wasn't that loud The sound wasn't that good Okay What everybody was like "Wish it was louder Wish it was louder." Because it wasn't We were at the very back of the stadium Beautiful view but not fantastic for sound You go "Dude you're watching [ __ ] Rufus to Soul in a stadium with your friends in Austin Weather's great Everyone's got a a beer or a sparkling water in their hand having a great time." Just this is something that you can notice in the moment You have Pick your direction Western Man Yeah And you are picking the sound's not good Yeah But in your business you are rewarded over and over and over again for realizing that the sound's not good This can I've done this before Uh are you zoomed can you do this so if you look very very closely here I might even have to get out the way for the light The alignment of the Instagram logo with the F from follow us here and the N from Newtonic below is out of alignment by what looks like one point It's less than a millimeter Guess who noticed this guy Uh I have been rewarded throughout my entire professional career for noticing things that other people didn't and then claiming that they were sufficiently big issue that we should actually change them Yeah Reverse gratitude like and this is a small thing It is now a big problem It's a massive it's a massive problem because you win in the weeds Yeah But you don't win in the weeds when it comes to happiness unless you are doing it in the other direction Right So you need to and this is so hot and this is this is why we enjoy talking about just for everyone who's listening Um Chris and I had a conversation prior to this being like what are we what are you thinking about right now and so we're both actually like in the same vein of thought which is why both of us were looking forward to having this you know conversation with you guys um about this this difficulty because one of the other things that's come up with regards to to gratitude and happiness has been there's a second conversation I think happens internally at least for me which is that like I will judge myself on being not as happy as I should be or not like hey I didn't notice anything I'd be grateful about you [ __ ] right and so trying to separate the fact that I like to take this to the absolute extreme why should I be grateful why should I be happy why do I demand of my life that it must be happy like that I must be happy during it that's a demand and so I try to decrease my demands in general as a habit you know as a personal practice and so I've been thinking about that that concept in of itself because the very early the earliest part of my career I just was done with happiness I was like screw it yeah it's just like it's irrelevant and so now I'm getting to the point where like well it'd be it would be nice uh to also have this while I have I'm aware that this is a very sort of basic [ __ ] insight but I do think that given the starting point that you were at and to a lesser degree the starting point I was at is like a homosy light uh like lifestyle approach Um that's a that's a big deal to make this pivot and I think it's one of the reasons I was particularly interested in in talking to you today because I would say the last you know three years or so since we've been recording together Yeah From a architecture perspective it's largely been the same Yeah That uh it doesn't matter how you feel Uh the hard work just needs doing Hard things are hard That's why they're hard And and disregard the emotions that getting in the way of it And I do think that that works for a for a good while and it can really propel you to great things But I also think that sometimes stuff you have such a orthogonal change in the way that your life's put together where you go I might have exhausted this fuel source I might need to switch from booster rockets to something else And um yeah you've got as you said earlier on about how you you take small bad moments maybe very impressive bad moments and then you scale them out Yeah You're not having a bad year you've had a few bad days that you're thinking about for the rest of the year I've found it helpful when I'm in a bad season like I'm in right now to just focus on having a good day A good day and a bad season is a bite-sized victory String a few of those in a row and a bad season feels less hard I'm pretty sure the difference between a happy life and an unhappy one doesn't come down to how many good or bad days you have but which days you think about over and over again In some seasons of life maintaining is winning Couldn't have put it better myself Um this has been the this has been my my big focus right now is um and I'm not the first person to say this but just winning the day Um and Bill Aman had this uh I heard him on a podcast talking about this hard season where he was getting divorced He just lost $4 billion in Perishing Square his investment firm And he was not him today He was earlier on his career So I mean it was just the worst And because he had lost his money the divorce was for way more money because it was based on his net worth that didn't exist anymore and was just a terrible slog And he said one of the difficult parts about that period is that there was no one thing that was like "Oh I can tackle this today." Like you're not going to finish the divorce today You're not going to undo the $4 billion loss today And so it's like when you have these larger more complex negative things that do scale it's like how do you how do you how do you navigate through that and for anyone who's listening right now it's like maybe it's the bad breakup Maybe it's the or maybe you're getting divorced right or maybe it's like the business isn't working the way you want It's like and there's like 10 things that you have to fix And it's like well I can't fix that change in the in the logo until the next run So I just have to see this every single day And so he he had this very tactical advice which I liked a lot which is he just tried to make progress and that was it And he said you know in a day you it's almost it's almost negligible right but at 30 days you're like "Okay I moved this." And at 90 you're like "Wow you know this this is really this has really materially changed um in what's happened." Now does this mean that we're our mood is still being dictated by circumstance yes I'll be honest Yes it does But I think I think many of us have this ideal We'd love to be able to great be in a great mood with in the absence of things to be in a great mood about But sometimes progress is the W like maintaining in some seasons is winning And I've had to tell myself that also that we can have these different like on the on business factor I'm murdering it I'm crushing there But like I had I tore my quad this year uh which sucked I had a uh yeah painful Um I have a a neck thing that's just been bugging the hell out of me Right So it's like and I have two great fears in life One is that I lose my mind which is really just more that I'll be a burden to everybody else I won't know cuz my mind will be lost Right Um and the other is chronic pain Those are like my two great fears in life because chronic pain is really tough Like the first thing you think about when you open your eyes in the morning is pain and it's like [ __ ] It's like and now I have to be in a good mood right because I demand this of myself And so um when in in navigating those those scenarios um just trying to chip away and also take the reverse of I had this one great podcast today I'm going to make that thing the thing that's making this a great day And then if I can make that great day then maybe it could be a great week And then trying to expand those basically like let those good moments eat up the season And I made a conscious decision on May 1st And I think I did I send you the the screenshot of my HRV Yes So I It was May 1st I was like "Fuck this." I was like I told Laya I was like "I have decreed that the rest of the year will be good." And so I'm putting so much mental effort into this which is why this is so timely from from the from us talking about it um in actively trying to minimize all the down things and super super focus on those moments and be like cool I had that good moment that's my day's made and I'm trying to even say that more like oh this podcast made my day this podcast made my week now I used to think oh this made my week when someone would say something small I'd be like that's what made your week like you must not have a lot going on so true right like ment like my own judge judge machine right that's lame Yeah Stupid thing Oh my god How feeble how small is your life that something so unimpressive is a source of gratitude to you for a week or and yet And yet your life is made up of small days like this That is what life is And if your expectation of life is that it's going to be well until I play the main stage at EDC until I make the billion dollars until I get married to the love of my life until I get these things you're just holding your happiness hostage until something great happens And what if again what we said before what if something small could be something great yeah And it's been and it exists in the specific those like the tiny moments and that yeah that's that's been that's victories boring boring victories Um but but making trying to make it basically I've had to recalibrate my entire scale to how little of a thing can happen that makes my day How little of a thing can happen that makes my week How little of a thing can make can make my month And like how crazy would it be if a year from now I say 2025 was a great year You know I woke up painfree for for probably like 70% of my days That was a great year Like I got to have coffee with Ila in the morning once a week and that that filled me up for the whole week Like if I can and I want to I I'm this I'm putting so anyone who's listening this like I'm putting a huge amount of my discretionary effort into this because it's my belief that right now what will what will prevent me from achieving my ultimate goals cuz that that [ __ ] is not gone Um um the thing that will achieve that will stop me from achieving my ultimate goals is um running out of steam because and and this may not be real for some people but like I don't need to do this like I don't need to work this hard Um and so I have to make or I'd like to I'd prefer to make the ride more enjoyable We'll get back to talking to Alex in just one second But first I need to tell you about element If you often feel tired you might not need more sleep You might not need more caffeine You might just be dehydrated Proper hydration isn't about drinking sufficient water It's about having enough electrolytes to allow your body to properly absorb those fluids element contains a sciencebacked electrolyte ratio of sodium potassium and magnesium with no sugar no coloring no artificial ingredients or any other BS It plays a critical role in reducing muscle cramps and fatigue while optimizing brain health and curbing cravings That's why it's used by everyone from Dr Andrew Human to Dr Mike Israel and Olympic athletes and FBI sniper teams as well This orange flavor this orange flavor here in a cold glass of water is how I've started my morning every single day for over 3 years now And they have a no questions asked refund policy So if you don't like it for any reason they'll just give you your money back And you don't even need to return the box That's how confident they are that you love it Plus they offer free shipping in the US Right now you can get a free sample pack of Elements most popular flavors with your first purchase by going to the link in the description below or heading to drinklnt.com/modernwisdom That's drinklmnt.com/modern wisdom That's a huge departure I think prefer I will still I will still [ __ ] ride at dawn That's a huge departure though And look dude you know I the conversation that we had the other week and I think the one that we're having now it might be less Gogggins Jo screaming alpha motivation [ __ ] sleep token track over the top of it edit thing However uh one of the things that I've noticed when seeing somebody that goes from a position like the one that you were in or the light equivalent that I was to talking in this sort of a way there's an awful lot more humanity I think that people can see in that because work until your eyes bleed Nobody cares about your emotions [ __ ] you dude Just go harder Um although it sounds fantastic in theory it's very impersonal and it sounds it sounds mechanistic It sounds robotic It sounds detached and that's fantastic and you can do that for a while You can completely disregard the way that you feel for a while Yeah But only for a while and sooner or later the entropy of positive affect being a motivator The fact that enjoyment is efficiency Mhm does tend to catch up with you and it'll catch up with you in sneaky ways Yeah Right The quad tear who knows and I'm completely open to this Who knows whether the quad would have happened if the book had been finished in twice as long Yeah You know your system sort of contributes to itself in a global sort of stress-based manner It's you know what's weird is that the thing that's made the season hard is not actually like work ethic or even time constraints because like I work pretty much every day all day but like that that's that's been baseline and that doesn't really bother me like I don't bother very much I like doing that The thing is that the nature of what fills that time and so like if I have all the things that are not work that are related to work that I must do as a result so that I can get back to doing the work I like doing like me writing a book is the is the most fulfill like is my favorite thing in the entire world Us doing these podcasts is some of the best moments that I get to have in my life Um uh like twice a month I'll have uh business owners who come out that are bigger that were that are like kind of like not portfolio ready but like they're they're doing usually like you know five to you know $25 million a year like right in that range And I get to I spent a whole day with those 10 businesses and it's like and I tell them I'm like this is the [ __ ] best Like I love this This is my favorite thing in my entire life Um but it's it's everything that's not that Uh and Basos talks about the overhead right and I think it's when the overhead starts to become a disproportionate amount of your of your time And I think that at every level of at least entrepreneurship I get these periods where the overhead just becomes bigger and bigger and bigger until I fix it right right And so like for us I had I think I I told you I'll tell everybody publicly like I had I think eight or nine lawsuits within um like 30 days at the beginning of this year And so I was like "Okay that sucked." And then I'll tell you the story that happened on top of this just to give everyone some context Um Ila had a health thing She went to the doctor to get it checked out and uh Rea was with her and uh I was like "Hey you know how's it going what's going on um and she had said earlier like she can't get in I was like what what does that even mean and then and then the next text I got from the EA was she has cancer And so I remember reading that text and being like okay uh all right This is reality now Uh like this is now the new frame And I sat with it just long enough to enrich and absorb that concept Sick Yeah And so then I was like all right And so I'm thinking okay like chemo like what do we need to do diet why like I'm already thinking through this stuff and I was like okay what kind of cancer is it what state like that's what I'm I'm going with this So I asked for more details and she was like oh my god no The reason that it was delayed was because the front desk girl has cancer and she just messed something up and that was what she was using as her excuse Laya doesn't have cancer And I was like oh she does have this other stuff right but she doesn't have cancer And the the thing is is that Ila after that occurred when I hung out with her later that night um was you know obviously annoyed at whatever issue she was dealing with But for me I was like I saw her and I just gave her this big hug and I was like "Hey." I was like "You don't have cancer." And so it's crazy There's the exact example of gratitude This terrible thing And just kidding it's not a thing anymore And now I'm really grateful that you have the terrible thing that you have now At least it's not cancer And so um to bring this back that all still happened in the same period of time Um and Chris mentioned this earlier uh I don't know if this before the spot but like I uh I there was a there was a mishap with printing um my next book that's coming out And um the equivalent of one and a half acres of trees um basically became unusable because there were sufficient errors in the book that I I couldn't in good EV you know in good conscious kind of like the can And it's like how bad of a mess up does the does it have to be on the can for me not to sell it right and like I had to have this internal I was like maybe I could make it a thing like hey our our books had some mess ups and we're and I was like no one's going to care No one's going to care They're just going to remember that they got a [ __ ] up book And so I had to destroy those right and so I I could I I have like seven more massive ones but I'm not going to get into it Um but the beauty of of this entire thing was I got to have this experience um of being forced to say "Okay is there a world where I'm going to have to endure more of this?" And the answer to that if I continue to do what I'm doing is yes And so I need to build a legal team which is what I've now built And I like and so there's these things and all of a sudden now am I better at gratitude or did I solve the problem i don't know I'd be like really like I I want to be real I don't know But as of May 1st things are a little better And my actual health for anybody who's a health nut my HRV average was about 32 Um and I'd have many many low 20s days for a 36-year-old active male Pretty bad Um and since May like May 1st uh I'm I'm up like 15 points on my HRV And I have changed nothing Like I like I eat the same I work out the same I'm pretty routine oriented The only thing that has changed was the decision that 2025 I'm not I'm not I'm not tossing out 2025 like and I started in the beginning of the year and I was talking to a good friend of mine and he was like dude [ __ ] bad year He was like [ __ ] He's like stop [ __ ] saying that And I was like you're right I should stop saying that Uh it will be a handful of moments over five months that were spread out and then the back seven I was like I can [ __ ] murder it Turn this around Yeah Exact We're turning the ship around Right And so that's I've actually been like it's almost been like an exciting thing for me right now So I'm I'm I have a little bit of a smile because I'm I'm pumped for it Personal observation you get absolutely better returns at the top ends of achievement because often times assets pull to the winners The problem is to achieve the highest levels you have to give up proportional amounts of the things you hoped the achievements would get you There comes a time when the hard work you have to do is learning that you can't work any harder any longer and that you have to change what got you here to what will get you to where you want to go You can work to get anything you want but you have to sacrifice the other things you want to keep it And that's sometimes harder than the work Yeah 2025 in the day Yeah Um the the the hard remains the same Actually I've I've given this a huge amount of thought So like what makes something hard like just in and of itself like what actually makes something hard and so if we think about this as an aversive stimulus or a negative stimulus then you have because habituation happens on both sides and this is what I think is so fascinating because it's like okay well you know I wanted this big thing to happen I wanted the Rolls-Royce I wanted the Ferrari whatever save my whole life and here I am right and I was happy for a week and then all of a sudden I got used to it right so I was like why can't I habituate to the suck right why can't I habituate to the suck and the thing is is that you do the only thing is that what makes the suck keep sucking is what makes punishment effective which is increasing intensity and variety And so if you want to effectively punish someone you can't just keep punching in the same way You have to increase intensity and change how you do it And the beautiful thing is that life doesn't fight fair And so life will change the intensity and will give you more variety I mean how many times you been like I didn't know life could suck in this way Like like this is a new one you know like wow Like you spin the roulette of life and you're like "Oh here's another one that sucks My dick was kicked from another angle." Yeah exactly Congratulations Had no idea And so so in thinking about that it was like okay I think the reason that the hard persists is because the nature of the currency that you pay or that you exchange for the thing that you want changes because in the very beginning you basically have to like you know conquer your friends and family who tell you that this might be a bad idea Okay fine You get over that And then you have to conquer yourself into the most basic level of like I have to do something Okay So you start you start taking action You start learning you start learning how to learn stuff which is learning through failure and learning through So you start doing that and you realize you're not going to die if you fail Okay Then after that then it's like okay but then now you have this dramatic skill deficiency Right so you have to very quickly level up in a ton of different things um in whatever whatever domain you're in Right and then that that has many failure loops that have we have we have we habituated to failure no it's too it's too uh generalized So the failures that that occur are specific and so it's just like oh I didn't know I could fail in this way right like we had an event um so we we hold an event at our at at our headquarters uh like monthly and when people come out I remember it was like three times in a row there was this thing at the front desk that got messed up and I was like how like it was the can thing I was like how how right and I swear to God they I got I got the message back and they said um well the system messed up in a different way this and I was like same issue new route exactly and I was like and it it happened three times in total and so it was the same problem three completely they're like well we fixed that version of the problem but then this one came up and so it's like it still sucked and so the thing is is that I think failure is our our habituation to failure is so narrow that every new type of failure there All three of those hurt Micro novelty Yes And so um and so when I think about that is like when like my like I said this year financially has been the best year of my life right and so that's been awesome Um but I've had all of these I mean I've had uh I've had health stuff le health health stuff that was separate We had legal things which is another another whole thing Business stuff book stuff Yeah there's Yeah there's the book and then there's stacking stuff Yeah there's a lot of things Um and so all of those things happened and I was like oh I was like so it's just that the currency has changed the currency that I'm paying And so I'm very happy to pay the long hours currency I'm very happy to pay the what am I willing to give up in terms of social life Like that to me I've habituated to that price That's not hard for me I I don't even consider it a sacrifice anymore which is I think what you want because people people will sometime maybe see you or maybe they'll see me and think of like the Gogggins uh you know work until your eyes blade thing is is that like and maybe maybe I don't know Gogggins but well I'll just speak for myself I don't I don't really push that hard like I don't really push I do it and I've already habituated to this like this is not this is not an excess for me pushed in the initial to get up to the moment and now yeah and I I like we worked so I had my whole team in a in a boardroom at the very beginning you saw my my timer so I have a timer that's well on my phone it has like 22 and a half hours on it and so What I've been doing is I've been challenging the team to they wanted to do a 12-week project and I said "Hey can we do it in seven days right?" And not only are we going to do it in seven days we're going to actually see how many actual hours does it take of us working together to get this done And my hope is that we get the whole thing done in under 50 hours with eight guys And so I'm like "Okay so we can shrink what was once going to be 3 months into this period of time." And so over the last two days we just did this and I'm going to do it again tomorrow um is that everyone was starting to work at 7 and continued didn't really leave the boardroom except for like to use the restroom until about 9:00 at night And so you're talking 12 14 hour days but like on the whole time and the thing is and this is what's this is what's crazy every single guy who was in that room texted me afterwards was like that was [ __ ] awesome like I wish we could work like this all the time And so like I don't think like we talk about work and what makes work hard and all these things but like most of the things once you learn how to work the work itself is self-reinforcing and you enjoy it It's everything else that you didn't know you were going to have to sacrifice so that you could get back to working And so that's that's where I've had to really consider this uh Bulgarian method approach So we talked about um a powerlifter friend of yours who like he went to go train with the best coach of all time And so there's the Bulgarian system which is the same thing uh in Bulgaria This tiny little nation disproportionately out competes in Olympic lifting And the way that they do it is they have a system which basically just breaks everyone who does it except for the one person who can sustain it and he becomes champion And so I actually see business unfortunately or fortunately very similar in a lot of ways which is that the path the uh the science of achievement is fairly straightforward right like you have to pursue high leverage opportunities and that is the working smart and then if everyone is working smart then the only thing left that you have to compete is working hard right because people say work smart not hard only works when you compete against dumb people like my competition is smart and they're also working hard and so we both have to work hard And so um that price though is has been something that I've been staring at um for myself because I've never had the aspiration of being number one I for at least for me it's not in my DNA I haven't had that desire to be the richest man in the world Not something I care about And so then it's it's getting into okay what's the sweet spot that maximizes enough where I can actually start looking at some of these other preferences that I have and say you know what I am no longer willing to make that trade And the the other part of me we talked about lame earlier like oh the coffee you know made your week Mhm To the same degree Um oh like this is enough for you Yeah And I've actually had a very I would say disdainful almost take when I would hear somebody who okay I well take this Fine I'll take take this whatever you want Um you know someone gets to a few million dollars a year and they're like that's it you know I made it and I and and I have to fight against this is what I'm working on Um I see that and I'm like out of the game Like he's out He's out Yeah Done Like just quit too soon Yeah Yeah Like there's so much so much juice left to squeeze right but then it's like well the the thing is is that the the juice that that comes out is your output and the thing that's being squeezed is you And so that's what I've been thinking a lot about Look at that person Yeah who gets to however much a year 50 grand 100 grand a million 2 million 10 million And they go "That's enough." Yeah Who won of Yeah Because that person finished their race way before you Way before you You're the You're the [ __ ] [ __ ] that's still running Let me tell you this story So my first gym ever I had my first manager who worked there Um and he was a trainer He was awesome Best trainer I ever had and I promoted him to manager And with that pay raise um he went from something in the neighborhood of like $25,000 a year as a trainer uh paid by session to getting a salary of like $45,000 a year which for me was a ton of money at the time when I was paying somebody else right and uh he did it for 6 months crushed it did an amazing job and he said "Hey man can I talk to you after work today?" I was like "Yeah sure man What's up?" Like you're like "You're doing great whatever." He says "Um hey I um I don't I don't want to be I don't want to be manager anymore." And I was like "What do you mean you're you're quitting?" He's like "No no no I I just I just want to be a trainer." And I was like "But I mean but you realize your your pay would get cut in half Like that like that doesn't really make sense." And he just looked at me and I still I remember this to this day He looked at me he's like "I'll just be poor then." And I and I it was like it was like it was like a it was it was like a bomb dead I was like And I looked at and I was I was literally speechless And I just said I respect it but I will never understand it And the thing is is that he is to this day I got to see him 10 I got to see him three weeks ago first time in like 10 years He was then the happiest person I ever met And today or when I just saw him just as happy And he's like "Dude I mean I can't can you believe that we were starting that gym and you were at the floor?" And you know we're cing some of those old stories He's like "Look what you have man all this stuff and I was like "Dude you won." Like I'm still trying to catch up to you And that was uh a lot of the conversation that we had A quick aside if you've been feeling a bit sluggish your testosterone levels might be the problem They play a huge role in your energy focus and performance But most people have no idea where those are or what to do if something's off which is why I'm such a huge fan of function I wanted a smarter and more comprehensive way to work out what's happening inside of my body And twice a year they run lab tests that monitor over a 100 biomarkers and their team of expert physicians then analyze the data and give you actionable advice to improve your health and lifespan Seeing your testosterone levels and dozens of other biomarkers charted across the course of a year with actionable insights to actually improve them gives you a clear path to making your life better And getting your blood work drawn and analyzed like this would usually cost thousands But with function it's just $499 And for the first thousand Modern Wisdom listeners you get $100 off bringing it down to 399 bucks So you can get the exact same blood panels that I get and save another $100 by going to the link in the description below or heading to functionhealth.com/modernwisdom That's functionhealth.com/modern wisdom The problem is to achieve the highest levels you have to give up proportional amounts of the things you hope the achievements would get you Yeah What's that i'll give a micro example of a sacrifice that I've chosen to reverse which is that I love training I love working out I've been I've been doing it It was it was my first love the first thing I ever liked like really got obsessed with And over probably the last you know however many years I still obviously trained I was still you know in shape But my training was you know sometimes two days a week sometimes three days a week It would be you know 60 minutes maybe 90 if I got lucky Um and I had this realization And it was during this year 2025 where I was like you know I have all this [ __ ] money and I can do whatever I want And I was like and I can't even have my workout be as long as I want it to be And so I basically made a rule for myself that I will not work out if I am rushed That's the deal And so I will work out for as long as it takes to work out and that's that And so that means that if my workout takes two hours or it takes two and a half hours or I'm with a friend and it takes three hours because we're just like talking between sets and having a great time There are three things in this world that bring me joy Working out with somebody that I like eating food with somebody that I like ideally after I worked out and writing The three things that bring me the most joy in life And I was like why am I sacrificing one of the only three things in this world that I know that I enjoy to get something that I hoped would buy me the freedom to work out as much as I wanted whenever I wanted And so what are the things that I put on the altar of the success what are the things that I sacrificed for this this god of achievement and I was like this one I'm not willing to sacrifice anymore And so I think part of the reason that like has been a life a lifeboat for me or a life raft while this kind of worst season has happened is like I put on like 20 pounds of muscle so far this year because I've been able to like I've been using that as a really wonderful outlet and I was like man and I'm focusing more on this like my training partner every day I'm like dude thank you for doing this with me like this is this is awesome like this is great like my I won the day like if I did nothing else I get to the end of the day and I'm like I crushed this workout and that was and that's It's a big pivot dude And it's one that I think everybody that's driven by the sort of hatred of past self whip yourself into submission Puritan work ethic thing will inevitably come to realize after a time There may be some outlier for whom their their capacity for discomfort and for sacrifice is literally greater than the duration of their life Yeah That they would have got there eventually They just died first Yeah You know and but I think that for most people it's not And you reach I would call it something like sort of uh lifestyle escape velocity uh where you go I'm I all of the objective metrics are right and the subjective ones aren't which is a good example uh of sort of what you've hinted at And you go how can I assume that the solution is fixing subjective metric problems with more objective metrics and and and then and and I'll say this for anybody who's in the season where like listen you're 22 years old and you're like I need to work my face off You do You need to you need to work your face off But the thing is is like there will get to a point we're fast forwarding you know however many years but there's nothing like I don't regret the amount of work that I've done Um and I and I I I don't regret it at all And I think that it was absolutely the right decision And I work a lot now But people make this extrapolated moment They take a moment of your life and they will extrapolate it to forever and assume that if you change your mind that what you did before this was wrong but it wasn't wrong it was right for that time and then we got feedback during a different time and this is right for me now and so I'm going to course correct now and if something else changes guess what you're free to change your mind tomorrow Yeah I I love this and I think about it so much that one of the issues with asking anybody who's successful for advice is that they tell you what they do now Yeah Not what they did when they were in your position Thousand% And you should not ask somebody how are you maintaining your success right now How did you achieve your success when you were at the stage that I was at that is the question that you need to ask And it's the same thing And stupid people see somebody changing their mind as a weakness not as a strength And if you are the sort of person who goes "Huh this strategy worked for me previously or didn't or I thought it worked for me and it didn't I'm going to update the way that I operate." Perfect example I've been on this sort of a flex similar to yourself I would say my uh lifestyle escape velocity I needed to reach a lower altitude than you So I was you know getting into coast uh as opposed to still using the booster rockets earlier Um but I started talking about how uh like purposeful deoptimization uh you know what is it that you're doing the things for transitioning from the work until your eyes bleed to a different mode of of reward and stuff like that And some people that I think don't understand me super well which is fine because no one's supposed to understand you especially not random people on the internet but people will see snippets of whatever's been sort of the most salient narrative And uh a bunch of them said something to the effect of "Uh bro sold us the problem now he's selling us the solution." Yeah And I was like "Huh that's really interesting." Because what I'm doing is saying "This works for me right now." And what I was saying in the past was this works for me right now Nothing has changed And this is why there's often when it comes to sort of internet advice it's very patronizing the way that the audience is treated by people that are critics as if they're sort of these agencyless undiscerning sponges Yeah That are totally incapable of applying or filtering Huh well Alex doesn't have [ __ ] five kids and no wife right like I'm a single father a five kid What you know living in Brooklyn and a single bedroom Okay I I think you might need to adapt some of the things that he's saying or I'm twice as old or I'm half the age whatever Like you should ask somebody what they did when they were at the stage that you were at not where they are now So many things I want to respond to So number one my my embedded command to everyone is use if useful Use if useful Number one Number two this is a documentary not a sermon This is a showing you know like at least my content is like this is me showing what's going on and I try to be real and that means that if I change my mind then it'll change Third model the rise if you want the rise Model the plateau if you want the plateau And so saying "Oh you know Warren Buffett says he had a great year if he only makes one good decision." It's like saying "Oh to get rich I should fly private." Doesn't really work that way I should play basketball I want to get tall It's your you're you're conflating variables right i should I should go to the gym once I have energy I should start saving money once I'm rich Uh like that's when I'll do it It's just it just conflates sequence right it's a win-win fallacy Um and so I think the the man I I haven't talked about this in in I don't I don't even know if I ever talked about this The greatest skill is the ability to discern what things to use and what things to cast out It is the is it is the the the central narrative of noise versus signal And the reason that I've spent such a disproportionate amount of time focused on behavior was because there's so much noise that if people cannot translate their quote advice into what I should do then there's nothing useful about it Which is why I think the density of useful information uh people I think people are blood hounds for value Um but I think that value gets translated most in the most crystallized distilled concentrated manner when it can be translated into do this instead of that Period And everything else the amorphous words that people use especially the you know the motivation manifesto the the the or just manifestation we'll get into that one Uh people get triggered on that Um that is what leads more people astray And so they take the entirety of someone and without all of the other conditions that apply to that person and say "Oh I will take this and apply it to my life." And if you cannot pull out what is useful for you you will never win And that is a really strong statement but because all you're going to be doing is trying to and I love this is my favorite tweet that I've heard from um Andrew Wilkinson from Tiny M here are the numbers for my winning lottery ticket Every entrepreneur explaining how they were successful And so like the next Google isn't a search engine right the best version of your life isn't copying Hormosi or copying Williamson It's being able to with nuance apply the principles that are generalizable across domains but then having the wherewithal yeah the discernment to apply the nuance to your specific circumstance and being able to map those two things I think is the skill that has gotten me the disproportionate return on my life I have bought and I've been public about this I've been you know very the earlier part of my career is very involved in what I would consider the alternative education you know space right people you know the the courses the the world that has I would say a relatively bad reputation But I have yet in my life to have purchased anything from anyone that I have not had an exceptional return from And is that because of them or is that because of me who knows but I can say that when I even had bad experiences I could say these are all the things that I will not do to a customer And then I have my notebook of the the crinkled can and the end that's off the center And that ability to observe and pause before immediately taking action Like there are some people that I have met where I know I'll tell you this story because it's it's heartbreaking I've helped a lot of gyms in my career is you know probably my second season of entrepreneurship Um one of the things that we'll do to a gym to make it more profitable is we you know we adjust pricing Sometimes we write send a price raise letter and this you know this thing's tested We that we've done it hundreds of times A guy you know reaches out and said "Hey I did your the whole price raise and 90% of my members left." And I was like "What like what h like how what happened?" And so he explained that he had a $29 a month gym and then he raised it to $200 a month That only works when you're a service business not a what I consider a facility usage business where you're just like $10 a month crunch and it's just like you can use the gym whatever you want You have equipment My model was for people who had trainers and who who were teaching you know classes or sessions or semi-privates And so in those instances if you're at 99 and you go to to $200 you're not going to lose half your customers You might lose a third but you still make more money you have more profit etc But he had taken what is otherwise something that has made so many gyms profitable and successful and he applied it to a specific context Now he says I'm a gym owner He said gym stuff Why did but then what happens is for you and I or anybody who wants to make content if I were to say okay under these situations under this part you know particular context if you have a decent relationship with your customers and you have ongoing communication then you can say it's like you you don't it takes 10 minutes of disclaimers to get to the point right and so then this is why fundamentally like winners will always win because they will still be able to find you know the the silver lining even in the terrible experiences that will make them better And my favorite my favorite visualization of the type of person that I want to be is and this is a a Harry Potter reference Uh but the sword of Gryffindor uh was made of dwarven steel and dwarfven steel in the in the mythology of Harry Potter um could only take in that which made it stronger And so it's not to say that the sword of Gryffindor couldn't cut butter or couldn't you know uh just get into a sword fight but if it happens to you know kill a basilix then it will absorb the poison of the basilisk So like so many people lose because they want to prove that this too did not work when in reality it was that you don't know how to make it work and it has been easier for you to complain and say this did not work the way that I would prefer right rather than like how can I make this work for me how can I turn this into something that has been that can still be a W And I think that one skill has probably been the single unlock that I've been able to have because like I I learned these alternative you know the this this alternative world of education of like how do you sell how do you how do you run ads how do you how do you sell you know courses how do you do coaching all this stuff that has a really negative kind of vibe But the thing is is the fundamentals of persuasion there are so powerful They were just being used to sell stuff that's not good But the thing is is that there's so much buyer resistance there that if you can sell stuff in that market when you go to sell insurance you murder And so I think people fail to take into consideration the context of the person who's given the advice and what piece is useful that they should use and the rest you can cast away Figure out what you want Ignore the opinions of others Do so much work it would be unreasonable that you fail Realize it never mattered to begin with Help others once you get there You've already achieved the things you said would make you successful Yeah The first five steps there is my um is basically my my master life plan Um figure out what you want which my first boss um I had I I had a pretty terrible first out of college experience of work Um but from that I learned some of the most important life lessons that I still take to this day And uh that boss particularly said one thing to me one day She said um figuring out what you want is 99% of it She said once you know what you want getting it is the easy part And I I kind of adopted that as a worldview because it's like once you're really clear like this is what I want everything that's not that is what I'm willing to give up to get it Now that thing can change and I think that's the part that people miss is that like once you learn how to get stuff then it's like okay well he said he was willing to do it's like yeah well the thing I wanted changed is do I have your permission to change what I want and I think we should all have permission to change what we want in any given moment and not having basically sunk life bias of like I put 10 years into this thing and that's okay and that's what I needed to do at that time and today I'm willing to I'm going to change everything And what's really interesting about if you look at like addicts and alcohol people who need to you know quit you know uh whatever bad habit they have there's a really strong frame Ed Mlet talks about it which is basically one more and it's been super helpful for me to not think of my changes as permanent because it's been it's allowed me to make such dramatic changes in my in my life or my business much faster than I think most people have been willing too because there's this this weight of forever on top of everything Like we extrapolate like you're in a relationship She told me to pick up my socks She's going to nag at me forever the rest of my life We need to break up right or I can do this for today and tomorrow if it still works I will do it for tomorrow And if 5 days from now or 25 days from now if I work this way I then say you know what I need a day People like oh he's burned out It's like I took a day cuz that's what I needed that day And I think giving myself permission to have that freedom has allowed me to take significantly faster action in what apparently looks like higher risk scenarios because who am I apologizing to realize it never mattered to begin with What's that cosmic irrelevance So like we're willing to sacrifice everything that we have for the thing that we want And then once we get the thing that we want we want back the things that we sacrificed which really just goes to the heart of the human condition which is we want it all And we're not willing to make trades And so one of the reasons that I've actually I would say largely tossed out the deathbed regrets of most people is that what they do typically is they will have the bias of wanting the other path they could have taken without considering the cost of that path So they say "Hey I was really successful and I did all these things but you know I I would give it all up today to have my family." It's like well yeah but you didn't because you actually chose the path that you're on and you weren't willing to do that But what you are saying right now is that you want it all Sure So does everyone And so um I've had a you know a few moments of clarity over the last you know year or so but if you want it all life will give you nothing And that has been helpful for me because in pursuit of we want everything without the cost and everything has a price and you will never be able to get the sufficient price tag paid on everything to reach critical mass to achieve a monocative success in any domain unless you are willing to trade from another And I think that that has significantly minimized my regret Before we continue if you struggle to stay asleep because your body gets too hot or too cold this is going to help Eightlee just released their brand new Pod 5 which includes the world's first temperature regulating duvet Pair it with their smart mattress cover which warms or cools each side of the bed by up to 20° and now you've got your own climate controlled cocoon built for deep uninterrupted rest The new base even comes with a built-in speaker so you can fall asleep to white noise nature sounds or a little ambient Andrew Huberman if that's your thing Plus it's got upgraded biometric sensors that quietly run health checks every night It spots patterns like abnormal heartbeats disrupted breathing or sudden changes in HRV And it still tracks all of the essentials like your sleep time sleep phases HRV snoring heart rate all with 99% accuracy And it'll even stop warming or cooling your bed an hour before you get into it Which is why Eightleep's been clinically proven to increase total sleep by up to 1 hour every night Every single person I've got on to Eight Sleep has had their life changed by it I wouldn't keep hopping on about it if it wasn't a massive game changer So I highly recommend that you try it And they've got a 30-day sleep trial So you can buy it and sleep on it for 29 nights And if you don't like it they'll just give you your money back Plus they ship internationally Right now you can get up to $350 off the Pod 5 by going to the link in the description below by heading to 8LE.com/modernwisdism using the code modernwisdom a checkout That's ei.com/modernwisdom and modern wisdom a checkout We give up our 20s for our 30s We give up our 30s for our 40s our 40s for our 50s And we trade everything we achieved in our 30s 40s and 50s to get back to our 20s We give up the thing we have most of for the thing that we have least of And we give up the thing that we want for the thing that's supposed to get it Right I I I will become happy when I'm sufficiently successful And I will sacrifice my happiness in pursuit of success so that I can become sufficiently successful so I can finally be happy Yeah We're the problem Yeah That that's that's that's reliably the takeaway But I think it's a really really good point this um like retrospective life reprogramming thing that people do uh where we spend our 20s wanting to be richer and older and have a family Then we start that in our 30s and we gain more wealth and do the family thing and then we get back to get to our 40s and we've got more responsibilities We've accumulated all of this stuff and then we think "God if only I could go back to my 20s." But you were [ __ ] miserable in your 20s This is a great uh lesson from Morgan Hel Fantastic I think I sent you the nostalgia artist Yeah Um people should just search nostalgia uh what's his fund called [ __ ] Uh collaborative fund Nostalgia collaborative fund It's a great essay Um and in it he's talking to his wife and Morgan's wife is uh discussing with him what their plans are when the kids are going to move out And Morgan starts talking about their time in their 20s where they could lie in on a Sunday morning and and and they didn't have any responsibilities and the kids didn't need taken to soccer practice And he says "Well God wasn't that the golden years like how amaz do you remember do you remember how amazing that was?" His wife turns to him and she goes "Honey you were miserable You hated it You had no idea whether you were going to be successful You were constantly concerned about money You were desperately needing validation from all of these people around you you were were permanently in dissatisfaction about this stuff And he realized that in retrospect he knew that all of his worries were a waste of time but at the time he had no assurance that they weren't something he should fret about and keep himself up at night We already know how the movie ends when we go back and say we want to relive it And you can't relive it into the same context because uncertainty is the largest part of the story I had a personal example that was similar to this which was Leila and I were talking and um I said you know when we you know didn't do any of the speaking and all this other stuff that we're doing and all we did was just own the portfolio companies and get distributions I was like man life was so chill like we just we could do whatever the [ __ ] we wanted you know we we didn't have an office like we didn't have to show up we just did whatever we wanted and she said you were the worst [Laughter] And so and now we're working like maniacs right i've I I haven't worked harder than I have in the last 18 months in a while Um and she's like I prefer you working the way that we do now to when you didn't have enough to do And so I I I only partially say this for the one person that this this affects which is that like even like we seek freedom but it's really that we seek we seek options Like the idea of freedom is a blank calendar but a blank calendar that never gets filled is not a fulfilling day And so we want the ability to have whatever we want during that day And so I think being deliberate about what are what are my what are my good day moments that I can try and recreate every day And I have it on my wall I have two things on that are permanently on my in my office wall Logic evidence utility and what does it mean how do you know and why does that matter and the other three are work out with friends eat food with friends write something my good day formula And so I I had the desire for freedom When you aren't sure what things to fill that freedom with when you know what to fill the freedom with then you're willing to give up optionality because you already know you've already pre-selected your lunch for the day because it's your favorite meal And so so you are willing to make some sacrifices in terms of flexibility because you'll be able to have even more of those lunches or write even more uh by making some of these I've tried many lunches and few are better than this Yes Exactly And I I do think uh the perennial creatures of habit like you are and I think certainly I am as well Um there is a a tendency to disparage new options So no no no no I already know the best lunch Like uh you maybe maybe And yeah you've tried a lot of lunches That's good But do you really like you're So what so you're never ever going to try another new lunch Huh well okay So maybe But also how much of that How much of that could be you excusing the pain of adventure and the pain of potential failure a bad lunch I might try a new lunch and it might be worse What a [ __ ] waste that would be Look at all the time that I've put into trying lunches Look at look at the quality of lunch I could have had compared with the new one And this is a kind of a lesson of getting older And this is almost certainly one of the reasons why people's openness to experience on ocean decreases as they get older that they have this sort of experts fallacy thing Um so I've spent time recently around a lot of people in bands and these guys are very artistic Uh they they have uh studios that are filled with [ __ ] torn up magazine sheets and like a sock Zack my housemate had a [ __ ] sock cellar taped to his wall for the two years we lived together I was like "What's that doing there?" I don't know Um well why is it there and he just cuz he's you know covered in tattoos and [ __ ] playing guitar and and and writing [ __ ] poetry and doing stuff It just to him that doesn't that doesn't really matter And I was like I should be around people that push me beyond my limits to do new things more in different ways Yes Yes Yes I need different levels of stimulus there Just to linger for one more moment on that uh sort of nostalgia golden years thing Um there's this really really lovely insight Perhaps golden years can only happen in our memory Nobody believes that we're living through a golden era right now We never think we're in the good old days but the good old days are always now Well sometimes I mean co probably wasn't there's somewhat periods during which people would go that wasn't the good old days but when you're 85 and you were 25 in co you [ __ ] give anything for it True True Yeah I guess good good old days can be in many many variet depends on how bad now is Correct Uh but I'm sure that in the whatever like the 80s and the '9s in America how many people considered they were living through the golden era Very few And yet in retrospect everybody just wants [ __ ] Britney Spears back Do you know what I mean like the old one not the new one She's crazy Um that's what everybody wants They want this sort of Creed big tackles from American football 18wheel articulated lorries and big American flags flying I have spent a huge amount of mental resources accepting suffering and not saying that there's something wrong with something bad Like a huge amount of mental resources has gone into this because my I I've I've been better and faster at correcting the loop of like oh I am not happy with this particular thing and therefore there is something wrong Yeah So fix the story that I tell myself as opposed to fix the thing And that's been um super helpful with the addition of everything that I remember will always be better than it was And the nice thing is that there's tons of science that backs this up which is that we learn uh through reward and punishment Punishment fades with time no matter how bad it was Like you get drunk you get hung over you say "I'll never drink again." 7 days later you're out drinking again Why the punishment of the hangover fades quickly you are with somebody for a while you're like "This [ __ ] is crazy." Or "This guy is crazy." And then you break up and then all of a sudden what do you remember the good times Because reward sticks And in some ways there's a little bit of a hopeful message there which is that when you look back on your life you will disproportionately remember the good times But it only becomes a problem if you lament the present which is the only thing you've ever actually lived in That's the fading affect bias Tragedy plus time equals comedy is the closest thing psychology has to an equation Um all right next one People only root for others at two times First when they're at the beginning of the race Second when they finish Neither is when you need it So you have to master the middle The boring exhausting soulcrushing middle That's where the winning happens on your own People will only cheer for you as long as you can't beat them at the game they value most friendly reminder that every person who doubts you is right until they aren't It's a bug not a feature I mean I feel like as you read these you're reading my soul from this year Um I mean that's why I mean I I tweet these every day as they come up because that's what's top of mind for me And you know the boring mundane middle like I think about you know the very very beginning people say you know I'm really excited for you that you're trying this thing out right and I noticed that everyone was very happy for me to try because I temporarily decreased my status I actually became worse than them during that period of time And then as soon as I achieved a level of success which I then realized that their happiness for me was proportional to where they were on the ladder relative to me And so as soon as I passed some people then they stopped being happy and then they start you know you know uh saying bad things right and the people who were still always ahead were still like "Keep it up Keep it up." And there's still people who have been that way my whole life And I just wonder if and when I pass them will they flip i don't know But also to the same degree it was the it was after you start the race when you're in the thick of it because you'll quickly pass the people who've done nothing But then you have this long period of time where you don't catch up to the people who've been doing it for a long time and that's the part where it's very lonely because you don't have your initial your initial posy You have to leave them at some point Um but then you don't get to the new group that's you know way ahead and actually has some some proof behind them that you can actually like sit at the table And so like today I have if I were to do something I have tons of support but I don't really need the support now I need I I needed it in the middle right in the many years that like no one knew who Alexi was Um and that's that's that's the hard part And I think it's it's the story that Morgan Hassel tells which is that you just don't know how it's going to finish And that's what makes it hard is the uncertainty of like what if I give up everything that I've done in my life for nothing and then all of a sudden if I knew that then I wouldn't be willing to make this trade But in retrospect when you do have the thing you're like of course I was like if I knew that this was going to happen I'd be I would I would happily make the trade But you don't know And so you're just putting the money down and they're rolling it But you get to find out if you hit black five [ __ ] years from now Yeah It's it it's why dealing with uncertainty is such a meta skill and it's one that I to be honest it's one that I really suck at I'm I'm very very not good at dealing with uncertainty My uh required line of assurance in order for me to commit to a decision is incredibly high Which is why I've basically never failed at anything that I've done M all of the stuff that I've done uh a string of incredibly slow but very reliable successes is just because my required number of uh sort of justification points is very high and you know in retrospect it might look like it was a risk It's like dude I I took so long to [ __ ] make this decision It's not I I knew that I wanted to move to America for [ __ ] ages years and years before I actually ended up doing it and it took a long time for me to commit to that decision I knew that I wanted to pivot out of nightife for a good while before I got myself to the stage where I was prepared to do that On the on the friend point it's a a painful realization that the small number of good friends want you to win in case you take them with you And the large number of bad friends are scared of you winning in case you leave them behind The best way to know who a real friend is is how they react when you win And when that happens you'll realize how few real friends you really have Mhm I I mean look I don't know whether it's just some sort of cosmic blessing or whatever but or maybe I'm discerning with friends I don't know Or maybe it's small circle thing or whatever Um it's been very rare that that's that I've been on the receiving end of that um that I've I've ended up being around as soon as I left the UK And even the people that I was around in the UK I' chosen a relatively small group of people but all of them [ __ ] like still now to this day love we're still in touch We still we still support each other and I keep I'm loving seeing what they're doing But I get the sense that if you're a little bit more open if the circle's a little bit more open there is a huge amount of incentive for you to listen to people who do not have your best interests at heart And they [ __ ] suck And those people need to get out of your life One of my rules is you should only take advice from people whose dreams for your life are bigger than yours are which is a very small number of people Sometimes it's your parents Sometimes your parents really do have bigger dreams for you than you do in different ways as well In ways that you don't notice I mean I think the the closest approximation to yourself is a spouse It's the most it's the most tactically aligned person that you can have Still obviously there are some spouses who are are not good but I can say that I think Leila's dreams for me have been in many ways bigger or ahead of where my dreams for me have been Um and I have big dreams And you know listening to her um has has has yielded really great returns But to the point that you were saying earlier about those those friends that were kind of with you in the early days I think it's actually cyclical So the people who are closest to you in the beginning if they're like true like actual friends then you recognize that because they actually want you to win and that's amazing A lot of people don't have that And so what I have felt at least for me was that when you're a little ahead is where the friction is when you blow them out of the water and there's no question like it's it's beyond reproach They will do one of two things They will either be really happy for you or they'll change the game that they're beating you at That's great but I'm in better shape That's great but my marriage is better right like or whatever you know whatever game that they choose to play And so I think the last um the last quote that you had there about um friendly reminder that every person who doubts you is right until they aren't It's a bug not a feature It's not a bug it's a feature Yeah people who doubt you will be right most of the time and this further increases your uncertainty about the path that you're choosing to take But on a long enough time horizon most people who don't bet are guaranteed to lose And so they get to win at being right more times than you get to win at being right But what that equation doesn't take into consideration is intensity which is can I be so right one time that it makes all of the times that I was wrong irrelevant and in the nature of life the answer is yes almost a resounding yes for just about every domain Like everyone can say that every person you've ever dated has sucked and they could predict that you're going to break up until you find the person that you're going to marry and in that moment who [ __ ] cares about the other 90 people that you went on dates with that everybody said was a bad idea or that you have a bad picker or you don't have a good taste It's like well you're not marrying them I date in a way that's different than than you would prefer Great But I did end up finding this thing I the you know the first thing that I ever did was you know an online an online fitness thing and it kind of worked and then I did my first gym and it kind of worked and then I started all these other other side side projects I got distracted and I didn't know and many people were like sure like good luck with that But I knew that they just weren't really rooting for me They were rooting for me to fail They were rooting for me the wrong way And so the downside risk is significantly smaller and more frequent It's both You're more likely to lose and it's more likely to happen more times It's just that upside is uncapped And so and I think about this one a lot So there's the story of the guy Do you know the guy who wrote Jingle Bells no So I didn't even know that that was I thought it was like Happy Birthday I thought he was just gifted to humanity when when we started So there's this guy He's a he's a it's he has the most tragic life you can imagine just like an a complete like you don't know his name right I can't even remember his name right has did nothing but failed was a failed everything and his entire life was nothing he just happened to write this small thing called jingle bells and it has become you know the number one song at Christmas time like maybe globally and I think about that life where it's like what if I failed at everything but then I have one thing that actually makes a permanent impact I was like would I trade that life for Aristotle's good life where I amount to nothing but the whole time was good and this is just one of my eternal battles where I think with myself that I have no answer for to be clear But when I'm when I'm thinking through the periods where things suck I'm like well maybe maybe I'll get a jingle bells out of this and maybe it'll just take 20 years longer than I thought on the contribution of other people The pessimists get to be right the optimists get to be rich And it's because of intensity It's the thing that it's we are so bad at estimating value returns Yeah we're very it's very hard for us to compreh comprehend an outside return We're very good at binary thinking of yes this worked No this didn't work But we're not very good at thinking through the bet of I get 10x and I'm going to lose 50% of the time People don't make that bet and they should do it every time The reason that this has been of particular interest to me is I would consider myself a criticism hyperresponder Um you know I I I'm not sure why being on the outside as a kid maybe being a little bit more socially isolated uh only child syndrome being hideous as but I mean I was like pretty I was a very late bloomer right um and you talk funny I do talk funny I did for the place that I was in as well as the place that I'm in now I just had a career of talking funny in different places Um but the reason that I'm so averse so the reason that I really don't like people who put down those that are trying to do something different or have big dreams is that I know how close I came to not taking a shot because of the opinions of other people around me And I'm aware this is not super alpha lone ranger solo degenerate prneur [ __ ] pill right the cannon and the law of someone that's supposed to be successful is basically one long middle finger to all doubters But this is what every single Rocky training montage gets wrong which is Rocky never doubted the direction and the path that he was on just doubted whether or not he could get there That's not the way the personal growth happens in my opinion at all You are filled with uncertainty Is this even working i I I have no idea if there's glory on the other side of this You know it's the other it's the other side of the lonely it's the process of the lonely chapter And if you have people around you that are adding weight onto the bar that you didn't choose like well you're just making it [ __ ] harder for me to stand up It's already hard enough for me And um yeah increasingly I just want to be around people that make me feel good about the things that I'm trying to do And I don't think that that's an unreasonable demand And I also think that it can seem fragile shallow or fickle or uncommitted or needy or um undriven not robust And yet I still want it And yet for me choosing to swim against the tide just seems like a stupid decision So I want people in my life whose dreams are bigger for me than mine are and who believe in me more than I do And I think when you find people like that who help you achieve the goals that you set out to achieve you realize when you achieve the goals that they were more valuable than the goals that you got I it's the I said to you before I'm hopefully about to move into some sort of a office studio location in Austin and I've just tapped out my [ __ ] solo DGEN energy Uh you know you don't work in a cupboard anymore as much Um sometimes but not always to my dismay Yeah Where I can't be in the cupboard where I can't stare at the wall Me in platform 9 and 3/4 Um because I've just run out of that gas tank and I want to be around people I want to be around my friends I want to be around the people that I work with and I want to have a little squad of people that help you know bolster me If you talk about work life balance as a 22-year-old man you're hanging around with the wrong people That knowing feeling when you realize you've outgrown your social circle isn't loneliness It's your ambition finally speaking louder than your need to belong And there's a narrative that we should not criticize ourselves We should not say the things that we could have done better But I believe that that voice isn't an insecurity I think it's a version that wants you to chase your potential And so I think not judging the criticism but accepting the criticism I think those are the two separate things Um and I think that's what that's what unlocks the potential while making it somewhat palatable along the way Yeah Well it's it's uncomfortable right you position an ideal you compare yourself to that ideal you find yourself lacking There is pain in that So you can either sit with the pain or you can judge the pain You mentioned this earlier on I call it second order emotions Mark Manson calls them meta emotions So feeling frustrated at your anxiousness and then feeling bitter about your frustration at your anxiousness and then feeling resentful about your bitterness at your frustration about your anxiousness and you don't have all that much control over the first ones Emotions are going to come and go You have a lot of control over the ones that come after that Did you tell me the story of uh Buddha and the second arrow no Oh it's great So the Buddha was trying to teach a lesson and he says if I um shoot you with an arrow uh does it hurt and you know the student was like uh yes it would be hurtful or like you know that that would suck And so he says okay if I were to shoot you with you know a second arrow in the same spot after the first arrow would that hurt and he said yes He said the first arrow is life He said you can't avoid the first arrow He said but the second arrow is you and that one you can avoid And so suffering is a constant That's a fixed cost of life We're going to have downsides We're going to have bad seasons bad moments bad days But I think a great rule to live by is like only suffer once Like great I and I mean my god I think if everyone only suffered once like just because I like tiny little monikers that I can remind myself in the moment of okay this happened I will only allow it I will only suffer this one time I will not relive this moment over and over again I will not judge myself for not you know behaving the way I would have liked to have behaved I will not judge the the the the version of me that I should have been at this moment And round and round you go It's like an infinite regress of self-castigation Yeah Right And so it's like I want me I want memory dividends not memory liabilities Yeah If you talk about work life balance as a 22-y old man you're hanging out with the wrong people This goes back to the ask them what they did when they were at your stage not what they do now thing And look I to hear you get within the same [ __ ] universe as something approximating work life balance Okay let's let's calm down here Don't get too ahead of yourself I mean that that is a that's a really sort of cosmic change for you in and your direction And as somebody who cares about your well-being it's one that I've kind of been hoping for at some point a bit of humanity to come through Yeah you know to prove and it's I said it earlier on dude It proves that there is a there is a human inside of there I'm being I'm being serious And I I think it does a bunch of things Um it shows that somebody who is very staunch about an opinion can change their mind which I think is something that's very admirable I think it is significantly more relatable to most people with a more common level of work ethic desire for life outside of it uh maybe a broader number of um things than three Yeah You know on the post-it note Um and I think you know selfishly for me it gives us more to relate about because uh I have more to relate about someone who's trying to navigate what life looks like outside of work Um but if you life outside of work if you are you're you're slowly getting that uh you notice that as of yet I haven't had some sort of Cassandra complex about I think I'll have mentioned if we go back to episode 3 at 4 minutes and 55 Um I told you so But it might not be okay to work your life away but it is okay to work your 20's away And so many of the realizations that we have arrived at are only really accessible to you because you've closed the loop of all of the ones that you needed to first So I want to I want to aggressively comment on this So everything I said up to this point I take it all out Yeah Um no I I want to comment on this because I think it's it's it's meaningful So um number one so I um I I would actually challenge um a couple of the things you said Um the biggest one being like the just shoulds in general which is like you shouldn't work your life away You should uh work away your 20s my opinion do whatever the [ __ ] you want If you have a goal then there will be ways that will increase or decrease the likelihood to achieve them And so if and having simultaneous goals dramatically decreases the likelihood of accomplishing any of them And it's typically easier to accomplish goals in sequence or chronologically rather than in parallel Y and so if if I were to say hey what are the three you know three goals you have and you say one two three and I say okay which of these three goals is the most important well then let's work on that one first And does that one goal allow us to does it decrease or does it decrease the failure rate of the other two goals which then makes it the most important goal overall sometimes they are uh dependent on each other I'm going to get in shape get rich then find a wife as opposed to I'm going to find a wife then try and get rich then try and get in shape Yeah you'll get dramatically higher quality talent Uh for sure U but maybe she'll just love you for you Who knows uh we we can all hope Regardless now most 22-year-olds irrespective of domain if you if if and I that's why I have these conting like if you seek to be good at something then you have a tremendous deficit in experience and repetitions that people who are ahead of you or who have achieved what you want to achieve have over you And so the only thing that you have now you do have an advantage you have a couple Number one is that you will have more energy than they do period And so your ability to work long hours sleep less and maintain high levels of focus while maintaining peak fluid intelligence is at its peak Use it The second thing is that you have nothing to lose And so the thing is is people always fear being the new the new entrant But when you have nothing to lose or you have nothing going for you it also means you have nothing to lose And that means that every position on the board always has an advantage because anybody who has achieved this big thing that you have was also once a 22-year-old who had nothing going for them And you're at zero right you can't get worse than this You have unlimited shots on goal And so not taking the shot is like saying "Life I don't want to scratch off this lottery ticket but the lottery ticket's free Why would you not scratch it off and try it?" And so the first advantage is you've got you've got energy Next advantage is you have nothing to lose Third is you also have time and you have very low responsibilities And so you have not only the ability to uh to put all of your yourself into something you also have no circumstantial things that are preventing you Now if someone is listening to this and like I'm 25 and I've got a kid Cool And which thing do you want to sacrifice and I'm saying sacrifice your kid but I'm saying like you're going to have some trades Now I take things to the logical extreme and say okay well Basos has kids Bill Gates has kids Warren Buffett has kids This is just if you wanted to be you know business successful It's like okay well then that can't be a reason that I can't be successful And so whatever reasons that we usually give ourselves in the beginning for why we can't achieve something you can almost always find not only just someone but someone who's achieved worldclass levels of success with worse conditions than you currently have which then means it's absolutely possible And then the only thing that it takes to get there is work And so um I I I just wanted to be very clear that if you are you know if you're 22 years old like the world does not hate you You're just not good at anything yet I I felt so jilted by the world as a young business person because we were stepping into these meetings with 40 and 50year-old nightclub leisure company owners and me and my business partner were 19 or 20 and we were saying "Hey nice club Shame no one's [ __ ] in it." And we can put people in Uh and the fact that someone twice our age or three times our age was sat opposite the table from us and didn't give me respect made me it made me really uh discouraged So I'm like I'm you need me You need f people I have people Why can you not see this why can you not see the value in what it is that I do and it feels like a personal curse some sort of cosmic judgment that's just bestowed on you Oh it's because of my failing It's because they are being mean to me Another 20-year-old business person who would have went in there they would have been given the respect that they deserve It's like no if you're young everybody in business is going to be skeptical of you Now this is changing a little bit I think uh the rise of the wonder kid the Elon Musk Doge Deen world I think maybe is leverage There's that uh kid that made the AI app that takes photos of food and it does calories and he's making like a million dollars a month or something He's 16 17 18 He just vibecoded his way to like multi-millionaire status in his teenage years Okay we're starting to realize that ideas get unlocked through technology and through youth and through insight But there is still an industrial era mindset industrial revolution era mindset which is this craft of sometime of some type will take a lot of time for you to get there And uh by virtue of that people are skeptical of young guys and young girls And you're right If you're 22 and starting your own business the world doesn't hate you They're just skeptical of you You know what's interesting is um what you talked about earlier about like the lowrisk path Like you look at all these things I think you become the exception by being the rule And so I'll unpack that but like we we highlight the 16-year-old right we don't nearly as much highlight the 30-year-old who's crushing it because it's like well obviously he worked for a decade and then he got there It's like but if you work for a decade and they get you there you are exceptional You are already at the very ends of achievement and you did it by following the rule which is that it's just maybe not unpredicted Yes It's not it's not a surprise And so I think people conflate surprises with exceptional and it is exceptional in that it's rare not necessarily that it's the only kind of rare Correct It's rare that it was a lottery ticket more than and of course and I want to be clear maybe he's 16 or and like Mr Beast is a perfect example of this He's 25 I think now Something like that 256 I know we're getting old Um and so the thing is is that he started I think making videos when he was 12 right and so it's like oh well he's got 13 years in just one game spending every hour of every day for that 13 years doing it And so some of these kind of younger guys and I think part of this is just proliferation of information and access to information has just gotten you know bountiful for everyone And with AI it's been easier for people with fewer resources that to to start actual things right the cost of entry financially is significantly lower And the cost the access to information is basically almost zero And so when you combine those things if you're 14 years old you have high fluid intelligence Like your brain's working So if you're like if you're on the younger side like there's there is no rule that says that an app designed by a 14-year-old is in some way or anyway valued less by a customer than an app that's developed by a 40-year-old There's no rule And so I will also push back on one thing which is if you continue to feel like people don't take you seriously if you continue to feel like people don't take you seriously because of your age it might be not because of your age It might be because you suck And I think that is a significantly harder and pro and more probable pill that you'll have to swallow Well especially given that self assessment and reflection is difficult to do when you're young Your own ability to understand where your strengths and weaknesses lie It's hard Full stop Sure It's really hard if you're 20 Yeah Right Or 22 This is from Mark Manson I had this episode with him this week It was so good Before you win everyone will ask why you're working so hard And after you win everyone will remind you how lucky you got Holy [ __ ] dude You know what's funny i actually Okay so I didn't know that's where the where the quote was going to go I thought it was going to go um before you win everyone asks you why you're working so hard After you win everyone asks you why you're working so hard That's I mean both of those work Yeah And it's it's it's true But I think in that in both of those situations both of those things are true um in both of them before you win everyone will ask you why you're working so hard There's no proof that this is going in the right direction You don't have any evidence that you're actually even good at this thing The likelihood of a positive outcome is incredibly low And after you win have you not yet reached escape velocity where you don't need to do this anymore um why are you capitalizing on an opportunity uh why are you capitalizing on um conquest instead of continuing to just start from opportunity at the bottom like because you've now reached the [ __ ] top of the mountain is enough enough uh or dude I mean you know just so precient to start a business at that time Like you you know like you really timed the market or uh I've been learning about um it's not venting but it's a I can't [ __ ] I can't remember what it's called It's this particular type of put down that chicks give other chicks And I I don't think that guys have I frankly don't think that guys have like the lexical capacity to do this socially Um but it's something like uh imagine that a bunch of girls are at a a wedding together and there's one girl that doesn't like another one and she'll say something like you know I really admire your confidence Like I would never wear a dress like that and it's just like I'm you know it it looks you know you just with your body type like it's really impressive that you that you decided to wear that today like that's just you know you've done you're com you've done really well or you know huh you you're prepared to like just eat like I you know I I can't I can't just like keep eating but it seems like you just don't really mind and it's this sort of odd venting come put down you know are you trying to No I'm saying the dress you know it's this sort of culpable deniability of an insult and um yeah I get the sense that the look retrospective But conversation thing is a little bit like that It's a backhanded insult not a backhanded compliment There's a meme from Family Guy that does this exact thing It's two girls eating lunch together just trading insults like this And then it just pans to two guys uh eating lunch after like a 60-second exchange of just insults And he says "Hey John I like your tie." He says "Oh thanks." And it says "Men we know how to be friends." That's sick I was just thinking about that while you're saying it Um but it's so it's so interesting like I have I have that statement that I said at the beginning which is um you live your life in a way that I would not prefer And all of these things boil down to that And I've had this as my my internal translation mechanism because uh before you before you win they're saying you live your life in a way that I would not prefer And then after you win in Mark's example you have won in a way that I did not prefer And then if you continue to work you continue to live your life in a way that I would not prefer And so at the end of the day they just cast their preferences on to you And then somehow they expect you to give a [ __ ] And I think this is where I've lost friends Um and that's okay And they're entitled to think that you should care and you're entitled to not care The problem here especially again for me and for the people who are the criticism hyperresponders that are listening if you overindex or even if you just index on other people's input you think "Huh maybe for a while you didn't have as many people contributing to your life as you might have wanted And now as a porpa how can I reject this penny someone's flicked me." What you don't realize is that this penny could have arsenic on the other side of it or it might be a fake penny or it might be a joke or it might blow up in your hand or something You go "Huh well maybe maybe this person's comment is like useful Maybe I should take heed of this Maybe it's something that I should I should listen to." And the ability to be discerning when you're not used to receiving feedback Yeah Is a difficult skill And again the I can just middle finger my way through life not listening to anybody's opinion is an interesting one but practically it's very difficult and it's a skill that you need to learn And you do need to learn You do need to listen to feedback Like if you had never changed how you did your podcast from day one until now your podcast would not be what it is Right if I had made sales presentations if I had written emails if I had made products that didn't respond to feedback then we would not be where we're at right now It's a really it's a really interesting question of like how do you discern which feedback is good and which feedback isn't Y um and I'm trying to think about what my my perspective is on that I think it comes down to number one aligned incentives like does this person benefit from me doing better Number two is competence Are they do they actually have sufficient domain expertise where their uh feedback would be relevant now I'll be clear here If you have a yogurt company and you want somebody to try your yogurt and your friends say "I don't think the yogurt tastes good." Well they probably had a lot of yogurt and they've eaten stuff before and so like they could very well have domain expertise If you uh have a business that's a yogurt business and then your mother gives her opinion about how the business works and she's never run a business that's different right and so so the second would be uh domain expertise or competence The first is uh aligned incentives Um and then what do you think i think that those are like I'm trying to think of I honestly think those two those two are because you can start adding [ __ ] on but it just makes it harder And the first one ensures that the person is pointing in the same direction as you The second one ensures that they actually know how to [ __ ] row a boat Yeah Uh so yeah I like that I like that Success really just boils down to this You got to want it more than you hate what it takes to get it If you're willing to suck at anything for 100 days in a row you can beat most people at most things Okay I'm so excited you said this So we we we talked a little bit about how well I'll rewind the clock So there's this quote that I read from Kobe where he said he thought that it was going to be super competitive in the NBA but when he got into the NBA he realized that people well they figured out that they had made it and uh weren't willing to sacrifice as much as he was to continue to win And I would say that that that realization has been somewhat true for me which is that like winning it's like it it hasn't gotten harder from the actual doing stuff side There has been the trades that have been different than I expected Um but especially when you're looking at you know the population of everyone to a 100 days of doing something in a row Uh there was a there was a friend of mine who had a he offered a guarantee on a product that he sold and the guarantee was this He said all you have to do you can get all your money back if you just open up a Google doc and say what you're going to do every day and at the end of the day you're going to say what you did That's it And you just do that for six weeks That's all you have to do And if you do that and you don't get the the results I'll you know I'll give your money back And what's crazy about that is when he was talking about it he said ' Do you know what the completion rate of twice a day doing something is he's like it's like less than 1% He's like so I can happily do it because it seems so simple And so I think we we we underplay how simple success is and extrapolate an expectation of how easy it must be from that And then we're disappointed or dissatisfied when it doesn't meet those expectations Like it is harder than we expect but also the rewards may be also greater than we expect James Clear has this [ __ ] unbelievable insight It doesn't make sense to continue wanting something if you're not willing to do what it takes to get it If you don't want to live the lifestyle then release yourself from the desire To crave the result but not the process is to guarantee disappointment [ __ ] Yeah Holy [ __ ] Super true I mean um I think Naval quoted this blog a long time ago but desire is a contract you make with yourself to be unhappy until you get what you want And if you never if you basically know that you're never willing to put the work in to get the thing Yep That's an iron law Like that James Clear thing is an absolute iron law If you don't want to live the lifestyle then release yourself from the desire There is a path between where you are and the place that you want to be Mhm if you're not prepared to do that walk still wanting to reach the end of the path is just guaranteeing that you're going to live an unsatisfactory life And so when I hear that quote I immediately go to my operational side of like okay how do I release myself from a desire so I thought about that and I actually think it's a lot like dating So hear me out on this So there is the old saying I think it's a girl saying um well I'm going to assume it's a girl saying which is if you want to get over somebody get under somebody else All right now there's a point to this which is I don't think you can release desire but you can replace it And so it's like if you have a terrible breakup there's basically some totem of reinforcement that's been removed from your life getting over something or someone is simply giving getting enough exposure to enough new things from the time that you've bought back from this reinforcer being gone to find another reinforcer Which is why I genuinely think that the idea of like oh I shouldn't date for a while after I get out of a breakup is just complete stupidity Like why would you like what why what rule is there well you have to heal Healing for most people is defined as I find something else that brings me sufficient joy that my baseline returns to normal But if I'm going to bring somebody else into my life that person's also going to serve that same function And so like I could I can replace it with tennis or gardening or business or just the next person I'm going to date And why is one better than the other to clear's uh releasing of desire I think it's just choose to want something else So if I were to say if I were to give someone the direction release the desire I would say don't try and release the desire Try and justify or reason why wanting something different is better Well also maybe be a little bit more open-minded about how that desire could be fulfilled It's like huh and I you know to push back on the why you should have a little bit of a break between partners I would say that there is a specific type of learning that comes especially from intense and emotional experiences that takes a little bit of time for you to embibe And that if you very quickly move into a new relationship you're trying to find the direction that you're going in while you're also rowing the [ __ ] boat and trying to fix the holes from the last one I get the sense that there are certain realizations that come about by we're often very bad at taking lessons from a thing while it's still happening And I wonder whether you very quickly move into the I can't take lessons from this thing mode because I'm focused on the new thing as opposed to let's sit down and debrief a little bit after this And what does life look like perfect example of this Alander Bottom has a a beautiful insight where he says uh people rarely change often not in relationships and never when you ask them to It seems that most people's changes in the way that they show up in relationships occur between them Now I would guess that a lot of this is because change is very emotionally painful and breakups are emotionally painful Therefore people change when they break up It's like my world got ripped out from underneath me Mhm But I do wonder whether moving on very quickly stops the reflective process that allows sense making to occur by immediately giving you new novel stimulus that is distracting So I so I will I will challenge back um which is one um it assumes that we must change Um if we take that if we take that frame which I wouldn't necessarily accept in all cases Um number two uh it assumes that the change that we're going to make in between is something that's going to increase the likelihood that we find someone that we like which may or may not occur Third I do think that change would happen no matter what because you've you've removed somebody who was altering your behavior And anyone who says that the person they date doesn't alter their behavior like I don't know what you're talking about Like of course they they give you little kisses when you do stuff and they say thank you Of course it you have reward cycles and punishment cycles that exist constantly and so like oh she's always different when she's in a relationship It's because they have somebody else who's deliberately uh changing their behavior and that's normal and we do control and counter control to our partners all the time People don't like using the word control but it's exactly what you do if you want your husband to pick up the socks then you do you say thanks and you give them a [ __ ] afterwards whatever like you do some sort of rewarding contingency in order to you know get more more of the type of behavior you like And also you say hey don't say that when they say something that you they said hey are you going to finish your dinner and you're like I used to have an eating disorder and my friends used to say I wasn't eating my food blah blah blah right and so um with the relationship piece I think that you're going to change when you have reward or punishment stimulus that changes and until those things change nothing is going to change to Ellen Debot Len's name that him um and so if you get out of a relationship you will change regardless because the conditions have changed and so your behavior will change and so and all of these things I then posit as the question is like and do I need to do this in order to find the person that I want How many people have gotten into relationships where they've changed the things that they like to do they've started uh staying up late because their partner stays up they started getting up early because their partner gets up early Let's say just that cuz it's kind of simple And then they get out of this relationship and they ask themselves the question still going to bed late or waking up early right because they've habituated that type of behavior right they ask themselves "Well huh I kind of forgot that I used to go to bed early or stay sleep in I forgot that bit of me because for the last 12 months I've been in this relationship with this person and I adapted We sort of met in the middle or maybe they really changed me or whatever it is." Well is that the way that I want to be is that the actual change that I want to make or do I want to go back to or do I want to uh alchemize both of these things together and and create this this new world i'm not convinced In theory maybe In practice no And in practice for most people certainly no It takes time for this stuff to filter through Yes Particular landmark events that you go through that are very traumatic I don't even think it's landmark I think you can change behavior really quickly and it's just not a huge thing Like Leila used to say in the very beginning of our relationship she said "Haha you're stupid." She would make that joke and I say "Hey I don't really like that." And then she stopped It's just a very small thing It wasn't like this traumatic thing I just said "It's a preference of mine if you don't say that." And she said "Okay." And then that was it Um with regards to the the staying up late thing the contingency of reinforcement that was the other part partner who was there is gone So now the reason that they were doing it before was that they didn't have this reinforce reinforce introduced so they're willing to change their behavior to accommodate this later you know timeline We don't have transparency with ourselves though you know I don't know what that means We do not see all of the reasons for our behavior and where they came from immediately Do we ever rarely but we will get more with distance I think to go huh I'm no longer receiving the stimulus It's like I tried to run on I tried to run on Jupiter Jupiter was really heavy I adapted my running style Huh I'm back on Earth I need Oh this is going to take a little bit of time for me to get back into this new running style So the reason So I'm I'm I will continue to to die on this because I I feel no I I like what I'm describing has been the central worldview that has been responsible for a great deal of my material success And it's rapid behavior change Rapid behavior change but also being able to accurately view the world At least to my I I think I I view it more clearly than I did before and my decision quality has dramatically increased by isolating variables that are dependent that actually change behavior change outcome And so when you said knowing why it's like a it's like a bingo red flag for me Not red flag but just like a you know pay attention thing because when when we say "Oh I figured out why." In my opinion for the vast majority of people when they figured out why it means that I have crafted a narrative that I accept which may or may not have any bearing on reality and so I focus purely on the observable because they are far more predictable in terms of predicting your own behavior and predicting other people's behavior And so with regard to the relationship it's like people have many counter controls that they do and so because of that you change your behavior and then all of those things are removed at once Now were there other things that are also variables in your life that occur during that period of time of course Do we know them all no And so I take the position that there are so many variables Why do I need to know why and I never will anyways And so why would I waste my time trying to figure out whether do you think you're this way because your father didn't hug you enough i don't know I know that I am this way Period And might be 20 different things because we're going to generalize work ethic to your dad didn't hug you enough when it might be like I write because I've had enough reinforcing contingencies around writing that I'd write and that's different than what I'm willing to speak which is different than when I do podcast which is different than all these others And so when we get into the basically we extrapolate out reasoning by analogy works really well When we get really down to what are the behaviors that changed when you were in the relationship versus not in the relationship and if you can get isolating on that which you can be specific about not necessarily why it happened but that it changed and what behaviors changed then you can look at your laundry list of okay these are the changes in my behavior that I have continued to keep post relationship Are any of these uh conducive to me getting a more attractive or better partner in the future now if the person that I was with got me to go to the gym because they went to the gym and then the gym itself became reinforcing because uh basically totems of reinforcement can shift uh over time in terms of the work itself can be reinforcing I might say this was a laundry This is one of the items that changed when I was in this relationship and I am okay with it And so if we have that laundry list then again why do I need time and so I anyways I I push back on this very hard because me discovering why I did something gives me zero value That's interesting I I would class myself as a uh understanding why especially around myself is one of the greatest sources of pleasure that I've got in my life Okay This be maybe where me and you differ Oh no I'm gonna we're gonna [ __ ] jam on this I love this Okay So I will give you I think a perfect analogy for this and the reason that I'm in general uh somebody who's not the biggest fan of therapy as is traditionally practiced If I were playing tennis right and I went to a coach and they said "Hey I need you to change your grip from this to this straightforward." Would I spend the vast majority of that session with the coach being like "Let's try to discover why you hold the grip that way Who [ __ ] cares i do Now when we get to why I used the word control before if we can understand the dependent variables then it means basically if you can predict it means you can control which people don't like that But if you can predict what's going to happen it means that you know what the variables are and you can influence those variables which you can influence the outcome which means you can control the system And so knowing why um from a narrative perspective I think again You'll never know why You will have a narrative that you've accepted And so what because then what do I want to do next i only want to ch like we have a set of behaviors or skills that will increase the likelihood of goal achievement Whatever that goal is being spiritual being a good husband whatever it is these behaviors will do that To increase the likelihood of me doing these behaviors then I have to have more good stuff less bad stuff I will I will die down that hill Beyond that what does anything that happened prior to this matter at all in so far as it only works if I can use that same variable and then and then use it again to change my behavior yet again to be conducive to the goal What if I love this [ __ ] yeah I can tell I can tell I can tell it's either the nicotine or or the debate Uh so what if the actual outcome that you wanted was the pursuit of trying to work out why because for me and tried to word that relatively carefully not finding out the actual why but the pursuit of trying to work out why Uh it's the reason that I fell in love with evolutionary psychology because to me it started to explain why we are the way we are It's one of the common themes in this podcast over 900 and something episodes It is a place for people to come to try and get some approximation of why they are the way they are And even if that's wrong even if it does not fully explain partly explain the process of that discovery for me is fascinating I have a a a journal entry from a long time ago when I was on mushrooms and I was it was post post party or post whatever and I was back at the house and I had some music on and I was just thinking through ideas like this and I could feel this game of tennis occurring in my mind as I thought a thing and then I asked why and then I asked why and then I asked why and then I asked why and it felt like this sort of movement almost probably certainly was default mode off and you know hemispheres talking and all the rest of And I wrote down not what I was thinking about but I wrote down the sentence I love the way that my mind works because I like that conversation of tighter and tighter spirals of sort of deeper and deeper questions And for me I enjoy the why such It's something that in and of itself brings me joy to try and work out why we are the way we are or why I am the way I am I I wholeheartedly accept that learning things is enjoyable And I think what you described more or less was that the um I I come purely from the perspective of changing behavior and the why is super important and not always knowable And so I I push back on narrative so heavily because in a way and like take this not as a as a slight I see a lot of that as mental masturbation I would agree And I do not decry that in any way If someone wants to do something with their time awesome Play video games Do whatever you want Mhm If we want to say this increases or decreases the likelihood that we achieve a goal then that is where I will because that we can know Does this increase or decrease the likely that we achieve a goal and the difficulty with ascribing why is that we cannot know because we cannot relive the same circumstances again and so in any equals one situations it has and I and I say this as somebody that um obsessed for a a long period of my life Um and this is not to say that now I'm better or different or anything like that Um over the wise but when I the reason I have two two two three statements on on on my wall the good day and those three What does that mean how do you know that and why does it matter and so if we say these are the changes that occur in this relationship Okay that's what it means rather than like I'm stressed now or you know what she rubbed off on me because she was really anal What does that mean okay it just means that she counted her calories and uh I now you know when I go to a menu I order like a diva Whatever right like these are the two behavior changes When I say anal this is what I mean Great Okay How do you know that well did I do that two or three times or is this every single time that I go out and so okay now I know the extent to which this thing that I have now defined And who cares why does that matter i'm anal now Well anal just means I change the way I order Does that matter no Okay And so instead of trying to maybe I maybe it was because I sought out approval from her and other people because I have this hole inside of me and I I wanted to gain um some sort of you know in-group outgroup I wanted to be accepted by her and her friends who also do that I think maybe that's what who cares And so it was that that's does me counting my calories and being a diva when I order decrease the likelihood that I find the next mate if the answer is yes then I'll change the behavior If no [ __ ] it Interesting I'll be uh the pursuit of the why to me improves my well-being and the quality of my well-being is a goal in and of itself So let's say that one of the few goals that you have is to be in moment to moment happiness or satisfaction or something like that For me the pursuit of the why is a source of that So I'm aware that that's like a lexical [ __ ] jiu-jitsu move but um I've thought about this a lot and it's been one of the most sort of common themes in the show and uh it's even if it's pointless Yeah kind of like uh like [ __ ] skimming rocks or something that it only occurs for a small moment and accumulates nothing over time Um I like it Yeah So uh this is the second half of that quote from above The bar for excellence has never been so low Most of your competition quits after the first sign of difficulty because they've never known what hard feels like If it's hard for you it's hard for everyone And most people avoid hard things which is why you can beat most people by just trying I think the vast majority of people don't actually know what it looks like to put tremendous effort into something And I think one of the most valuable things that the office which now you're going to have um has given me is the people who now work in my proximity one of the number one things that I get back as feedback is like I really didn't understand how much he works And like he doesn't stop And it's it's easy to say these things and it's hard to act because one of the difficulty especially the vast majority of successful people have one thing in common which is they're consistent and consistency you cannot see in a snapshot You can't see consistency in a sound bite You can't see consistency in a real And so consistency is one of those things I think you talked about un unlearnable lessons I think they are difficult to learn without large amounts of exposure And so those and I think those are the types of lessons that become unlearnable is that you need large amounts of exposure in order to encapsulate the lesson itself You and so trying is one of those like the act of trying Yes And so I so uh Ila had a mentor of hers say this uh to her and I've been and it's it's lived rent free in my mind since then Um so we had this thing that we we had this house that we were pursuing and the and and we we ended up not getting the house or whatever The mentor first said "Are you settling or did you move mountains?" And it's just a great it's it was just a great visual for me in terms of like did you did you try or did you move the [ __ ] world to make it happen and when you think about like the extreme versions of this which is maybe the person that you care about most in the world dies if you don't the amount of options of action that open up is dramatic And I think people are so constrained in their thinking of what level of effort is because they haven't considered what trading way more for that thing is But they would be they would be willing to trade far more for that thing if the trade were clear But because they've never tried hard at anything they just think "Oh this is what trying looks like." Which might be like the occasional Google search and a couple hours a week of like watching some videos on YouTube on something It's like that is not trying Like that is not trying Like if you cannot count the amount of repetitions that you're having in the hundreds that is not trying And like and and the the longer I've been doing stuff um that's that's you know yielded material reward the the greater my history of delay on me getting what I want with volume And so it's like I know that this thing like everything in my life volume negates luck You know violence is the answer Like these are sayings that are plastered around the wall of this office because they've been so true for me that you can brute force what you want into reality And yes today you know we talked about trades that we're not willing to make But if you want something like did you [ __ ] move mountains well the trades that you're not willing to make is you saying I don't want to move that mountain And I think and that's and that's perfectly acceptable Yes You might say uh I could do like I so I thought so because she posed that question I thought about all these other things that I could do I was like well I could offer an extra $20 million for the house That would probably get me the house Okay Am I willing to do that no Okay what else i was like I could like I had I was like completely deconstrained thinking I was like could I pay somebody to Yeah Well that that was a thought but I was going to say that one um could I um pay someone to you know we could figure out I could have a private investigator figure out when basically tail them uh the other buyer who's thinking about buying the home and uh when they're visiting it have crime occur next to them or near them or in that vicinity to be like oh this is not a safe area right like what and I was like oh man I completely opened up my now am I willing to do that no but it it completely deconstrained my thinking when I raise the bar of okay let's say I would pay anything And let's start at this guarantees me success Okay I'm not willing to I'm not willing to to pay that Okay well this also pretty close to guaranteeing me success Am I willing to pay that no Well this one still guarantees me Oh I'm willing to pay that And so it starts at goal achievement and then works backwards on price rather than starting with price You negotiate you negotiate the cost with yourself backwards from the assumed success which is why do so much volume it would be unreasonable that you were successful I think the bar being set incredibly low is just a it's such a [ __ ] perennial truth and there's sort of two things happening at once here One is you can work way harder than you think you can Yes And another one is most people work so not hard that even a small amount of working hard puts you into a rarified strata of people And both of those things are true at the same time Right Yeah And I'll add a third one And the bigger the goal is the fewer the people who are pursuing it just because they think it is a big goal and therefore it must be harder to achieve That's the fairest thing about most people try to achieve mediocre goals which makes them the most competed for and they assume that how difficult it is to compete for that goal must therefore extrapolate proportionally on the consistency point No one cheers you for not drinking for a day not smoking on a long drive or not overeating for one night No single workout or meal is ever impressive on its own The reason so few people understand success is consistency never looks impressive in the moment only at the end the point that you were making before around um you don't get to see the process You don't get to see what trying looks like right trying is opaque Outcomes are obvious What you have done is you have made what was previously process into an observable outcome at least a little bit Fact Alex spends a lot of time in his office Let's say I mean I assume that he's working I already knew the output of work that he was getting out of him But now I've actually seen the process that he goes through in order to be able to get that And unless you are moment by moment turning your process into some kind of an outcome live streaming it tracking it journaling publicly or privately or whatever uh no one ever actually gets to see the inputs only the outcomes And no one knows that's real impressive Maybe it came easily to him Yeah Maybe he's able to crack it out in half an hour Maybe he's got a team of people that do it on his behalf Maybe he maybe he maybe maybe And yeah you can try way harder than you think you can And most people aren't trying at all I'll give a tactical thing that has helped for trying And like this is actually one of those more rocky cuts scene type things But when you work and you actually are working you're writing the emails that you need to write you're you're you're preparing for the podcast you're doing that that work that you know is not short work It's this is going to take me 2 hours This is going to take me 4 hours When you get to the end of that and you're like man I'm kicked You know I'm this you know I I earned my shower today I think the difference is that at that point you go you grab a bottle of water and then you look at your to-do list at the next large thing and say "Great let's start on this." And I think people who don't witness that happen they don't see 4 hours And this is what working side by side someone can do I remember when I we just have we have a new uh director of marketing uh in his first week uh we needed to we needed to write some massive amount of stuff and um he was like okay so we have to do this and I was like great pull up a document let's go and he was like oh like now and I was like you got something else to do and he was like oh I mean I I no okay yeah let's let's do it now and then we shared screen for eight hours uh and then we finished it and he was like oh wow I was like great what's the next thing and he was Oh yeah Uh we we have this other thing I guess we can do too And it was and I could see his like perception on on the level of work shifting in real time And so if you have the opportunity to work with anyone that is exceptional at anything especially in that sub30 crowd for the love of God move across the country live in a tiny apartment live far below your means work for free if you have to because the skill that you will get from learning the unlearnable or the difficult to learn lessons cuz I it is pathier to say unlearning but like it's harder to learn these lessons if If you can get in proximity you will learn so much so much faster Like if you want to time warp yourself you can try and observe the little bits and nuggets and crumbs from videos podcasts things like this Cuz all we're doing is trying to describe scenarios But when you live them it completely changes you forever Like if you want to win Angela Duckworth talked about this The number one most consistent way to become a champion is join a team of champions Have I given you my 2D lessons 3D lessons thing no but I Very cool So uh Bill Perkins wrote a book called Die with Zero Great book Great book Three-hour lesson Everyone should go and get it You'll be far less motivated afterwards Keep going Yes that's true But he's fun and he is an important redress to people that struggle to spend money uh and struggle to have fun So Bill Perkins writes this book Die with Zero I bring him on the podcast The book is about how to use your money in a manner that gives you a life that you will enjoy at any level of wealth That's a 2D lesson Even speaking to him on the podcast was largely a 2D lesson We finish up the podcast and he says "What are you doing now?" And I said "Well I was going to go home and write the show notes for this." Cuz it was me an editor and a Mormon assistant in a Facebook Messenger chat That was our business at at this stage And he said "Well do you want to go wake surfing can you wake surf?" It's like "Yeah I can wake surf." When do you want to go wake surfing like when now uh yeah Okay I I mean we've just been on a podcast for 2 hours 3 hours It's the middle of the afternoon So okay no worries We go downstairs His driver's outside waiting for us We get into the car We get to Austin 360 bridge His boat captain is there on the boat with shorts for both of us and towels and food and snacks and and uh caffeine And immediately we're wakeing within 30 minutes of having finished the podcast And I was like 3D lesson 2D lesson reading the book 3D lesson going to Bill's house and seeing his staff Like huh this guy puts his money where his mouth is And the difference for exactly what you're talking about 2D lesson 3D lesson the value of narrative Yeah there are two types of people Those who want to know more and those who want to defend what they already know M so many people are afraid of changing their mind when most of their beliefs aren't even theirs to begin with Man I got some good quotes That first one's Morgan Hustle so you can go [ __ ] yourself Yeah Um No cuz I like it It's interesting that we said that cuz I was like man [ __ ] I was like I don't even remember that [ __ ] That's why Yeah Uh there's a a idea called the second half is Yeah I did write Yeah Yeah Uh do you know what the dead internet theory is no Uh over time so much content on the internet is going to be created by AI and bots that nothing is going to be left that's userenerated Essentially it's going to be a rounding error of that It's dead internet theory I get the sense that the people who are concerned about dead internet theory should have been concerned a long time ago given that most people are propagating ideas that they didn't even come up with and can't explain It's like you're worried about mindless robotic creatures producing things on the internet that you might have to read Have you seen what most people put on the internet and ask them about where they got that idea from so yeah I think the dead internet theories already occurred It's just it's as Naval says people failing the touring test in reverse People failing the touring test in reverse So they behave like robots H the second half of the quote was what so many people are afraid of changing their mind when most of their beliefs aren't even theirs to begin with So there's this this quote by Marcus Aurelius that I have I wrote I wrote on the the executive How much [ __ ] wall space have you got it's all whiteboard Yeah there's a lot Um and it was uh what are you so afraid of losing when nothing in this world belongs to you and I read that and I was like [ __ ] that's good And so like there's also things but there's also beliefs Like what are we so afraid of because every belief that we have like we got it like we come as a blank slate right now You could say you know I combined three things and made it my own You know I think you've you've you've read enough quotes in this world that like most interesting things have already been said Um but the ability to change your mind um like if you can't if you can't explain why you believe what you believe um then it isn't your belief It is someone else's And what's weird about that is that people are willing to defend someone else's belief but they're not willing to accept someone else's belief It's just that it's just one step removed I'm talking to you and it's your belief And I'm defending another person's belief but it's mine right now but it's not mine Mhm And I you know strong beliefs loosely held is I think a saying in the Y cominator world Um like before I get this like big trigger effect of like h says that I am wrong and therefore he is calling me stupid and I'm inadequate and I will die because I will you like and you extrapolate it to everything Um I think the quick check of like why do like what if he's right and I think that's a great perspective I remember having my own mind changed on something like this I had to do a debate um when I was in high school for affirmative action and so I was a very pro- affirmative action guy uh going into that debate I had to argue the opposite perspective for the debate That's cool And by uh and that was I think I think it was one of the requirements that teachers everyone had to say what side they were on and they just flipped it Um which was amazing teaching by the way Yeah it's really cool Um and at the end of the whole thing I was like I was wrong I actually think this hurts people more than it helps people And like I had all these I had all this reasoning behind it Um and I I'll tell you a completely different scenario of this in terms of questioning our beliefs So in in the gym world which is where I came from um I remember a period of time where I saw people work out and I would I would judge them and I'd be like "That guy's form is bad or he's doing too much volume or he's not he's not you know squeezing in the right way whatever." And then I learned more and then learned that that you know thing that I was seeing some guy do actually was more effective and my thing was not as effective And then a few years passed and then I learned that the original thing that I said was actually the thing that mattered And then I learned even more and it was like oh so all of these things have different rates of progress based on uh quote efficacy but all of us eventually cap out at our genetic max And so all we're really debating all we're really debating here is how quickly we reach our genetic max And if I enjoy training wouldn't I rather have longer progress over an extended period of time so then which one is better huh and so it's just like and and basically having myself and luckily for me at least um each of those times where I quote learned that I was wrong it was in silence and I after like the third or fourth time of this where it got flipped again and again I was like you know maybe I should back off a little bit Just be humble Yeah Like I'm just going to exercise the way I like to And kind of like the pursuit of why for you like I I like training this way I can't really explain it too well It just seems to give me joy Yeah Right Yep Yeah Uh there's this idea from Gwindogen Can I add something to this which is I saw this uh this yacht and it had the because every yacht names are always like wild right and it said um don't analyze your pleasures What's that mean to you he used the word analyze but I think judge is the right is the word that he that he that he I'm assuming it was he cuz this thing makes you feel good Yeah Don't don't question it Don't worry about it Just let it be Yeah That's really cool That is really really cool Like don't sec it's like the suffer like only suffer once like don't judge this thing went well sure I mean just enjoy it enjoy it Uh Gwinder Bogle's got this idea two-step flow theory Most people's opinions are copied from their favorite influencers who in turn copy the opinions of their favorite mass media As such politics is largely a battle between two armies of puppets being ventriloquised by a handful of actual thinkers And that's the you defend uh an opinion So many people are afraid of changing their mind when most of their beliefs aren't even theirs to begin with And there's people who want to know more and those who want to defend what they already believe Oh so interesting because it was kind of like this is like kind of like the Mark Manson quote I thought it was going to go in a different direction So I So based on that premise my expected outcome was um these people copy the behaviors of their favorite influencers and the influencers are using the most tested thing that the masses have said is the highest performing version of those Oh okay So it's like a means-ested outcome It's like oh the best rose to the top and then everybody's copying that Well I mean maybe but I think that the point here is that original thinking is very rare Yeah and that you have it's maybe one of the reasons why you get conceptual inertia and stuff takes a very long time to change even after a heliocentric version of the universe is [ __ ] you know turned around you have a long time for humans to catch up and I wonder whether this plays back into the breakup thing like there's just this [ __ ] conceptual inertia sometimes thought patterns for someone who has trained it perhaps be able to change like that But [ __ ] me when you start to scale that across an entire society and media and legislation and government and expectation and religion and what what is it uh a lumbering behemoth that sort of drags its feet We end up with that thinking is hard which is why the vast majority of people delegate it And I and what's really interesting and I think you had George Mack and this is his whole thing with high agency Y like you can you can be exceptional by just actually trying to come up with your own opinions like and and starting with what do we what are the few things we know which is you know reasoning from first principles which people say over and over again but don't know what reasoning from first principles is to begin with which is we start with the facts the things that we are obser in the observable universe and we only go from there and we build on that and if we if we arrive at our current thing then I will also agree with it if I don't arrive at the current thing then I'll arrive at somewhere else and then I'll have reasoning to believe that thing And the thing is is that if you do reason from first principles it does give you the ability to sustain the course for an extended period of time because your logic is sound And so you can look at everyone and there's one of my favorite memes I have like my two favorite memes of all time Um and one of them is there's this one dude and they've probably seen it with in front of like a zillion little heads that are going the other way and he says "Yes you're all wrong." And I I love that meme because to me it's like that meme is agency It's like I know I don't know why you all believe what you believe but I know why I believe what I believe And until I have observable evidence that somehow contradicts my the stack that has built this belief this is what I'm going with The problem is that this takes time to do that research to do that thinking and and and come to it Whereas and as much as we can uh you know uh throw shade at people who delegate decision-m we all do because you can't actually derive you don't have enough time to first yeah you don't have enough time So we have to just be more purposeful about what are what are the beliefs that I'm actually like what hills will I die on so I will die on my hill of of of behavior change because that is what I've spent a huge amount of my time you know thinking about Um but if if if it's around food stuff I'm like I don't know Like and I was in the and I was in the business for for 13 years Like I was in the business for a long time Um you know around fitness and nutrition and things like that But even then it's like I you know what this guy's Dr Mike's smart and I believe that he spent his time looking at all this stuff So I'm just going to delegate thinking to him Incentives are aligned Yeah If he doesn't get people leaner or more muscular then his business falls apart pretty expertise Yeah Uh the fastest growth periods are often the most miserable If you want progress get used to pain The worst thing that's ever happened to you is the worst thing that's ever happened to you The hardest you've ever worked is the hardest you've ever worked Every new challenge shows you a new territory you were scared of but survived Every time you break a new limit you now know you have the capacity to handle more than you ever did before It's inverse PTSD like workload exposure therapy that teaches you "Oh I've been here before and I didn't die This is okay." So one of my training partners what he likes me to tell him when he's in a hard set is "You're fine." That's what he likes me to tell him So he's he's right at those money sets where you're like "I'm dying right now." And you're like "You're fine Not keep going You got this It's and a lot of people like that He's like "You're fine You're fine." And I think that that's probably what he tells himself when he's going through those harder times because I um so when I was back in in in the fraternity days um I was in the SEC which is you know the South Um and they were notorious for like heavy hazing And so I was going to join as a pledge And so I called my dad up and I was like "Hey you know I don't know what's going to happen." Blah blah blah And he said he said this to me which actually was one of the strongest things that was my frame going into it because of what he said He said he said there is nothing that they can do to you that you have not already had worse happen And it was this great like huh they can't do anything worse than what I've already had happen And so going into all of these it was this very comical like oh my god I was like this is so much not as bad as this other stuff I've had to go through And I think that um to to your point of like you have only worked as hard as you've ever worked Um the the frame of I can stand it because I am not dead I am living proof every day that I have stood withtood everything that I have been through which I think almost all of us could probably give ourselves a little bit more credit Um and the day that you can't stand it anymore you won't have to What would you have said if they could have done something worse to you than what had already happened to Am I dead guess what i have a new bar that I know that I can't stand Yeah Yeah More evidence That's the new territory that you go through It's a that sort of safety thing I think of you're okay This is fine Yeah You're fine Yep It's a It's a a lovely bit of reassurance And I wonder whether a lot of that comes down to control just this sense that even if this is a new territory like your capacity to cope with it still exists and that in that there is a kind of there is a kind of control that you have or maybe it's not a direct control but it's certainly a uh not a sense of lack of control right or not a sense of lack of outcome I'm trying to unpack what you said When you reassure somebody that they're fine Mhm what it tells them is even if this is something which is novel or outside the bounds of your current model it's something that you can handle Mhm I think that's where we're trying to get to You have evidence that you have So this would be we will generalize your history to this novel situation and it also applies Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes You've been through breakups before You'll get through this one Mhm Even if this one's worse Mhm Even if this one's worse And maybe it's got nothing to do with the breakup Maybe it was to do with the way that you handled that change in career Maybe it's not even to do with any one thing Maybe it's the fact that you've handled all of your life put together up to right now is 50% of the suffering that you're going to get and the other 50% is going to come from this one thing Or maybe it's you've this is 99% of the suffering is coming from this one thing But in the 1% that you've had so far that is the only evidence that you've got I reckon that you still got this There's this uh idea I might have told you this before but uh a friend of mine told me about a time that he went through uh a really rough period sort of public scrutiny and and and lots of bad things happening to him And he said "All my life I was scared that I was a coward." I was terrified that I was a coward that I didn't have bravery And I think of myself as a hard man I hang around with hard men I do hard men things I'd tested myself but I'd only ever really tested myself under my own valition and in my own control And one day I thought huh the world's going to test me in a manner that I didn't get to choose and it's going to test me at a velocity that I wasn't prepared for He used this sentence I [ __ ] adore He said "I could always hear my better self clearing his throat in the room next door." Could always hear my better self clearing his throat in the room next door And then his wall came crashing down It's like and I wondered whether or not that guy next door was going to stop [ __ ] coughing and kick the door in And sure enough he did And it's this lovely explanation of the difference between chosen and unchosen suffering Mhm It was one of the criticisms I had that everybody made around CrossFit Uh that you know training so hard you know the Ryan Fisher like world of this like dude you made yourself [ __ ] pass out from a heat stroke in a competition but even though that is unbelievably extreme and really really impressive Let's make no bones about it You chose to be there You chose to do that pursuit What if I said you need to lie on the couch for 3 weeks and not train how hard would that be that's the difference between chosen and unchosen suffering And the weird thing is that you can't choose unchosen suffering It's very difficult unless you throw yourself into kind of chaos you know like flicking yourself like [ __ ] throwing yourself off a cliff is like well I don't know how this is going to go Uh so yeah the clearing my throat clearing his throat in the room next door is a [ __ ] wonderful visual I have two thoughts on this So number one is that one of the strongest reframes for for suffering is that it gives you the opportunity to create evidence of the person who you want to be And so it's like I cannot say that I'm the type of man who can withstand hard things without having gone through hard things And so this hard thing that has occurred that was not of my choice can still be something that serves me and my ultimate goal to become the type of man who can do these things And so reframing suffering as opportunity to create more proof I think is really really strong because we are ultimately just the behaviors that we do But we also ascribe our narratives to why we do those things which um may or may not be true but we do ascribe those narratives And so being able to say like this is going to be an amazing story was one of the things that got me through the earlier parts of the gym days when there wasn't any evidence and I could say hey this was many years of my life because if it had happened overnight how unrelatable would that story be and the reason that we don't tell stories of the the prince who just goes up to the girl and she says yes and they lived happily ever after is a very terrible story And so I think at the end of our lives we would much rather have the the twists and the turns and the the depths of character and the and then the triumph and then the and then and like this is is a story that's far more interesting than this Dude I had Jeffrey Kenberg on the show the other day Do you know who that is guy that founded DreamWorks with Stephen Spielberg Oh cool The dude that did Lion King Oh amazing And uh like every big [ __ ] Disney movie He's a legend And uh I asked him "What did you learn about storytelling?" He says "Story is only as good as it villains." Oh yeah I mean the Joker in in Dark Knight I mean it's just like he made the movie And another way to put that would be the story is only as good as it stakes Yeah The bigger the monster the more epic the hero Yes Yeah Yeah Yeah Find a woman who kills drama instead of starting it makes life quieter not louder tells you you're better than these guys you can beat them and wants you to win even more than you do then become the man required to attract that woman and marry her the moment you find her Yeah that was just a tweet about my life Um when I was debating uh whether I should marry Leila I had a mentor who I reached out to and I was like "Hey what do you think?" Um and I was actually like just not sure I just honestly came in with like open hands here I was like I don't know Um because my relationship with Ila was different than any other relationship that I had been in before And he said look at your stats And this is probably the most hormosian of of of of love story decisions But he was like "Your business is up You're eating better You're working out you are less stressed than you were And she has done all of these things to create the space for you to do that And when I translated into like what has changed about my life rather than you know do I feel the chemical compound of whatever um it actually made it a much easier decision for me to say you know what this makes sense which was by the way my proposal to Laya I think it would make sense if we got married was my actual um which wasn't a question It was a statement She was like "Is that a proposal?" And I was like "Well are you saying yes?" And she was like "Yeah." And I was like "Okay then we need to get you a ring." And that was that was that was our proposal There was there was there Yeah So that's Heros's romance But anyways um I think that I think a lot of people chase chase the um the the fireworks rather than the the the coal the coal furnace that takes a long time to to heat up but then it just it keeps it keeps going and it can power for a much longer time during good times and bad times Because if it makes sense if it makes sense without emotion then it will make sense when the emotions are gone Yeah that's an interesting assessment of the way that the human attachment system works that basically you have sanity insanity sanity again Uh and you should everybody should see themselves as potential future drug addicts that are playing around with maybe one of the most powerful substances on the planet The only issue is that it's endogenously created inside of you as opposed to exogenously given to you by a guy in a BMW That's what falling in love is Falling in love is choosing to deal yourself drugs for between 6 and 24 months Yeah During that time you cannot trust your own decision-m So you need to make as rational of a decision up front in the belief that that will be where you end up on the other side of this window For the terminology it's the passionate versus the companionate attachment system It's because serotonin gets dropped in the brain because you're just dopamine epinephrine norepinephrine [ __ ] drive drive drive and then you don't sleep you don't eat you're like "Oh my god she's amazing." He like come out of it 24 months later you're like "What the [ __ ] was that?" And if you're not careful you know in a relationship in a [ __ ] house with a golden retriever and maybe a ring and maybe a kid with a person who you don't really like all that much and made your stats go down Do you ever hear the uh diary entry that Charles Darwin wrote when he was unsure about whether or not to get married yes But please but you could recap it [ __ ] sick The document has so Darwin's unsure about whether or not he should get married so he makes a list The document has two columns one labeled marry one labeled not marry And above them circled are the words this is the question On the promarriage side of the equation were children if it pleased God constant companion and friend in old age who will feel interested in one object to be beloved and played with After reflection of an unknown length he modified the foregoing sentence with better than a dog Anyhow he continued "Home and someone to take care of house charms of music and female chitchat These things good for one's health but terrible loss of time." Without warning Darwin had from the promarriage column swerved uncontrollably into major anti-marriage factors so major that he underlined it This issue the infringement of marriage on his time especially his work time was addressed at greater length in the appropriate not marry column Not marrying he wrote would preserve freedom to go where one likes choice of society and little of it Conservation conversation of clever men at clubs not forced to visit relatives and bend in every trifle To have the expense and anxiety of children perhaps quarreling loss of time cannot read in the evening fatness and idleness anxiety and responsibility less money for bucks and if many children forced to gain one's bread even experts in mating and evolution struggle with big decisions [ __ ] sick The line that I remember from that most vividly was money for books It was just such just such a like and less money for books Yeah that will be in there I want to do another one I don't mean to just read [ __ ] that exists Have you ever read Richard Fineman's love letter to his wife uh no I read the pleasure of finding things out Okay But I love Fineman Love I mean you can see a lot of influence I might I might not be able to say this without crying which is going to be very embarrassing but I'm going to try October 17th 1946 Darlene I adore you sweetheart I know how much you like to hear it but I don't only write it because you like it I write it because it makes me warm all over inside to write you It is such a terribly long time since I last wrote to you almost 2 years But I know you'll excuse me because you understand how I am stubborn and realistic and I thought there was no sense to writing But now I know my darling wife that it is right to do what I have delayed in doing and that I have done so much in the past I want to tell you I love you I want to love you I will always love you I find it hard to understand in my mind what it means to love you after you are dead But I still want to comfort and take care of you And I want you to love me and care for me I want to have problems to discuss with you I want to do little projects with you I never thought until now that we can do that What should we do we started to learn to make clothes together or learn Chinese or get a movie projector Can't I do something now no I am alone without you And you were the idea woman and general instigator of all our wild adventures When you were sick you worried because you could not give me something that you wanted to and thought I needed You needn't have worried Just as I told you then there was no real need because I loved you in so many ways so much And now it is clearly even more true You can give me nothing Yet I love you so that you stand in my way of loving anyone else But I want you to stand there You dead are so much better than anyone else alive I know you will assure me that I am foolish and that you want me to have full happiness and don't want to be in my way I'll bet you are surprised that I don't even have a girlfriend except you sweetheart after 2 years But you can't help it darling Nor can I I don't understand it for I have met many girls and very nice ones and I don't want to remain alone But in two or three meetings they all seem ashes You only are left to me You are real My darling wife I do adore you I love my wife My wife is dead Tough to play the reverse out It's like would I want Leila to write that letter and I don't think I would unless she was happy writing that letter But if the removal of me as a contingency of reinforcement for her um meant that she couldn't find that in somebody else um would sadden me and so I've already so like with lay life I've told her I tell her a lot um I was like I'm going to die before you statistically there's I'm for sure going to die before you she's a little younger she's younger and I'm biggerale and she exercised like she's for sure going to live longer And I was like I want you to spend as little time as humanly possible from the time that I die to finding somebody else Um you do me no service by making yourself miserable And you do not discredit or dishonor me by finding somebody else to spend your life with So yeah just I I only think about that from reverse There's a the joy of melancholy Yeah is an interesting kind of emotion that's kind you know this strange think wallowing satisfaction in wistfulness um and yeah wallowing wallowing is maybe a little a little more loaded um but melancholy I you know there can be odd joy and sadness and and a kind of beauty that you get to experience after something is gone that you can't experience during it I've not had anybody in my life die Only child with a mother and a father that's still alive Like I've got there's no one must be nice Yeah [ __ ] Um but there's not been many things that I've lost And this is me [ __ ] Monday morning quarterbacking Uh I don't know But maybe what's a mood setter modern women see Ila and think "I'll wait to establish myself in my career before I date or get married or have kids." But they forget we got married when she was 23 and we built this together Love is one of the rare times you don't do life in order but rather all at once If you find someone that makes your world go round and makes the world make sense to you where you both look at the same thing and say "Oh you saw that too?" Like I feel like I was the only one I think that for high achieving individuals finding someone who sees the world the same way is incredibly rare And when you find that person you should stop what you're doing and then you should get them to stay with you And it's been you know one of the best decisions of my entire life marrying Ila And there's there's this especially unfortunately for women right now there's this huge you know put it off delay There's no rush But it doesn't actually take into um consideration two things One is that biology hasn't advanced with culture and society You can't have kids past you know 35 I mean you can but you're a geriatric you know it's a ger geriatric pregnancy past 35 Ruthless time Yeah I'm just being real right yeah Um and so I mean I I this is like super prevalent and I know this is a much more common theme on the show and I don't touch it very much but it's it just I just say it more like because it I think it sucks Um it's not fair It's not Yeah it's like objectively it's not fair Guys can wait the you know their whole lives They can do everything Um and you have to if you go to college graduate college at 21 or 22 And if you want to have four kids assuming that you have perfect pregnancies and you have exactly one year you know 18 months between each one okay that's six years by the time you're done And so if we if we rule out geriatric that geriatric pregnancy is our last then it means that we have to basically have or we you have to have your first kid at 29 Well okay maybe it'll take let's just tack one year on of marriage to have the kid and be married Okay 28 you're married All right do you want to marry somebody within 6 months of meeting them let's give it two years to give our logical you know brain in Okay so 26 26 you graduate at 22 you have 48 months And I think that again this is if you have if you don't want kids then all of this is null If you do then you have a very small window um to piece that together Now of course there's surrogates and maybe in the future you know like I I'll say in general betting on I'll smoke I'll smoke cigarettes now because by the time I'm old they'll have a cure for it Um I don't know I just I don't make those bets And so it's easier to work with reality the way it is not the way you hope it's going to end up landing Yeah to to knowingly incur basically a guaranteed price for the potential of maybe a non-existent solution is probably not the best decision-making process And to be clear I say this Ila and I you know we don't have kids She's not 35 Um but I think that we have these unrealistic expectations that someone is going to make our lives that they're going to complete us in some way when I think that for me the the the best thing that a partner can do is help you be the best version of yourself and that may mean that you also have other friends who who fulfill other needs for you I remember a mentor of mine uh you know he had had a wife that well most people have wives that are not involved in their business I'm more the exception there Um but his wife wasn't involved at all in the business and they had a very happy marriage Uh and he said um and I said ' Do you ever like wish you could talk shop with you know your wife and he said God no And I was like uh why not he said that's what I got you for And it was just such a business It was just a such a flippant like off-handed answer that I was like there was actually a lot of wisdom in that He's like I don't need I don't need her to do that He's like I need her to do this And he's like and I've got you and you and Kevin to do these things with And he's like and when I want to do like church stuff I go to these people And so um and I think a lot of that is because we've become increasingly remote People live together in close quarters for extended period of time And so it's like our exposure our surface area with one another has gone so far up compared to how the vast majority of kind of uh relationships were call even 50 years ago Like you didn't spend nearly as much time with your spouse And so it was more normal to have different people or different parts of your life that were or needs being fulfilled by many people and only the ones that are confined by the laws of marriage being delivered on that Now if you get somebody who can who can takeick two of those boxes or three of those boxes amazing But I think the idea cuz I tend to reject the idea of soulmate and I think that people have this fallacy of the perfect pick like I have to pick this person perfectly when there's also the Buddhist perspective which you and I have both you know spoken length off off camera about which is like suffering is going to be a constant and this person will like we get to choose how we want this to go and so I think that if you take off the societal pressure of a perfect partner and think does this person make me Will this person hold me back from my goals um if the answer to this that is they will make me better they will make it more likely that I I do the things that I want to do and we have no what I would consider non-negotiables I want to have kids they don't want to have kids I want to travel they never want to travel If those things are good I think part of the excitement of life is is learning how to be married There's a cool idea Louise Perry taught me about uh which is how people buy a lamp So okay if you were to move into a house completely unfernished finding the right lamp is super easy Get any lamp and the house will fit around it But if you've spent a decade and a half constructing the perfect house and all of the upholstery is chosen and the arts on the wall there's this sort of sage uh uh effevescent uh candle over the far sides Even the smell Trying to find a lamp that fits that perfectly cured house is really difficult And it's a price that we don't like to talk about I say this as somebody who's unmarried at 37 right and has constructed a pretty [ __ ] elaborate complex life Um it's significantly more difficult to find a lamp that fits into a house that you've designed for a long time than it is to build a house around a lamp And assuming that you want a lamp in your house getting the order at least somewhat right may make it easier Now there are lots of great [ __ ] things about the fact that your house is more big and complex and you've had fun in building it and all the rest of the stuff but it is a cost that we don't talk about which is how much more difficult is it what are some of the irreversible doors that you have of just being older and more ingrained in your habits and this is the theory versus practice tension again of well you know if I find the right person I can you know we can it'll and you go "Yeah dude but your mind is not that of 21 or 25 or 30 is that of 35 or 40." And it's going to be harder for you to feel as satisfied with your choice It's a difference between satisficing and maximizing And the problem is even if you're looking for satisficing you start to that bar begins to raise Yeah Exactly And how do you know that you're not kidding yourself into selling that short we've seen I was at uh Zach Zach's wedding a couple of months ago and this is such a [ __ ] universal truth of every wedding that I've ever been to as soon as the ceremony is finished all of the eyes of the older people turn onto the single people in the [ __ ] crowd And they're like blocked on like this and they're coming over Anybody that's not married the Christopher when are we going to see you know when are we going to be you know you can't you must not forever yeah exactly and uh it's vicious it's like a [ __ ] heat-seeking missile from all of the older people that are there and uh Zach's mom had a lot to drink and was being super loud and came out with an absolute [ __ ] slammer of an insight where she was you know so when do you think and so on and stuff so I I can't wait to be Dad I can't wait to have a family I can't wait to do the thing I feel like I've spent a lot of my life looking after me and I'm starting to get sick of myself and I'm looking forward to looking after somebody else And she said uh that's all well and good Make sure that you love you fall in love with the girl not with the institution And you see this with women because they have tighter timelines again Yeah that as the nightclub lights are about to come on the standards have to increasingly slip And it's not entirely the same for men But look most relationships that are an age gap of 2 yearsish I think the average is 1.5 years older in the guy's direction You can play around with this all that you want but it's going to become increasingly difficult if you're talking like over 10 years Like okay like how much are you going to have in common very different life stages You can get a particularly youthful older person or you can get a particularly mature younger person But come on like it's going to be it's going to be another uh challenge for you guys to get past And uh yeah make sure that you fall in love with the girl not with the institution to reverse engineer this situation out of somebody that isn't right for it Uh I think is a a good insight I think there's a distinct advantage to be clear not that everyone needs this but if you are a younger guy the fear that you have is that you're not going to have the resources to attract you know a super eligible bachelorette but I think that there's really deep bonding that occurs in going through hardship together Like when and this isn't me saying my way is better I promise Like hopefully the end point of this whole podcast is like Alex clearly has no idea Um but Leila's 23 I was 26 and she saw me lose everything twice and that was before we got married And so I felt very confident that she liked me for me And I think that one of the what people don't talk about is the the flip side of this like playing it out right let's play it out a couple steps is let's say you do have the the nice place you have the big bank account you have whatever income stream all the the societal W's You're not sure if she loves you or the institution of you Yeah And is there a way to know i don't know Well you can stress test it but it's a high-risisk purposefully bankrupt myself to see if this woman loves me Yeah Um and so I uh without being 1950s nostalgic because we weren't there and it was probably not as good as people think it is now Um find the person who allows you to be the most version of you And I think that that really comes down to it And the most version of you um I think is the highest potential version of you The person who can lubricate the gap between who you are and who you want to be Um you know I've said this before but the person you marry marries two people The person you are and the person you want to become Just make sure they love both of those people because they're going to be the one who's either going to prevent that from happening or be the one who's a rocket pack for you Like what's really interesting is that there was a uh there was like a super red pill podcast that reached out to Ila um and wanted to interview her and she turned down the the request but the in the invite it said you and Alex seem to have like the only like relationship where it's like modern relationship but it seems like it's working cuz they're super you know tad conserved whatever and you know Ila responded um you know we had a conversation basically about the invite um she she didn't do But um I think what a lot of people don't see publicly is that like Leila and I actually have an incredibly traditional relationship And in some ways I just feel like Ila is the most extreme wife you could possibly find which is that she just said "I will support my husband in every possible way to help him achieve what he wants including becoming his business partner." Yes Yes And that's what people don't get Like Ila has done everything for me And that's the part that people can't see And like sure she'll get girl boss and like whatever you know that world wants to but like we have a very traditional relationship and Ila is also a very strong woman And I think that for the very strong women that are out there this will probably be you know chopped in a million pieces and put all over the internet but I think you just need an even stronger man And so unfortunately with like the pussification of society especially men um the and the and the flip side of like the more girl boss etc is that it's making it harder for those very confident strong achieving women to find men that they will let be men And the real real is that the guy that you will end up with he will not accept you quote letting him be a man He will be a man and then you will fall into that world M you will fit within it And I know that that will probably you know rub some people the wrong way but that is my worldview Um and Ila shares this worldview and this is again not as public on cuz you can't do it in Instagram sound bites Um but Ila's life has been one of absolute service and she just did everything she [ __ ] could to help me and she still does to this day to the point of pushing herself into health issues to to to help us win And I think the sooner that you can get an ally that you can absolutely trust we think about competence and we think about incentives right a wife is ideally like recommendation to the younger guys find a competent wife Um the incentives take care of themselves once you get married And I will say that contrary to to popular you know pop culture getting married makes you more money So as much as Darwin said "This will cost me money I will have less money for books getting married will make you more money." And I'll say even at the most basic level because you're not spending a third of your mental effort chasing tail you get a third the admin the sheer admin of dating in the modern world It's true though Yep Um and and you go you go from from a third of your time chasing tail with always trying to gauge people's intent and you know intentions and all this stuff to getting all of that back plus another 3/3 of somebody else provided you're aligned on where you want to go And like I would not be here without Ila not just because uh she's been instrumental in everything that we've done business-wise but she above all else created space She allowed and and she was the first person in my life who just who who just wanted me to be me and like even in the times when I would like I was at I was at a wedding and I was about to post something and Ila was with me and I was like ah this is a little bit edgy I was like I don't want to piss people off and she just looked at me and she was like never dilute yourself And it's like somebody who wants you to be the most concentrated potent unshackled unconstrained version of you She puts up with the fact that I wear the exact same thing every single day I eat the same lunch every single day the same breakfast every single day I talk about only one topic which is business And I do that unrelentingly and forever for every single conversation And she has dealt with all of these things Um and the the perspective that I have on this is that like after the two years of all the the serotonin hyperdump or norepinephrine and dopamine that you get from the love drug um what you'll have left is you and them And if you do not fit into their idea of what they wanted you to be then that is going to be a tough ride And so I think the baseline is I accept you for who you are and I also accept the person they want to become and I'm going to do everything in my power to help you get there And ideally both of us becoming that person is aligned with the same actions I had this insight from George Mac's birthday last year in Miami I haven't met George and I feel like he lives he lives in Austin now So come through Um I know you never travel so that's a a a hollow offer that I never actually need to cash in on A friend was recently asked who his best friend is He said he wasn't sure It's a bit of a rare question after age 12 So the question was asked differently Who do you have the least amount of filter with when you're around them another good question is who can you sit in silence with and not have to fill it mhm Even if there isn't a single person that wins these are the people who you should prioritize spending your time with We all feel the compulsion to change ourselves to fit in We adjust our behavior words nature everything in attempt to be liked validated and accepted The more people who make it feel safe for you to truly be yourself around them the more confidence you'll have to be that person every day And I feel like that's a coralate to the you partner should be someone that helps you become more of you not dilute They should be salt to bring out the flavor Yeah Obviously he salt Yeah analogies have limits but like salt more of you And so you brought up authentic authenticity as I define it from a behavior perspective is how you behave if you have no if you have no risk of punishment Mhm And so what would you do if you could not get punished and if you behave that way in front of them then it means that either they do not punish you or they have no desire to punish you Either way it accomplishes the same thing which is that you behave as though they weren't there M how to get a top tier goal Oh god did I say this is this mine yes Yes it I'm sorry It is How to get a top tier goal number one get in shape Yeah Number two get rich Number three don't be a dick Pretty good advice So the second one So get in shape Uh I highly recommend like the first thing you like strongly strongly strong recommend for young guys like for the love of God get in shape Uh it's it'll never be easier You'll never have more time I had one of my sales guys who I said "Dude I don't see you at the gym." And he said "You know I'm just really busy." And I just like looked at him and I was like "You will never have more time and less responsibility than you do now." So I kind of used the James Clear thing I said "Hey if you can't make it work now accept that you're never going to be in shape for the rest of your life." He was like "Whoa." I was like "Think about it Rid yourself of the design." Yeah I was like "You're just never going to be in shape." He was like "Well I mean I was like right So do it or don't but stop wanting it." And so uh back to that point So I think that getting in shape just dramatically enhances the the people that you can that you can hang out with Like and I I have this belief from humans in general All humans at ideal body weight and like normal levels of musculature are almost all attractive Like at like a one or zero binary scale of attractive like almost all humans are just purely physically And so like just don't have that be a constraint for you Like don't have it be a negative at the very least Right Yeah I've got this limitation and that limitation and another limitation It's like okay you're just adding another Yeah I think I think Peterson said something like uh they say they're depressed And he's like well you're living in your mom's basement and you're unemployed It's like you didn't give yourself a chance Now if you're in shape you're rich you do all these you're you've achieved whatever you've achieved Doesn't have to be rich but you've achieved whatever you want to achieve If you're still depressed then we can talk about it But until then you haven't even given yourself a shot I can't find girls Well are you any of these basic things no Well then do that first The rich thing is more I mean obviously for me um I think uh Professor G Galloway um said this it's it's more about the signal that you have the ability to gain resources more than having them And so like if you think about trust fund kid now there is the element of having money which does for sure there are girls who just want the money but if you compare that to the young hungry guy I don't know if they win in a headto head right and so it's the same reason that the starving artist sleeping on his friend's couch but who's got lots of upside potential is attractive Yeah It's like but he [ __ ] has one guitar and a pair of boots to his name Like how is that well yeah but so did Dylan Look at look at the predictors that I'm seeing here Look at the [ __ ] early onset alarm warnings of something potentially great in this future Yeah So uh get in shape Signal that you are ambitious and that you plan on pursuing whatever it is that you're going after And then finally it's just don't be a jerk Like I'm not saying you have to be like you know the world's sweetest whatever but just don't be a dick If you do those three things like you'll be able to get whatever whatever girls you want What does don't be a dick consist of great question So it would probably be the behaviors that um so that is a bucketed term for many behaviors underneath of it Um that basically would just decrease the likelihood that a girl would want to continue to fraternize with you Uh but like you know specifically like and I think that'll also depend on the girl to be real Um so girls might prefer this So whatever your target girl is she probably has a bucket of behaviors Now that's different than do what she wants Very different It's is there something that is non- negative to me that is beneficial to her Do as many of those things as you can Mhm Mhm It's interesting as well that it probably means you need to ensure that the kind of girl that you want to be with Mhm and the kind of behavior that you want to have around her will often align because those two things might not You might want to be a really distant I'm just going to work on myself kind of guy but you might want a very forthcoming very caring sort of woman and you have really reduced down your mating pool if those two things don't tend to correlate and I'm going to guess that they don't If you want a really forthcoming very caring woman I'm going to guess that she's going to kind of expect that sort of interaction in reverse And if you're not prepared to give that it's like rid yourself of the desire or you're going to have to change your preferences or you're going to have to change your behavior One of the two Worth bringing up early if you are on this like you know I would like to find somebody train This is something that worked exceptionally well Um which is I and I think our first or second date I just said upfront all the non-negotiables that I had Um which to be fair this isn't the like red flags whatever thing It's just like I work a lot I will not sacrifice that If that is a problem then this will not work and that is okay I just want to be upfront that these are these are the thing like I work out I will do that I'm not going to give that up I will not give that up for anyone Um and so like just stating those things and I would say like because people have this like they want to put on a show right they peacock they they have to do the mating dance and I have to you know present myself in a way that's different than I currently am But I would say over time the less you can make the discrepancy between how you're quote acting or performing and who you are at baseline for that person the better it's going to be long term because they're going to find out eventually And so they might as well find out upfront and then you can just say triage I've said this a bunch of times but I went through a breakup at the start of last year was three and a half year relationship and I was like "Okay I'm back in the dating world." very different world very different person very different environment so on Uh and I did the sort of intellectual equivalent of a [ __ ] test which was early on I would start sending them psychology today articles and weird Substack posts and stuff just to see huh are we going to have at some point when we next catch up are we going to have a discussion about this because this is the sort of thing that's interesting to me And I don't see this going away at least for a little while I imagine the next decade of my life and maybe for the rest of my life I'm going to be reading stuff and learning about human nature and I think it's important to me to be able to talk about this with my person This is really good So what you just said reminded me of um a speech that uh Horowitz gave Ben Horowitz and he talked about not pursuing your passion um as a career choice And one of the main arguments that he makes is that your passions will change He said the things when you're you were really passionate when you're 20 are be the things that you're passionate when you're 40 And to to link that to something that Jeff Basos talks about which is when they asked um hey you know what do you think the future of Amazon is going to look like he said people always want to know what is going to change He said I think it's far more valuable to think what is not going to change And I think that if you're trying to find a mate you really want to find the fewest common denominators Like what things will not change about me over a long period of time If you happen to be in a stint that you're really into fencing or whatever that may change And I think that's where like in some ways it lowers the bar for the quote perfect match because trying to find the perfect match today versus that same match 50 years from now virtually impossible And so if we accept that many of the things that are surface level today are going to disappear on a on a longer time horizon then there's only going to be the few things that actually matter which are going to be what are what are the behaviors under duress right what are the core things about myself and my behavior set that uh I find it unlikely that will change over a long time horizon What are the things that are predictive of the things that end up manifesting like what is it that underpins this what are the foundations and so I think that if you can and it's probably just a handful of big rocks rather than hundreds of pebbles And so when when girls have the and guys too right have the big list of like the hundred things that I I can never have it's like you probably should have three that you must and then kind of ignore the rest because that's that's the that's the game People who obsess about work life balance are typically mediocre at both Obsessed people apply their obsession to everything and just call it life I stand by my statement I mean have you met anybody who's like maybe it's genetic you know the finding the dent in the can and the like um I mean the first thing that Leila and I did when we got married is that we went through a divorce course cuz we're like well shoot inversion right we're like well let's just find out all the reasons that people get divorced and let's handle all of those things now And so we did that as the first thing What are the reasons money is a big one Kids are a big one Um and then a lot of it is actually really tactical preferences So like when I come home from a long day of work do I want you to then unload all of your days you know woes on me probably not right and so for me specifically and it's being um I mean a lot of it comes down to communication assuming that you guys liked each other at some point right um and that and rounding up I call it running up which is like if I said something and there's two ways of taking it a bad way and a good way I meant the good way We're married I love you And so having that be kind of the default setting And like Ila has learned a lot of my nuances which I actually only got to learn with her because the thing is is that we're going to have you know novel experiences that then become routine So you know when we work together there was no me coming home at the end of a long day but we I mean we work in the same company now but we don't like work together during the day And so very often she's at home and I get back and she learned because I to just give me space Like I usually just want to be left alone for a minute to basically let the dust settle in my head so that I can be you know fully present for her Um but I could see somebody who didn't know that assuming that if I don't want to talk to you when you get back you don't love me Y is a problem And so it's really just dissecting these issues and saying instead of saying like you hate me or extrapolating this to our relationship forever and always just as a preference in behavior and obviously Leila subscribes to the same uh perspective on behavior that I do which has made our relationship so much easier to navigate without the landmines cuz she'll just say what would you prefer I do instead and I say can you do this instead of that and she says sure and that's it like recently So this actually this is super super recent We went out and had dinner and she said "Thank you for dinner." Cuz I paid you know I paid a restaurant and I was like it like really hit me and I was like I haven't had someone like no one's basically no one thanks me for buying [ __ ] cuz I'm the assumed default guy who pays for [ __ ] But on top of that Leila and I work together We make this money together So it's almost weird that she would thank me for paying for dinner So it's not like impolite or weird that she done it Yeah It's our money right but I was like that meant a lot to me Means a lot to me too Yeah And so what she what she's realized is when she if she says I'm proud of you you're you know you're awesome You that was great Whatever That means a little bit Um but for the most part I'm like well I have a whole bunch of things that I could have made better and you just didn't see it And like here's you know I'm thinking about all that stuff right but like it means something but it doesn't mean the most But when she said thank you I was like "Please do this more." Like and so in like this is this is this week So this is like very fresh top of mind for me Like I came home yesterday after the two mega days that I was talking about the beginning of this Um and she said "Thank you for working so hard." And I was like in and it was just a tiny shift in terms of verbiage Instead of saying like "I'm so proud of you." And she said "Thank you for it allowed me to feel like I was actually serving us by doing what we do." And it basically gave a huge reinforcer on top of my already large existing reinforcers for working Um but it's like I'm I'm like a I'm like an appreciation camel Like I don't need a lot and it can carry me for a long time Um but she was like and she said the thing that she said at the very beginning of our relationship She said I'm coachable and and I told you that your your stupid thing The one superpower that Leila's had uh in our relationship which I think everybody you know could could use is that the number of times that I have to repeat feedback is zero She is the most responsive person to feedback And maybe it's hyper hyper criticism responder what you know whatever it is but she will immediately change behavior permanently And it's been one of those you know I mean when we were dating there was a period of time where I said "I don't think this is going to work." And she was like "Why?" I was like "You're too cold." And then like the next day she was like "Okay what does warm look like?" And I was like "Well if you do these things," she was like "Okay I'll do that." And so um and you know some people might hear this doing something that makes your mate happy without incurring a cost on you Bingo If it means if it makes no difference Now if it does incur a cost have the conversation Okay Well this is a trade-off here And there was a period of time uh she made all of my meals uh for a very long period of time and then like in 2019 uh she came to me and she was like stressed out of her mind She's like I can run this company or I can make you eat all of my meals No seriously She was just like and she just said tell me which one you'd prefer And she was like terrified to have this conversation with me because she was afraid that I would I I say you have to be this and this And I was like oh no it's a way rarer skill to do what you can do in the business I was like we can just find someone to cook the food And she was like "Oh." I was like "It's great." I was like "But this is like this means way more to me." And so just having that like "Hey I'll do it Just I also just like if you had an employee not to say that they're the same thing but like you can't just say keep doing more and more things." At some point there's a priority that has to happen I have to do this instead of that And so what things are you willing to trade and then us being able to openly talk about behavior the way that we do has made this way less emotionally charged because the sense of self that it's attached to It's interesting with that I wonder I think a lot of people will feel like it's some sort of denial of who they truly are when this happens I remember when I first started working with a speech coach Uh I got a addiction coach I figured that if I was going to talk for a living it would be good to speak to somebody that was an expert at doing that And oh addiction I thought addiction Yeah Addiction coach Okay Uh and a bunch of my friends said "Uh well you are you worried about losing the way that you speak you know you've got a you've got a way that you speak and well you know it's going to change who you are." And I didn't really understand until probably only this year about why they were uncertain or had a bit of push back against it And it's because the way that you speak is seen by many people and maybe rightly so as attached to who you are your your not only your sense of yeah it's your sense of self right it's a very sort of transparent so many thoughts hole down to that and the analogy that I used was well let's say that I started learning to play the saxophone and I said I'm going to get a teacher to teach me how to play the saxophone and your response to me was "Well what about your natural saxophone playing ability?" I'm like "I'm trying to be a better boxer and I get a boxing trainer." They go "Yeah but what about the way that you naturally throw jabs?" Like okay if we assume that there are better and worse ways to do it then yes there might be some unique quirks that you have which if they were eroded away would lose a specific competitive advantage with this But the things that we attribute as very closely attached to our sense of self and the things that we don't I think are really interesting And the way that we speak would be one of those But if somebody starts to expand that to everything that they do wow I mean this relationship is not going to work if you don't like the way that I open doors You like that my door opening is that's a unique part of me You're denying the person that I am by doing this Okay you know this is really important to me My door opening ability is really important to me You go that and I wonder what uh the size of territory that somebody is or is not prepared to adjust I wonder what that is you know at me I have Yeah I know I have so I think you wrote a longer blog piece I want to say a month or two ago about how um do people love me for the things that I do or do they love me for the person that I am and then the followup is do I love me for the things I do versus who you know who I am and I think I texted you afterwards which is what is the difference and I mean that now people get all the woo world gets really upset but when I but if you say if I said who is John the first thing that you would do to describe who John is is talk about what John does And so I think that the whole being is XYZ thing just confuses a lot of people And so our identity in you know Alex's worldview is just the amalgamation or the or the aggregation of all of the behaviors that we do just put together It's all the stuff we do We are like he is a carpenter Chris has a podcast He does podcasting Like that's it's part of quote who you are But like it's just what you do And so to to hold a specific action that you have on a pedestal you make it mean something But fundamentally it's just a behavior And so I think that if we see ourselves as just this list of a thousand behaviors then we get to ask the question does me changing this behavior and going through the effort of doing that mean more to me than this relationship and if the answer is no well then then change it And especially if it's at virtually no cost to you and a significant benefit to them And I think that trade is when you when you see yourself as I am just a person who does these things then there's way less emotional rigidity uh with change because you're like oh well I'm happy to trade this for that No big deal Especially given that the thing that you're doing now in terms of a behavior might mean a little to you but not that much And your pleasure in doing something that makes your partner really really happy could be [ __ ] infinite Yeah Uh this is related to one of yours that I didn't do earlier on Lazy people don't know how to start Weak people don't know how to finish Successful people don't know how to stop People demand success but refuse to work weekends People want opportunity but won't talk to strangers People claim ambition but sleep in every day We are the result of our actions not our aspirations I think once you've actually learned how to try really try one thing for an extended period of time every single day and taken all of your discretionary effort and your money and your time and your resources and put it towards just doing that thing Number one you realize how few things you can really do well because of the amount of time that it takes Mhm The second thing is you realize how easy it is to beat everyone else because of how few of them actually do that And that learning how to try becomes a generalizable skill across domains So when you do learn how to play the saxophone and if you want to pick up tennis you think about how many sessions you did to fix your fix your fingers and you know play play a more advanced and a more advanced thing over and over again And then when you when you realize that the domains are similar in terms of skill um achievement uh you're like oh this is the same thing And then when you go like "Oh I need to make content now." It's like "Oh it's the same as hitting 500 forehands and 500 backhands and I make 500 tweets and 400 posts and if I do it for an extended period of time and I take the feedback and I don't stop I'll probably beat most people." You also get to see uh if I am focused on playing the saxophone and becoming the best saxophone player that I can be but I also want to be kind of good at tennis The better that I get at playing the saxophone the more repetitions it takes for me to become even one increment better And in order for me to become even remotely in the same [ __ ] universe in tennis how long's that going to take and I need to work really really hard It's like when you play a computer game right you're playing some [ __ ] RPG and the first few levels it's just noob games all the way you're [ __ ] level leveling up every time you turn it on and then people are grinding and grinding and grinding to get from level 94 to 95 to 96 You go well all of the gains acrew to the people at the top And if you've invested all of this time into this thing you are getting per unit of effort way more back than you ever were in the beginning Yeah The difference is that you no longer feel the progress quite so much So we have this odd issue that willpower at the end can sometimes Wayne but the returns are at their highest and the progress per unit of time put in is at its lowest and the inverse happens when we start something And this is why when people get to the top of a thing plus motivation which is maybe just like a a tiredness with the pursuit of a thing and a desire for novelty generally which is maybe a little bit of of different but this is why people get to a thing and then like this thing's tangential to that Maybe I'm going to start you know I've been learning to play the saxophone for a long time I learned to DJ DJing is kind of the same Just go "Yeah but you're you're starting again at this thing in the beginning." I maybe it can augment in a different way you know is it as close as I know lots about training so I'm going to learn about diet Or is it I know lots about lifting weight so I'm going to learn about playing tennis And some things augment and enrich and other things detract and take away I think the better you get at one thing at least for me the less it's made me want to do other things because I know what's going to take to do them to this same level And then I think well if let's say I'm a nine out of 10 at saxophone and I would like to be a nine out of 10 at tennis I know how much work it would take to be a nine out of 10 at tennis And then I just wonder to myself if I took all of that and put it right back in the nine out of 10 that I'm at saxophone would I go from being top 100 in the world to number one in the world and then how different would my life be if I was a 9 out of 10 saxophone player to a 9 out of 10 tennis player versus a 10 out of 10 sax player and which life would I prefer and I have tended to be a maximizer in my whole life And so like I'm probably pretty my die is relatively cast in this perspective in terms of like I'll be doing business for the rest of my life Uh it's the only game that I really enjoy that I spend all my time on Um but I recently have had a really strong consideration that you and I talked about um which is I was I've been really strongly considering devoting myself to um taking meditation as a practice seriously And the reason for that is because the literature on basically the standard deviation improvement in subjective well-being basically how happy people are of um Buddhist monks who have meditated for like 40,000 plus hours is like three to four standard dev deviations above the the norm Like monstrous So to put context here one standard deviation would take you from like 50% to like 84% In terms of like general population if you're two standard deviations you're at 99 That's two three and four And so what's interesting is that like a year of meditation gets you that first that first chunk at an hour a day Uh I was looking at four hours a day but um I'm aggressive And so but the thing is is that in looking at this it was basically like it in order to to to replicate those outcomes it takes about four hours a day Now if you do an hour a day for a decade you're going to get probably one maybe one and a half depending on who you are whatever And so I being a maxer was like well okay let's start with spending $20 million on the house Like okay if I if I spent all of my time that's available to doing this thing would it be worth it and the the thing that was that's been troubling me is that the answer is yes And so this is something that I've been it's like I I know what it looks like for me to go work really hard at something and I've just been like I've been teetering at the edge of this being like okay am I really going to do this and so everyone's getting this as a snapshot of where I'm currently at right now um thinking through this because um the single greatest skill that you can develop is being in a great mood in the absence of things to be in a great mood about And seeing these guys literally just take their median and just move it all the way up They get the first arrow that hits them and they just completely avoid all the other second arrows and then it vanishes in the moment And the uh description of what three to four standard deviations ahead um of of of subjective well-being is a constant state of bliss Have you looked at Gary Weber's stuff he's one of the guys he's he's a somebody who has uh become awakened enlightened like permanent abiding non-dual awareness Oh super cool type thing And uh that's and he he's that way His his description I mean you you know it's uh un stress testable in many I guess put them in an fMRI but who knows if this is because of the meditation or they were the sort of person etc etc but unless everybody is part of the same grift which is to get you to sit in silence for a long time with your eyes closed the incentives don't seem to really be there to to get you to do that and the thing that's been like enticing me about it is and I don't know if you're the same way but like when I see how bad I am at something on My first few tries I'm like "Oh my god my newbie gains are going to be through the through the roof." Because I'm a meditation hyper resppond Oh my god Well me me trying to meditate is like is I'm so bad at it So bad at it that I'm like I'm I I'm going to unlock so much I'm so bad Yeah And so and I also like it because like it's fits so well in my worldview of like of course h having that level of happiness takes work Of course it's not me changing my of because like I spent my life changing my external conditions I I I literally live in a fortress of my own making We are we are in one of two huge rooms that are my gym right and I I I look the way I look because of that effort I married the person I wanted to marry I I have the business like I did all of those things and yet this guy who has a chair in the middle of Tibet is is fist [ __ ] you and having he's just murdering you Yeah Well this is you know we we spoke about this when we chatted the other week and I do think it's an important pivot and I think that the story as well is an important pivot uh more for you than for me but for me a little too of you spend a long time trying to achieve things that you think are going to make you happy and fulfilled and they bring with it material objective real changes in life And some of them are really important to frontload And some of them can only be achieved at certain periods of your life And after a while you ask yourself is this still the game that I need to keep playing I'm 10 out of 10 in this thing And 11 doesn't exist but tiny increments of tens do If this isn't the answer does it make sense to continue trying to fill an internal void with external goals And I think it's pretty cool to hear you look at a different even just consider uh a different mode of input with regards to that And just for the record I'm only doing it because I think unlocking the next level of achievement Here we go I have to I have to still have my logic brain for why it'd be worth it Um but no it's it's um the I think the reason I'm so I'm I'm I'm actually considering it is it takes so much violent level of work It's true though The only way that anybody could describe meditation as viol [ __ ] the only way that you could convince yourself to do it is to call meditation violence Um but look I I something and this is me stealing you and then repurposing it in a different way Uh we sacrifice the thing we want for the thing that's supposed to get it Like we sacrifice happiness in order to become successful so that when we're sufficiently successful we can finally be happy And then if you were to make some sort of psychological equation and just strike off success from both sides you kind of get left with the happiness piece But we're not closed systems Humans need a sense of validation They want to be recognized by the world We have goals that we want to do And it is important to realize it's an unteachable lesson It's important to realize that the thing you thought was going to fill the void wasn't the thing But you can't realize it wasn't the thing that was going to fill the void until you've got it And then once you have you go "Okay sick Take that one off Now allow me to move on to the more subtle insight that I could have never achieved had I have not gone there." And so when I was um 1920ish kind of when you have a lot of these existential crises it's very common time between 18 to 22 when people develop their worldview at least solidify some version of it I strongly debated leaving everything and you know pursuing the meditation monk path because I saw I saw the same research that I'm looking at now 16 years later right and what was interesting was that that was actually during the process where I was like [ __ ] happiness I'm not I'm not going to even think about this anymore um and I made my new life goal to just be useful because the thing is is that and this might be me doing the the lame judgment on other people but me seeing a guy who sits in a hut and then just sits there and is happy for eight hours a day every day I see that I saw that I try to have no judgment here but as a waste because I think there's also a duty that we have to help other people Now that's a should I want to be clear So you don't you know obviously you don't have to subscribe to that but I at least have it deeply enough in me that I feel like we should be useful to one another Um and so I my desire to be useful has been greater than my desire to be happy But if there is a world that at this point I can be both I'm okay with it Money doesn't buy happiness past $70,000 per year because spending money effectively is a skill and most people never acquire it As someone who earns more than $70,000 a year what have you learned about the skill of spending money effectively so so it's so funny because people assume that there are not levels to skills Um and I remember seeing you know my first billionaire start spending money And I was like whoa that's a thing Interesting Um and a lot of people who even do make money or save a lot of money never learn how to spend it Well now I'm not saying blow it on stupid things but the the 3D learning that you described with um die with with Bill he spent money to create that experience and it was probably worth it And so the most people just limit themselves to house car food travel That's that's the majority of it But there are so many other things that you can do with money that improve your daily experience that create memories that will pay memory dividends for a long period of time Um and the biggest the easiest ones to basically pay down are time And so it costs roughly $1,500 a month to get about 90 hours a month back if you add up uh driving gas preparation cooking cleaning of food cleaning of your dwelling cleaning and prep of your clothing If you put all of those things together what the average American spends per week it's about 20ish 25 hours a week that they spend doing all of those things for themselves And so 90ish hours per month And the cumulative cost of fixing all of that stuff is about 1,500 bucks a month Well that be a maid/housekeeper person who maybe could also cook or maybe a cook who's separate a Uber daily Yeah Uh at the low end later you could have a personal driver but yeah totally Just those two Those are the only two Well then you have uh food prep We could do uh one Yeah One-stop shop housekeeper probably cost a little more there but Yeah Yeah But it would fold two rolls into one Yes And so but thinking about that and we have our $70,000 per year you know cap But if we're assuming okay we're making more than that If you make a million dollar a year it's like okay would you be willing to spend 70 to get somebody who does all of those things for you and you get a 100 hours a week Well as if you get the 100 hours back let's just say it's let's say let's keep it at $5,000 a month for what we're willing to spend So more than that okay so if you can make more than $50 an hour with your free time or you simply would pay $50 to get more free time to lie in a hammock that to lie in a hammock then it's worth the trade or go wakeboarding And so I think the that most people have who who start making more money they just stop at nice house nice car maybe nice clothes and places to eat occasional travel that they spend once or twice a year That's it That's all they do But there's so many ways to improve your existing environment I get the sense that it's actually the middle level It's the people who maybe earn a 100 grand a year in USD maybe sort of 70 grand they're the ones who are likely to probably need this information the most because if you're up to the half a million a million a year or something like that it's like you you've probably realized that this is something that you can spend money on People don't I talk to entrepreneurs all the time Well that's that's it's one of the first things I do when I look into a company I say "What do you like do you have do you have a housekeeper do you have a like and we go through all this stuff cuz the highest ROI money I can spend as an investor is getting a 100 hours a month back for the entrepreneur for 50 grand My god." Well I mean the Yes that's crazy Uh and also if you are someone who to whom an additional 50 grand a year of income would be 30% of your net worth or 30% of your annual income making 150 grand a year for you this opens up a lot more than it actually does for the guy that's let's say that I guess when you're making a million each hour that you would then spend would be worth more etc etc but yeah it's uh that overcoming that sense of I can do this for free therefore I shouldn't pay someone to do it Guilt of spending this sense of opulence and wastefulness entitlement Totally Um overcoming that has been a real a real challenge for me And it's good that I've been around people like Bill yourself And uh it's almost like it's a very specific type of ambition and it's not ambition in the material sense it's ambition in the life quality sense Freedom Yeah Yeah So one of the things I think from today that's been novel or interesting to me has been updates in your worldview So reflecting on the last 12 months or so what do you think are the things that you've changed your mind on the most or updated your beliefs on the most instead of saying [ __ ] happiness I am open to the idea that I can be both useful and happy I'd say that's probably the biggest one that it's not a trade between the two That's number one I would say the second is getting very specific about moments and not extrapolating moments to days weeks months years This one good thing Can I spread that wide and this one bad thing can I shrink it into the absolute smallest possible box and making sure that I don't suffer the second arrow I would say like if I had the two probably those are probably the two biggest things that I would say I have been actively working on for how I see reality Well I look forward to seeing what you've learned next time I appreciate you man Thank you for having me Thank you very much for I mean let's be honest you've made it to the end of an episode that's like four hours long I there's a rarified number of people that have made it here Uh so there's a treat for you which is an episode with an Indian less jacked version of Alex Hormosi Naval Ravikham waiting for you Go on press it